End of the Innocence (8 page)

“I am not in the mood to go anywhere,” I told him.

“Oh good. Because I didn’t ask you,” he replied. “Five minutes. Then I
am
throwing water into your bed.” He closed the door, then opened it again. “That was not a joke.” And he was gone.

“What the fuck?” I asked myself as I got out of bed. I had no idea what had happened beyond the fact that I was confused.

In less than five minutes I was outside, carrying the ruined clothes in a plastic grocery bag.

He stood smoking in front of a lime-green VW bug with the top down. Normally I would have said a lime-green any kind of car would be extremely gay, but somehow the bug worked for him. He offered me the pack in his other hand. “You smoke?”

“Uh, no,” I answered, waving them off.

“Good, don’t start. They are an ugly, ugly habit.” He tossed his cigarette away and got into the car. I got into the passenger seat, although I had no idea where we were heading. He turned off the loud house music that had started the minute he turned the key in the ignition. “Buckle up,” he ordered as he backed the car out of its parking space. “This is the only neon green car people can’t seem to see coming a mile away. Already been in two accidents in it. I’m just waiting for the front end to fall off one day.”

I slowly put the seat belt on as I examined the car’s structural integrity.

We headed left on East Avenue, traveling farther out of Foster instead of toward downtown. “Where are we going?” I asked after a few minutes.

“To the past,” he answered cryptically and lit another smoke.

“I doubt you can get this thing over eighty-eight miles an hour,” I mumbled, looking out the window.

“That’s cute, McFly. Very topical,” he said, turning the music back on. “I speak fluent nerd.”

I settled in and stopped talking.

My thoughts began to wander as I waited for us to end up wherever we were going. If you’d asked me if I would end up driving in the car of a guy I had just met to the surface of Mars, I would have told you no way. But here I was trusting someone based on nothing more than the word of my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend that the guy driving was to be trusted.

“Hey,” I said, sitting up suddenly. “Tell me about Jennifer.”

He gave me a quick glance to see if I was joking. “What about her?” he asked cautiously.

“Why doesn’t she hate me?” I asked, getting to the heart of the matter.

He laughed at that. “Oh, she did. Trust me. She hated you both something fierce.”

“So then why the one-eighty?”

He paused for a moment. “You mean three-sixty.”

“No, if she did a three-sixty she’d end up in the same place she started. A one-eighty is ending up facing the opposite way,” I explained to him.

He did a slow double take and then shook his head. “You really are a complete brain, aren’t you?” I nodded but prompted him to continue. “Well, she was obviously thrown by the whole ‘My boyfriend is now gay’ thing, but I talked her down from climbing a water tower.”

I didn’t get the reference, but I figured it out enough to know she had been mad. “What did you say?”

He kept his eyes on the road as he began to explain. “I told her that in towns like Foster, being gay was akin to being a vampire, and not the sparkly kind. Which means you hide yourself deep underground or risk a pack of villagers trying to hunt you down with pitchforks and torches and burn you alive.”

I was about to comment on the fact he mixed his Dracula metaphor up with Frankenstein, but in the end, a monster was a monster.

“So I explained to her that if Brad had the guts to come out in front of everyone, then the least she could do is try to imagine what it must have been like to force himself to be something he wasn’t for so long. When she didn’t like that, I told her to imagine she had to pretend to like girls for the past eighteen years and see how she felt about it.”

I was equally impressed and humbled that he had our back even before he knew us.

“So why haven’t I ever heard of you before?” It was something that had been bugging me since Jennifer introduced us. I was under the impression that there were no gay guys in Foster at all. Yet here was what could politely be referred to as an openly gay person, and yet he had never been mentioned before.

He glanced once and then again at me like he was waiting for me to add something else onto my question. “Okay, really?” he asked. “You really want to ask that?” I nodded, and he sighed. “Well let’s count down the reasons, shall we? One, because the world does not start and end in Foster High. There is a lot going on in this town that doesn’t get mentioned during study hall. Two, it isn’t exactly like you have your finger on the gay pulse of North Texas, so the fact you have never heard of me before isn’t as shocking as you make it sound. And three, I keep mainly to myself when I’m in town. Hanging out on Second Street getting wasted at the Rodeo Club is not my idea of a good time.” He looked over at me. “That cover it?”

