Boy Erased (18 page)

“I know what those are,” the man finally said. “Your dad's been trying to hand me one for ages.”

“Oh,” I said. I looked away, my gaze circling once again to the bunk. I couldn't help it.

“Your dad's funny about those things,” he said. There was a slight pause. “If I took one, would you give me those M&M's?”

My eyes adjusted to the dim; I could just begin to make out the man's weak attempt at decorating his cell: a few magenta crayon drawings on the wall from what looked like the hand of a child, a faded calendar open to the wrong month, a stack of letters on the corner of his desk. Unlike the large men's cell where my father and I would be handing out candy, there was no television here to distract him. Perhaps he had done something violent. Perhaps he had killed a man, assaulted a woman.

“If you can recite two Bible verses,” I said. “I'll give you a handful.”

The worry lines of the man's face grew more pronounced, his eyes receding deep behind his furrowed brow. “I don't have a Bible,” he said.

“My dad probably has one in the next room,” I said. “I can get you one real quick, and then you can find two short verses. It'll be easy.”

“What if I told you I couldn't read?”

I looked at the stack of letters on his desk. Did he have someone to read to him or was he simply telling a lie he couldn't be bothered to conceal?

“Maybe I could read them to you,” I said, “and you could repeat them.”

“What if I told you I have a bad memory?”

My throat tightened. I closed my eyes.
Left palm facing out. Breathe. Turn the left hand in
. The man continuing to watch me from his bunk.
Breathe
. All I had to do was hand this man
a tract and walk away. It was the least I could do.
Do not say to yourself, “Turn the left hand.” Awareness is all.

“Why don't you just take one of these tracts,” I said, “and we can talk again next week?”

“No,” the man said. The word was harder than the steel between us. I didn't press him further.

That was the best I could do. When my father returned a few minutes later, I would hide my failure behind a smile.

•   •   •

T
HERE
WERE
DETAILS
I would sometimes forget about the night of my father's ultimatum. The memory would dissolve, and then it would return at unexpected moments. Waiting in the jail hallway for my father to come back, tracts glued to my sweaty hand as I stared at a patch of bare concrete above the exit, I remembered the worst moment from that night.

It had been sometime after midnight. I was on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. I had paused before the sliver of lamplight between the door frame and door of my father's bedroom.

“What about the doctor?” my mother had whispered, her hand cupping the cordless phone receiver. My father sat next to her on the edge of the bed, watching the carpet. I had no idea who might be on the other end of the line, whom they might be talking to about me.

“Do you think it could be hormones?” my mother said.

“It can't be hormones,” my father said. “The boy doesn't need a doctor. All he needs is to read the Bible more.”

“How do you know?” my mother asked, covering the receiver. “How do you know what he needs? Maybe he needs a doctor.”

My mother looked up at that moment. I couldn't tell if she saw me, but she scooted over on the bed out of my line of sight.

I walked into the kitchen, stared up at the half-moon just outside the window, at its reflection gliding along the softly rippling lake, unprepared for whatever lay ahead.

•   •   •

A
FTER
THE
JAI
L
, after walking away from the unbeliever and wandering the hallways with my unopened bag of M&M's, I began to look forward to the mysterious doctor I'd overheard my parents talking about. Though I had no idea what this doctor might do for me, and though I didn't ask my parents if they had scheduled an appointment, I hoped this exam might be easier than the ones that had come before. I began to look forward to the idea of a needle pricking my skin, to blood funneling into labeled vials, to anything concrete that might tell me what was wrong with me or why I couldn't perform what seemed to me then the simplest of tasks: a humble exchange from one hand to another, the passage of Jesus's Word between two people. Maybe my mother had been right. Maybe something was off about my hormones. Maybe my hormones made me less of a man. I had failed my father's test at the jail, though he hadn't even questioned me about the tracts, though I wasn't
certain either of us even knew what a passing grade might resemble. Perhaps it would look something like Wild Thing's smiling face when he came back empty-handed yet armed with stories of the men who courteously took his tracts into their hands, said they'd read the words before his next visit. I didn't know anything more now than I had before my visit to the jail.

