Boy Erased (15 page)

I hadn't seen much of Brother Stevens since moving to college, and I was happier for it. There was something about his small close-set eyes that made me nervous. In high school, when I ran the church projector for him on Sunday mornings, I had felt as though he were directing every word of his condemnation against me, as though I were the Satan he warned us about, sitting up in my mounted booth above the rest of the
congregation, mocking God with my fantasies of the straight-backed Brewer twins who sat in the front row. During sermons, he would sometimes speak of the prodigal daughter who continually made his life more complicated: her drug overdoses, her live-in boyfriends, her casual use of the Lord's name in vain, her frequent incarceration. She was the typical preacher's kid gone wild. As a result, Brother Stevens had developed a policy of tough love. He had left his daughter to fend for herself numerous times, though he'd often agreed to help foot the bill for rehab.

I knew that whatever advice he had to offer my father would be harsh. I had a hunch that inviting me to the jail ministry had been his idea, part of a scared-straight routine that the church employed when, for example, it invited ex–drug addicts to recount their horror stories in long-winded testimonies that took up the majority of the service, most of our congregants leaving teary eyed and feeling lucky to be alive in their own skin as they walked out the front door. Despite my hunch, I still believed Brother Stevens might be right. A strict, dark, new perspective might be exactly what I needed.

•   •   •

W
E
ROLLED
to a stop in front of the main highway, and my father switched on his blinker. “It's the difference between what's natural and what's not natural,” he said, the brakes hissing beneath us. “You've always been a good Christian,
but you've somehow gotten the two mixed up. We'll get you to the right counselor.”

I hadn't felt truly natural since junior high, when I first saw my handsome neighbor walking his dog down the street: a moment that had me begging secretly for a leash. “I don't want to talk about it,” I said.

“Your friend what's-his-name didn't have a problem talking about it.”
Friend.
The word sounded cavalier, without a trace of irony, landing smugly between the blinker's ticking like a hard fact. It made me want to jerk the wheel in the wrong direction, slam the gas pedal to the plastic floorboard, drive us into the side of the nearest building.

“He's probably told half the town by now,” my father continued.

I had been avoiding public places for this very reason. David didn't live too far from our town, and odds were he'd already told several mutual friends I was gay in an effort to save face. I'd found out from one such mutual friend that he was on academic probation, that no one had seen him on campus for a month, that it was likely he'd moved back in with his parents. He'd probably exaggerated facts, made it sound like
I
was the pedophile. He'd probably told people I had tried to sleep with him. (My roommate, Sam, had already decided to move out of our room; I was now rooming with my friend Charles, and I suspected that the reason for Sam's sudden departure was that he'd heard these rumors.) There was nothing to do
now but hide, wait for the current to calm, and try to find a cure.

“I don't care what he tells people,” I said. “He's not a Christian.”

“I thought he went to church,” my father said, pulling onto the highway. “I thought you said he was a good kid.”

“Yeah, a Pentecostal church,” I said, remembering the old post office with its rusted metal beams and its brightly lit stage, its motor oil. “It's not the same.”

The words came out of my mouth without my permission. Blaming, self-righteous in nature, they felt natural, marching into place somewhere between a truth and a lie, powered almost exclusively by rage. They leant themselves to a sense of conviction, of purpose. They snapped everything around us into focus: the double yellow lines, the strip malls along the sides of the road, the faces looking out from smudged windows. They carried with them the tone and lazy dinner-party logic of some of my professors, but with very little of the same content.

Months later, when first meeting the LIA staff, I would instantly recognize these hybrid words as my own, though I wouldn't know the full extent of their power until they were used against me.

“They speak in tongues and use anointing oil,” I said. “It's disgusting.”

“Judge not,” my father said, the blinker snapping back into place as he turned the wheel, “lest ye be judged.”

“Thou shalt not bear false witness,” I said. More than a decade of Sunday school lessons, and I could recite scripture almost as well as my father, use it just as easily to justify my means.

“Honor thy father and mother,” my father said, using the trump card that always put an end to our disagreements.

I crossed my arms.
That's what I'm doing
, I thought.
That's why I'm here
. But I couldn't really be sure. I was here, at least in part, because there seemed to be no other option.

My father steered us onto a back road lined with maple trees on either side. The dying leaves brushed the roof of the truck, a dry rustling followed by the light thump of a tree branch.
Right palm facing upward. Rotate. Repeat. Left palm facing upward. Rotate.
I focused my gaze on a distant tree trunk and held on until we swept past it, until the pattern of its bark grew indistinguishable, something easily forgotten in the forest.

•   •   •

W
HEN
I
WAS
in junior high, my father took me into the beating heart of the forest to go hunting. I had pushed aside its pine branches in the quiet haze of the morning, my breath fogging beside his, our twin clouds joining for a moment in front of us, blinding us as they caught the sun. As my father tapped my shoulder to draw my attention, I raised my rifle and aimed its scope at the space beneath the shoulder of a large doe. One eye to the scope, the other winking, I watched this doe for what
seemed like several minutes, though it couldn't have been for more than a few seconds.

The doe appeared to me as an image of the forest itself, its wild grace effortless and unstudied, part of a natural world that didn't feel the need to question itself. It didn't seem to care if it lived or died. It simply
was
. Its awareness was all. The bullet I eventually fired landed somewhere in the path in front of us, missing the doe by several feet. My father spent the rest of the morning convincing me that I had hit this doe—that we were here to track its trail of blood, its thin red thread, through the forest—though I knew better. I knew he was trying to comfort me.

