Boys Keep Swinging Read online

  After convincing my mom to let my cousin Jackie Sue perm the front of my hair, I started the eighth grade in style. The new paisley button-ups that my mom let me buy in the women’s department at an outlet mall made me feel chic. The pictures tell another story, however: I had pimples and braces. My face looked like a splitting nucleus. On top of that, I had flat, pigeon-toed feet that pointed like an arrow when I walked.

  It was at video arcades, or the mall—where the cooler boys tore through in overalls (one strap hanging down at the waist), maneuvering in packs, loud and vicious—that I truly realized what a girly freak I was.

  We had just one of those cool types in my class—only one. His name was Austin. Cocky and boisterous, he had thick, dark hair, and his lips were twisted in a perpetual yet sexy sneer. Austin always bragged about his skateboarding and sexual exploits. In PE, I would gawk at his meaty, gorilla-hairy legs. He was a full year older than everyone in the class and wasn’t a boy like the rest of us, not anymore. At school he could be callous and cruel toward me. But on weekends he slept over at my place, where we would lie on my waterbed and talk into the night about girls and sex, seducing each other with language. These nights were agonizing bliss. As it grew later, I’d begin to tremble. We never kissed, never even tried. That would have been too gay. But everything from the neck down was fair game.

  At school, we held this knowledge, this dangerous secret over each other. He’d be a jerk most days but knew he could never go too far. It kept me up at night: Would he dare say anything? We kept fooling around until the very end of the school year. I knew once the semester ended that I wasn’t going to see him anymore. Our final night together was almost romantic; I remember already feeling nostalgic for it before it was done. The affair was over, but I think we’d both had fun. I’m sure today he’s probably got a wife and kids; I was just someone to get off with.

  My desires at the time, however, were confusing. When I was by myself, the words I’m gay would flash in my head, accompanied by a sharp bolt of anxiety. I would push the notion away, telling myself it was something I could deal with later. Gay people were not cool, supposedly pooped on each other, and all had AIDS, not a desirable scenario from any angle. It didn’t help when my sister would play me Andrew Dice Clay tapes, with their jokes about dead fags hanging off trees, AIDS spreading among the queers like mildew. I would do my best to pretend I thought it was funny, while on the inside it was scaring me to death.

  At the dinner table, my mother capitalized on my queenery. She would beg me to do my impersonation of Lady Miss Kier from Deee-Lite in front of dinner guests. I obliged, in my pretend pink faux-fur shrug, pouting and pacing. “How do you say . . . delicious?” Sultry and alien. “How do you say de-lovely . . . delectable, divine?” I mimicked her steps on our living room floor. “How do you say . . . DE GROOVY?!” My hands up in a Y, palms to the sky. This was the shit.

  I would wait until no one else was home and play Deee-Lite’s “Power of Love” at full volume, twirling through the house, gripping the couch when the room wouldn’t stop spinning. I found a photograph in a magazine of Lady Miss Kier and Kate Pierson of the B-52’s, standing together at a PETA rally. There was so much flair in that tiny, crinkled photograph! I’d gaze at it and fantasize about writing the two women letters. Maybe, just maybe, they would meet up with me for lunch sometime.

  I’d hang up Budweiser posters that my sisters’ guy friends had given me: They were trying kindly in their own ways to butch me up. I thought that if I just looked at more girls in bikinis, the correct desires would form within. But no matter how long their legs were, how inviting their breasts, nothing in me wanted to fuck them.

  This was pre-internet, so I had to get creative with masturbation, jerking off in the bathroom to International Male catalogues. I pored over every chestnut-haired Adonis with his Supercuts hairdo and perfect square jaw. I’d concentrate on two guys standing next to each other, in swim shorts or underwear, and rip off little pieces of toilet paper to lay on top of them. If I did it just right, I could make it look like they were standing naked next to each other, only covered by clouds of Charmin. I would then lie on my back and finish off with an intense longing—praying for some big man with broad shoulders and a pelt of hair on his chest to appear in the doorway and scoop me up. My mother had to have wondered why every day she would find tiny pieces of toilet paper scattered around the bathroom floor.

