Boy Erased (4 page)

“It looks like you've got a lot of
A
on both sides of the family,” J said, admiring my poster, his voice a steady monotone. “That must've done a real number on your mom and dad. You know, they say sometimes the biggest sins skip a generation. You must be
really
gay.”

“That sucks,” I said, looking up to make sure no one had heard me. Even mild profanity was strictly prohibited. “I guess it'll take a long time to get cured.”

Smid stepped between us, eyeing our posters. “Good work,” he said, patting me on the back. Light and cool, the pads of his fingers barely registered. Later I would feel this touch again, on my elbow, as he corrected my flamboyant akimbo stance to something more straight appropriate, a flagging Cro-Magnon pose popular in small Southern towns like the one where I grew up.

“I don't want to hear that language again,” he added, his
voice lower, a filed-down baritone worn by strain. “Only God's language is tolerated here.”

I could hear S laughing quietly behind me.

“Newbie,” she whispered.

“No shit,” I said. The curse registered as a slap, but she quickly composed herself and laughed again, loud enough to draw Smid's attention back to us.

Looking back, I think she must have been glad, for once, not to be the object of the room's derision, to be rid of the attention of people who considered themselves lucky to know someone like her who hid an even more shameful secret. She must have been glad that people for one second had stopped picturing her lying on her back in the cramped living room of her trailer, the half-empty jar of peanut butter like a dark stain on the kitchen counter as her parents entered through the front door to find their daughter changed beyond recognition.

“Take your time,” Smid said, circling back to me. “You'll want to get this right.”

I slid the pencil behind my ear and surveyed the half-finished genogram, trying to recall the sins of my fathers. I sat like this until the activity time ended, afraid to write something I couldn't
erase.

T
he men gathered in the showroom, the soles of their leather saddle shoes squeaking against the tile. The previous night had brought several inches of rain that by now had gathered in the gaps of their rough concrete driveways, settled into the foam-rubber seals of their car doors, and spilled out of the hidden reservoirs of suspension beneath their floorboards. It was as if the weatherman with the practiced Midwestern accent had been wrong and there had been no rain. The roads dry as usual, and in the haze of only the second or third cup of coffee of the morning, these men might never have noticed anything different if it wasn't for the squeaking of their soles, a sound signifying that the night's activities had gone on without them.

“I tell you it's the End Times,” Brother Nielson was saying. Two men helped him limp to a black leather couch in the corner
of the showroom. As Brother Nielson passed his reflection in the red Mustang parked in the center of the room, he smiled briefly at his hulking form then looked away. “War in the Middle East. Over what? Why don't we just nuke them all?” Brother Nielson had earned his respect from twenty hardworking years as a deacon in our local Missionary Baptist church. As his health began to fail and his body slowly calcified, his stature as a pillar of the church and our small Arkansan town grew more pronounced. But in the end, his path to respectability had cost him his vanity. “I used to have all the girls a man could dream of,” he was known to say. “Hundreds of them. Lined up. Every make and model imaginable.”

Now, the hem of his khakis lagged behind his shoes, mopping up the hints of water that the other men had left behind. “I don't know why people have to make things so complicated. CNN wants us to think we shouldn't have gone over there in the first place. Don't they know Jesus will be back any day now?” He sank into the couch with a leathery squeak. “I can feel it in my bones.”

Something my father and the other men liked to tell people about the Gospel: God has no time for anyone but a plain dealer. Speak your mind, and speak it clearly. “There is no neutral,” my father liked to say. “No gray area. No in-betweens.”

I watched them from the doorway of my father's office, holding a leather-bound King James Bible in one hand, gripping the wooden doorjamb with the other. In less than five minutes
I would be joining them on my knees in front of the couch, leading my father and his employees through the morning Bible study for the first time. Since my father moved to this town several years back to assume control of a new Ford dealership, he had held a Bible study every workday morning. Like most church members we knew, he was concerned with the lack of prayer in schools and businesses, and he believed that the country, though led by an evangelical president, was constantly trying to strip away all of Christ's original glory from its citizens' everyday lives, especially when it came to things like the Pledge of Allegiance and Christmas festivities, which were always rumored to be under attack. Like my mother, he had grown up in the church, and since there had been only one church where my parents had lived most of their lives, our family had always been Missionary Baptists, concerned with leading people to the Lord.
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
My father took the verse literally, like all Missionary Baptists, and, like all evangelicals, he believed that the more souls you could gather in Christ's name, the more souls you would be saving from eternal hellfire. Two souls was the minimum, three was adequate, but nine or ten or more was best. “I want to lead at least a thousand souls to the Lord before I die,” he would repeat to me almost daily.