•   •   •

A
WEEK PASSED
. My parents visited with Brother Stevens while I was away at college, discussing whether or not there might be a cure for my condition. He knew surprisingly little about how Love in Action operated but seemed to think that this was the best organization of its kind. An ex-gay umbrella group, Exodus International, had recommended it to him, and with a strong endorsement from the fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family, my parents were sold. LIA was the oldest and largest residential ex-gay therapy facility in the country. If they couldn't turn me straight, no one could.

In order to prepare me for ex-gay therapy, LIA wanted me to attend some intro sessions with a staff-approved therapist. My mother drove me to Memphis at the beginning of Thanksgiving break to attend one of these sessions. The therapist's office was adjacent to LIA, but we weren't allowed to go inside LIA's facility until I had completed an application process that would take months for final approval. Inside the counselor's office, I confessed what I would later learn was my first Moral Inventory, detailing my same-sex attractions in a vague,
desexualized language, leaving out all the stuff about David but including as many sexual fantasies as I could recall. When the counselor asked me if I'd had any relationships, I told him about Chloe, about how guilty I'd felt lying to her through omission.

“She might have helped you through your struggle,” the counselor said. “If you'd told her the truth and both of you had confessed before God, you might have had a future together.”

I couldn't say anything in response. I wanted to tell him about the pressure I'd felt, about how Chloe and I had almost had sex in order to cure my condition, but I was afraid he'd just tell me more about what I'd done wrong. I grew quiet, and the counselor used this as an opportunity to preach about the need for true repentance. When our hour was up, my mother asked if she could speak to him alone, and when she came out of the office, her eyes were watery and red. I knew he had told her something, and this something had finally convinced her.

Once we were inside the car, she said, “We're going to take it one step at a time. We're going to try every option.”

We were silent the rest of the way home.

•   •   •

T
HE
S
UNDAY
before Thanksgiving break ended, my father was in a rare mood. It was late in the morning, but he was still sitting in his leather recliner, wearing camouflage boxers and a white V-necked T-shirt, one pale leg propped on the glass coffee table. His eyes were trained on the television, where a young
Clint Eastwood narrowed his crow's-feet eyes at a desert landscape and prepared to set off into the unknown. Always the sharpshooter, Clint never missed his mark. You could see it in his eyes.

I brushed past my father to grab my car keys on the table. Even though I no longer had to work the projector, I often left early to clear my head before the service.

“He's not afraid of anything,” my father said.

“What?”

“Clint,” he said. “He walks right into the line of fire.”

At the jail two weeks earlier, my father had preached about the importance of courage. Real men, he said, weren't afraid to show emotion. Real men followed Jesus. As I sat beside him, passing out the M&M's through the bars, I had thought,
Jesus wept.
The one verse he told them not to memorize even though it would have fit in so nicely with his sermon. Such a simple, compact verse at first glance, but one every bit as difficult to interpret as any other.

“We should know something about the doctor this week,” he said. “Don't worry.”

I headed into the kitchen to find my mother sweeping a patch of tile near the door. “Hi, honey,” she said. “You go on ahead.”

I couldn't leave without asking her what my father had meant about the doctor. “What will we know,” I said, “at the end of this week?”

She looked up from her sweeping. “Dr. Julie's going to give you some tests over Christmas break,” she said. “Something to
do with testosterone levels. And then we'll move from there.” Dr. Julie, our family doctor, was a woman I'd visited for the past five years. She always knew how to make me feel comfortable when she read over my charts, casually reciting her litany of cause and effect. I felt better knowing that this “something” would at least be performed by her.

I left the house that morning in a stupor. I hardly noticed when my parents entered the church. I hardly heard a word of Brother Stevens's message.

And when I drove back to college that afternoon, my stomach full of roast and mashed potatoes and gravy from the church potluck, the Ozarks sinking into flatland on either side, I almost didn't notice the auburn-colored blur that edged its way to the line of pines, slipping past my periphery like a spot of dark light. I didn't brace myself, but the impact never came. Only a second before, the doe would have sent me spinning into the sharp granite wall flanking the road. Still, the afterimage remained: the hesitant doe, one foot hovering above the unkind asphalt—a stray drifting from her natural habitat, afraid of where her steps had taken her.

Outside the context of a political war between faith and reason, more nuanced arrangements may be safely undertaken.

—J
ENNIFER
M
ICHAEL
H
ECHT
,
Doubt

Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who have used them, to disguise themselves so as to perfect them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.

