Rapture Practice (27 page)

And swallow.

The cold liquid hits my tongue. The carbonation is familiar, but the taste is not. It isn’t sweet; it’s sort of tart and sour.

Now I know why they call this an “acquired taste.”

Derrick is watching me we with a delighted grin. “How is it, man?”

I lick the foam off my upper lip. “Well, it tastes better than it smells. I’ll say that.”

Derrick laughs. “You’re a good kid, Hartzler.”

I feel a rush of excitement, and a sense of belonging, like I’ve been waiting out in the cold for a long time, and now I’ve been welcomed into the club. I understand beer commercials all of a sudden—drinking this bitter golden liquid together
makes you more than acquaintances, somehow. It makes Derrick my friend.

As we stand by the bar, laughing and drinking, Derrick points out the girls who are looking our way.

“Wait—really?” I ask. “Where?”

He laughs at me for not noticing.

“Those chicks behind you are totally checking you out,” he says. “Girls like tall guys.”

I glance over my shoulder in time to catch one girl with curly red hair turn away in a hurry. Her friend waves at us and giggles.

I stand in the bar with Derrick until we’ve finished our beers. The taste isn’t great, but it doesn’t take long before I’ve gulped it down, leaving some suds at the bottom of my glass.

“You feel buzzed yet?” Derrick grins.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Maybe.”

When we go back to the table, our food has arrived, and as I eat, I keep waiting for the beer to kick in. I’m not sure what a “buzz” is supposed to feel like. I don’t feel especially woozy or dizzy or anything, but my cheeks feel flushed, and there’s this sense of intense excitement in my chest, like the thrill I got when I landed the lead in the school play and saw my name on that list taped to Miss Tyler’s door. It’s the same thing I felt when I bought that movie ticket in Nebraska, and spent the night at Bradley’s for the first time. It’s the feeling of freedom I get every time I make my own decision about something.

I’m not sure if it’s the beer or the giddiness, but I’m starving
again. Derrick orders more burgers after devouring his first, and insists I eat one, too. French fries have never tasted this good, and I stuff myself until it hurts to breathe. I play darts with Carla and Derrick, and as the party winds down a couple hours later, Deena comes to our end of the table.

“Hey, mister. I promised your mom I would keep an eye on you.” She smiles. “Derrick isn’t corrupting you, is he?”

“Nah.” Derrick smirks. “Just one beer’s worth.”

I freeze.
Is Deena going to tell on me?

“You okay to drive?” she asks me, eyebrows raised, brows creased.

“He’s fine,” Derrick assures her. “It’s been a couple of hours. Plus, I made him eat a second burger. Need to get this kid some protein so he can pack on some muscle.”

“Be careful,” Deena commands. “Your mom will kill me if anything happens to you.”

“Really, I’m fine,” I say, and I’m telling the truth. Any trace of a buzz from my single beer has drifted away. Crossing the line and having a drink feels exciting and dangerous, but my head is clear. Still, as I leave the bar and reach for my keys, I remember the accident on the first day of sixth grade—the crunch of the metal and the spray of the glass—and a shiver of caution rolls through my chest that has nothing to do with the low temperature of a blustery February night.
Is this how drunk driving begins?

I turn the key in the ignition and remind myself to watch my speed. I dig a lemon wedge I grabbed from the table out of my pocket and chew on it as I drive down the highway
toward home. Mom will be up waiting, I know, and I want to make sure she doesn’t smell my first beer on my breath. It’s freezing out, but I keep the windows rolled down as I drive to air the cigarette smoke out of my clothes.

Mom is in the kitchen when I walk in to hang the keys up on the hook.

“How’d it go tonight?” she asks.

“It was fun,” I said. “Deena says hi.”

She reaches in to give me a hug, and I inhale deeply as she does, hoping the air flowing in will keep any hint of beer from flowing out.

“I’m glad you had a good time, honey.”

“Thanks for letting me go, Mom.”

I walk up the stairs toward the bathroom to brush my teeth.

“Aaron?”

I stop on the steps. My stomach drops.
Here it comes.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Sleep tight.” She smiles at me, and turns off the light in the hall.

