It's All Relative (16 page)

“Fabulous choice,” Rupert says. “I'm thinking of a peony tree.”

“Oh, my God!” Gary screams. “I didn't think of that. How stunning!”

Why don't you two get a room and jerk off while reading native plant guides to one another?

Then it hits me: I look around Homo Depot and notice that most couples are like us, one person interested in gardening, the other bored out of his skull. And then I notice that most couples are beginning to pair up, one of the men talking excitedly to a complete stranger about wood. It's like closing time at a gay bar.

I certainly don't need a do-it-yourself workshop to learn how to fight for my man, and I pride myself on the fact—at the very least—that I am way smarter and way more cynical than most men. I know
I can pull myself together in time to either bullshit myself out of any situation or bury my competition in bile.

“You know, honey,” I say, putting my arm tenderly around Gary's waist, “I was thinking we should buy two dogwoods—one pink, one white—and plant them so they intertwine as they grow, as sort of a symbol of our love.”

Gary is a weeper. He cries when a pigeon hits his windshield going under an overpass, while I scream, “Bam! Got the little germ spreader!”

He starts misting up, and Rupert glares at me.

I go in for the kill.

“But I don't know what kind of mulch we should use, since we'll have a pink tree and a white tree?” I ask stupidly. “What do you think?”

I ask Gary this question while looking at Rupert, who I know will interject in order to impress.

“Red mulch, no doubt,” he answers. “It would complement the pink and white.”

Gary lifts his hand to his mouth in horror and stares at Rupert as though he just poked a puppy in the eye with a sharp stick. Gary despises red mulch, loathes it, in fact, more than Ann Coulter or fat people in Crocs. He considers red mulch tacky, classless.

I knew what Rupert would say, of course. I'm a former journalist: I notice the little things. I can even read upside down.

Rupert's nails were rimmed in red. The tacky little jackass might as well have been branded with a scarlet
R
.

Rupert looks at me and then at his partner.

“Why can't you be like
him
?” he says to the cage-fighting walrus, nodding at me before storming away.

Gary and I buy two dogwoods, which he plants later that afternoon while bawling the whole time.

The next year, I suggest we go to Lowe's.

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.”

–OSCAR WILDE

I
was asked one spring, when I was in middle school, as my family ate Mother's Day dinner, if I was thinking of going out for Little League.

I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but when it was repeated, I began to smile prettily while shoving a forkful of roast in my mouth and bat my eyes, as though my beauty might blind my family from yet another follow-up.

My mother refused to let that happen.

“Why, yes, we are a family of very gifted athletes.”

While I consider my mother to be one of the smartest women in the world, she has always had this odd habit of just making things up on the spot and then immediately telling them with complete conviction as if they were the absolute truth.

I nicknamed this habit “fact or fiction,” a term she never found particularly amusing.

For instance, I have never been aware of anyone in my family ever playing a sport on a highly competitive level, unless Chinese checkers counted. Only my father, who was too small to play high school football, tried, and he played “little man” sports like tennis and golf, although he was a lightweight boxer in college and has the nose to prove it.

My mother, however, was never an athlete—it is impossible for her to make it to the bathroom without pulling a groin muscle—and my brother never played a sport in his life, unless you counted picking the tails off lizards or shooting squirrels as an organized childhood sport. I've seen pictures of my mom in athletic gear, such as the time she wore a football helmet to cover a bad blonde dye job, or a baseball jersey when it was Halloween, but it would be a stretch to say we were a family of athletes.

“Fact or fiction?” I yelled at the table.

My mother glared at me as I jammed another forkful of roast into my mouth and batted my eyes, and I immediately knew I would pay for this outburst.

“You are mistaken, sir! That is fact! James Wade, you have the genes of
—what
!—a great athlete residin' in your bones, isn't that correct?”

The only thing I had residing in my bones, if anyone in my family cared to open their eyes and actually look, was a lot of gay genes, considering I was a sixth grader who adored chokers, hemp bracelets, friendship pins, and mood rings. Never mind that I secretly pinched my cheeks to make myself look flushed and excited.

“You are mistaken!” my mother repeated, turkey-walking away from the dining room table to retrieve a collection of family photo albums.

One of my mom's favorite things to do, especially on Mother's Day, was to get out our old photo albums and pore through them, inventing happier tales than the ones depicted in the actual pictures.

The photo of me crying on Christmas because I had unwrapped a football instead of an Easy-Bake?

Tears of joy.

The photo of me fixing my hair while my brother tossed that football my way?

I was reaching high to make an amazing reception.

Just as my mom was saying, “Just before your hole in one!” and
turning a page to display a photo of me applying cherry ChapStick while singing into a putter as our family played miniature golf, I yelled, “Fact or fiction!”

“Fact!” she screamed.

“It's too late anyway,” I said. “Teams have already been formed.”

And I was right. These were the important dates all tortured gay boys remembered from their country school days, along with how to skip class every time it was shirts-skins basketball day in gym class, or feign illness whenever the nurse announced it was scoliosis week.

To try and prove her point, my mother still checked around town, but was saddened to discover that:

Bob's Butcher Shop—whose uniforms featured a muscled pig swinging a bat—was filled.

The overall factory—whose uniforms looked, well, like overalls—was filled.

The Dairy Dip—whose uniforms featured a scoop of ice cream that looked like a dripping baseball whizzing into space—was filled.

And my favorite, Connie's Hair Barn—whose uniforms featured a comb dusting off home plate with a brush—was filled.

