Mississippi Sissy (33 page)

This time we didn't spend the night in a hotel, but at his younger son's apartment in Raymond, the town in which Hinds Junior College was located. It was where my mother and Kim and Karole and I had lived in that old faculty house after my father's car accident, when she first read to me from Katherine Anne Porter inside her blue-green bedroom and pleaded with me to call for help on that night she could not take the pain inside her anymore. I had not been to Raymond since the night I had hidden behind the drapes when the gurney was wheeled from the ambulance into her room. When I realized that Raymond was where Dr. Gallman was taking us, I was even more upset at being back in that Mercedes. He had officiated at the wedding a few days earlier and had borrowed the place while his son was away on his honeymoon so that no one in his family could be aware of the furtiveness of his reasons for using the place as a kind of hideaway-in-plain-sight. There were two small bedrooms in the apartment, and when the time came to go to bed, I started to go into the room with Kim. A discussion ensued. Kim and I had seldom shared a bed before. The few times we had, when cousins were visiting for holidays, he complained that I kept him up because I kicked him in my sleep. Dr. Gallman told us to stop our fighting and that Kim could sleep by himself and I'd sleep with him. I wish I could say his suggestion met with more resistance from me, but I gave in much too readily, so readily, in fact, that it must have signaled to him that he didn't have to seduce me all over again once he got me behind the door that awaited us.

The minute we went into his son's bedroom Dr. Gallman stripped down to his boxer shorts. I stripped down to my white Hanes briefs. I did not put on the gym shorts I brought along. We climbed into his son's bed, our bodies brushing up against each other as we settled in under the covers. Dr. Gallman immediately turned toward me and pulled his penis from his boxer shorts and pressed himself closer. He began to hump me and put his hand down my briefs. I did not want to be erect, but I could not stop it from happening. This time my Pelahatchie trance did not work. So I tried instead to think of images of my dying mother, of Mom when I caught a glimpse of her in the bathroom when she was hospitalized after her stroke and the nurse was cleaning her up, of what my father's head could have looked like when he flew from his Volkswagen and his skull was instantly crushed, the sound of his own blood—the last sound he must have heard—sizzling momentarily, it had to have sizzled, next to his ear embedded in the bubbles of tar pocking yet another Mississippi blacktop in the unrelenting August heat. All the images were of illness. Of death. They were the images of my childhood. But none of them worked. They did not make me feel again like a child. I just got harder. Dr. Gallman began to masturbate me. He kissed me on my shoulder. I lay completely still on my back and stared at the ceiling. For the first time,
I felt nothing.
I let myself go blank. Dr. Gallman's cock grew larger. Bits of his pre-cum began to ooze from him onto my leg. His saliva thickened on my shoulder. He grabbed me tighter before running his smooth old palm down my scrotum in an attempt to touch my sphincter, to open it, with his longest finger. I put my legs together as tightly as they would go. He gave up his search and put his hand again around my cock. He stroked me over and over. He humped me harder. He ejaculated on my leg. I ejaculated on my stomach. His mouth opened wider and it took as much of my shoulder as it could inside itself, careful not to bite down on me though I felt his teeth shudder against my flesh. I never stopped staring at the
ceiling. I waited for him to take his hand away, to remove his mouth where he now slobbered with relief. He lay against me. He would not move. I slipped from under his arm and went to the bathroom and washed my stomach. I washed my leg. This time I did look at my face in the mirror. I looked at my face in the mirror for a very long time. I decided not to go back into the bedroom. I went into the living room and lay shivering on the sofa. I heard Dr. Gallman open the door. I closed my eyes. He came and stood over me. I listened to his breathing. I pretended I was asleep. He let me pretend. He left and got a blanket. He put it over me, gently tucking it around my body. I listened to his breathing again as he stood staring down at me. I would not open my eyes. He sighed, a sound mixed with desire and exhaustion and disgust. He went back into the bedroom to his son's bed.