I wondered if this was how it was going to be. I would aim for something in the county jail, some truth just out of reach, perhaps behind a wall of thick black bars, and my father would spend the rest of his life trying to convince me that I'd hit the target. The deeper we descended into this labyrinth, the more lost we would become, to ourselves and to each other. Tracing everything back to where it had all begun would become impossible, our origins the raw materials of myths.

•   •   •

“H
AVE
YO
U
MADE
many
good
friends at college?” my father said, speeding through a yellow light.

I thought of Charles and Dominique, the twin music majors who sang spirituals in the dorm lounge and asked me to watch
Imitation of Life
, what they described as a “white-friendly
intro” into the black experience. “If you don't cry after watching this movie, you've got something wrong with you,” Charles had said. “White people always cry with that one.” Charles, Dominique, and I were quickly becoming close friends, but I was afraid of what my father would say if I described them. Though he claimed to have “no problem with black people,” I didn't want to bring up race when I mentioned them, didn't want to parade them around as my token black friends, didn't want to dig too deeply into my ancestors' cotton-ginning history for fear I would inherit an even greater sense of shame than I already had. There was also the fact that my college life and my home life were becoming increasingly separate entities, and after David's call to my parents, I was afraid of what other secrets might come to light if I started talking about my other life.

“Most people aren't that good,” I said, tapping the glass with my index finger. “You have to be discerning.” Original sin was a concept my father and I knew well.

I thought of my professors, and of my Western Lit class, how exhilarated I'd felt being able to discuss ideas and opinions as though they were nothing more than dirt or tiny pebbles we could sift through our fingers. I recalled how ideas that had once seemed so otherworldly and unapproachable came unglued before my eyes, lost their many associations with the angry and loving God I'd been taught so long to believe in, how they had assembled themselves into grist for other religions, other philosophies, other ways of daily living.

After a few more minutes of silence, my father turned up
Creedence until the music blasted my eardrums, shook the windows with its bass.

I see earthquakes and lightning
, Creedence sang.
I see bad times today
.

I slouched in my seat, propped my feet on the dash. The seatbelt locked, pinning me to the leather. I didn't talk the rest of the way. I was in my father's territory now, the Bible Belt more real to me than the one hugging my chest.

•   •   •

A
T
COLLEGE
, Dostoyevsky's Underground Man still took over from time to time, inviting me to recede into the background, blend in with the furniture, observe. The only difference, post-David, was a deeper need to hide that sometimes overtook my days, kept me in my dorm room for so long that I would piss in discarded water bottles, tuck them under my bed, forget about them. When I later found them during one of my more sociable states, I would greet them as I would a stranger, shocked by their sudden appearance, looking back at my former self as an ugly impostor.
Who would do this?
I'd think.
Who would be so desperate?

When I learned about Freudian theory during my first semester, I grew even more concerned.
This must be some unresolved childhood issue
, I thought, remembering my bedroom carpet hieroglyphs.
This must be another sign of my brokenness
.
No
, suddenly switching to an Old Testament perspective,
my sinfulness
.

There seemed to be no branch of psychology, philosophy, or literature I read that couldn't be bent to prove my guilt. By that same token, there seemed to be no idea I'd encountered that didn't complicate my understanding of Christianity, that didn't call into question my parents' God-given right to dictate my beliefs. I decided that this was what it was like to be truly insane, that only insane people clung to both sides so doggedly, refused to let them part ways, let them battle inside the mind.

•   •   •

T
HE
TREES
gave way to flat grazing fields studded with cows then to the rectangular buildings that served as the administrative center of the town, each one tethered together by the dark cracked asphalt whose deep potholes my father's truck easily absorbed. Through the cracked window, I could smell the strong scent of manure heated by the warm morning sun, and something else—some mixture of gasoline and rusted metal found only in farming communities where the methods of corporate farming have advanced so ruthlessly, so rapidly, that it is necessary to devote large plots of land to junkyards and fill them with old machines stripped of valuable parts.

The county jail sat on the outskirts of town, hidden behind a cluster of white-roofed buildings and a red Conoco gas station that also served as a tire and lube shop. Beside the jail stood the county courthouse, an identical building with only a few windows facing the road, last-minute additions that only temporarily relieved the uniform brick façade.

I sat up to get a better look, the warm leather leaving the back of my sweaty shirt with a quiet hiss. I had been expecting barbed wire, watchtowers, rotating guards in blue uniform. I had been expecting a series of security checkpoints, each more severe than the last. Some expensive Hollywood set. Instead, drawing closer to these squat buildings, I had a sense that what the town wanted most of all to hide might also receive the most traffic since there were so many cars darting freely in and out of the parking lot.

My father parked near the back, slamming the lever between us into park with the open palm of his hand.

“What do you think?” he said, turning to me, the leather squeaking beneath him.

I fear rivers overflowing
, Creedence sang.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin
.

My father cut the engine, muffling Creedence midnote.

“It's different than I expected,” I said, looking up at the white metal roof that caught the sun at a bad angle, sent it shining directly into my eyes. It made sense, seeing it now, that people in town wouldn't want to spend all of their money on a state-of-the-art jail. They could use their taxes for keeping the beautiful things beautiful, let the ugly things remain ugly, allow the facility's dark brick to recede beneath the mountain-studded mecca surrounding it.

I had learned by now that there was a cumulative effect to beauty. If people already saw something as beautiful, the object of their affection would continue to receive all possible praise
and attention.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
, Gertrude Stein, my new favorite poet, quipped. Naming something beautiful made it so. I'd seen this in the way the church spoke of marriage as a sacred institution and in the
ONE MAN + ONE WOMAN
bumper stickers people sported on their vehicles, the same ones my father would hand to any customer passing through his dealership's service department.