Openly Straight (17 page)

For
the first round of the soccer play-offs, we played at home against Belmont. We’d beaten them early in the regular season, when we still had Bryce, 4–3. Without him, we knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“All right, fellas,” Coach Donnelly said in our pregame locker room pep talk. “I want to talk about selflessness. Selflessness involves giving up your self. You become a martyr. Like the Hindu kamikaze warriors. These Japanese Hindus chose to give up their lives, and they were killed if they didn’t. Imagine what their families felt. One day you have a father, and next, you’re watching him fly a plane into a ship on Pearl Harbor on television. Those kids didn’t do anything wrong. They just lived in an evil country. The axis of evil. That sort of evil is beyond anything you or I will experience in our lifetimes. So be glad. Be glad we live in the US of A. Be glad we get to choose, with our freedoms. Now get out there and fight!”

My mind was only half there. I had bigger salmon to sauté, as Claire Olivia would have said. She had called back, and this conversation went a little better.

“I’m really upset,” she said. “I’m upset about what you did, and I’m even more upset that I yelled at you and hung up on you. I should not have done that.”

“Well, I should have probably told you sooner.”

“Yeah. Way sooner.”

“I should have just told you last year, when I decided to do this, but I was afraid you’d tell me not to.”

“Well, I probably would have, since it’s, like, insane,” she said.

“Yeah. I know. But I gotta tell you, it feels so right. I am having this bromance like you wouldn’t believe. We’re really good friends, and that never would have happened if I hadn’t done this.”

“Bromance? Can gay boys have bromances?” she asked. “Is that why you did this?”

“No! It’s just … a great perk.”

“It’s that Ben guy, right?”

“Yup,” I said. “You’d adore him. Well, actually, I don’t know if you’d adore him. He’s really smart and funny, but he’s kind of a jock. You might actually hate him.”

“Fantastic,” she deadpanned.

“Well, there’s one way to find out.”

“I am NOT coming to Massachusetts to see my best friend, who is straight slash gay. That is so NOT happening.”

“I’m coming back for Thanksgiving. With him.”

“Wow,” she said. “Do your parents know what you’re doing? Are they cool with this?”

“Not exactly. But they’re trying.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’d be very good at playing along.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Think of it as an acting job. Don’t you love acting?”

“Ahk-ting … is be-ing,” she said, in this terrible, stodgy British accent.

“Could you? Please? I wanna hang out with you AND Ben while he’s there.”

“This is so weird.”

“Please? For me?”

“Oh, you know I can’t say no to you.”

“Tee hee. I thought not.”

“You owe me big time.”

“I know, I know, I know, I know. Last thing: And, yeah, I owe you for this too. Put it on my tab: You were my girlfriend before you got angry and broke up with me a few weeks ago.”

She sighed. “Sounds about right.”

Belmont scored a goal forty-five seconds into the game, when Robinson let a pretty easy shot slide through his fingertips. A couple of minutes later, he made a nice dive on a shot to his right. Unfortunately, the ball flew by him a second earlier.

Down 2–0, I overkicked Steve by about fifteen feet on a pass. I felt it, in my chest. Failure. This jittery sensation that was like a chill. Steve shot me a look from across the field, and I got the feeling I was going to be hearing about that.

We didn’t get another really good chance. In some ways, that made it easier, because when you lose 4–0, one play isn’t to blame. But the fact is I didn’t have a good game. I stood out. And as we
trudged back to the locker room, our season over, I wasn’t liking the feeling.

The group was dangerously sullen as we listened to Coach give his final talk of the year, something about a German submarine found off the coast of Carolina “back in the day.” I was having trouble paying attention; I just wanted to get showered quickly and slip away to the dorm, where I could hang out with Ben some more. I guess one difference between me and the real jocks was that I didn’t care enough to get really passionate about a loss.

Of course, the showers are never a solitary, quick endeavor. The mood, the tone were ugly from the start. I had a feeling I was about to witness what happens when the positive façade of Natick jocks disappears.

“Nice season, Ben, nice season, Zack,” Steve said, rinsing off his back. “In fact, most of us had pretty good years. I just wish I knew how you miss a ball that hits you in the hands.”

I looked over at Robinson, who was going about his business.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I know I sucked.”

“Yeah, well, being sorry won’t get us to the next round,” Steve said. “Maybe if you weren’t out getting your cock sucked by Toby twenty-four seven, this wouldn’t have happened.”

The shower room got real quiet, the sound of rain on tile reverberating through the room.

“Shut up,” Robinson said.