Working for him as a car detailer each summer kept me at a respectable distance from the business of saving souls. At eighteen, I hadn't yet performed any actual ministering duties.
Though he never said it outright, each summer he required me to do the kind of manual labor that would help me turn out to be a normal red-blooded Southerner, the kind that would offset my more bookish, feminine qualities. My workday companions were spray bottles filled with sealants, polishes, body compounds, and tire glazes. Pink and purple and yellow liquids I hardly knew other than by the smell and feel of them baking into my sunburned skin, and then by the aggregations of foam that settled and eventually swirled into the shower drain at the end of each day. When my father would ask me how many customers I had witnessed to out on the lot, I was able to smile and say, “I don't think the pressure washer has a soul, even if it does make those crazy humming noises.” And my father was able to say, “We need to get that thing fixed,” and turn his head away from the sight of me.

But when it came to the morning Bible study, jokes wouldn't save me. I had to perform or else disappoint my father in front of the other men. Since I was seen as an extension of him—
Going to turn out just like your old man; can't wait to see what gift the Good Lord's given you
—great things were expected to pour from my lips. Wine from the jars of Cana: what was empty suddenly restored, the wedding feast continuing, the disciples believing in miracles.

When my mother would join us for our lunch breaks at the Timberline, one of the only restaurants in town, in a giant wood-paneled room whose walls were covered with splintering
handsaws and rusty blades three times the size of my head, my father would look around at the people eating, and he would sigh, a wounded sound that left his voice hollow and quiet.

“How many souls in here do you think are headed straight to Hell?” he would say.

And before we could leave the restaurant, he would make a show of buying everyone's lunch. He would stand up from our table, pull a waitress from her autopiloted course through the sea of grease-stained faces, and whisper the order in her ear. As customers brushed past us, my mother and I would stand near the entrance, waiting for him to finish paying. Sometimes a customer would walk up to my father and protest his charity, and my father would say something like “The Lord has blessed me. He'll bless you, too, if you just let Him into your heart.” Most often, the customers would sit at their tables absorbing the smell of fried chicken livers into their jeans, T-shirts, and follicles, oblivious until it came time to pay, when they would stare narrow eyed at the passing waitress, as if she might somehow be responsible for their embarrassment. No one in this small Southern town liked to feel beholden, and no one knew this better than my father.

•   •   •

I
JIGGLED
the wooden doorjamb of my father's office doorway until it almost came loose, listening as Brother Nielson and the others settled their speech into a steady rhythm. Many of
the dealership employees regularly attended our church, some more devout than others, some perhaps exaggerating their piety for my father's sake, but all of them my Brothers, a name the Missionary Baptists applied to any follower of Christ. Brothers and Sisters all serving the same Father in the name of the Son. I couldn't make out their words, but I could feel their excited speech almost to the point of pain, each syllable a loud buzzing noise, a hurried wing beat.

“Another earthquake this morning,” my father said. “Are you ready for the Rapture?”

I could hear him typing at his computer behind me, one key at a time, adding his own metronomic countermovement to the ticking of the polished chrome clock above his desk. He had recently swapped his dealership's 56k dial-up connection for high-speed DSL, and each morning he sped through Yahoo! headlines looking for Armageddon talking points. An earthquake killing hundreds somewhere in the Hindu Kush. A siege at the Church of the Nativity. The U.S. invading Afghanistan. All of this related to the predictions outlined by the dreams of St. John in the Book of Revelation. One simple logic guided these searches: If every word of the Bible was to be taken literally, then the plagues and fires of St. John's testimony were certainly the plagues and fires of today's news cycle. The only thing we could hope for in these End Times: the country announcing its allegiance to Jesus before the Rapture began, righting some of its wrongs, continuing to elect solid born-again Republicans into office.

“I'm ready,” I said, turning to face him.

