Boy Erased (26 page)

•   •   •

I
L
OOKED
UP
, the afterimage of the handbook's words floating like red banner across the dark room, my mother's face half
hidden in shadow. After a few seconds, I finally broke the silence. I wanted to let her in on the therapy lingo, test it out on her and see what her reaction might be.

“Was Dad ever an alcoholic?” I said.

We watched each other's reflections through the shadow world of the empty television set, where the distance between us was even greater.

“Why would you ask me that?” she said.

“It's for a project,” I said. “Genograms. The sins of the fathers. I want to make sure I got everything right.”

The moment slid once again into silence. I thought we might drift into that dark shadow world, never speak again.

“What about the sins of the mothers?” she finally asked.

We must have sat like that, staring at each other in the empty television for a long time. “That, too, I guess.”

“Your dad had some experiences with alcohol, but your grandfather was the real alcoholic. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

I thought of my grandfather, my father's father, the drunk. On the rare occasions when I'd visited him, he'd barely recognized me, and even in moments when he had recognized me, he'd called me by my middle name—Clayton, Clay—as if the name I'd inherited from my maternal grandfather was part of an identity he didn't want to recognize. He was a small man with small arms and a small desiccated face—the face of someone who'd already traded all of his good smiles for that last drop of alcohol. It was hard to imagine how he'd ever had enough power
to whip anyone, how he'd ever managed to inspire fear with those small muscles of his. Standing beside my father, my grandfather had seemed a tiny man, the opposite of masculine—and yet, somehow, my father had managed to take those raw materials and form his own version of the ideal Southern man. What was
I
missing, then? Where was the defect? The more I thought about these things, the more LIA's logic began to break down, and I wanted my mother to be there when it happened.

“I can't understand why you'd need to ask me this,” my mother said. She was standing up now. The lamplight met her at a sharp angle, the freckles on her face and arms a painter's absentminded, expert flicking of wetted brush.

“Well,” I said, drawing out my words. “They need to know where all of my sexual feelings come from.”

“I don't understand any of this,” she said. “Why do they need to know so much about our family? What does our family have to do with sexual feelings?”

“They say a lot of it's caused by childhood trauma.”

“What step is this in?”

“I'm still on Step One.”

“How long does each step take?”

“I have no idea. Months. Years.”

“Years?”

“Some of the new counselors have been there for more than two years. The older ones have been there for a decade.”

My mother was straightening her wrinkled blouse. She
looked to the mirror hanging on the opposite wall, teased up her hair. After a few seconds, she grabbed the car keys from the coffee table. I wondered if we were going to leave right then. I wondered if she might march into the office and demand an explanation.

Before the silence fell on us again, she said, “Let's go out tonight. Forget the rules. Get some real food.”

LIA was very clear about its “safe zone” rules. There was a map on one of the facility's walls that listed the few areas in the city without any malls, restaurants, movie theaters, secular bookstores, or porn shops. Every part of the city was forbidden except for places with the word “Christ” in it, really. Our hotel was situated directly in the center of LIA's map, as far from sinful influences as possible. The idea of leaving, if only for a moment, was tempting. Something other than stale KFC biscuits, cold gravy, a pile of picked bones tucked away in a paper box. Something other than half-empty parking lots and homogenous strip malls. I closed the handbook, the plastic sleeve cracking along the spine. I pictured the crack of my grandfather's belt, my father in a corner with one forearm raised to protect his face.

“Did he ever fight back?” I said. “Dad? Did he ever try to leave home?”

My mother walked past me to the door. She slid the chain through its gutter and unbolted the deadlock: a hollow slicing sound. “There are some questions I don't ask.”

