Paper Covers Rock (4 page)

Addendum to the Birch School Handbook, October 1982

Scissors Cut Paper

An announcement regarding this addendum to the rules is made in chapel that same night, October 1, at a school-wide memorial service for Thomas. Thomas’s parents and little brother are still here. I do not want to see them, so two hours before the service, I go for a run to get in my miles for the weekend, even though I know Mr. Wellfleet would be understanding if I didn’t. I run seven miles of hills, above and beyond the required four. So it is easy afterward to make myself vomit, which I do, and then I check myself into the
infirmary. When you’re sick, you’re not allowed on dorm. I make myself vomit again for good measure once I’m there so that I can stay with Nurse Patty overnight.

I would rather stay with Miss Dovecott. Her apartment is in the infirmary, not on dorm like the male teachers’ apartments. This old school doesn’t know what to do with her, now that they have her, Miss Dovecott fresh out of Princeton. Birch gets a hard-on for Ivies. I would rather stay with her, but I’m guessing that would be a dismissible offense.

No one at the school has a crush on Nurse Patty. She is sugary and plump, like a gumdrop. If you want to have a crush on a Birch bitch (a long-standing label, not of my invention), you don’t have a lot of options. You’ve got your dining-hall employees, but they’re inbred, being from the nearby hollers, which is also kind of where I’m from, just farther away. I’m not really into mountain lasses, even though they are nice and I went to school with some of them before I came to Birch. There’s Mrs. Davido, the French teacher, who is undeniably beautiful for an older lady, and if you could imagine her twenty years younger, you could develop a crush pretty easily, but who wants to work that hard? Plus, she is married to Mr. Davido, who teaches Spanish, and it’s creepy to think of them together in bed. And Mrs. Inskeep, the switchboard operator, has a face as leathery as an orange. They are like grandmothers and, like grandmothers, would do anything for us. They are there to serve, and we are there to take.

Miss Dovecott isn’t like that. Hemingway or Fitzgerald would be able to describe her better than I can: think Brett Ashley without the royal pedigree, or a kinder, gentler Jordan
Baker. Miss Dovecott is dark (like me), and good-looking in a tomboyish, no-nonsense way. Her face isn’t beautiful, because her nose is kind of big, but when she smiles, which isn’t all that often, her face looks like a sunburst. It’s blinding. She’s got great legs, slender, well-defined. Soccer legs. She played attack on her college team, a fact that gives her way more credibility with us than an Ivy League degree. Half of the school has a crush on her, and not just because she is basically the only female under the age of thirty within nineteen miles.

Miss Dovecott isn’t like the other women, because she is both giver and taker. She has given me my raison d’être. She has cut out my
coeur
, now cradled in her hands.
Mon Dieu
. I lie on this cot where other sick boys have lain and drown a thousand times over in my nightmares.

Green Fields

In the days after Miss Dovecott read my poem in class, a whole new vista of knowledge spread out before me, and life on dorm became much less interesting than life in English class, than life inside my head. Who cared if I could hear Clay jacking off every night? I could rise above it; I was learning how to float across the horizontal lines that I’d always thought were reasonable borders. My running times began to improve because, all of a sudden, I could make the trail beneath my feet disappear, and the destination was nothing more than a wide-open space of beginning. One night, the guys across the hall found a “Coloreds Only” sign in the attic of our dorm and plotted to hang it over the table in the dining hall where the ten or so black students at Birch sit at
lunch, and the next morning when they were at breakfast, I snuck into their room, stole the sign, stuffed it into my backpack, and walked over to the maintenance shed, where I borrowed some black paint and covered up the “lor.” “Coeds Only.” I returned the sign to their room, and they never said anything about it. I was beginning to see
through
things; language was flying at me from all directions, and I grabbed on to it as if it were the tail of a kite.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1982, 3:13 P.M
.

You’re getting the picture, aren’t you, that Is Male is scared out of his mind? Which is why he spends hours surrounded by the order of the Dewey decimal system, writing his Not-So-Great American Novel. If your trusty narrator were a little less intimidated by the permanence of ink, you might well be reading an autobiography, one that doesn’t steal its chapter titles from sentences written by a guy named
Her
-man.

Thomas’s Funeral

For six days, the flag in front of the main building flies at half-mast. On Friday, October 6, the student body crosses the state in buses for the funeral in Raleigh, a much bigger deal than the memorial service I chickened out of. For most of us, it is our first funeral, and we shuffle and bow, uncomfortable with the postures of grief. And for what are we grieving? For me, it is so much more than loss of life.

Because when I see Thomas’s parents and little brother at the funeral, my soul weaves a nest into some inner part of me I never knew existed. Although I’m not sure what Melville meant by it, somehow it feels right: meditation and water
are
wedded forever, and the church is out of proportion to the world. I offer my seat to an old woman and inch to the back wall, as far away as I can get from where Thomas’s family and the casket (closed) are.

The Casket

Polished wood the color of autumn. It is extremely difficult to convince myself that Thomas is really in there. What if he isn’t dead; what if he hears all of this in his brain, but his mouth doesn’t work? Or his feet or hands? What if he can hear, and he is just playing a joke on all of us?

Hands

Make a fist, Thomas. Make a fist and punch through the lid. Arise like Frankenstein. Mummy-walk to the back of the church where I am and beat me to a pulp. I hold hands with myself to keep from shaking, remembering the cold of your hand the one time I held it. Remember, Thomas? Remember how at Birch, it’s always either too hot or too cold? Remember how our freshman year it snowed the first of May, two whole feet?

Before we left the river, after Glenn found you under the murk and he and I pulled you to shore, after we tried CPR and mouth-to-mouth again and again, even though it was stupid and pointless, I held your hand.