  My discoveries weren’t just with regard to sex. There was a new girl in my class that year named Rachel, and she was dialed in. The first day of class, she came in shaking rice out of her hair because the night before she’d been at a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Later, she explained to me what “alternative” music was and that I could hear it on this AM station, KUKQ.

  The day she told me, I played it in the dark as I was falling asleep. Maybe I thought my subconscious mind would sponge up the songs, so hungry was I for input that would move me. But just as I started to doze, a song came on that made me sit up, causing my waterbed to make tiny waves. I cocked my ear to the speakers, afraid to move, to miss anything. I couldn’t tell if the singer was a man or a woman; the voice was aggressive and hallucinatory. It was “This Is Not a Love Song” by Public Image Limited.

  Violent Femmes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Big Audio Dynamite, REM—I discovered so many bands. My first real concert was Siouxsie and the Banshees. The anticipation and release of that performance were almost like what I knew sex to be. Each discovery was leading to another. At the Siouxsie concert I asked a guy standing next to me what the preshow music was. He told me it was a new album by Nine Inch Nails called Pretty Hate Machine. I saved up all my money for cassettes and when I couldn’t afford something, Rachel, who seemed to know everything good, would just dub me a copy of, say, Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual.

  My parents gave me quite a bit of freedom. They intuited that I wasn’t interested in trouble. I wasn’t seeking out friends who had access to booze or drugs. I was looking to experience as much movies and music as my free time and allowance allowed. But my mother drew the line at The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The film was enjoying its fifteenth anniversary and had just been released on video. I wanted so badly to go see it live at the theater on Mill Avenue on a Saturday night, but my mom was steadfast in her suppression, reasoning that there were “heavy themes” that she didn’t think I was “ready for yet.” She was being ridiculous, and I was going to see that damn movie.

  Windi, who was living nearby us in Arizona at that point, let me rent it when my parents were out of town, just like old times. I lapped it up, every shot, song, outfit, hip shake. Rocky Horror was like an invitation to the rest of my life. I’d found the message in a bottle, a sly telegram from my future letting me know that there were people out there like me.

  Both my art teacher Jennifer and Windi got pregnant at the same time that year. Windi was going to be a single mom, to the chagrin of my parents. I found out the night before Valentine’s Day. I sat at my desk the next morning chewing on candy hearts, a pall over me. I was worried for her, about how she was going to support herself and raise a baby at the same time.

  Jennifer was ecstatic about having a baby, but halfway into her pregnancy there were complications. These visits to doctors were kept under wraps, but finally she told me that the baby would die as soon as she was born. Jennifer decided to carry her to full term. It felt different being around her: Our lives carried on, but it was impossible not to feel an immense sadness. There was no way I could comprehend her and Mat’s private pain. But her chipper optimism was unremitting as she exhibited bravery to an extent I had never seen.

  It was an accident, but I managed to scare Windi into labor. After entering her apartment one day and realizing she was asleep, I stood close over her face and stared at her, my nose inches from her own, thinking I was being funny. When she opened her eyes and screamed, her water broke. It was such a joyous moment, she really couldn’t get mad. My nephew, Caleb, was
born within hours.

  SAN JUAN ISLAND SEEMED SO much smaller upon our return, my father having finished his business in Arizona. At first, I thought it could be a new start, an opportunity to brand myself as someone a bit cooler than I’d been. But high school soured on me like a glass of old milk. The rot was subtle, at first. I could feel it in a small shoulder shove in the hall from an aloof stoner, or a word bomb (“—fucking girl—”) tossed from a car window. I was officially being clocked for what I was: a queer.

  In the hallway three guys tackled me and wrote the word FAG in black Sharpie on my forehead. I didn’t fight back. There were three of them and one of me; I just went limp like a rag doll and let them do it, revolted with myself for not putting up a struggle. Even after I washed off all traces of it, I still saw the word on my forehead when I looked in the mirror.