•   •   •

O
UTSIDE
,
THE
AIR
was even hotter and more humid than I remembered, but a slight breeze followed us to the car, daring us forward. After I had sat in the facility's antiseptic light for hours, the promise of an elegant dinner in a good restaurant was like the promise of manna in the desert. I half expected LIA staff members to flag us down as we exited the hotel parking lot, their arms waving wildly about our car, but the parking lot remained empty as we made our way to the interstate. My mother's face soon relaxed into a sweetness I had known when we used to go shopping in the city together. And as we traveled farther from the hotel, we managed to wrestle free of the present, to slip into an alternate future that only a few moments ago had seemed impossible.

It wasn't that she had given up on the therapy. In the hour that followed, my mother would ask me at least half a dozen times if I thought I was going to be cured. We just decided to ignore the details for the moment.

“Where are we going?” I said, watching the soot-stained lines of the interstate sound barrier skip past the window.

My mother switched on her blinker. “It's a surprise.”

As we exited the interstate and turned the curve, the mirror façade of the Adam's Mark Hotel towered over us, a rare glinting diamond in the center of the city, and my mother said the same thing she always said as we passed it: “Your dad and I used to go there every New Year's Eve. It used to be so beautiful
inside. Everything was so beautiful.” But we weren't going there. We were going someplace else to make our own memories.

•   •   •

I
OFTEN
THOUGHT
of the life my parents had shared before me, how inevitable it all seemed. My father the quarterback. My mother the cheerleader. Everyone in town cheering for their success. Champagne glasses held up each year on New Year's Eve, the only night they allowed themselves to drink alcohol: a toast to the next year, and the next, and the next, until, finally, it must have been my mother without a glass in hand standing before their friends on the top floor of the Adam's Mark Hotel, toasting to a new birth that would never arrive that first time. And then there was me, the boy in whom they placed their dreams. It was hard to imagine the degree of their love for me, the easy faith they must have placed in God at the moment of my uncomplicated birth. It was hard to imagine how disappointing it must have been for them to figure out I wasn't quite all that they had hoped for, a stain on their otherwise perfect union.

Just that morning, I had read Smid's testimony at the back of the handbook, one that had suggested we could all one day follow the path many of our parents had followed. In “Journey Out of Homosexuality,” Smid wrote that he had met his second wife, Vileen, while doing yard work. “How romantic!” he wrote. I imagined her in a floppy sunhat, long sundress catching on her knees, thong sandals on her pedicured
feet. She must have caught sight of Smid's dimples as he approached his next weed or stray branch with the simple smile of a child, the smile that had wooed so many men to the ex-gay lifestyle. A hiss and spray of automatic sprinklers pivoting rainbows. “She is aware that my attractions haven't changed in general toward men but that I love her deeply and make choices daily to remain faithful to our marriage and have not regretted that decision.”

Like my father, Smid was excellent at conversion, at justifying whatever sudden mood overtook him. He had skipped over most of his former life in his testimony, never explicitly mentioning it in our sessions. It was hard to imagine that he had ever been married, the way he talked about how many men he'd been with. Until I read his testimony, I had no idea just how vast his journey had been. “I had developed an addictive habit of masturbation that carried into my marriage,” Smid wrote. In the same way that my father had condemned everything before his calling as rubble, as fodder for God's greater purpose in his life, Smid had consigned every failed act in his first marriage to the sin of addiction. Rising out of this sin, Smid now believed a higher power had elected him to lead other gays out of their addiction into successful marriages. He believed he could do this because he knew a thing or two about the familial circumstances that had contributed to the formation of homosexual addiction. My father's story carried an obvious parallel: Working with criminals—“thugs,” as he called them—had
compelled him to begin the jail ministry in our small Arkansan town. Why did good men turn out to be thugs? Because they came from circumstances like his, families in which the alcoholic father had done something brutal.

But what had held their lives together before the conversion, before the A-to-Z logic of sin reduced human complexity to a syllogism? What form had their faith taken, however limited, in their long lives as preconverts? Christianity is, among other things, replete with converts. Peter renounces his atheism to become a fisher of men. Saul becomes Paul on the road to Damascus, wiped clean of a past in which the execution of good Christian believers was his life's work. But the Bible never shows us the beating heart of a preconvert. Crumple the first half of the story and toss it in the trash; all else is distraction.