It doesn’t matter what the minister says as he stands over your shiny casket; it doesn’t matter that everyone but me in this church is singing. What idiot chose “I’ve Got Peace Like a River” to be sung at your funeral? Is this part of the joke, too?

In the back of the church, I think about your last words to me and the last words you heard, which were mine: “Rock, paper, scissors.” I mouth these words to the tune of the hymn while it groans out of the organ, and the syllables scan. But your last syllables to me don’t scan, and why should they? Normal people don’t go around talking in iambs. Your little brother, Trenton, seems to agree; he is nodding his head in time to the music, each downbeat like a peck at the truth.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

We all take chances with our lives. It is all such a gamble. I learn while I’m sitting on that bench outside the Headmaster’s office less than twenty-four hours after Thomas died that I may be safe. Because the tape recorder is there between us, Glenn tells me the good news by reaching into my backpack and writing on a sheet of paper that he tears out of the back of my journal. I don’t think he realizes what it is, but in spite of what I just said at the start of this paragraph, I’m not taking any chances. From now on, my Not-So-Great American Novel is staying in the library.

I’ve taped the torn page back into my journal.

And I couldn’t. There was no worse label at an all-boys’ school than “gay.” It was worse than leprosy, way worse. If someone laid that name on me, I would want to leave, too. Worse than “liar,” worse than “cheat,” worse than “thief.” Getting kicked out for drinking was even considered “cool” in some people’s books. (Not mine, but some people’s.) It doesn’t even surprise me that Clay said nothing about it the night before as we lay there on our very separate twin beds. When Clay comes out of the office, the look on his face tells me that Glenn wasn’t kidding. “Don’t worry, Stromm,” Clay whispers. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

Peace like a River (Ha, Ha)

For how long was I one with the water? It’s a math problem I give to myself while being interrogated inside the Headmaster’s office after Clay has taken the fall. Clay is going home today, but where are you, Thomas? The autopsy came back on your body. You were way over the limit of what’s known as “legally drunk,” but I guess you probably know that.
Knew
that.

“If the water was cold, Mr. Stromm, as it typically is at the end of September, then why did you want to swim in it?”

Thanks to Golden Boy, who is still waiting with the tape
recorder on the bench in the hall, I am prepared with the prologue to the accident that we agreed to the night before. “We were playing this game of Frisbee, kind of like tag, where we …” As I explain the made-up game, I picture the orange Frisbee under Clay’s bed, and then I picture those cigarette burns in the carpet, made by some other asshole who smoked like a chimney and probably got away with it. “And we got hot from all the running around, so we went for a quick dip, and that’s when we decided, stupidly, to jump off the rock.”

Dean Mansfield takes over for Mr. Armstrong. “Did you have a taste, or more than a taste, of vodka?” he asks, enunciating every word.

I know that with Glenn, Dean Mansfield will not have time to repeat the question. I know how Glenn will answer: “No, sir, no way. Coach Harding would kill me for drinking.” Glenn is the star wide receiver, well on his way to setting a school record for receptions.

But when Dean Mansfield asks me, I pause, questioning how effective the licorice gum was that Glenn slipped out of his backpack on the way up the hill as we followed Thomas’s stretched-out body. They probably could have broken me if they’d tried a little harder.

“Mr. Stromm?” Mr. Armstrong turns his grandfather eyes on me. “Had you been drinking before you jumped from the rock?”

I have already told so many lies that it almost feels like truth when I answer, “No, sir.”

Ten seconds at the most, mathematically speaking; that’s how long I was in the water before I knew something was
wrong. My last ten seconds of innocence, you might say. For ten seconds, I
was
the river.

Reverend Black

Birch School’s own personal shepherd, Reverend Black, goes with us to the funeral, driving the lead bus. We are shuttled back to school, back across the state, that same day, Friday. When I descend the bus steps, I have to grab on to the rail put there for the old and crippled.

Reverend Black is waiting at the foot of the steps. He has something he’d like to say to me. I don’t have anything I’d like to say to him, but I’m not going to make a scene, even though it means being alone with him in his office, a narrow room under the chapel, a room that is hard to breathe in, like a coffin, because it has no windows.

The good reverend is light in his loafers. The good reverend is a hypocrite. He preaches on the sin of homosexuality—at least once a trimester, he quotes the Scripture, twists it so that it fits his message.

His Message

Leviticus 18:22, the King James Version:
“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Now, I’m no stellar grammarian, but to me, it sounds like Leviticus is saying that we really shouldn’t be lying with anybody.

The good reverend says that we are made in God’s image. God is perfect.
Therefore
, God is not gay.
If
you engage in the sin of homosexuality,
then
you will contract gay cancer and die a very slow, very painful death.

I’m no stellar mathematician, either, but I’m pretty sure the reverend’s logic wouldn’t hold much water in Mr. Behr’s geometry class.

None of us trusts the good reverend as far as we can throw him. Which wouldn’t be far, because he is a chunky man, overstuffed like a worn-out armchair.

I should tell Reverend Black that I’d rather have this talk with my advisor, Mr. Parkes, because I like the way Mr. Parkes talks, kind of old-fashioned. And he never rambles on or repeats himself like so many other teachers. He knows when to stop. The good reverend does not, and now he is telling me that I will have to sit here and listen to his bullshit once a week, otherwise known as “grief counseling,” which Glenn will also have to endure. “On occasion,” says Reverend Black, “you two might even like to come in together.” As I sit there at one end of his black leather couch, a brass lamp cold at my elbow, Reverend Black perches at the other, his left palm flat on the cushion between us. He wears a gold signet ring on his pinky. I don’t trust men who wear rings. (Wedding bands don’t count.) The rumor is that he had Jesus Christ’s initials inscribed on it, but the engraving is too swirly for me to confirm or deny that rumor, and I am not about to lean in closer to inspect it.