Boy Erased (19 page)

I
t was the gummy bears. Red and yellow and green, coated in plastic, the plastic coated with a film of dust. No one had touched this package in months. I stood frozen in the Conoco aisle, trying to decide between gummy bears and gummy worms, the need sudden and unexpected. My mother was outside waiting in the car, but we weren't in any hurry, we still had two hours to go before the ordination ceremony, and it seemed as if we had planned this stop without saying a word to each other, as a sort of way station between the two worlds we now inhabited. Only now that I stared at the candy, it seemed that the simplest decisions had taken on an endless complexity, as if this were a death-row meal or some red-pill, blue-pill moment after which we would never be the same. I wanted to return to the car with the right bag of candy in hand, some surprising choice that would delight my mother, an intuitive leap that
would send her voice into upper registers—“I haven't thought of those in
years
!”—only I was no longer so sure I knew my mother well enough to surprise her.

I left the gummy bears hanging on their metal rod and walked up the aisle, the refrigerated glass to my right so cold it was almost hot, bright labels flashing in my periphery, metal cans lit up with pearl-white phosphorescence. The cashier, an older woman with a frizzled white ponytail, acted as sentry, eyeing me from the moment I first walked into the station. I must have looked out of place that morning: dark blue blazer and white button-down, cuffs barely visible; matching pants; black penny loafers—a college kid headed to Sunday school on a Saturday morning when he should have been vegging out on his couch watching television, maybe even recovering from a hangover.

A camera was perched above the woman's head. For a brief confused moment, I wondered what this footage could later be used to prove. If I died sometime in the near future, or if I was an accessory to some terrible crime, would a police officer later comb through this footage in search of my brief appearance, analyze the look of hesitation on my face for traces of fear or malice? It was silly, not to mention overdramatic, to think such things, but I couldn't help it. I'd just come from five mornings in group therapy with suicide cases, with lives that had been wrecked in an instant and never fully recovered, and I had begun to expect the unexpected. A moment of grace or terror—arguably the same thing—could descend without any warning, and now seemed about as good a time as any for God to resume
His communication with me. Lying about my sexuality in front of hundreds of people while standing beside my father as he took his holy vow—this felt like the lightning rod, the pillar-of-salt moment, the thing I couldn't turn back from.

I headed to the bathroom and locked myself inside the last stall. According to the rules in my handbook, I wasn't even allowed to be in this bathroom by myself: “During any trip to public restrooms you must be accompanied by two other clients, one of whom has been a Source client for at least two months.” At once I knew why the counselors had made this rule. I recognized the usual bathroom graffiti, the casual seductive tone etched into the lacquered stall door. There was a number beside the offer, and a name, Mark. Without really knowing why, I took out my RAZR and keyed in the number, saved the contact under Mark Bathroom. I exited the stall without peeing and straightened my jacket in the mirror. I twisted the dirt-caked faucet knob and cupped my palm under the hot water, used the water to smooth the cowlick at the back of my head. I wanted to make sure nothing looked out of place. At the very least, I could look the part of the Good Son.

I turned off the faucet and listened to the quiet in its wake. In my pocket was a kind of charm against whatever might happen today: A number I could dial, and even if I didn't plan on doing anything with this mysterious Mark, the act of dialing would be my secret, something no one else would know. It felt good to have a secret again, to be free of the blond-haired boy and his palpating hands, almost as good as it would have felt
getting my Moleskine back and entering the secret world of stories that belonged only to me. Mark's number filled me up, squared my shoulders, and puffed up my chest. Why hadn't I noticed this before? It was telling people the truth that got you in trouble.

•   •   •

T
HE
PREVIOUS
AFTERNOON
at LIA, while working in our Addiction Workbooks after the mask activity, our group had been offered two scenarios to test the intensity of our addiction to gay sex. I had very little personal experience, but I was still expected to repent. The first scenario had been remarkably similar to the one I later found on the gas station's bathroom wall.

The two scenarios Cosby presented us were almost comically opposed, and I had to keep from laughing as I read them that afternoon, even as I felt the familiar longing throbbing beneath my open handbook, the blood taking its familiar course to my lap.

1. It is Saturday, you do not have to go to work, but have the whole day free. You know from reading the graffiti on the walls of a local men's room that there will be a man there at three o'clock who will sexually service any who comes along. In less than five minutes you can achieve orgasm. You have thought about it all week. Will you choose to be there at three o'clock?
   
2. Again, the same circumstances, it is Saturday and you are free. A friend you love is coming to town this day, and has asked you to go to the beach with him. He is your very close friend and you have much to talk over. Will you choose to go to the beach with your friend?
   

“You need to be honest with yourself,” Cosby said, standing at the front of the classroom with the fingers of both his rough mechanic's hands barely touching, channeling a less Zen
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. I stared into the gaps between the pads of his fingers, thinking about how people were never really touching even when they thought they were touching, how it was really our electrons doing the touching, a fact that made me feel slightly less guilty about the one major transgression I'd written about in that morning's MI—kissing an art student named Caleb—but also a little sadder about living in a world where one illusion could so stubbornly dictate the way I saw every interaction with the people around me. It was a concept I'd encountered in one of my all-night reading marathons, its word sharp and satisfying as I'd silently mouthed it. “Osculation”: two curves touching but not intersecting, never intersecting. From the Latin
osculationem
: a kiss. Intimacy as a parlor trick, an illusion. But what was one more illusion when it seemed the whole world operated on so many of them? With each passing day at the facility, it seemed as though becoming straight was simply a matter of good lighting, of ignoring what you didn't want to see.

“Think about what you'd really do in this situation,” Cosby continued. “Write down the scenario you'd choose. Take your time. Really think about it.”