Zack took over. “You think people don’t notice you guys going into the woods separately, coming back separately? What are we, fucking stupid? You screw that faggot in the ass too?” he asked.

Robinson just stood there and took it. He stood under the water and let it pour over his face and said nothing. I wanted to say:
Stand up for yourself!
But it wasn’t for me to say.

Zack continued, “Got a fag goalie who can’t stop a fucking shot if it was kicked right at him….”

“Hey,” I said, surprising myself. “Cut it out.”

“Oh, it’s the guy who can’t handle making a wide-open pass. Yeah. You should really be talking right now,” Zack said.

I stepped toward him. “Shut the fuck up,” I said. “You don’t talk like that about our teammate. And don’t talk like that about my friend Toby.” The vibrato in my chest felt like a tremor. It made my head woozy.

“Your friend Toby?” Zack laughed. “He sucking your cock too, Colorado?”

I took another step. Zack took one toward me too. I seized up a bit. I was too skinny for this, but I was also mad, and sometimes when I get mad, I feel bigger than I am.

“If you say another word, I’m gonna blast your head into that wall,” Ben said from behind me. Zack froze. I turned around and there was Ben, standing tall. He was big, bigger than anyone on the team, including Steve.

Robinson just went on showering in silence.

“Cut out the homophobic crap,” Ben said. “Seriously. Grow up.”

Zack skulked back to his showerhead. I tentatively went back to mine, feeling all sorts of conflicting things at once. I was afraid to look at Ben, because my feelings for him were out of control. He was a beautiful, beautiful guy, inside and out.

“He’s right,” Steve said, ever the leader. “Let’s put that stuff away.”

I wanted to say,
You started it, asshole
. Everyone in the room should remember that Steve wasn’t this perfect guy, but the guy who had started making antigay comments in the shower before someone bigger than him put a stop to it.

But instead, I went back to soaping and rinsing, allowing the hot water to sting the back of my neck, washing away the pain.

The last time I almost got into a fight was back in Boulder.

It was the summer after ninth grade, outside a PFLAG dance in the Methodist church on Spruce Street. Mom was already inside, and I was going to the dance because why not, even though I was not a big “goes to dances” type of guy. And these guys about my age walked by, and one saw the banner for the dance and nudged his friends.

“Fags,” he said.

I stopped, turned around, and said, “Gays. We like to be called gays, not fags, just so you know.”

And the guy stepped forward and said, “You a fag?”

“No, I’m gay. Like I said. Why?” My heart was pounding in my chest then, and I looked him up and down. He was no bigger than me, but I wasn’t sure what I would even do if a fight happened. I’d never punched someone before. Would I kick him too? But here I was, stepping toward him, my chest getting all puffed out like a tough guy’s.

“I’ll fuckin’ waste you,” the guy said, and his friends backed off, because they obviously didn’t feel the same way he did. Neither did I, really, but I continued forward, and I felt like what I imagine a heart attack feels like. And just as I was about to go after the guy, not
knowing whether he would run or if we were gonna throw down, I heard my dad’s voice.

“Hey!”

I stopped in my tracks and turned around.

“What’s going on here?” Dad hurried out toward us, panic in his eyes. The gay-bashing kid started backing off, and then he turned and ran away.

“He called me a fag,” I said, my voice cracking, my head buzzing.

And my dad came and hugged me fiercely. “You’re no fag, okay? You don’t owe those idiots any explanation about who you are. They’d be lucky to be half the man you are, Rafe. Okay? We love you. Don’t fight those idiots. They may never change. You just let them be.”

Unspoken in those words was the fact that I probably would have lost that fight. Because I’m not a fighter. And who knows what happens when you’re down on the ground, having lost a fight? If my dad hadn’t come out, would the kid have killed me?

I lay in Bryce’s bed, eyes wide open, the night of the soccer game. Ben slept peacefully on the other side of the room. I thought about the almost-fight with Zack. Something hadn’t felt right ever since. Ben and I had hung out and talked, as usual. Nothing had changed with him. But I felt as if a part of me had disappeared in the altercation in the locker room.

Who was I? How could I stand up for gay people while at the same time hiding that part of me?

And I felt so foreign, lying there, the wind howling outside our window. What was I doing here? Who was Rafe, really? Can you just put a part of yourself on hold? And if you do, does it cease to be true?

Straight people have it so much easier. They don’t understand. They can’t. There’s no such thing as openly straight.

Because once, there was something that I was, and it was a difficult thing to be. But at least I was, you know, something. I wasn’t just a guy who stood tall in the shower, standing up for someone else, when really, I should have been standing up for myself.

And that was something my best friend Ben couldn’t know about me.