—M
ICHEL
F
OUCAULT
,
Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice

Thanksgiving break had ended, I had gone back to college, and my mother had been washing dishes all afternoon. The mail had just arrived, but she was too afraid to sort through the stack. Thanks to a phone call Brother Stevens had made on my parents' behalf, she and my father had been expecting a reply from Love in Action any day now. They had also scheduled an appointment for me with Dr. Julie over Christmas break to test my testosterone levels. They were taking all possible steps to cure me, but my mother felt that everything was moving too quickly. Only a few months ago she hadn't even known anything was wrong. Half a year ago it had seemed her only son had found the girl of his dreams. If only she could slow things down, get a chance to breathe, to think a little more clearly. Brother Stevens had set things into motion too quickly, telling
my parents that they needed to act fast or else I might fall into even greater sin while away at college.

My mother was letting her hands air dry. She took a deep breath and walked over to the stack of envelopes, sifting through them until she found LIA's. She tore it open and pulled out a glossy brochure, one wet thumb against the freshly shaven jawline of a familiar-looking boy. When she moved her thumb away, the boy's face appeared newly distorted. His colors bled. His neck rippled out, bulging. His nose grew twice in size. But his eyes, they were the same haunting green.

“The first thing I noticed was his eyes,” she will later tell me, nine years after my time in LIA. It will take all of those nine years before either of us will feel confident enough to sift through our memories in search of all that we have chosen to put behind us. It will take all of those nine years before we can talk about what happened without entering into spirals of blame and self-doubt. She will stare into the surface of the shiny black voice recorder between us and ask to be understood, for her words to be recorded, and I will sit at the other end of the table, hands in my lap, thinking,
This is the most uncomfortable it will ever get
. I will force myself to hear her side of the story, listen for her voice amid the buzzing of harmful memories I thought I'd buried for good.

“His eyes were so sad,” she'll say. “They were calling out to me.”

“Take your time,” I'll say.

“I wanted to save the boy in that picture. I wanted to save you. But I didn't know how.”

All those years ago, standing in her kitchen on what should have been a normal afternoon, she had imagined this boy's trapped eyes might be his real eyes, capable of looking outside the red border that framed his portrait. The eyes of his soul, a reverse Dorian Gray, the eyes growing kinder rather than more sinister the longer she looked at them. During the months leading up to LIA, she read
The Picture of Dorian Gray
at my request, after I had first experienced in Wilde's seductive language a justification for the sensitive side I was discovering during my freshman year of college, years before I learned that this book carried weight in the history of LGBT literature. Standing there in her kitchen, she imagined this boy, this reverse Dorian, looking past the whorls of her fingertips, past her standing figure, into a kitchen she had filled with what he might recognize as the familiar relics of a healthy childhood home: a stack of dishes in a white ceramic sink, the open mouth of a Frigidaire dishwasher, the freshly swept expanse of tile abutted by oak molding, the cream-colored carpet of an adjacent family room. She imagined a boy like this one in the brochure—trimmed sideburns falling just above his earlobes, button-down shirt stanchioned by a white crewneck, sensitive curled lashes protecting his eyes from seeing too much of the world at once—would find in this house a sense of peace. There was order here, and cleanliness. There was the scrubbed
surface of her hands, the hot water she had left running on her thin fingers until the blood rose to her skin.
And what else
, she thought,
could this boy need?
Coming from a home like this one, how had he later come to be trapped inside this red-bordered brochure, surrounded by the portraits of the sin sick, the spiritually crippled, the chronically addicted?

She walked to the kitchen table in the corner of the room. As she passed the sink, a soap bubble erupted on the surface of the topmost plate, one that a second before must have held the trembling reflection of her standing figure in a floral nightgown.

“I remember the soap,” she will later tell me, eyeing the recorder between us. “A strange thing. But then all of it was strange.”

“Take your time,” I'll say again.

“I remember the smallest details.”

Like a drop of water trickling down her bare freckled arm. Like the afternoon sunlight hitting it at just the right angle, a golden glinting streak. She had brushed away the spot of cool wet light from her arm that afternoon. She had smoothed out the pages of the brochure on the surface of the table and sat. Yes, the features were nearly identical, this boy's and mine. She felt dizzy. She could see, as in the endless snaking reflections of two facing mirrors, a different mother peering down at this portrait of a familiar-looking boy, this mother in turn imagining someone like my mother doing the same, all of these mothers asking, in polyphony,
What else could this boy have needed?
She waited for the dizziness to pass. She had felt this before, at moments when someone in church would speak of eternal life, of living forever in Heaven without end, when she had felt tired just at the thought of eternity, had waved a hand in the air in front of her face, and had said, “My mind can't handle this. It's too much.”