A choose your own adventure story,
I'd thought. Only in this situation, the wrong choice could send you, invariably, to Hell. Sitting next to J that day, staring through the window his legs made to the carpet, it seemed that either choice would send me directly into the fiery pit. What if this best friend whom “you love” and with whom you wanted to experience a beautiful day at the beach takes off his shirt to reveal the body you've thought about all those years you've spent away from him? What if an innocent day at the beach becomes the beginning of a complicated love story, one you repeat to friends decades later? I could imagine all of this happening with someone like J. The two of us sitting in a snug beach cottage on opposite couches with thick Russian novels propped in our laps to hide our erections, shooting suggestive looks at each other, searching for seashells just before sunrise, collecting them in pouches formed from our T-shirts, the dampness cold against our stomachs, the sand scratching our feet.

The Addiction Workbook made it clear which choice was the right one: “The person who choose [
sic
] to go the beach may look at his watch around three o'clock and fantasize about the sexual encounter, but he knows he has made the right choice.” Whereas the person who chose to go to the bathroom may regret his decision “especially if when he arrives at the men's room, the police are there.”

Exiting the gas station bathroom with the mysterious Mark saved in my phone, I half expected the cold slap of handcuffs against my wrists. I half wanted it. At least a trip to the police station would have saved me from lying to so many people—from lying, once again, to myself.

•   •   •

I
RETURNED
to the car empty-handed. If my mother was disappointed, she didn't show it. Her heavily mascaraed eyes were already trained on the pine-studded Ozarks we'd soon be entering. I sank into the seat as my mother started the car.

There was a loud ding from the dashboard.

“Oh,” she said. “We're almost out of gas.” We'd meant to stop only for a bathroom break and a snack. Somehow we'd ignored the gas indicator the whole way. “Think we can make it?” There was a dare in her voice:
Could we really make it or might we find in our breakdown the best possible excuse
not
to make it
? I ignored the dare. Too obvious: the preacher's son and wife stalled on the side of the road, some congregants' car passing us on the way to the church, pulling over to save the day.
That was a close call
, people would say.
Satan trying to block your path
. And my mother and I sitting with the knowledge that we were the Satan in my father's story, that perhaps this was what we'd always been.

“The gas is pretty low,” I said, already opening the door. “I'll get it.”

My mother pressed the button for the tank. “You
are
your
father's son.” Meaning my father and I didn't take these kinds of risks with cars, having worked at the dealership for so long. Meaning these weren't the risks that mattered to us. But the truth was, I wasn't really like my father in this respect. I had yet to take the kinds of risks he'd taken at my age. At nineteen, he'd already married my mother and taken over the family cotton gin, changed the entire trajectory his life was to take. Now in his midfifties, he was about to change everything again. Time was running out for me to turn out like my father. I had yet to make the jump into hetero life, work miracles with my hands, create something stable.

I slid the nozzle into the tank, pressed the trigger. I'd always enjoyed the rush of gasoline beneath my palm, the knowledge that such a simple act could propel us such great distances. The myth of progress, of unending supply: I, like my counselors, still clung to it. I read enough articles each day to know that President Bush was continually telling the country how important it was to tap into our own oil reserves, reduce foreign dependency. And why couldn't faith operate the same way? Couldn't God's love come back to me in all its abundance if I just searched in the right places? Couldn't I still be cured if I dug deep enough—went far enough behind the mask—to the source of my true hetero self? Or had I already dirtied myself too much by pressing Mark's number into my phone, harboring the enemy in my pocket?
Make me pure
, I prayed, gallons of unleaded gasoline rushing through my fingertips, soon to be
converted into something useful.
Please-help-me-to-be-pure
.
Pleasehelpmetobepure
.

•   •   •

H
IS
SON
.
H
IS
WIFE
. For a while, it seemed my mother and I had lost ourselves in the abundance of all that my father had come to represent for the people around us. We couldn't blame him for it, but still, he hadn't done anything to stop it from happening. Perhaps he hadn't even known it was happening. For him it was natural, and I suppose it was natural for us, too, since the Bible continually advised the lesser members of a family to get behind the head of the household, support the father's belief system.

But hadn't there also been times when my father had urged me to become my own person? Hadn't he, of all people, learned the importance of individual character? His father, the drunk, had brought him to God, taught him the importance of the church, all the while beating him and his siblings whenever he got into one of his foul moods. Statistically, my father should have turned out to be the same violent drunk as my grandfather was; instead, he had rebelled against this childhood trauma and taken on the more radical faith of the fundamentalist. By Love in Action standards, it should have been my father who turned out gay, not me, since he'd suffered all of the trauma while my own childhood had been relatively peaceful. By Love in Action standards, my father's life made no sense.

•   •   •

I
S
LID
BACK
in the seat, kicked off my loafers, and propped my black-socked feet on the cold vent, my toes instantly submerged in what felt like icy water. A sliver of sun burned the side of my face.

“How do you feel?” my mother said. Her hands were firmly fixed at ten and two on the wheel. This vigilance, this never taking a risk when you didn't have to.

“I'm fine.”
We're all faking it
.

“We can stop again if you need.”

“That's okay.”
It's just that some of us are more aware of it
.

Silence. My big toe toggling the vent open and closed. With Mark's number in my pocket, I suddenly knew that what I was thinking was true. Keeping a secret, telling a lie by omission, made it much easier to see all of the other lies around me. An expert liar wasn't merely an expert on his own lies, but those of others as well. Was this why LIA's counselors were so good at challenging their patients, at calling them out? Was this why Smid and the blond-haired boy didn't fully trust me?