Have A Little Faith In Me (11 page)

Sam laughed.  “Yeah, no shit, huh?  Listen, Dex.  I’ve got an apartment in Nashville for you and your family.  And a record contract for you.  Not just because you’re in need, I’m not that nice,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

“You’ve got something, Dex.  Natural talent.  Screen presence.  All that.  There’s a lot of development you’ll need, but I don’t wanna lose the opportunity to get you before someone else does.  You interested?”

It had happened after all.  It was a miracle.  The Angel of Biloxi had come to save him, to lift him up and out of here.  He would save his family, and himself. 

“Yes.  Yes, sir, I am.” 

Rocky watched the procession of cops and criminals in and out of the holding area.  Mostly white cops arresting black men, he noticed.  He’d already learned a lot about racism by having a black best friend, and tonight was another lesson.

Here he was, on a bench, hands free, bundled up in a police officer’s warm coat, lent to him by a kindly sergeant who’d seen him shivering.  But his shivers hadn’t come from the chill in the room – it had come when Rocky watched his best friend led away to Juvenile Hall in handcuffs, while Rocky, who’d practically bragged about being the ringleader and sole culprit, was free, his sole legal punishment a phone call to his father.

Tonight he and Korey had “vandalized” an ATM, by pasting a “Bank of Evil” sticker over the Bank of America logo.  It wasn’t Rocky’s first petty crime, just the first one for which he’d been arrested.

It had started a few months earlier with shoplifting – but a form of shoplifting Rocky considered a moral act. 

He and Korey were 17 now, seniors in high school, and Rocky could hardly believe that, in 2005, it would still be possible for some Bible-thumping fool behind a pharmacy counter to refuse to sell condoms to a teenage boy. 

Well, a black teenage boy, at any rate.  “Just go in and get ‘em for me, will you?” Korey said outside, shrugging it off.  “They’ll sell to you, I’m sure.”  He tried to keep his tone light, but the bitterness was apparent. 

Rocky smirked.  “Right.  No, they’ll say ‘just a minute, son,’ and pick up the phone and call my grandma.”

Korey laughed.  “Well, fuck, man.  I gotta date tonight.  Guess it’s gonna be a blow-job-only night.”

After their years in the “nerd chrysalis” of adolescence, both boys had burst out of it like butterflies.  Well, Korey had, anyway – suddenly, being a music freak who was into computers wasn’t the end of the world socially.  And girls, Korey discovered, liked rebels and bad boys – and boys who were going to make money when they grew up.  Especially if they played guitar.

Okay, so expressing your creativity in Georgia still got you called “faggot” on a daily basis.  Especially if you adopted a personal style that most people outside Brooklyn had yet to see. But it was working like a charm for Korey, at least with the girls.

Korey used to laugh at Rocky when he angsted about being gay in Georgia.  “You think you have it bad?  I’m a straight black man in the Deep South who’s seriously into Belle and Sebastian.  My own alleged kind have disowned me, man.  I gotta get the fuck out of here.”

Rocky’s emergence from the cocoon had been slower, more cautious.  He knew his looks had transformed from gangly dork into future rock star.  He had the cheekbones, the kissable lips, the perfect skin, the lean but strong body…and the height of a rock star, too.  Yeah, he’d always be on the short side, but he consoled himself that Anthony Kiedis was 5’ 9” and hell, Iggy Pop, that volcano of energy, was 5’ 7”.   Of course Chris Cornell was 6’ 3” but that was because he was a God.

And he had a scowl on him now, the kind of anger that makes some beautiful faces even more so – because it’s a righteous anger. 

“No.  No, my friend, it’s not a blow-job-only night for you.”  And Rocky marched into the store.

He was coming to understand his power, and his privileges.  Not only did he have his position as Reverend McCoy’s son to make the locals more deferent to him, but his new beauty meant even strangers were nice to him. 

He’d noticed it around the time he turned sixteen, the way the bullies suddenly stopped teasing him and moved on to weaker prey, the way the girls started to bat their eyelashes at him…and of course the way that some of the football players took a second longer than they should to blink and look away from his inquiring gaze.