The smallest details. The late-morning sun falling across one half of the table. The dust motes spiraling into what looked like columns of sand. Outside the double-hung windows, algae-striped water lapped at the steep shore that divided our property from Lake Thunderbird. During the tourist-heavy summers, my mother would sit on our balcony to watch the speedboats cut Vs through the water, daring the waves to come closer. On winter weekdays like this one, however, the lake sat still and quiet, and she kept indoors most of the day.

She glanced at the other portraits that staggered—left, right, left, right—down the page. One girl resembled her childhood friend Debbie, a skinny brunette who always bunched up her curly hair with a clip when they visited the public pool together to cool their feet in the shallow end and stare at boys. Another, an older man, resembled our previous family doctor, Dr. Keaton, who always made sure to warm the metal diaphragm of his stethoscope before pressing it to my mother's bare back.
What are they doing here
, she thought.
What went wrong?

But, of course, these weren't the people she knew. The difference resided in their smiles. These trapped faces were smiling in an altogether different way, the corners of their lips
stretched beyond the limits of normalcy. Even in her happiest moments, even in her sixteenth year—when friends and family had turned in their pews to watch her lace-veiled figure float up the aisle to meet my father—she had never seen such smiles before. It was the kind she would come to know as the ex-gay smile. Once she saw it for what it was, this smile would trail her through the next nine years. She would imagine seeing it almost everywhere, even on the faces of townspeople she met every week, as if the whole world had been carrying these secret ex-gay lives all this time without her knowledge. Turning down a grocery aisle, the wobbly shopping cart steering away from her grip, she would seize up—freezing, hands clenching the plastic handle—the moment she felt this smile sweep over her, as if a gunman had just waved a pistol in her direction. Such was the power this smile would hold over her, over us.

She read the words that floated beside these faces.

Since coming here, God has shown me a great deal about my selfishness and fear, which I had used to keep myself trapped in a cycle of homosexuality.

In my time here, I've learned that I am loved and accepted even though I have been involved in sexual addiction.

Being at Love in Action has given me a second chance with my family.

All of these faces saying what sounded at once foreign and familiar to her. Foreign, because she was unaccustomed to the way Love in Action's institutional jargon could rearrange perception until even the most complex human emotions could be boxed and labeled as “selfishness,” “fear,” or “addiction”; familiar, because the church was designed to be God's extended family, His lost tribe on earth, His chosen number to survive the Rapture, with words like “love” and “acceptance” digested alongside every yearly dose of unleavened bread, every plastic thimble of grape juice.

She slid the brochure away from her. The remainder of the kitchen table was covered with the loose sheets of the Love in Action application form that had been included in the same envelope as the brochure. The top sheet featured Love in Action's logo, an inverted red triangle with a heart-shaped cutout in its center.

“Even then I knew that logo was strange,” she will later tell me. “The heart was cut away, like that was all it took.”

I've felt this
, I'll think, pressing pause on the recorder, playing back a few seconds to see if I've captured all of my mother's sentences. You cut out what was once dear to you, ignore the ache in the back of your throat, erase the details you want to forget. Toss the first half of the story in the trash, as my counselors had. I've lost so many friends in the years after LIA, gone without talking to old boyfriends for years just because it came so easy for me to ignore something I'd once felt. I've been so
heartless without even trying. The truth is, being heartless came so easy for post-LIA me that I didn't even have to think about it. The trick was to believe that cutting people out of your life was a necessary step in your development. It was like those fields that used to burn for hours in the late fall outside the living-room window of my childhood home, the orange wall of fire leaping right up to the edge of the property: slash and burn to make room for next year's crop.

And so I had. Chloe, Brandon, David, my college friends Charles and Dominique—and Caleb, the senior art student who so fascinated me during my freshman year, the first boy I kissed.

“Let's stop for now,” my mother will say, standing up from the table, sliding the recorder in my direction. She will stand in the middle of that field if that is what it takes for me to notice her pain, refuse to budge even as the fire draws closer. She will wait for my father to join her.