It seemed I could breathe another year.

But then my mother walked in one night after work, wearing her bloodied scrubs and a maniacal grin, and said, “Daphne Wilkins has saved the day!”

Her son, Willie, our town's equivalent of Robby Benson and Roger Staubach all rolled into one beautiful boy—had broken his arm over Christmas and was not expected to play baseball this year. But his family did have athletic genes, and he had recovered in time to play. Daphne had, at the last minute, persuaded her company to sponsor our team.

So, fittingly—the irony too much to take at such a young age—I lickety-split found myself standing in middle-right field wearing a skintight, bright-pink uniform that simply read “Mary Kay.”

I looked like a bloated flamingo.

I stood out there as if under a klieg light and cursed God, who I did not realize until now had such a wicked sense of humor.

It was a nightmare, attending practices, dropping fly balls, whiffing at home plate, my family in the bleachers watching my every move, critiquing my play and the practices on rides to the Dairy Dip in the Rambler after we'd finished.

But what did they see?

Not the truth, obviously, as their love for me was blinding their vision.

What did I see?

I saw myself standing tense and motionless, holding my glove straight out in front of my body like Wonder Woman with her bracelets, looking as if I was trying to halt a runaway bullet. I saw myself standing at the plate, blowing bubbles with my gum, waving at people in the stands, staring dreamily at boys whose uniforms fit like gloves. I had no idea what I was doing out there, so most times I simply panicked, happy to strike out on three straight pitches.

Instead of even looking at the pitcher, I would stare at the vast expanse of pink fabric that funneled into my navel as if I were a pretty, pink, pregnant woman.

Though I had been forced to be on this team because I wanted to please my parents, to fit somehow into the fabric of rural America, I initially agreed because I believed that my team—apart from Willie—would comprise a band of ne'er-do-wells, nerds, and nincompoops, since all the good athletes in town had already been plucked to play for other teams.

In fact, I would dream at night that Willie would coach me every day, one-on-one, making me better, and then, of course, he would fall in love with me. And at the end of the season, as a thank-you and sign of my commitment to him, I would give Willie one of my mood rings over the red mosaic votive holder at Pizza Hut, pretending
that we were canalside in Venice instead of sitting in a former Radio Shack eating iceberg lettuce.

But Willie, being the town's athletic god, had been able to persuade the best players to abandon their other teams and play with him, the promise of an undefeated team and league championship seemingly in the bag.

I was retained only because the team had to field ten players and because Willie's mother had promised my mother, and the team was not happy, to say the least, about this maternal verbal agreement, so I ended up being alternately abused and ignored like Dilbert Reynolds, the slow but evil kid in town who ate Elmer's glue, burned Hot Wheels on the sidewalk, and wrote dirty words on his Lite-Brite.

Thus I was quickly designated the team's “fourth” outfielder, a position I wouldn't realize until much later in life didn't even exist in real baseball, and so I was buried in deep right-center field, not far from the hurricane fence that served as the field's home-run wall.

Still, my team was confident early on, and it felt good to be around winners for once, naturally blond boys who didn't have to use Sun-In, boys who didn't eat Pop-Tarts or Funyuns and already had perfectly formed six-packs.

“Aren't you hot?” Willie would ask me at practice. “Why don't you take your shirt off?”

“Ummm, I'm good. Have a wicked sunburn on my shoulders,” I'd lie, not wanting anyone to see the obvious: that I needed a training bra.

Eventually, I had to take the field in a real contest, and it was then I realized the hard truth: All the other teams in the league were pissed at Willie for stealing their best players, and so their anger fueled them, drove them—like revenge-minded killers—a long-standing vendetta waiting to be settled.

In our very first game we played Bob's Butcher Shop, and I remember going 0 for 4 and striking out looking every time, interested more
in seeing how tan my hands were getting than in actually swinging the bat. Although my parents seemed to believe they were watching a young, albeit plumper, Mickey Mantle in action, snapping photos in the bleachers, my mother screaming, “Hey, batter, batter—yes, I'm talking to you, sir!—batter,” my teammates comprehended my shocking lack of talent and interest. That's because with every ball that was hit even remotely in my direction, two outfielders would converge and call me off, yelling “Mine!” and leaving me to pedal backwards until my butt was pressed against the hurricane fence.

In our first game, we were leading, if I remember correctly, 8–7 in the bottom of the ninth, and Bob's Butcher Shop had a man on third and two outs when their final batter lofted a pop-up high into the sky, as high as a plane it seemed. I waited for my teammates to come running toward me, to help me, but I only heard, “I've lost it in the sun! I've lost it in the sun!” followed by the one word I never expected to hear: “YOURS!”

On a blindingly sunny day, I was the only one able to see the ball, thanks to the fact that I had tanned my whole childhood and was oblivious to the sun. I followed the ball's trajectory up, without the aid of sunglasses or eye black, high above the field's light posts and into the blue sky.

I remember holding my glove straight over my head, my left arm stiff like rigor mortis had set into my body. My right arm, tellingly, was held askew on my right hip as though I might be modeling capri pants or a jaunty summer bracelet. I felt dizzy and faint.

My hands were shaking, my body quaking. I could hear my mother yelling.

And then I had an epiphany: I can catch this ball. I can prove myself to the team. I can prove myself to this town.

But suddenly a lone cloud, puffy and white, happened to stagger by slowly, like a drunk cotton ball, and the baseball simply disappeared into it.