“Have you ever felt as if you were living in someone else’s body?” Robert asks me. “Did you ever touch your skin and couldn’t feel it?”
“All the time,” I admitted. “Not so much now. But it hasn’t been so long ago since I felt that way.”
He called his mother, told her not to worry, he was all right, they’d talk about it later, decide what to do, where he’d go, after exams. He stared at the open book on his desk, unable to read, not even seeing the print on the page, finally closing it. It was pointless, his father was cutting off the money and he wouldn’t be returning, at least not until he could earn some cash. Barely eating, unable to sleep, not bathing, he wandered the streets until daylight, talking to himself, he counted down the days-twenty, nineteen, eighteen-until they closed the dorm for winter break, leaving him nowhere to go.
He paced outside the library, open all night during exams, arguing with himself, swearing he wasn’t going to give in to temptation, finally losing the battle and ending up in the men’s room deep in the bowels of the building. Locking himself in a stall, he waited, not wanting sex actually but needing to feel something warm-a belly or a crotch-against his face, hoping someone would slip into the next stall and a foot would slide across the tile and nudge his, the blossoming of romance.
He sat for hours, his ass and thighs turning to cold lead, hearing nothing but piss against porcelain, an occasional turd plopping in water, flush and run. Just when he was about to give up, go home and pull the sheets over his head, he heard the sounds of procrastination at the sink, hands being washed and dried, then washed again, a brief, hushed conversation, and then belt buckles slapping the floor in the next stall. Robert leaned forward and saw suede bucks and familiar red sneakers with black racing stripes. His knees buckled and his stomach heaved when he stood to pull up his pants. He tripped over his own feet, cutting his chin on the edge of the door, and, bleeding, ran as fast as he could, away from the banging and thumping and hands slapping the stall, from the grunting and groaning, from Cary ’s voice, begging the boy in the suede bucks to do it harder, go deeper, harder.
He waited until nine in the morning when the dorm was empty. Then, alone in his room, he slipped a pocketknife in the pocket of his robe and walked the corridor to the shower room. Once the water was scalding hot, he pulled the shower curtain behind him and slashed first his left wrist, and then, before he passed out from shock, gouged his right, not as prettily, but effectively. The blood came in spurts and the last thing he remembered was it swirling around his feet and disappearing down the drain.
“I didn’t think about killing myself. I just wanted to feel something, something that hurt. But I didn’t want to kill myself, you’ve gotta understand,” he says, shaking my arm, pleading with me.
“Why?” I ask him. “Why is it so important I understand you?”
“Because no one else does.”
“Why are you so sure I do?”
“Mandy told me,” he says. “She said you were a fag. I thought about you all the time after that. I wanted to talk to you so bad. I almost called you, but I was afraid.”
The shrink thinks Robert would benefit from intensive therapy and the medications might need to be adjusted, but the insurance won’t approve any further inpatient treatment. Bobby’s wife panics. Robert cannot go home. The hospital can’t keep him just because he has nowhere to go.
I haven’t finished making the offer before he accepts. I explain my spartan existence and warn him his feet will hang off the couch. More permanent plans can wait until after the holiday. Who will follow his case? Who will make the doctor’s appointment? What about school? What about the lost semester? How he will pay his tuition? And the dormitory. Will they take him back? How can he face all those well-scrubbed little Tar Heels who last saw him being carried out the door by paramedics? It’s not my problem. After the new year, I’ll send him packing, bus ticket in hand, destination unknown.
Much to my surprise, my prison cell at Magnolia Towne Courte seems larger, not smaller, when he takes up residence. It’s strange, how much we have to talk about, this eighteen-year-old kid and me. He wants to know everything about me. No, not everything. He’s not interested in my life with Alice. He’s only curious about the life he and I share. He assumes I was always what I am today. Which I was. Only I didn’t know it. No, more accurately, I didn’t want to know it. He wants to know about my first time. What did he look like? Was he nice? Did you love him? No, I certainly wasn’t in love with a long red snake. But I don’t share that with Robert. He’s still a boy, impressionable, and, after Cary, his faith in his fellow travelers is too precarious to withstand the sordid little tale of my rape by a nicotine-stained stranger in the cab of a tractor trailer. So, instead, he’s enthralled by the tall tale of the First Time I wished I’d had. Like Baron Frankenstein, I assemble this chimera from bits and pieces-part Randy T, part Brian Wilkins, a dash of the Rocket Boy, a bit of Steve, even a trace of Douglas. I christen my fantasy first love “Nick,” inspired by the Beach Boys Christmas song on the radio. Surely, you’ve got a picture of him? Somewhere, I lie, I’ll look around. I dig out an old photo album I hadn’t put in storage and chose some long-forgotten young Nocera Heat and Air technician captured for posterity at the annual summer picnic to cast in the role of Nick.
He uses me as his sounding board for his theories and opinions about everything and anything. The debate between genetics and environment. The theory of dominant mother/absent father. Why Lou Reed, despite overwhelming evidence of his heterosexuality, is a better role model for gays than Elton John. I make mental notes, checklists, of all the things I want to tell him in our short time together. Soon enough, it will be time for him to be thrown back into the harsh world. He puts up a good show of bravado, but I know he’s afraid to venture out there alone. He reminds me of a boy I once knew, a kid who dreamed of conquering the world, but chose safety and security over Chicago. I don’t want Robert to retreat like I had; I want him to be strong and fearless.
Gina calls on Christmas Eve to wish me a Merry Christmas and to inflict a ration of guilt for declining her invitation to spend the holidays in Boca Raton. The family’s making progress, she reports. Dustin’s father got him the Original Cast Recordings of Annie and Rent for Christmas, and Dustin is over the moon about the Stowe father-and-son ski trip the two of them are planning. She wants to talk about our mother, to rhapsodize about our last tortuous Noel, remembering it as a glorious Technicolor MGM musical. You really are a selfish bastard, she says, do you know how much it would have meant to me to spend this first Christmas without her together? That goddamn minimum-wage job is a pretty lame excuse. We both knew I hardly need the money now. But she says all of this affectionately, without rancor.
I tell her it would have been impossible anyway. I have a houseguest. I can’t really talk. He’s sitting a few feet away. Robert. JR. You know, I say, Bobby’s kid. No, he’s eighteen now. Yeah, how time flies. Stop being so suspicious. He got into a little trouble and needed a place to stay. No, not that kind of trouble. Of course his mother knows he’s here. She’s the one who asked me to help. Look, I said, I’ll tell you about it later. Merry Christmas. I love you too. Yes, I got it. Yes, I love it. No, I haven’t read it yet. But Robert has spent hours poring over the Beatles coffee table book she sent me for Christmas.
Christmas is a clear, sunny day. The forecast is calling for a high in the upper sixties, chance of precipitation nil. I let the kid sleep in the morning; it’s almost noon before the smell of brewing coffee, my second pot of the day, lures him off the couch. He chews on a Pop-Tart, crumbs falling to the floor, and asks what we’re doing to celebrate. I invite him to take a ride with me. Sure, he says, not asking where we were going. A couple miles from home I curse myself for forgetting my sunglasses. He insists I borrow his.