Little Squirrels Can Climb Tall Trees (16 page)

I raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“Yeah. I was gonna do it—tell her that her son is gay and loves his boyfriend’s dick up his ass.”

“You might want to hold off on that second part until maybe your second or third conversation.”

“Fair enough. You know that I’m too much of a chickenshit to ever say that to her anyway.”

“True.”

“Hey! You didn’t have to agree so fast!”

“Babe, no boy wants to have that conversation with his mother.”

“That’s better. Why the iced tea?” he asked.

“You like tea.”

Kyle smiled his supernova smile that lit up a room and said, “I like you too.”

“Good thing.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes, watched the eleven o’clock news, and then called it a night since both of us had to work in the morning. Kyle’s shift at the ER began at the usual 7:00 a.m., so he desperately needed his sleep. We were both asleep in a surprisingly short amount of time.

O
KAY
, now you have to understand—I was not present for the next part. Still, I feel I can tell the story because I’ve heard it many times from several people who were present. All of them agree pretty much right down the line, so I’m pretty confident that I’m telling it just as it happened.

The next day was another busy one in the ER, which was just as well because it kept Kyle busy and kept him from thinking about—no, dreading—his upcoming evening with his mother. When seven o’clock came around, he changed into his suit and caught a cab across town to his mother’s hotel. In the cab he gave me a quick phone call and found his anxious nerves calmed by simply talking to me for a few minutes—I have that effect on men.

In the lobby he asked directions, hoping that it wouldn’t be too hard to sort out which ballroom to go to for this dinner. It turned out not to be a problem since there was only one event scheduled in the hotel for that evening. As he walked into the ballroom, his mother was almost immediately at his side, and she guided him to the table where she had grabbed some seats with some women she knew.

Like proud mothers since the beginning of time, she introduced her son the doctor to all of her friends. For the most part, Kyle didn’t know the women she introduced and didn’t spend a lot of time anguishing over which name went with which face, since he hoped never to see any of them again after that night. Not that he had anything personally against any of them, but he knew that it was unlikely that he and they would have much in common and that they wouldn’t have much to talk about if they ever met again.

At one point his mother was especially eager for him to meet a young woman. He was a bit confused at first as to why his mother was spending so much time introducing him in this case, and then it dawned on him:
Oh, shit! She’s trying to fix me up!

Kyle wanted nothing more than a hunky waiter to walk by so he could grab the man, bend him back, and lay a killer kiss on his lips. Alas, no waiter, especially not a hunky one. If he had wanted a short, heavyset Latina woman, he would have been all set, but that wouldn’t work—now or ever.

Regardless of the circumstance and the fact that he was seething inside at himself for not picking up on things sooner and at his mother for trying to do this in the first place, Kyle was a gentleman. He was polite while quiet.

Fortunately for everyone, the lights were flashed at that moment, indicating it was time for everyone to take their seats for dinner. Kyle escorted his mother to her seat and took the seat next to her, letting everyone else fend for themselves.

They were all able to focus on the hubbub that ensued with hotel staff trying to serve so many people food in one place at the same time. Kyle had seen the dance many times—too many times, actually—at medical conferences in and around the Harvard area during his time in medical school, so none of the activity surprised him. His mother and the other women, however, were new to the experience and were all studying the activity intently. Kyle was silently delighted that it gave him a few minutes to try to calm himself and refocus his energy on getting through the experience.

Another distraction came when their salads were delivered. The hotel had done a fairly decent job of jazzing up the simple ingredients. Everyone at the table admired the handiwork, and several asked one another if they knew what particular ingredients were.

The salad course seemed interminable, but Kyle did his best to sit quietly and listen to others babble about meaningless bullshit that meant nothing to him. He had no idea who they were talking about and couldn’t have cared less about who was knocked up or whose cow had won what blue ribbon at what showing.

Finally the salad plates were removed and dinner was served. As they finished eating, the lights of the ballroom dimmed, and everyone looked to the stage at the front of the room. Kyle had no idea who was going to talk or what they were going to talk about, and he intended to do his best to ignore the whole thing. He’d even go so far as to pretend he had an emergency at the hospital that at least required his leaving the room to take a call if that became necessary.

When the speaker took the stage after suitable gushing introductions, Kyle looked around the room to try to study the group, or at least their attention to the speaker. Not surprisingly, nearly everyone seemed to be paying rapt attention to the man on the stage. When Kyle looked up next after momentarily zoning out, he saw the speaker holding a microphone and strutting back and forth on the stage like some prize rooster at the county fair.

Kyle’s wandering attention was snapped back to the present when he heard the man on stage speak of “the sin of homosexuality.” To Kyle’s utter and absolute horror, the man proceeded to strut and rant and babble about one misconception after another about being gay. Kyle was simultaneously appalled and infuriated.

The more the man on stage talked, the angrier Kyle became, but he didn’t have a clue what to do. He didn’t want to embarrass his mother in front of her peers, her friends, but he was close to spitting with anger as the man continued to speak. As Kyle silently fumed, he ran through everything he would like to do to the man for the hatred he was spewing, for all the harm he was doing to innocent people, for all the lies he was spouting.

After about thirty minutes of haranguing the audience, the speaker concluded and ordered the lights in the room raised. He called attention to microphones around the room and invited the good Christian women in attendance to come up and ask him questions—all, it turned out, a part of his effort to promote some new book he had just published.

