Boy Erased (17 page)

My father turned to me, his hazel eyes flashing green in the fluorescents. The door buzzed open in front of us, but he didn't move.

“That's right,” he said, raising his hand to clap me on the back. I flinched involuntarily, and his hand froze.

“Right,” he repeated, opening the door.

Wild Thing and I walked with him up to the front desk. A police officer with a half-chewed cigar sticking out of one corner of his mouth nodded at us and buzzed us into the next door. This was a small jail in a small Ozark town, so the jailers knew my father well. No need to present ID, no need for a frisking.

“Make sure to stay at least five feet away from the cells,” my father said. “And don't listen if some of them cuss at you.”

He motioned for me to enter first. I nodded. I wanted to prove that I was as brave as he. I wanted to prove that I could change.
Open the doors and see all the people
.

•   •   •

T
HE
HALLWAY
inside was dark. It was dark, but this could have been simply because we had just stepped out of the sun.
Neon spots swirled in an arc across my path, popped along the edges of the dim cells.
Phosphenes
, my high school biology teacher called them when I fell asleep in her class.
Did you enjoy your visit with the phosphenes?
The night David forced me to his bed, I had seen hundreds of them, pink and yellow and orange swirls gliding like figure skaters beneath my eyelids.
Sometimes this is referred to as Prisoner's Cinema
, the biology teacher continued
.
A phenomenon that was associated with staring at blank walls for hours—in my case, staring at my blank bedroom wall with a pair of scissors in hand, hoping a solution would present itself, that God would write the answer with His disembodied hand, as He had for King Belshazzar in the Old Testament.

I kept to the wall, my shoulder dipping in and out of the gaps between its white concrete blocks. Occasionally I could make out the pale flash of a smiling face striped with dark metal bars. None of the inmates seemed to stir. None of them said a word except for the occasional “Hello” or “Nice to see you.” I kept my candy-filled hands away from them, afraid they might lunge through the bars, though they all seemed overly polite.

I could hear my father's footsteps echoing behind me, but I didn't turn back, afraid he would detect fear in my eyes. The previous weekend, when I'd visited him at the dealership, my father had raised his fist to strike me, a moment when our mutual fear of my sexuality first met. I'd made some kind of joke in the showroom while everyone was watching, something
about him not wanting to seem weak in front of his customers, something I hadn't been able to recall the minute he brought me into his office and threatened me with his fist. In the next moment, his face had filled with terror at the recognition of what he was doing, what his father had once done to him, and he relaxed his fist, apologizing, looking down at the carpet the whole time.
Do it
, I thought.
Do it, and I'll have a free pass. Do it, and I don't have to love you anymore.
But he hadn't done anything. A tear formed in the corner of his eye, ran down his cheek to the spot between the cleft of his chin, and that was it. Whether the tear was for his gay son or for himself, I couldn't say. I was mostly thankful he hadn't begun to weep. “We'll figure something out,” he'd said, his voice trembling. “We'll get you to a specialist.”

I reminded myself that he wouldn't knowingly lead me into danger—that despite everything he had chosen to relax his fist—and I relaxed a little in that dark hallway. My father was the one person in a crowd you could rely on to respond immediately if an emergency popped up. When I was younger, he would survey every carnival ride at the county fair before I was allowed to ride any of them. As I swung by him on the rotating swing, my legs kicking up, the summer air tickling the backs of my knees, I would see his serious face as a fixed point in the turning world, his eyes fastened to the bolt above my head. He seemed always to be right behind me, watching over me. College had made me stray from him, from his and the church's teachings, and I had been severely punished. The bolt had come
unfastened, and I had plummeted to the spot where David could easily pin me down.

“Excuse me,” the cigar-chewing policeman said, moving past me. He spat clumps of tobacco into a Styrofoam cup in his hand. Catapulting from his lips, they looked like tiny dark pieces of confetti. In his other hand he carried a large brass key ring filled with what looked like hundreds of keys. His fingers sped through several keys until he found the right one and plugged it into the door at the end of the hallway, jerking open the lock.

