After my parents’ accident, I’d moved from Modesto to Hutchinson to live with my grandparents. I spent my first day in Kansas in my new school’s vice principal’s office, filling out forms, enrolling in classes that paralleled the ones I’d taken in California. American government, senior English, advanced art-everything seemed unnecessary. I scribbled my name on countless papers. On each page, someone had thoughtfully blacked out the spaces designated for parents’ signatures. “All done.” I handed a secretary the finished forms. Her eyes, which darted from my clothes to my expertly applied eyeliner to the dyed spikes of my haircut, couldn’t fathom how to feel sorry for such a freak. I trudged to the hall, dreading every moment.
There he stood: Neil, jamming books into his locker. His looks were faultless. He had lips so pouty they might have been swollen; brown eyes; brows that met in his forehead’s center. His angular nose, chin, and cheekbones seemed sculpted by an ecstatic, mescaline-fueled god. His hair was the color of onyx. Everyone else seemed to be avoiding him. When he saw me watching, he smirked. That smirk delivered me from hopelessness.
Later that week I learned his name; I also heard the word fag used in the same breath. We shared two classes. During discussion in American government, I stared at him instead of the Bill of Rights notes that Mr. Stein scribbled across the blackboard. After school, Neil would rush to his Impala, as if fleeing a burning building. He was sometimes accompanied by a shady-eyed kid named Christopher. They’d drive off, oblivious of me, and I’d walk home. Those first few nights, I fell asleep imagining what he looked like naked.
It didn’t take long to discover that being a queer in a Kansas high school was a world of difference from being one in California. I learned to proceed with caution. After two weeks, I spied Neil hanging out with this “Christopher” in the park on the south side of town, a place I’d heard through various grapevines was notorious as queer cruising ground. He wore sunglasses and a cantaloupe-colored windbreaker. As I later wrote in my journal, Neil would have “averted my eyes from an uncapped grenade.” I assumed that a young guy in Carey Park was strange, because I’d only seen the over-forty crowd there.
I’ll never forget the smug expression on Neil’s face as I drove by in my grandparents’ powder blue Gremlin. It was as though Neil knew he’d wind up sleeping with me.
Neil waved, and I blushed. I sped home.
The next day, he turned toward me in American government. He briefly appeared as if he would spit or swear. Then he grinned. He pointed to my exam; held up his. We’d both gotten D pluses.
“You forgot to answer the Brown v. Board of Education question,” I said. I injected my voice with all the cockiness I could muster. “At least I wrote something down.”
“You stare at me a lot,” he said. “I’m Neil.”
“I know.”
His bangs fell in his eyes, and he angled his head to shake them away. “Is your mother aware of where you were yesterday?”
“My mother’s dead,” I said.
He didn’t flinch. I liked that.
“That’s why I’m here,” I said. “I would have moved eventually anyway. Sooner or later they would have kicked me out of school. My friends and I started some fires, did some vandalism.”
That was a slight exaggeration, but Neil seemed impressed. He told me I had guts for dressing like I did at such a backward high school. On that particular day, I was packed into tight black jeans. The usual cross dangled from my neck. My T-shirt, massacred with rips, featured Christ’s stigmataed hand reaching from a thunderhead toward an amazed crowd. Neil touched JC’s dripping nail hole. He winked. A girl in a cheerleader’s uniform rolled her eyes, as if she’d seen this process a billion times before.
Neil and I skipped last hour. We headed for the parking lot, where Christopher was waiting. “See you later,” Neil yelled to him, not bothering to introduce us. He showed me his Impala, and I crawled in. Although it was a chilly March day, we bought tutti-frutti ices from the 7-Eleven. We whizzed toward my grandparents’ house, which by that time I was calling my house as well.
No one was around. I shut the door to my room, and Neil stood there, staring heavenward. What could have been so engaging about a mobile home’s waterstained ceiling? Curious, I looked up too, and that’s when he pinned me against the wall. He kissed me. His mouth was extra cold and wet, as if his tongue were a chunk of pink ice. We took all of ten minutes to get our clothes off.
It’s not the actual sex I remember best. It’s what he said to me after we’d finished. Neil toweled off, slipped his underwear back on, and sat at my bed’s edge. He asked when I would turn nineteen, and I answered December. Then he looked away, smiling. “That makes you younger than me,” he said. “What a novelty.”
As it turned out, “novelty” wasn’t a bad word to describe our sex. We only fooled around a couple of times after that, but I soon discovered that Neil’s major focus was older men-preferably, ones with cash. Strangely though, he didn’t discard me; since his pal Wendy had moved to New York, he claimed, he only had Christopher and his mom to hang out with. “But Chris has serious problems,” he explained, “and my mom’s not around much.”
What the hell, I thought: I didn’t have friends, either.
The air in Neil’s neighborhood smelled like hamburgers and split hot dogs, like lighter fluid and barbecue sauce. It was an odor of permanence and familial bliss. After he parked the Impala, we jumped out and ran for his front door, if only to get away from that smell and into somewhere familiar and cool.
Neil’s mom was at work. She had left the windows open, the door unlocked. “What this means,” he announced, “is we can watch porno on the VCR.” I followed him to his room. On the wall, a framed photo showed Wendy, the best friend I’d yet to meet. The sides of her head were shaved, the rest matted into worm-slender dreadlocks and pulled back into a ponytail. She’d autographed the photo’s bottom like a movie star. Beneath her was Neil’s nightstand, littered with small hills of pennies, a dead violet-winged butterfly, and two trophies he won in Little League years ago. MOST RBIS, SUMMER 1981, the gold plaque on one of them read. A towel was wadded on the floor. It reeked of sex, and I wondered if the dried sperm on its surface was Neil’s or the memento of some middle-aged trick he’d brought to this very room. I didn’t have the nerve to ask.
Neil reached under his bed’s mattress and retrieved a key. He unlocked his bottom dresser drawer, his back blocking it. He closed the drawer and turned. He held a videotape in one hand, a bag of pot in the other. We shuffled to the front room.
The movie, an old one, starred men with mustaches and an abundance of body hair. There was substantial fucking, but not a condom in sight. Neil and I sat at opposite ends of his sofa, not touching ourselves or each other. “Here’s my number one scene,” he said. A beefy ranch owner entered a barn, only to find a young ranch hand bound and gagged, pleading for mercy. The ranch owner untied, caressed, then seduced him. Their sex gradually transformed from tender to ferocious. At one point, the pale skin on the young guy’s ass grew streaked with red welts. The film ended with ranch owner once again holding ranch hand in his glistening, tanned arms.
After the credits, I poured two glasses of lemonade from a pitcher in Neil’s refrigerator. His mother had left a cherry-colored lipstick trace on the pitcher’s rim. The air conditioner’s cool wasn’t enough, and Neil plugged the cord from a portable fan into a socket. My hair whipped back, and I smelled the black dye job from the previous day. The smell was identical to the antiseptic odor of the Modesto Funeral Home. I made a mental note to wash my hair again before I joined Neil at Sun Center.
Neil ejected the tape and inserted a horror film called Suspiria. “I’ve seen this one hundreds of times. It’s great, but if I fall asleep it’s your job to wake me. I have to be at work by six.”