  There were certain things I tried to improve my standing at school. I threw a party at my house when my parents were gone. I befriended the louche, laid-back girls in the grades ahead of me and tried pot with them for the first time. I thought that if a few of the right people liked me, maybe they could influence how the rest of them felt about me, too.

  There was a boy named Curtis that I had grown up with in elementary school. We weren’t that close but would find ourselves hanging out together alone. Our conversations about sex turned into effortless blow jobs. One night, he stole his dad’s car and parked it up at the road, walked down our long driveway, and snuck in my window to fool around. I didn’t feel the strange guilt I had when kissing girls or the jittery tumult of hooking up with Austin from junior high. On the couple occasions that I tried anything with girls, it felt like I had just done something really gross, like making out with my mom or my sister.

  My clothes were getting incrementally louder. My hair—sometimes colored with markers—grew longer. I pierced my left ear, trying to show that I was different. I looked for anything that made a statement. For instance, I thought it was a great idea to wear a knit purse on my head as a hat.

  I was still friends with Ryan Smith, whose family owned the apple orchard, but we bickered frequently. Every week we would get into a fight about something inconsequential. He thought I was getting strange and could see through my need for attention. In turn, I thought Ryan was being too square. Still, our connection was strong, and when we hung out, more often than not, our differences would fall away.

  We were both cast in the school musical of Narnia that year. And our roles were magnified mirrors of who we were becoming. Ryan was cast as Edmund, a proper, well-spoken, and well-mannered young man. I, on the other hand, played a monstrous henchman of Fenris Ulf, the snow queen’s bloodthirsty right-hand wolf. I wore giant boots and leather, my long hair lank and stringy, my nails painted black.

  I started shoplifting cassettes from the drugstore, suddenly deft at the sleight of hand. There were a couple close calls, but thankfully I never got caught. It gave me a huge rush, to walk out of a store, not having paid for something. It was not an unpleasant feeling, the way it made my heart race and the blood throb in my temples.

  My most daring and dangerous heist was unplanned. My mom and I were in a mall off-island. I was perusing the magazine rack at a Waldenbooks when I saw a Playgirl peeking out on the top shelf. Without waiting to think twice, as if it were nothing, I reached up and pulled it out, holding it discreetly to my side. After walking to a more conspicuous part of the store, I slipped the magazine into one of my shopping bags and walked casually out. The layers of illicit action gave me a sudden, slight boner, which I covered with my bags. I couldn’t believe such contraband was in my possession: a treasure that—if found by anyone—there would be no way to disavow. Its discovery would automatically brand me a thief and a homo.

  The Playgirl lived under my waterbed that whole year, deep in a cubbyhole only I was able to crawl into. No longer would I tear up toilet paper to place on International Male underwear models. I had complete access to images of grown men with engorged dicks and thatched chests. If any object had fulfilled its reason for existence, pulled its weight, it was that magazine. I got off on it every day.

  That summer, I was cast as Baby John in a depressing community theater production of West Side Story. The director couldn’t pull a band together in time for opening night, so we sang to recorded instrumentals. The costumes were reinterpreted as glam-punk disasters that looked terrible on the cast of mostly thirty- and forty-somethings. The play got an abysmal, borderline scandalous review in the local paper. The piece singled me out as the one decent thing in it, but they were probably just being nice because I was fourteen years old and the youngest person in the cast.

  It was a weekday afternoon and I was in the theater rehearsing when an ambulance screamed by outside—not a sound you normally heard in Friday Harbor. They were responding to an accident that had happened near my house on the west side of the island. A boy had fallen down a cliffside while rock climbing. It was Ryan Smith. My memory has blocked out who told me or where I was when I found out. But it was as if I’d entered some parallel reality, an uncanny feeling that yesterday was continuing on as it was supposed to, somewhere else.