“Wait here,” my father said, moving past me, heading inside with the policeman to an area where a large group of inmates awaited us in one large cell. The officer and my father were going ahead of Wild Thing and me to ensure that everything was in order for the service. Each time my father visited the inmates, he had to spend at least ten minutes calming them first, asking them to turn down the mounted television in the corner of the cell, to stop cussing at one another.

Through the open door, I could also make out the women's cell block at the other end of the large room, the figures of several older women moving away from the bars as my father passed, embarrassed grimaces overtaking their faces, strands of long hair falling limply over their shoulders.

“Your old man used to preach to those women, too,” Wild Thing said, leaning against the wall.

The door groaned shut in front of us, followed by the sound of its latch sliding into the faceplate.

“What happened?” I said. “Why'd he stop?”

“They started getting too nasty,” he said. “They offered him favors, if you know what I mean.”

You don't know what it feels like to be with a woman
.

“What did he do about it?” I said.

“You know how your dad can be,” Wild Thing said, eyeing the cell across from us. The man inside didn't seem to be listening; he was lying on his back, his features concealed by the forearm he'd draped across his face. As I later discovered, this hallway was reserved for some of the more extreme cases.

“He tried even harder after that,” Wild Thing continued. “Preached better than I'd ever heard him preach.”

“Did he change them?”

Wild Thing shook his head. “The things those women said to him after that,” he said. “I can't repeat it in good conscience.”

I wondered when my father had told this to Wild Thing. Had they exchanged looks of momentary bliss, stories of the women they'd been with, of near misses that had almost resulted in a fall from grace? The one time my father took me to Hooters, around the time I hit puberty, I had been so obsequious to the waitresses, looking down at their shoes the whole time, that he must have mistaken this for a foot fetish. “There are plenty of parts to admire on a woman,” he'd said, as if we were talking about nothing more than his hot rods. We'd never gone back.

“He finally quit though,” Wild Thing said. “Sometimes there's just no curing people.”

Months later, in a gesture that would shock our church, my father would receive permission from the jail to marry two of the inmates who had known each other before incarceration, proving that he could still reach the women in some capacity, that this sacred ceremony might lead some of them to the straight path. He would stand with his back to a large maple tree, recite 1 Corinthians—
Love is patient, love is kind
—allow the other inmates to throw a short reception in the big cell, and arrange for a conjugal visit that night.
Marriage knows no boundaries
, the gesture seemed to suggest,
so long as it is sanctified in God's eyes
. The ceremony would earn him even more respect than he already had, inspiring many female inmates to kneel on their concrete cell floors and ask Jesus into their hearts.

Wild Thing dug his hand into the back pocket of his jeans. When he pulled it out again, he was holding several multicolored tracts. He held out a stack for me.

“Now we just hand the women a stack of these and hope they learn something from Christ's message.”

I tucked the bag of M&M's under one arm, took the stack, and thumbed through the thick pages, the bright red and gold Comic Sans typeface glinting up at me in the dim light. I flipped through to the end of a booklet, to a watercolor illustration of a heavenly mansion with one large street of glittering gold stretching out in a straight path in front of it.
THERE IS ONL
Y ONE WAY TO ENTER T
HE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
, the booklet read.
J-E-S-U-S
.

I had seen these tracts lying around our house each time I
came home, more and more of them littering our counters, our tables, the seats of our chairs. When I would leave again for college, my father would urge me to take a few just in case I found the chance to minister to a lost college student. The most I had ever done was leave a few of these tracts on top of a toilet-paper dispenser in the library bathroom. Exiting the stall, however, I'd imagined strangers flipping through these pages, their fingerprints melding with mine; it had given me a thrill to know that this would occur at their most vulnerable moments, jeans bunched around their ankles. Like my father, I knew something about temptation. It seemed the best option, in those cases, was to toss the tracts and keep walking. Given enough time, a solution might present itself.

