“Gina was in the room. She looked like she wanted to rip my father’s throat out.”
“Good for her.”
“I don’t know what to do, Mr. Steadman. My dad played like he was all nice but I could tell he was really mad. Gina could tell too.”
“Smart girl.” I shot him a smile. “Look, I have to make a phone call.” I stepped out of the room and called Tom. “Can you talk?”
“Just got out of court. Walking towards my car.”
“I need a lawyer.”
“I’m your man.”
“You don’t practice family law, do you?”
“No. Hurts too goddamn much. Rather work with criminals.”
“You know a good lawyer who does?”
“Sure.”
“This boy,” I said, “he can’t pay.”
Tom didn’t hesitate. “No worries,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
I went back to the kitchen where Danny was sitting. Mrs. Lucero poured me another cup of coffee. It was terrible, her coffee, but I drank it with all the grace I could conjure. She stepped out of the room and left us alone so we could talk. “You have a number where you can be reached?”
“My dad turned off my cell.”
“Let’s go get you one.”
We went to one of those places where you didn’t need to buy a plan. I just filled the phone with plenty of minutes to get him through a month or so, and we were good to go. I punched his number into my cell phone and called him.
“There,” I said. “Now you have my number too. Call me if you need me.”
“Mr. Steadman, you do this all the time?”
“No,” I said.
“So why am I so fucking special?”
“Watch your mouth,” I said.
We grabbed a bite to eat. He ate as if he’d never tasted a burger before. God, that boy had a hunger in him. It almost hurt to watch. “I’ll be eighteen in three months. And I’m going away. And he’ll never be able to find me.”
“Where is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’m just going away.”
I wanted to tell him that his father would always own a piece of him, that he would have dreams of his father chasing him, dreams of a father catching him and shoving him in a car and driving him back home, dreams where he could see every angry wrinkle on his father’s face as he held up the belt like a whip. He would have those dreams. I knew all about them. I couldn’t tell him that. He would find out on his own. He would have to learn how to save himself from everything he’d been through. Salvation existed in his own broken heart and he’d have to find a way to get at it. It all sucked, it sucked like hell. I didn’t know what to tell him so I lied to him again. “He’ll just be a bad memory one day.”
He nodded. I don’t think he really believed me, but he wasn’t about to call me a liar.
Tom and I saw each other every night for a couple of weeks. We went to a few movies and held hands like high school boys. It all felt strange and foreign as if I was inside one of the movies we were watching. We went for a long drive and listened to his favorite music and he wanted to talk. Talking could be so easy sometimes, and sometimes it could be hard, impossible. Sometimes the words were just there and sometimes they disappeared and there was no way to get at them. But, Tom, I don’t think words ever disappeared for him.
He stopped the car and we took a walk in the desert. It was strange, the desert. I loved the stark landscape that refused to be tamed. I loved the mesquites, the cacti, the ocotillos that were like desperate fingers reaching out towards God, the rain bushes that held the smell of a summer storm in its stubborn sticky olive leaves. I thought of Danny. I thought of all the students who came to me. So many of them were like the plants that survived here, living without water. How did they do it? How did they survive? They came to me with a thirst in their eyes, a thirst, such a thirst, and I knew that I could never give them the rain they deserved, the rain they so desperately needed.
“Where are you, Al?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Tell me.”
“I was thinking about the desert.”
“You love it, don’t you? You love its austerity.”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“You could have been a monk.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“You’re a better man than you think you are.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Who hurt you?”
“I don’t want to talk about that, Tom.”
“Okay,” he said. We just walked through the arroyos. It was winter and we were both wearing coats and even though the breeze was cold, the sun was warm. “I love you,” he said.
“You shouldn’t,” I said.
“Shouldn’t love you or shouldn’t say it?”
“Both.”
“Why can’t you just let yourself be loved?”
“Because,” I said.