The next day, Dr. Gallman dropped Kim and me off at the first matinee of
The Cross and the Switchblade
at the Jackson Mall Cinema but did not come in himself. I sat watching Pat Boone play a street preacher named Wilkerson from Pennsylvania who puts the love of Jesus into the lives of two warring gangs in New York City. I kept staring at the red socks Pat Boone was wearing in the movie and wondered what Dr. Gallman was up to while Kim and I shared the bag of popcorn he gave us the money for. Were Dr. Gallman's feelings hurt because I slept on the sofa? Was he was now looking for another boy out in the mall as my replacement? Finding an unlocked church in the neighborhood so he could kneel alone at yet another altar? Was he shopping? Having his shoes shined? Hitting up some businessman for a contribution to that college he worked for up in Kentucky? Was he calling his wife from a pay phone? Or was he—this was what I decided he was doing—smirking at his good luck? Suddenly a scene in the movie gripped my attention. I looked up. Erik Estrada, who played Nicky, the meanest member of a Spanish gang called the Mau Maus, awoke from a nightmare in his apartment and was filmed wearing only a tight white pair of briefs. Why couldn't he be the one who
stuck his hands down my pants and ejaculated on my leg and put his mouth so hungrily against my shoulder? Pat Boone, after banging on Erik Estrada's door that night, gave a sermon to the rival gangs. “I'm here to talk about love,” he told them. “That's right:
love.
That word that bothers you. It's a
sissy
word to most of you. But love is the gutsiest word in the English language. You pretend you don't want anybody to touch you. But inside you are crying out for love.” I laughed at Pat Boone. Kim punched me on my arm.

Dr. Gallman was waiting for my little brother and me in the mall after the movie. He took us to a bookstore and bought us each paperback copies of the
Good News for Modern Man
Bible, which all the cool church kids back in 1969 carried with them on Sundays.
Good News for Modern Man
was a translation of the New Testament written in language we could understand better than all those “thees” and “thous” in the King James Version. Dr. Gallman noticed me admiring his Montblanc pen when he signed the credit card bill for the Bibles. “You want this?” he asked. I hesitated accepting it. “Take it,” he said, and put it in the front right pocket of my jeans, letting his hand linger there for a few extra seconds. He did not drive us back to Forest in his Mercedes but instead took us to the Greyhound bus station downtown, close to the Lamar Theater. I did not know it at the time but when he put us on that Greyhound to Forest I would not see him again until thirteen years later when I returned home from New York City to attend my grandmother's funeral. (I would never receive another postcard from him, another letter, or another phone call.) He attended the funeral and came to our house afterward. We sat across from each other in the living room yet did not exchange one word. He did not even look at me, though I made a point of staring right at him, the way he had sat up behind the pulpit in Harperville that night before his sermon when he couldn't take his eyes off me and I was convinced he was seeing directly into my twelve-year-old soul.
He finally got up from his chair in the living room and excused himself, I alone knowing it was because of my unflinching, accusatory stare. As he turned his back on me, he pointedly sighed in that way he had when he stood over me while I pretended to be asleep on his son's sofa in Raymond, the sound—an even richer mixture of exhaustion and disgust and desire—sending a long-ago shiver through me. Without saying a word, he had the final say. It was as if he had only just put me on that Greyhound bus, a premeditated gesture—all his gestures were premeditated—of rejection. I certainly had felt rejected as I tried to read my
Good News for Modern Man
paperback on the bus home to Forest that day after the matinee of
The Cross and the Switchblade
but was getting too nauseous with motion sickness as my eyes scanned the verses laid out like paragraphs. I took Dr. Gallman's Montblanc from my pocket and wrote “70 × 7 = 490” in the margin of the eighteenth chapter of Matthew. I wondered if I would have to do as Jesus said, and forgive Dr. Gallman that many times. I skimmed the next chapter, my woozy eyes falling upon more of Jesus's words. “There are different reasons why men cannot marry,” He said. “Some, because they were born that way; others because men made them that way; and others do not marry for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let him who can accept this teaching do so.” I looked over at Kim in the seat next to me. He had fallen asleep. We were passing through Pelahatchie on Highway 80 and I caught a glimpse off that old two-lane of the green-shingled house we had lived in and the ersatz log cabin next door where I had looked into the Simpson Lady's bathroom window and become my father's teammate. I gripped Dr. Gallman's Montblanc tighter and wrote the same five letters in Matthew's margin that my mother had so indelibly instructed me to write across her stationery when we stayed up late together: SISSY, I wrote as I had written then. I took Dr. Gallman's Montblanc and traced over each letter, making them even more pronounced in
the margin. I heard my mother's voice overriding Jesus's. “Look at the muscles those S's have. Look at the arms on that Y.” I tried to recall what else she said that night, but all I could remember were the muscles and the arms.