There’s a gay pride parade in my Bible class.

The video on the screen up front shows a guy wearing a black leather harness and a pink Speedo with leather chaps—the kind a cowboy might wear when riding a horse in the Old West, only this guy isn’t riding a horse. He’s riding a float surrounded by lots of guys who look very similar to the He-Man action figures I used to covet in Randy’s bedroom when I was a kid.

Mr. Kroger’s latest video series is called “Having a Christian Worldview” produced by a televangelist with a syndicated Christian news show. Today’s segment is about what a born-again Christian’s response should be to the hot-button topic of sexual immorality.

The televangelist has orangey makeup and a big blond hairdo left over from the eighties. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard these words. He leans toward the camera and proclaims: “God’s plan for human sexuality is one man, with one woman, for life.”

Dad has said this for as long as I can recall, but the time I remember most clearly was when he took me on a road trip in eighth grade. He’d been asked to speak at a Christian boarding school in Nebraska, and he’d decided I was coming with him. The year before when I was twelve, he’d given me a book called
Preparing for Adolescence
by James Dobson, the host of the Christian radio program
Focus on the Family
. I was supposed to read the book, and we were supposed to have special father-son meetings to talk about it. Those meetings had gotten lost in the shuffle of our busy schedules, and Dad saw this trip as his chance. Before we left, he handed me a special workbook companion to
Preparing for Adolescence
complete with fill-in-the-blank worksheets, and charts of the human body.

I was
mortified
.

Dad was two years too late. I’d read everything I needed to know about the mechanics of sex under “Reproduction” in the
R
volume of the
World Book Encyclopedia
when I was ten years old. I didn’t want to talk about sex with my dad. I didn’t know why, exactly. It felt
weird
. I didn’t want to know about his sex life. Why was he so intent on talking to me about mine?

Speeding up the highway, I was trapped. Dad had me read sections of the book aloud, and then we’d talk through the questions in the workbook together. These chapters covered the gamut from male anatomy to masturbation, to a simple, somewhat cryptic description of intercourse.

I was relieved to read that Dr. Dobson thought masturbating was a normal thing that most guys did. It was strange to read the word
masturbation
aloud to my father, but he
seemed to think this was important, so I soldiered through my embarrassment. At least Dr. Dobson didn’t think jerking off was anything to feel guilty about.

I, for one, certainly never felt guilty about it, but I’d always assumed Dad and Dr. Dobson would say it was wrong.

“Aaron, are you struggling with masturbation?”

I felt the blood drain from my face.

Did he really say that out loud?

“What?” I asked.

“Are you struggling with masturbation?” he repeated.

I had no idea where to even
begin
with a question like that. I opened my mouth, to answer, but nothing came out. I closed my mouth again.
Am I
struggling
with masturbation?
Even his phrasing made me angry. It insinuated that somehow masturbation was wrong, and this made my blood boil. I wanted to open the door and roll out onto the shoulder of the road to get away from my dad; to get away from everything. I did not want to have this conversation. Dad was prying his way into the most deeply personal thing I had ever experienced.

That first night on the bottom bunk when I was twelve years old, it all happened so fast. Afterward, I lay there, not moving, surprised, and vaguely terrified, until I remembered the World Book Encyclopedia. Words from those old musty pages like
arousal
and
plateau
and
climax
flashed to life like flares hissing around a collision on a rain-soaked exit ramp, finally defined by experience instead of the dictionary.

If there was ever a moment when I felt I was in touch with
a capital
G
God, that was certainly it. It was incredible—an experience that had changed me fundamentally, somehow. I had no idea that my body was designed to feel pleasure so intensely.

I stared out the window, trying to avoid Dad’s question. Nebraska in February sped by: frozen dairy farms and gray corn fields as far as the eye could see. I felt so tired of having to hide something at every turn: movies, music, magazines. Every corner of my life seemed to require a compromise, but this?

Not this!
I wanted to scream at him.
Not this, too!

Again, Dad asked the question: “Aaron, are you struggling with masturbation?”

