faggots

tyler, texas, autumn 1978

i had come home from school that weekend--i was always coming home back then--and, finding myself out of cigarettes, ran across the loop to the 7-11 as i had done countless times since grade school.  chatted with mrs. evans a minute as she rang up my smokes, and, on the way out, stopped to spin the little rack of paperbacks by the door, more out of habit than anything else.

i dunno what i was expecting to find, because it was always the same old shit.  a jobber came by every couple weeks, filled the racks with an assortment of trashy bestsellers, romance novels, true-crime pulps and westerns--whatever he had left over after servicing the more lucrative drugstore accounts on his route--and that day the selection was no different than it had ever been.

except for the one, whose bright-yellow cover screamed a gay slur at me from the confinement of its little wire restraint.

i stood there stunned, the blood turning cold and then hot in my closeted virgin veins.  how this book with its brazen, outlandish title had ever found its way into my dry, baptist little corner of east texas, i did not know.  what i did know was that i had to have it.

the other thing i knew was that i couldn't just walk up to the counter, set it down in front of mrs. evans and pay for it.  which presented me with a quandary:  dare i try it again?  because the consequences of failure this time would be far greater in every way than the last.

see, mrs. evans and i had a history.  plump and jovial, she had managed the 7-11 across the street from my house forever, and her daughter bennie and i had been classmates from fifth grade all the way through high school.

but she had another, much tougher side, did mrs. evans, as i would discover in my fourteenth year the day a friend and i tried to lift a couple packs of swisher sweets when we thought she wasn't looking.  i'll never forget it--as we cruised toward the door, clean getaway assured, i felt a steel vise clamp onto my bony little shoulder, and an equally steely voice say, "give 'em up, mike."

i froze, slowly turned, looked up into a face that was no longer smiling but hard as nails, and meekly did as i was told.

"now, you're gonna go straight home, you're gonna tell your mama what you did, and you're not gonna set foot in this store for three months, because i figure that's about how long it'll take before i can stand to look at you again"

because that's the way such matters were handled in small towns in those days.

of course, there was no need to tell my mother when i got home--mrs. evans had already taken care of that.  and just to add the icing to the cake, my jubilant little brother happened to be the one who answered the phone.

but that was then, and it had been a couple packs of cigarillos.  if she caught me this time, with this, i wasn't worried she'd call the cops.  she'd do something far worse:  she'd tell her daughter, who'd tell everybody.

all this flashed through my mind in the instant it took me to slip the book from its rack and down the front of my jeans with a deftness the artful dodger might've admired, wave at mrs. evans without looking back and walk out the door.  clean getaway assured.

*     *     *     *     *

austin, texas, morning after halloween, a year later

the phone rings.  

"hey, mark, what's up?", and then, "what's wrong?"

turns out, a lot.  seems the night before, after a raucous party, my little brother had piled a bunch of people into his new jeep and taken off across a field near his apartment, hit a mogul and flipped the thing, throwing himself and everybody else hither and yon--except the one girl, whose left shoulder had been crushed when the roll bar landed on it.

"please don't tell mother, ok?"

i tell him, "too late--she's sitting here next to me,"  because she'd come down for the weekend.

an hour later, i'm on my way to dallas in her car, not sure what i'm gonna do or say, but knowing i have to be there for him.

see, my relationship with my brother had always been strained, and we'd never been easy with each other. he was the jock, the good-looking one, the cocky asshole

he went to new york the summer after high school, walked into the only modeling agency he'd ever heard of, slapped a few polaroids of himself on the counter, asked the girl at the front desk if they were interested, and, when the higher-up she'd immediately called assured him that they were, laughed and said, "i just wanted to see if i could" as he walked out the door

who'd never understood why people didn't warm up to him like they did me.  and he'd never much looked up to his older brother, not that i'd ever given him reason to.

when i pulled up, he was carrying a bag of trash down the stairs of his building with a jaunty tweed newsboy cap on the back of his head, looking every inch the model he always had, greeted me like he couldn't figure out why i was there.

it wasn't til we were back upstairs that he broke. "i almost killed her, mike--another couple inches and it woulda been her neck."  and then

"you know, everybody in our family tells me i'm the strong one--i'm the one who's like our dad.

well, thanks for that little insight into how everybody sees me, little brother

"but i don't feel very strong right now.  i hate this life--i don't know what i'm doing.  i don't know why i'm here."

i'd never seen this side of him.  i remember driving back to austin the next morning, crying, asking god why we were all so fucked up.

a month later--girl on the mend, no lawsuit because they didn't do that back then--he's quit his job and is on his way down to stay with me for awhile, because i'd told him he could.

i prepare--not much to clean, not much to hide.  only the book, which goes into a box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.

it's awkward at first--loft apartment meant for one (or a really close couple), and we're all over each other, no privacy at all.  but i tell myself it's only for a few weeks, until he gets himself straightened out.

but he stays, and stays--never asking, just presuming.  depressed, and brooding.  and judging--i can feel it.

it's not all bad--there was that day we cheered the US olympic hockey team on to victory over the russkies.  that was fun; for a minute we were close.

the weeks turn into months, and it's not until the school year and my lease end in may that i manage to shoehorn his ass outta my life.

he's gone, and i'm packing, and i suddenly remember the book.  pull the box out of the closet, dig through it--nothing.  it's not there.

*     *     *     *     *

since then, out of the catalog of resentments i could cite, the thing i think i've resented most about him

besides what he did to our little sister, which is a post for another day

were the little digs, the out-of-his-way efforts to make me look bad in front of people.

i could always see it coming--we'd be with a bunch of people, he'd get that smirk on his face and start reminiscing, and i'd think, "here it comes".

and, sure as shit, it always did.  usually it was little things, like the time in high school i got drunk and came home and vomited all night, or some other such stupidity--all in good fun, of course.

or the time when my mother excitedly announced to a table full of relatives that i was in san francisco for the weekend and he snorted, said, "yeah, i'll bet it's not the first time."

but it wasn't until that night when his kids were older and just starting to look up to me and he said, "lemme tell you about the time your uncle mike got caught stealing cigars at 7-11" that i really started to hate him.

maybe i'm just paranoid.  god knows i'm an absent-minded sort--that book coulda ended up any number of places.

but i know exactly what happened to it.

of all the books i could've come across as a young, repressed homo to introduce me to the life, the fact that it was this one explains a lot, does it not?