screaming.
I said before that I’d never met anyone like Ian. It was only a half-truth, one of my specialties. So here it comes, the big, repressed memory. And I’m not even paying to lie on your couch.
Senior year of high school, my friend Darren invited me up to the projection room for a smoke. He wasn’t really my friend, not yet, too cool for me with his baggy green corduroys and his blond hair dyed pink with Kool-Aid, but we had APs and honors classes together, which meant we could act like friends without going through the whole preliminary stage. I’d never been up to the booth before—of all the kinds of geek I was, audiovisual geek was not among them—but it was exactly what I thought: lots of switches and lights, an old paint can half-full of cigarette butts. I knew Darren was gay, or I would have thought it was a low-budget date. He lit our cigarettes and we stared out the little window, down at the seats in the auditorium, like something was about to happen out there.
He asked how I was doing—I’d been dumped a couple of weeks earlier, three days before Homecoming—and I pretended to be recovering. I said, “I’d pay good money to be gay.”
Darren looked shocked, confused, horribly wounded. I said, “I’m sorry, I mean I know it’s really hard . . .”
“You know I’m gay?” Of course I did. The entire school knew. People talked about how brave he was to be out of the closet. Gossip about his love life would win you a rapt audience in the cafeteria. “Because I’ve only told, like, two people. Ever.”
So I lied. I said, “I have exceptional gaydar. It’s a talent. Seriously, if college doesn’t work out, it could be my
career
.”
“Oh.” He tapped his ashes onto some kind of control panel.
“I mean, I guess maybe it’s obvious. Like my dad has always been worried about it, from the time I was, like, three. He took away all my coloring books.”
“Why?”
“I guess I was a little too into them. And then he wouldn’t let me play with girls, but then my mom was like, it’s worse for him to always play with boys, so then I wasn’t allowed to play with anyone but my cousins. They’re Catholic. My parents. Well, so are my cousins, but you know what I mean.”
We talked through enough cigarettes to make my throat sore, and I suppose he was impressed that I hadn’t flipped out on him, that I was talking with him about this like it didn’t shock me. I’d guess 80 percent of the kids at school would have had the same reaction, would have been thrilled just to get a private audience with Darren Alquist, but Darren didn’t seem to know that, and I couldn’t tell him without letting on how far out of the closet he inadvertently was. Besides, if I pretended I was one of the only ones who could understand him, it might lead to his friendship, and he was far more interesting, more popular, than my other friends. I had some vague vision of our sitting together in the cafeteria and checking out boys.
Deep into the conversation he said, “It’s like from the time I was born, they’ve been taking away pieces of me and plugging in these fake parts. Like my dad took away my coloring books and gave me Legos, and then all the guys in middle school made fun of the way I walked until I got this fake walk I have to think about every second. And then
this
school, God, it’s like they took away my heart and gave me a chunk of lead.”
I said, “It’s like the Tin Woodman.” He raised one eyebrow—effortlessly, as if he raised one eyebrow all the time. “In the book, not the movie. How he started off real, then he chopped his arm off and got a tin arm, and finally everything was tin.”
He nodded and laughed and I knew it would happen, our friendship. And it did—we smoked and watched track practice from the roof of the arts building, we partnered up for a film project for English, he drew a picture of a giraffe inside my locker. In my yearbook, he signed in green
I said before that I’d never met anyone like Ian. It was only a half-truth, one of my specialties. So here it comes, the big, repressed memory. And I’m not even paying to lie on your couch.
Senior year of high school, my friend Darren invited me up to the projection room for a smoke. He wasn’t really my friend, not yet, too cool for me with his baggy green corduroys and his blond hair dyed pink with Kool-Aid, but we had APs and honors classes together, which meant we could act like friends without going through the whole preliminary stage. I’d never been up to the booth before—of all the kinds of geek I was, audiovisual geek was not among them—but it was exactly what I thought: lots of switches and lights, an old paint can half-full of cigarette butts. I knew Darren was gay, or I would have thought it was a low-budget date. He lit our cigarettes and we stared out the little window, down at the seats in the auditorium, like something was about to happen out there.
He asked how I was doing—I’d been dumped a couple of weeks earlier, three days before Homecoming—and I pretended to be recovering. I said, “I’d pay good money to be gay.”
Darren looked shocked, confused, horribly wounded. I said, “I’m sorry, I mean I know it’s really hard . . .”
“You know I’m gay?” Of course I did. The entire school knew. People talked about how brave he was to be out of the closet. Gossip about his love life would win you a rapt audience in the cafeteria. “Because I’ve only told, like, two people. Ever.”
So I lied. I said, “I have exceptional gaydar. It’s a talent. Seriously, if college doesn’t work out, it could be my
career
.”
“Oh.” He tapped his ashes onto some kind of control panel.
“I mean, I guess maybe it’s obvious. Like my dad has always been worried about it, from the time I was, like, three. He took away all my coloring books.”
“Why?”
“I guess I was a little too into them. And then he wouldn’t let me play with girls, but then my mom was like, it’s worse for him to always play with boys, so then I wasn’t allowed to play with anyone but my cousins. They’re Catholic. My parents. Well, so are my cousins, but you know what I mean.”
We talked through enough cigarettes to make my throat sore, and I suppose he was impressed that I hadn’t flipped out on him, that I was talking with him about this like it didn’t shock me. I’d guess 80 percent of the kids at school would have had the same reaction, would have been thrilled just to get a private audience with Darren Alquist, but Darren didn’t seem to know that, and I couldn’t tell him without letting on how far out of the closet he inadvertently was. Besides, if I pretended I was one of the only ones who could understand him, it might lead to his friendship, and he was far more interesting, more popular, than my other friends. I had some vague vision of our sitting together in the cafeteria and checking out boys.
Deep into the conversation he said, “It’s like from the time I was born, they’ve been taking away pieces of me and plugging in these fake parts. Like my dad took away my coloring books and gave me Legos, and then all the guys in middle school made fun of the way I walked until I got this fake walk I have to think about every second. And then
this
school, God, it’s like they took away my heart and gave me a chunk of lead.”
I said, “It’s like the Tin Woodman.” He raised one eyebrow—effortlessly, as if he raised one eyebrow all the time. “In the book, not the movie. How he started off real, then he chopped his arm off and got a tin arm, and finally everything was tin.”
He nodded and laughed and I knew it would happen, our friendship. And it did—we smoked and watched track practice from the roof of the arts building, we partnered up for a film project for English, he drew a picture of a giraffe inside my locker. In my yearbook, he signed in green
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