Beauty is a weapon, and when clad in charm, it’s invincible.  Rocky gave the clerks in the pharmacy his sunniest smile, making their day.  And absolutely nobody was watching him when he pulled out a pick, jimmied open the lock on the plexiglass door behind which the “marital aids” were secured, and slipped a slim 3-pack of condoms (the expensive kind) into his pants pocket.

He bought a soda and made small talk with the clerk, sweet and innocent as a lamb.  Outside, he handed the package to Korey, a triumphant glow on his face.

Korey made a face of mock disappointment.  “Only three?  Shit, it’s gonna be a short night.”

Rocky rolled his eyes.  “Life is hard, my friend.” 

His own celibacy was still intact.  He’d slowly but surely come to the realization that he was gay, that he was everything his father, his neighbors, his church, regarded as wicked and sinful.  But, having become a rock musician before he knew he was gay, he was already in the Devil’s grip, so adding “future cocksucker” to his list of sins wasn’t such a heavy burden.

It had just…dawned on him one night, smoking pot with Korey in his friend’s room, listening to Audioslave’s “Like a Stone” for about the 30,000
th
time.  Chris Cornell, still his idol, still his God, his friend, his fantasy…lover.  Yeah, he realized, I’m gay.  It was as if he’d just fallen off the top of a wall he didn’t know he’d been climbing, until he landed on the other side.

“I’m gay,” he blurted to Korey.

“Call the paper,” his friend replied.  “Dog Bites Man.  Bear Shits in Wood.  Priest Touches Kiddies.” 

They giggled.  Then the short attention span that the weed imposed had them moving on to something else.

But he hadn’t acted on it.  Not because he was ashamed, or afraid.  But because…well, maybe some of what he’d been taught had stuck, after all.  Nobody’s immune to the culture around them.  It soaks into you in ways you can’t even see, even as you declare yourself free of it. 

“True Love Waits” had been the cry of the abstinence-only movement, an effort to rein in raging adolescent hormones by not denying, but delaying, gratification.  Of course, saving yourself for marriage wasn’t a possibility for Rocky, since he could never get married to anyone he might want to have sex with.

But some part of him believed in waiting.  Like Chris Cornell, “Like a Stone,” he’d wait.  For something wonderful.  For someone who would make him feel…everything.  For someone who would restore, replace, the exhilaration that his faith had once given him.

The shoplifting experience had been like a drug to Rocky.  He was a good person, a good kid at heart.  But he was also an adolescent, and the sense of power it had given him, to just walk in somewhere and…take what was denied others, had made him feel like a superhero, an Invisible Man, a snake charmer. 

Korey had become obsessed with New York graffiti artists, and while Rocky’s artistic taste was too classical and formal to “get it,” he went along for the ride.  They would bounce around town at night, as Korey refined his tag with cans of spray paint that Rocky bought for him.

“It’s for a church mural project,” he’d say to the man at the paint store, his sunny wholesome smile in place, his hair neatly plastered down, his BLACK FLAG t-shirt concealed under a nice sweater.  And the metal doors to the tagger temple were unlocked, and behold, behold, there was every color of the Krylon rainbow.  Rocky would fill Korey’s order, written on stolen church stationary in case anyone wanted to pry.  But they never did.

They got busted one night as Korey was tagging the back of the Publix market, the cops rolling up on them silently, lights suddenly flashing.  Rocky was remanded to his father’s custody, no booking, no charges.  Korey was booked and charged as a minor, but Barrett Springfield’s wealth paid for an excellent lawyer who got the charges dropped. 

It was hard to say who was in more trouble at home.  Barrett was enraged that Korey would “do something as stupid as putting your black ass in legal jeopardy in a small Southern town.”  Faith was stunned that Rocky had even dreamed of doing anything remotely illicit, never mind aiding and abetting a criminal.

Rocky’s punishments were phoned in from afar, via Faith’s calls to the Reverend on the road.  Reverend McCoy had become an intimate member of “The Family,” that group of right-wing Christian politicians hellbent, so to speak, on replacing the Constitution with the Bible. 

Sadly, their support was eroding among Americans, who in ever greater numbers were refusing to agree that gay people were to blame for everything terrible in the world.  Fortunately, however, The Family was discovering congregations in African nations, still free from secular humanism and liberal education, where their message about the Evils of Homosexuality were greeted with enthusiasm.