When I was fourteen, going on fifteen, I spent most of my time playing sports and trying not to get a hard-on in the locker room, where I often found myself pulling on or off a smelly jockstrap. It was my freshman year, my one year of truly trying to fit into small-town life, when I accepted fully my dead father's mantle. I doubled as tailback and safety on the football team. I was point guard on the basketball team. And I won first place in all the Little Dixie conference track meets, where I still ran the 100-yard dash and 220-yard dash as well as anchoring the 440-yard and 880-yard relays. In fact, I had run those races at the conference finals all bruised up with a big black eye from a car wreck I had had close to home the Sunday before, when I skipped church and went to pick up Kim and Karole after the service at Trinity. I'd been trying to find any kind of rock on the AM radio in
the old used Dodge that Pop had bought me when I got my license. I had taken my eyes off the road for just a moment to fiddle with the dial. When I looked up I had run off the road onto the shoulder of a steep ditch and been thrown to the other side of the car. I grabbed the steering wheel and pulled myself back over to the driver's side and sped across the road. The car then jumped the other ditch, crashing into one of the poles that held the barbed-wire fence around the Derricks' cow pasture. My face smashed against the wheel. Stunned, I jumped from the car and ran, bawling, all the way home. By the time of the track meet at the end of that week I really had a shiner but had shaken off the shock of the wreck—I kept thinking how close I had come to having my own skull smashed on a patch of country asphalt—and felt that my roughed-up appearance butched up the sissy residue I could never quite shake, no matter how many blue track ribbons I won, first downs I made on end-around runs, or assists I made on the hardwood to Bobby Thompson so he could take the shot.

But a year of playing all those sports was all that I could take. I quit every one of them when I was a sophomore and concentrated on graduating from high school early, especially after I consciously admitted to myself that I was a homosexual, saying the four words silently to myself: “I am a homosexual.” Earlier in the year, I had started hanging out with an older guy—in his mid-thirties, maybe—who still lived with his mother in Forest. I had met him at a revival at the First Methodist church that summer after I spotted him in his white linen suit and was impressed at how he was keeping the choir ladies in stitches. His name was Joe Rex Dennis and he was no doubt a homosexual, the kind small towns tolerate as best they can. I'd never been happier to make anybody's acquaintance. He knew instantly, of course, I was what I was and helped me reach the same conclusion. He was in the process of getting his master's degree in English and writing his thesis on the works of Flannery O'Connor.
His first act of kindness—he never made one sexual pass at me—was to give me a collection of her stories. He also adored Leontyne Price and constantly played her albums, but never “Melancholy Baby,” like Frank did. Joe Rex took Leontyne much too seriously for that. He played only selections of her arias (preferably recorded live so he could revel in the sound of the ovations as much as the voice that led to them) or, often, he would make me sit and listen to her in whole operas, mostly by Verdi, though he'd put the needle down on Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess
and Puccini's
Tosca
from time to time. But Verdi's
Aida
was his favorite. I liked three other of her Verdi operas just as well:
Un Ballo in Maschera, La Forza del Destino,
and, of course,
Il Trovatore,
in which she made her great Metropolitan debut. Joe Rex filled me with Leontyne lore and pointed out the metaphors in Flannery. One day in October, when I was looking at the
Jackson Daily News
sports pages while listening to Aida's “O patria mia,” I spotted a picture of football players from Jackson Prep who were going to dance in a production of
The Nutcracker
in December and were already rehearsing for their roles. I was amazed by the photo, and Joe Rex told me that one of the boys was like us and that he knew him personally. I still had never had sex with another guy—only with Dr. Gallman and the stranger at Audrey Whatshername's movie, and they did not count. Although I wasn't sure how to label those experiences, I nevertheless reasoned that I shouldn't call them sex. I begged Joe Rex to introduce me to the boy in the picture. He set up a phone call for us, and when I went with a group of friends to the Mississippi State Fair that weekend, I snuck off and met the hunky Jackson Prepper. During the halftime of a televised Ole Miss football game, I had my first freedom-of-choice sex with another guy. He was friends with a couple of male music professors at Millsaps—”old-lady lovers,” he called them—and had arranged for me to rendezvous with him at their house. They gave us our privacy in their study, even furnishing us with clean sheets to put on the fold-out couch
they sensed we would be folding out. It was that very next Monday at school when I admitted who I really was. I was in biology class dissecting a frog, the smell of formaldehyde wafting through the room, when the thought hit me, when I said those silent words: “I am a homosexual.”