I pictured the coming earthquake, the miniature hot rods lining his office shelves crashing to the floor, their tiny doors groaning, hinges cracking open. For someone who had built fourteen street rods from scratch, for a man who could boast of winning a national street-rod competition in Evansville, Indiana, with his aquamarine 1934 Ford, my father was ready—eager, even—to watch all of his work burn to the ground the minute the trumpets sounded. He could do nothing halfway. When he decided to build cars, he built not one, but fourteen; when he decided to work full-time for God, he did it in the only way he knew how without jeopardizing his family's material well-being—by making his business God's business. His idol was Billy Graham, an evangelist who used the public sphere to such an advantage that he had been able to shape our country's political climate by whispering into the ears of no less than eleven presidents. Before my father came to be a pastor of his own church, his small-scale influence mirrored Graham's in its intensity. Members of our town's police force, who purchased their white square Crown Victorias from my father, never left the dealership without his admonishment to go out and bring order to our town—and, more important, to help spread the Gospel to unbelievers.

“We have to be vigilant,” my father said over his computer monitor. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and they shall shew great signs and wonders.”

He clicked his mouse several times with his too-big hand, a
hand that could take apart a carburetor but whose rough edges and burned skin made it difficult for him to operate a personal computer.

•   •   •

S
EVERAL
YEARS
before I was born, my father had stopped on the side of the highway that passed through our hometown to help a man whose car had broken down. As my father crawled beneath the engine to check for any abnormalities, the stranger turned the key to his ignition, igniting the gas that had been leaking from the carburetor, an ignition that spread third-degree burns across my father's face and hands. The burns left his nerves burned and dead so that now he could cup his hand over a candle flame for thirty seconds or more until my mother and I would scream for him to stop. When I was a colicky baby, he would comfort me by sitting in a wicker rocking chair with me and bringing a candle close to my face. He would press his palm flat against the open O of the glass holder until the fire almost fizzled out, repeating the act until I grew tired, my head falling against his chest while he quietly sang me to sleep with one of his many made-up lullabies.

He's a good old friend to me

As simple as can be

He's a good old pal

He's a good old friend

He's a good old pal to me

At certain moments in his life, my father must have asked himself why the stranger had turned the key. He must have asked himself why anyone would turn the key.

“Whatever you do,” my father had said, stepping around the stranger's car to examine the motor, “don't turn the key.”

There must have been some hiccup in communication, something in the stranger that said it was all right to start the engine at the exact moment the Good Samaritan crawled beneath the bumper of his car. Whatever his motivations, the stranger didn't hesitate.

My mother later told me that when my father showed up at the front door, his clothes covered in ash and his face half burned and his whole body shaking, her first reaction had been to ask him to stay outside. She was vacuuming the carpet. She assumed he was simply caked with dirt.

“Go away,” she said. “Wait till I'm finished vacuuming.”

Hours later, standing beside my father's hospital bed, waiting for his hand to heal so she could at least hold on to some part of him, what she felt in the place of love was pity and fear. Pity for a man who would risk his life for strangers without a second thought, and fear for a life lived with a once-handsome man, a twentysomething former quarterback with the cleft chin and deep dimples of a
Saturday Night Fever
John Travolta now transformed into—into what? No one could tell exactly. The bandages would have to be removed weeks later, and only then would doctors know if the grafted skin would resemble anything of his former face.

•   •   •

“T
OO
MANY
earthquakes to keep track of,” my father said, tossing the mouse into a stack of papers beside him. He popped each of his knuckles. “But you don't need shelter when you're wearing the Armor of God.” He pointed to the Bible in my hand.

“Sure don't,” I said. I pictured armor-plated locusts swirling in corkscrews from the clouds. Scores of unbelievers with their bodies run through by silver-plated scabbards. And somewhere in my conscience, the beginning of an idea that had recently begun to plague me: that I might be one of them.

•   •   •

A
T
EIGHTEEN
, I was still very much in the closet, with a halfhearted commitment to my girlfriend, Chloe, whose predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach. A week earlier as we sat in my car outside her house, Chloe had reached for my leg. I had shifted away from her, and said, “It's so cold in here,” flipping the lever for the heat, sliding back into the passenger's seat, wishing there was an eject button. I had experienced my own Armageddon fantasy in that moment: the depressed button of a radio controller, a hooded insurgent walking calmly away from our flying debris, pieces of my flannel shirt flying through the air on flame-tipped wings, a thick-necked policeman picking through the charred remains of the explosion for Chloe's purple hair scrunchie.