I didn’t scream. I didn’t open the door and leap from the car. I opened my mouth and gave the most truthful answer I had ever uttered:

“No.”

I wanted to say more. I wanted to tell him,
No. Jerking off is the easiest thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s no struggle at all.
Instead, I stared out the window and silently prayed that God was on my side about this. I begged the gray expanse of heaven over Nebraska to let this moment pass quickly.

Please God, let him drop it.

“Mom told me she found some socks behind your bed the other day that had dried semen on them.”

“
Dad!
” I yelled. “This is none of your
business
!” When he said that, suddenly I was almost crying.
Why won’t he stop?
“I’m not talking to you about this.”

“We
need
to talk about it, son. I disagree with Dr. Dobson on this point in his book.”

“Got it,” I snapped. “You think I
should
feel guilty about jerking off.”

“I want your thought life to stay morally pure. Jesus said if you even
think
of lusting after a woman in your heart it’s the same thing as having committed adultery with her.”

I closed my eyes and took a breath. “Dad. I am not having sex with anyone. Can we please drop this?”

“It’s not only about having sex, Aaron. If you’re engaged in sexual fantasy during masturbation, you’re being controlled by impure thoughts and not by the Holy Spirit of God. Until you meet the one woman God has chosen to be your wife, you should be striving to keep your thought life pure.”

Back in my Bible class, I’m feeling the same discomfort with this video as I did when Dad asked me about jerking off. The guy in the chaps on screen may not be controlling his thought life, but he
is
controlling his massive pecs, making them bounce to the rhythm of the dance music playing in the background at the gay pride parade.

The televangelist narrates this segment with Bible verses about how it’s an abomination for a man to lie with a man as he does with a woman, but I can barely hear him. There’s something strange about watching this scene. It transfixes me. I can’t imagine wearing a pink Speedo and a leather harness in Central Park, or dancing on a float with a bunch of oiled-up bodybuilders, but as the camera pans away from the
burly man in the chaps, it passes over many others—thousands of them—and focuses on two guys hanging out in the park with a couple of beers.

These two are younger than the men on the float, probably only a few years older than I am. They are wearing jeans and tank tops. One of them has a Kansas City Royals baseball cap. They’re both tall, tan, and muscular. They’re not really dancing. They are simply standing there, watching the festival, and as the camera focuses on them, I see a thing I’ve never seen before.

They’re holding hands.

My heart speeds up, and I feel a lump form in my throat. There’s something about this image I can’t put my finger on. It makes me feel something I don’t have a word for—like the sadness I feel when I think of a good memory from far away, or when I laugh so hard that I cry. It’s a fleeting warmth I grasp for, but can’t quite catch, a slow, delicious heartbreak.

The guy wearing the KC ball cap whispers something to his boyfriend, who smiles, and kisses his boyfriend on the cheek.

Suddenly, the camera zooms in and freezes on this simple kiss. With a screen wipe of wild angles, the video turns to black and white, then flashes to a color reverse image, making the image of this kiss appear to be an X-ray. A red title flies across the screen:

ABOMINATION

Erica is sitting one row up on my right. Her eyes are wide, glued to the screen. She slowly shakes her head in a daze, as if she can’t believe what she is seeing.

An old panic pings up my spine and tightens my shoulders, but I’m not sure why. These guys are different from the men on the floats. They aren’t wearing crazy costumes and don’t have anything pierced. They’re not made up like Jezebel or dancing like Salome. They look so… normal.

They look a lot like me.

The video quickly cuts to a Bible verse from the New Testament about men burning in their lust toward one another not entering the kingdom of heaven. Now the televangelist is talking about AIDS and there are images of men marching in the parade who do not look like me. They seem old and angry. They are shouting and raising their fists. They are skinny and pale and appear to be terribly ill.

I can’t stop thinking about that guy in the baseball cap. Something about it sticks in my head. The way he laughed with his friend reminds me of the way I laugh with Bradley. The kiss he gave his boyfriend on the cheek didn’t look like anything evil. I kiss my dad on the cheek like that. And I’ve seen him kiss his brothers on the cheek the same way.