“Do you know Mr. Parker?” I asked, and his expression immediately went sour.

“Pick another question. I am not answering that one.” It was the first time I heard real anger in his voice.

“Wait. Mr. Parker is pretty cool. What’s wrong with him?” Which, of course, was the absolute wrong thing to ask.

“Little Ms. Parker is everything that is wrong with this town, in my opinion. Walking around like he is Foster’s most eligible bachelor when he is as gay as any three guys I know. If guys like him came out and told people they were gay, there would be a lot more people realizing we are as normal as everyone else.” He raised his knee up to steer as he lit another cigarette. When the car weaved a little, I reached over and steadied it.

“He did come out,” I said as he flicked his ashes out the window.

Robbie grabbed the wheel and gave me a long stare. “When?”

“When they were threatening to kick Brad off the baseball team. He came out and spoke for him, pretty much told everyone he was gay.” I was confused because I knew it wasn’t like that was front page news, but nearly everyone in town seemed to know what had happened. Maybe Robbie really did keep to himself.

“And who made him do that?” Robbie asked after a few seconds of seething silence.

“Um… my mom, I think,” I reasoned, since I hadn’t asked her.

“Who’s your mom?” He now sounded suspicious.

“Um, Linda Stilleno. You just met her. She went to school with him.”

He seemed to digest that news and then shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Tyler Parker is an asshole, a total closet case. I want you to promise me that you will never count on him to back you up.” The look he shot me was dead serious. “I mean it,” he added. “He is only on one person’s side: his own. I don’t want you to get caught up in all that straight-looking jock camouflage because deep down, he is a self-loathing SOB and will stab you in the back.” He tossed his smoke out the window. “End of story.”

I settled in and decided not to say another word.

We ended up out in the middle of nowhere, which is a feat since most of Foster was nowhere to begin with. On a stretch of road that went even farther nowhere stood a little dive bar. It looked like every other dive bar within fifty miles of Foster—all wood, no windows, more like a chicken coop with delusions of grandeur. Weeds pocked the dry, dull dirt all around and made the bar even uglier. I almost choked when he pulled into the “parking lot.”

“Did you bring me out here to harvest my kidney or something?” I asked, half joking.

He gave me a half grin to match my half joke, I had a feeling. “I bet other people find that sarcastic wit just oh so cute.” He turned off the car. “Yeah, I brought you here. Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

“You show up, practically kidnap me, and bring me to what I think every serial killer’s hideout looks like, and I am not supposed to judge?” I shot back, slamming my door. “So far I am the dumb blond in every horror movie I’ve ever seen.”

He spun on me with a passion that shocked me out of my funk. “Look, you want to live in New York or West Hollywood and have that attitude, great. But until then, try to remember you live in Mayberry, and that means not everything is nice and shiny like you see on
Queer as Folk
. So before you start throwing around attitude, learn a little first. Got it?” I wasn’t sure what had pissed him off so much, but I nodded nonetheless.

I really was going to lose a kidney.

He stalked around back and knocked on the door, which looked like the kitchen exit with a few trash cans and empty crates. “If you can’t say anything nice, do me a favor and just fake it, okay?” he asked quietly. I nodded again, still not sure what I had stumbled into. Robbie pounded again.

A few seconds later, the door half opened, and I could see an older man’s face peeking out. “Robbie?” he asked in shock. “What the hell you doing out here so early?”

“Guided tour,” he quipped, jerking a thumb at me.

The old guy looked at me and shook his head. “You and your newbies.” He closed the door, undid the chain, and opened it all the way. “Well, come in, if you’re coming.”

We walked into a small diner-style kitchen with a stove on one side and an industrial dishwasher on the other. As soon as the door closed, I took a look at the guy who had let us in and almost choked when I saw the rifle in his hand. He explained as he reracked it by the door, “Sorry ’bout that. Can’t be too careful when someone comes knocking this early.”