Rocky’s own religion was long gone.  In his junior year, Korey had brought him a book called “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, the first atheist manifesto of the new secular age.  Rocky had converted it into “Southern samizdat,” disassembling the book so he could leaf the pages into a textbook – the only way the book wouldn’t be found by his father or grandmother. 

Reading that book, his own religious feelings already crippled by American Christianity’s constant attacks on homosexuality, well, that was his “conversion experience.” And there’s no atheist so virulent as a former believer.

And of course he still remembered that day, long ago – the antigay protest when he was just six years old, where he’d cheerfully carried a sign denouncing the gays.  And the look on that man’s face, the look of horror and sadness, that an innocent child was being used to spread so much hate.  All in the name of religion…

When the sentences were called in from afar, Faith often had to yell on the phone, to be heard on the crackly connection to Uganda.  But the message that came back from the Reverend was loud and clear.  Penance and punishment must be Rocky’s life until he saw the error of his ways.

They would have taken away his CDs, if he’d had any.  But all his music was on the computer, torrented, because he had no money and no way to get any.  But he swore he’d make it up to those artists when he had the money, someday.

His father was smart enough to check his computer for music.  He saw the look of satisfaction on his dad’s face as he deleted the only two folders in the “Music” folder – Kelly Clarkson and Nickelback, Rocky’s little joke.  What he didn’t know was that all the
real
music was buried deep in a Windows system folder. 

It killed Faith to be the executor of her son’s decrees.  To strip her grandson’s closet of rock-and-roll t-shirts, to have to go through a teenage boy’s drawers to make sure he hadn’t hidden anything…sinful.  To take away his pens and pencils and…

No.  She’d drawn the line there, so to speak.  No matter what, she would leave him with his art supplies.  There was a limit to what was just. 

Rocky’s father drove him home from jail, the cold silence between them a contest.  His father was home on one of his triumphal visits, to inform his flock about the great work being done in Africa, where there was still time to save them from the Gay Agenda.  And to raise urgently needed funds, to pay for his first class plane ticket back, so he could continue to minister to these poor souls from the comfort of the Kampala Serena Hotel.

“Arrested,” the Reverend said, pacing back and forth in the living room in front of Faith and Rocky.  “Arrested!  This is a new low.” 

He’d made his own search of Rocky’s room, and glared at Faith as he came back downstairs waving Rocky’s drawings, knowing she’d deliberately skipped them. 

“What…the hell… is this!” he shouted, waving them around. 

“Art,” Rocky said defiantly.

“Ha!  Filth, is what it is.”  His father’s eyes were different now, glittery, fevered.  His membership in “The Family” had given him a taste for power.  Now he had access to noble and upright politicians like Senator John Ensign and Governor Mark Sanford, and even a Supreme Court justice.  Power had made him feel invincible, and had embedded his certainties even deeper. 

“Evil, hateful, filth,” his father said, grimacing as he looked at them.  Rocky’s art tutor had taught him well, and had helped him bring his talent to full flower.  Gone were the drawings he’d once made of Faith playing the guitar, the people at church with their eyes closed, waving their hands like saints.

He’d become obsessed with da Vinci’s “grotesques,” his drawings of faces with twisted and exaggerated features.  Rocky thought they were portraits of people who’d been turned inside out, their real selves now apparent on their faces.

He’d copied the most famous one, the “Study of Five Grotesque Heads.”  It had been done with a fine hand, and an eye for detail worthy of a Renaissance apprentice.

And in the place of the noble Roman patrician at the center, with four greedy, mad, ignorant and downright stupid people around him, leering and mocking, Rocky had drawn Harvey Milk, and surrounded him with Anita Bryant, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell…and Reverend Norman McCoy.

He smirked in triumph when he saw the look on his father’s face, his eyes widening when he came to that one. 

The Reverend looked Rocky straight in the eyes as he tore it up, into little pieces, as Faith choked off a protest.

But it was too late.  His father was an idiot.  The originals were gone, but Rocky had prepared for that.  They’d already been through Korey’s high-resolution scanner, and the images were safe on his friend’s hard drive.