And who was I before Love in Action? A nineteen-year-old whose second skin was his writing, whose third was his sense of humor, and whose fourth, fifth, and sixth were the various forms of sarcasm and flippancy he had managed to pilfer from his limited contact with English professors during freshman year at a small liberal arts college two hours away from home. Remove the skin, and I would be no safer from the threat of suicide than T. Remove the skin, and there was nothing but an ache to fit squarely into my father's lineage, into my family. According to LIA logic, the only option was to convert, smother one's former self in the branches of the family tree, and emerge, blinking, into a Damascene sunrise.

•   •   •

M
Y
MOTHER
AND
I stood in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, where the big tourist draw was a flock of mallard ducks that lived in the lobby fountain. The ducks spent half of their days waddling in formation to the rooftop, and that must have been where they were now, the fountain empty save for hundreds of pennies flashing gold in the dim. My mother and I watched the water ripple over them until they became indistinguishable.

“Want to make a wish?” my mother said.

I imagined grabbing a handful of pennies and tossing these strangers' wishes over my head. “Not really,” I said, noticing how, in the low lobby light, all of these pennies looked exactly the same. Most of us weren't going to get what we wanted.

The lobby was quiet, but this was a quiet my mother and I could handle: the murmuring of cheerful voices amid the low light of chandeliers, the plashing of the fountain, the echo of expensive shoes against polished marble. We added our own less expensive shoes to the echo as we made our way to a small candlelit Italian restaurant at the back of the lobby.

“This is nice,” my mother said. She was rushing ahead, and I was trying to keep up.

The restaurant was mostly empty, with a few middle-aged couples sitting in booths along the walls. My mother and I chose a booth in the back, hoping to get a good view of the
room and the people in it. The waiter handed us two menus, smiled, and disappeared behind the kitchen door before I could get a good look at him.

“What do you think their story is?” my mother said, darting her eyes to a couple directly across from us. Arms tangled in wineglass stems, candles lighting up the man's cuff links, plates half full: Food seemed to be the last thing on their minds. Every few seconds, the woman would tilt her head back and smile.

“Do you think they're having an affair?”

“I don't know.” I glanced back at my mother. She now held herself upright and stately, the mirror image of the way she had looked in the newspaper clipping we kept on our refrigerator at home, the one where she'd been photographed in her sequined ball gown at the Peabody Hotel premiere of Sydney Pollack's
The Firm
, the whole evening a twenty-fifth anniversary present from my father. In the caption below the article, my mother had been mistakenly labeled an extra in the movie, a modifier that always managed to thrill her. The word seemed mysterious to me: someone standing on the outside, but also a little extraordinary. I'd often wondered if these people whose lives we constructed might be doing the same for us, if we might be the extras in their dramas. It was comforting to think that what we were going through might be a minor part of someone else's production.

“The woman's at least twenty years younger,” my mother said.

“Twenty-five,” I said.

“Thirty.”

We opened our menus, and my mother propped hers on the edge of the table and leaned in to shield part of our conversation from view. “Want to hear my big idea?”

“What?”

“We're going to make a lot of money with this one.”

“What is it?” It was fun, once again, to add a flare for the dramatic to our conversation, to tint the scene with a few choice words, to feel like a character in a movie. After listening to the naked liturgy of our therapy group's various suicide attempts, HIV prognoses, and tailor-made Bible hermeneutics, I was ready for something fun.

“Well?” I said. She was stretching it out. My gaze wandered over the bar. Men in suits, a few of them with leather briefcases resting near polished shoes. I thought of
The Firm
. Some of the cotton used in Tom Cruise's escape scenes was from our family's cotton gin, and even though we hadn't seen our names listed in the credits, we'd still felt important, involved, watching Cruise land in a soft white bed of our making. I felt a familiar wave of family pride wash over me.