  The next morning I shuffled into work at my summer job in a consignment clothing shop. I was numb, seeing everything as though peering through thick, warped glass. I went through the motions, totally checked out. My thousands of memories played faster than I could keep up, erratic jump cuts mixed with visualizations of my friend falling down the cliffside, over and over. I could see Ryan’s parents and siblings in that big log cabin they all shared so closely, now just shells of themselves.

  I went to the service, but skipped the burial. I don’t now recall if it’s actually real, but I have a memory of driving past the cemetery afterward while the burial was happening. I refused to watch Ryan go into the ground. The few times in life I’ve experienced intense grief, I’ve had a delayed reaction, been unable to cry. Weeks later, my sister Sheryl insisted that I cut my long hair off for her upcoming wedding. At last, this caused me to have a complete meltdown.

  Jennifer and Mat came up to the island a few weeks later for a vacation. They were like family now, and we’d kept in constant contact the past year. They appeared to me as an EXIT sign, a way I could get off the island: My surroundings looked like nothing if not a beautiful prison.

  Above all else, I needed access to music. Unlike when I was in Arizona, on the island I had to make extensive plans just to order a CD or see a concert. If it was a school night, my mom would take me and a friend, boarding the ferry as soon as classes ended. After seeing Faith No More, or Nirvana, or Jesus Jones, we’d make the drive back to the ferry and sleep in the car for a few hours before the 6 a.m. boat. I would arrive at school on time, bleary-eyed but reveling in the afterglow of whatever performance we’d seen.

  My mom was doing her best to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything. But it still wasn’t enough. I had to find more people like me. The Playgirl under my bed had fostered new wants, fueling my drive for sex—with guys. The voice in my head that had previously been sidestepping the truth had begun declaring itself. I was gay. Maybe my mom knew there’d be an emptiness in my life, now that one of my closest friends had died. Or maybe it was just out of a deep generosity, but after much deliberation, and talks with Jennifer and Mat, my parents let me go: I left my home and moved back to Arizona, where the Leberts would become my legal guardians while I attended a public school. I didn’t pause to calculate what this meant. I just wanted out of that place.

  I knew I had to get rid of the Playgirl. But I couldn’t just leave it under my bed or throw it in the garbage for somebody to find. I took it down to the beach and jerked off one last time over the tan men. I doubled over and gasped on my knees, coming on the ancient beach rocks. Primordial ooze. Pulling up my shorts, I stacked some driftwood kindling underneath the well-worn and crinkled pages. The ocean was flat and still when I burned the magazine. It slowly caught fire and disappeared, pieces floating upward i
n the air.

  CHILDHOOD WAS OFFICIALLY OVER. MY old skin was sloughing off quicker than I could make a new one. This other self was growing outward from the inside, started tilting my head at certain angles, making my hands fall limp. Moving states didn’t make it easier to fit in—in fact, the opposite was true. But I still found plenty of fellow misfits in the vicinity.

  Like stray dogs, we hung out in my friend Josh’s backyard. It was pretty gross: Dirt and dead grass, Coke cans and candy bar wrappers were littered around a long-dead trampoline. We sat on rusty lawn chairs and smoked cigarettes so cheap they disintegrated after three hits. Courtney would stand, half swaying to the handbag house that blared from a weary boom box, the speakers shot, the CDs always skipping. As the Arizona sun cooked everything in sight, we found shelter in the shade of the house’s fragile roof.

  Atticus, a ropy blond boy with a penchant for backward baseball caps, demonstrated a recent dance-floor sandwich. The previous weekend, he’d been at Preston’s, a gay club in Phoenix that would let minors in after 2 a.m. Between swigs of beer he droned on: “. . . And the lights, they have, like, three strobes. I can totally get us in.”

  Josh, with his math-teacher glasses and long, straight hair, was quiet but bemused as he rolled joints. His weed kit was a metal Band-Aid box with the a and the n replaced by a u, so it read BUD-AID, the gear splayed before him on a warped particleboard card table. I never saw him take off his black leather jacket, even in the heat. “Maybe my dad would let me drive his car,” he said, brushing a lock of greasy hair behind his left ear. “He’s let me drive it before.”