“Tom, this is Kyle,” Robbie said to the man.

“Howdy, Kyle.” He put out a huge paw of a hand. “Welcome to the Bear’s Den.”

I looked around the small kitchen as I shook his hand and asked, “This is what, now?”

He laughed and led me through the kitchen with a hand on my back. “This is where we make what little food we serve.” We passed through two swinging doors, like the ones in an old western saloon, and walked into a huge bar. A pool table stood in the corner; there was a jukebox, and between the table and the jukebox, a space had been cleared out to make a small dance floor as well. What caught my eye, though, were the pictures on the wall. There had to have been a hundred of them; the first—and from their sepia tones, the oldest—ones were black and white and grainy while others were Polaroids and 35mm. The newest were digital photos printed out from a computer. They were all guys, almost all of them were young, and they all had a slightly bewildered look on their face.

I turned around to ask what they had in common, when a flash from a camera blinded me.

“What the…?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“That’s a keeper!” I heard Tom say with an evil laugh.

“A little warning next time!” I said as I squinted, trying to kill the afterimages.

“That’s not the tradition,” Robbie said when my eyes cleared a bit. “First-timers always get their picture taken,” he said, pointing at a photo a couple of years old. A much younger Robbie and a stupid hot guy next to him stared out from the picture. They both looked like deer caught in the headlights. “That was my first night here,” he said with a wistful tone. “And you know him, of course?” he asked sarcastically, pointing to another picture. In it was a picture of Mr. Parker. He couldn’t have been more than a year older than Brad in the picture.

“Wow, he was hot,” I said out loud.

“Who’s that?’ Tom asked from behind the bar.

“Fucking Tyler,” Robbie called back to him.

“Yeah, he was a little stuck up when he first came in here, but he grew out of it.” I could hear a printer going off.

“My ass he did,” Robbie muttered under his breath.

“So this is a gay bar?” I asked, trying to change the subject. I began looking around in wonder, trying to take the place in.

“No. This is
the
gay bar. Only gay bar for almost eighty-five miles,” Robbie said with some pride. “Trust me, when you’re gay, places like this are like gold.” I didn’t know about that. It seemed a little run down to be gold. I didn’t say anything, but he could see the look on my face. He held up one finger, reminding me of my promise. I nodded and tried to look neutral.

“And done,” Tom said, holding up a piece of photo paper. On it was a picture of me, looking half-stoned. “Welcome to the club,” he said, pinning it to the wall.

It seemed like a moment for him, so I smiled and said, “Thanks.”

His laugh was so loud it seemed to fill the entire room for a moment. “They’re all the same at first, aren’t they?” he asked Robbie.

“I wasn’t any better,” Robbie admitted.

“No, but you made up for it.”

I still had no idea what was going on.

“I still have no idea what’s going on,” I said out loud. “You wanted to show me a wall of photos?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. “But not that wall, this one.” He led me over to the wall across from it.

It was a wall full of funeral notices.

Some were from the actual service; others were cut out from the newspaper. It wasn’t just the fact that there was a wall of dead people smiling out at me. It was that there were twice as many death notices as welcome photographs. I walked up to the wall, and I began to skim the articles one by one. Some were hospital deaths, AIDS-related kind of stuff, others were just random accidents like car crashes and the like.

The majority of them were assaults.

Robbie stood behind me and pointed. “He was stabbed, beaten, and then lit on fire.” His voice was thick with emotion. “They followed him home from a party and attacked him.” He pointed to another one. “He was attacked by two guys in a car. They beat him with a baseball bat, once he tried to fight back, they tried to pull him into their car, closed the door on his arm and dragged him for over a block before they let his body go.” He pointed to another one. “This one was jumped, and they took him—”

I pushed him away as my stomach threatened to expel its contents at high velocity. “Stop!” I screamed. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” My breath was heaving as I struggled not to vomit. “Why would you bring me out here to show me this?”

“Because it is our history,” Tom said, sitting at the bar quietly. “It is part of being gay in Texas.”

“What is wrong with you?” I raged, taking a few steps back from them. “I don’t want to know this crap!”