“You know what?” Wild Thing said, running a hand through his phantom hair, forgetting, like always, that a tangled greasy mess no longer covered his head. “We should hand out some of these tracts while we're waiting for your dad.”

“That sounds good,” I said, pocketing the tracts. The words felt hollow, but I was committed.

“Good,” Wild Thing echoed. “We can head in opposite directions, talk to a few men, and meet back here.”

“Good,” I said.

He turned away. His faith in me was instant: I was my father's son. The path had been rolled out right before my feet, unfurling all the way to the edge of God's gilded throne. Wild Thing must have believed that
I
was the lucky one, skipping so many steps.

I watched him walk down the hallway in the direction of the entrance. He headed down an adjoining hallway, and I was left alone.

I flipped back to the beginning of the tract.
Are you lost?
it read. There was a drawing of a small brown-haired boy standing in the middle of a poorly lit street. Leaning on a lamppost in the distance was a dark-cloaked figure, Satan himself, cartoonishly evil, with a crooked cane and a sharp red tail sliding out from the back of his cloak. Despite his menace, Satan looked lonely, standing there by himself in his isolated patch of darkness.

•   •   •

T
HERE
HAD
BE
EN
only one year when I hadn't felt alone. I was twelve years old, a time when Missionary Baptists would say I was born again, the moment in every true believer's life when you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and vow to be a Christian for the rest of your life. Though the feeling had waned since I was a young child, I could still feel God's all-encompassing love emanating from some deep shelf behind my solar plexus. The feeling mounted itself there on a night when I was lying in my bottom bunk and feeling as though I didn't deserve to live. This was after our preacher gave a fiery sermon about how Christians must humble themselves before the Lord, how we must realize how wicked and small we are the minute we leave our mother's womb. That night, within the empty echo chamber of my mind, a place usually reserved for the petty
considerations of the day, I asked, “Am I loved?” The answer came in the form of a physical burning that traveled through my whole body, sent my limbs trembling. In that instant, I loved the feel of the sheets on my back. I loved the way the bedroom carpet felt cool beneath my toes when I stood up. I loved every face I had ever seen, every blemish and worry line. I covered my face in my hands and wept for joy. In asking for love, I had given it to myself and others. And at the time, I believed that God had lent me this capacity. As I grew older, however, and as love came to me less easily, I began to wonder if that feeling wasn't all just a hallucination. After all, this had been an untested love. Love, over time, could either blossom or wither, become a source of wonder or a remembered ache.

•   •   •

I
LOOKED
UP
to see the inmate across from me sitting upright in his bunk. He was watching me. He must have been listening to us the whole time. He was older, with gray hair cuffing his ears. Half-moon worry lines etched the skin around his eyes, and his long arms fell between his knees like limp vines.

“Hello,” I said. “What's your name?”

The man nodded, his eyes still watching me. I tried not to follow the length of his arms, tried not to look at the slight slope of a bulge between his legs. It was all too familiar, with him sitting on the bunk that way. I felt something overturn inside my chest, some hidden pocket of rage I'd previously forgotten.

“Where are you from?” I said. It was a stupid question. The inmates were all locals. Most of them had been born and raised in this town.

The man coughed, blinking. “What do you have there?” he said, his voice a dry rattle. “Candy?”

“Yes,” I said, holding the bag of M&M's in front of me. The tiny marbles shifted to one side. “But I have these, too.” I reached inside my pants pocket and pulled out a wrinkled batch of tracts, stepping closer, holding them out for the man to examine. I didn't touch the bars, afraid they might crumble at the slightest pressure.

He looked from my hands to my face, from one to the other, as if trying to decide which was more dangerous. A look of fear passed between us. As his eyes watched me, I thought of all the doors that kept this man from seeing the view of the Ozarks outside, from seeing the way the fog lifted over the peaks each morning in pink ribbons. It was no wonder my father's tracts worked so well, their bright streets a stylized dream of the world outside.