Kyle couldn’t take it anymore after the third woman spoke in praise of the man’s remarks. Without planning his move, Kyle found himself standing from the table and walking to the nearest microphone. When he was recognized, Kyle stared at the man, leaned down to adjust the microphone to his height, and spoke calmly to the man on the stage.

“I am a doctor here in New York. I want to take just a moment of your time tonight to tell you about one of the patients that came into my ER today. It was a young man. I learned later that he was just eighteen. He was so badly injured that we couldn’t save him—he died. He’d been beaten. Beaten to death, as it turned out. For one reason: he was gay. He’d been walking down the street holding another man’s hand when someone, some stranger, decided to make himself judge, jury, and executioner—just like you’ve been doing here tonight.”

Kyle proceeded to describe in detail all of the injuries the young man had suffered when his attackers had taken a baseball bat to his head, fracturing his skull, among other things. The room was so silent while Kyle spoke that it seemed as if time had simply stopped. All of the servers who had been moving through the room pouring water and removing dishes stopped what they were doing. All of the diners stopped. Every eye in the room was on Kyle. Everyone could tell that something big was happening, even if they couldn’t define what the “something” was.

Kyle didn’t rant. He didn’t rave. He didn’t shout. He didn’t wave his hands. Instead he calmly and methodically described what he had confronted when the young man had been wheeled into the ER. Several women gasped as Kyle described how the young man’s skull had been crushed from repeated blows with a baseball bat. Kyle was actually surprised that the man on the stage was silent. When he looked up at one point, he saw that the little weasel on the stage was nearly turning white with panic at how this whole thing was turning out.

Turning his attention more to the women in the audience, Kyle continued. “I just simply wanted all of you to know that you may all rant and rave about the horrors of homosexuality—even though most of your facts are just dead wrong—but you all need to realize that you’re not talking about a concept. You’re talking about real people. You’re talking about some mother’s son. You’re talking about someone’s brother. You’re talking about someone’s sister. You’re talking about people that have names, lives, identities.

“Nearly every gay person is born into a straight family, born of straight parents, raised in a straight household. No one recruits anyone or leads anyone into a life of sin. As a wise woman has said, ‘I was born this way.’ Some people are born with blue eyes. Some people are born with black hair. Some people are born tall. And some people are born gay. It just is—so get over it.

“Words like I’ve heard here tonight do nothing except incite more incidents that hurt more innocent people. You all proclaim to follow Christ, a man of peace and love, but all I’ve heard here tonight is hatred and lies. If Christ were here tonight, he’d hang his head in shame at what’s being carried out in his name by those who profess to follow him. Thank you.”

As he stepped away from the microphone, Kyle intended to leave the room and walk around before returning to say good night to his mother. He assumed that his little speech had made him into persona non grata with his previous fellow diners. He was quite surprised to hear a scattering of applause from around the room. Many of the people present didn’t know whether they should applaud or boo. They couldn’t separate out the parts of the message into neat little boxes, which was the very point Kyle had tried to make.

The man on the stage was trying to regain control of the audience but was interrupted by someone else approaching a microphone. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” she said. “I see that the last speaker is about to leave the room, and I just wanted to say something to him before he left. Young man, thank you for sharing your message. It moved me to tears. You’re right that Christ was the gentle shepherd, and he would indeed be embarrassed and ashamed of us. Thank you, whoever you are.”

The applause around the room returned a little stronger this time. Another person approached the microphone and started speaking without waiting to be recognized. Apparently Kyle wasn’t the only child dragged to the event tonight. The woman speaking didn’t identify herself. “I’m here tonight with my mother. I’ve been sitting here listening to you speak,” she said to the man on stage, “and I’ve been feeling so
angry
!”

“As you should!” the speaker tried to say.

“
At you!
” she yelled at the stage, raising her hand and pointing. “At
you
for spreading
lies
and spewing hatred. You’re telling people that it’s okay, that it’s proper, to hate others—to hate me! I’m one of those people. I’m a daughter. I have a mother, sitting right here in this room tonight. You all look real close. You see me? There are millions more just like me out there. Probably in your own families too. Every gay child has parents. We don’t just appear out of thin air by magic. And I think it’s about time we all start fighting back. I think that the days of you walking all over us, of beating us in the street, are
over
! Tonight we start to fight back!” Pointing at the man, she said, “And you. You want to talk hate, then you haul your skinny ass down here and we’ll have this conversation. Right here, right now! And honey, let me tell you—you don’t want to piss me off any more than you already have.”

The man on the stage knew that he’d lost his audience, even if the audience didn’t know what to do. Even though the current speaker absolutely did not need any assistance—no, she was doing a bang-up job all on her own—Kyle stopped his exit and walked over to the woman as she stood alone at the microphone. He reached out his hand and grabbed hers, raised his other hand into the air, and added his voice. “Tonight we fight back: We will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on, we’re going to survive—today we celebrate our Independence Day!” Kyle was secretly delighted that he had found an occasion to use his favorite lines from
Independence Day
, a movie that Joseph had shown him just a few days earlier.

The audience applauded, for the emotion if nothing else. Not everyone knew what was going on. Some were appalled, especially the event organizers, who wanted nothing more than to drop Kyle and the woman beside him into a big hole and close it up afterward. But the two stood their ground, raised their angry fists into the air, and spurred on the applause. “For all the children who can’t speak!” she shouted.