“Because? Because it hurts? So fucking what? Love’s a hurting game, Al, don’t you know that? But it’s worth it. Sometimes it’s worth it.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t play that game.”
“What do we have then?”
I took his hand. “We have touch. It’s good. Let’s just leave it at that.”
We drove all the way to Marfa, Texas, and stayed at the Thunderbird, an overpriced place redone to look like a modern version of the 1950s motel. People were always trading in nostalgia. It was always good for business. It was such a cheap and easy thing to dress up the past and make it look beautiful.
Tom was so tender that night that I almost cried.
I always thought of men as being hard—maybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn’t. I don’t know where he’d learned it, but it wasn’t something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn’t. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn’t know which one of us had it worse.
I didn’t hear from Tom for a long time after that. He dropped me off at my place and said, “I’ll call you, babe.” I knew he was going to disappear again. I wondered what it would be like to follow him to wherever it was he went. I had a funny feeling that it was a very dark place. Not that I minded dark places—it’s just that I wasn’t much of a follower.
I started working on a painting. It was for class but not really. I think it was just for me. I was trying to paint Tom and Danny. I had pictures of Tom on my cell phone and I e-mailed them to myself. I wasn’t a great painter, and that was the truth. I wasn’t terrible either. I had more imagination than skill. In the painting, Tom was driving a truck. And Danny was standing on the hood of the truck, his arms outstretched. The truck was floating in a blue, blue sky, and they were both happy. I think I liked the idea of the painting more than I liked the execution. But I wasn’t finished and I was trying to make something that resembled real art. I knew I’d never be an artist. Look, I wasn’t hurting anybody and working on a painting was good therapy. And I didn’t have to sit across from a therapist and tell him the story of my life.
I got the urge one Friday night to go out to the bars. I lived in Sunset Heights, an old neighborhood that had old houses with a lot of class. It also had a lot of shabby houses that were falling apart. I liked the shabby houses. I liked that I could walk downtown. It was February and the night was cool, but it didn’t feel like winter. It was as if spring was knocking at the door again. Not that I liked spring in El Paso. The winds came after us and left us beat up to hell, the taste of the desert sands being shoved down our throats by a God who didn’t love us much.
When I got to one of the bars, I ordered a bourbon on the rocks and thought of Tom. I sat there and listened to the voices of the men around me and n
odded my head to the beat of the music. I never felt like I belonged in these places. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to belong. Gay guys weren’t any different than straight guys. They all wanted you to be a part of a club, to be one of the boys. I don’t remember ever wanting to be one of the boys. I didn’t want to play for anybody’s team, didn’t want to go along with all the definitions of what men were supposed to be, definitions that were thrown around like baseballs in a ball park. Some guy sat next to me, smiled, told me his name. Sam. Latino, nice black eyes and hair as dark as the night. He offered to buy me a drink. He was good looking enough. I thought, what the hell. “Sure,” I said.
We sat there and made small talk—and then he asked me, “You got a boyfriend?”
“Lots of them,” I said.
He laughed. “I bet you do.”
“So? You like to party?”
I knew exactly what that meant but I pretended not to know.
“Party?” I said.
“You know, party?”
“You mean like with a birthday cake?”
That pissed him off. He got the idea I was toying with him. “You always a wiseass?”
“Pretty much.”
“Ever tried it?”
“Snow? Rock? Ecstasy? Nope.”
“Not even a little 420?”
“Bad memories. It reminds me of the time in my life when I used to wake up and masturbate. Guess I’ve outgrown it.”
He shrugged. “Live a little. Try it. We’ll have fun.”
“Don’t want to try it.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Look, I’ve never tried walking out in front of a bus. I’m pretty sure I know what would happen.”
“Partying isn’t like that.”
“It’s exactly like that.”
“Not that you’d know.”
“Yeah, not that I’d know.”
He gave up on me pretty quickly. I wasn’t what he was looking for. And he sure as hell wasn’t what I was looking for. Not that I knew what that was.
I walked back home.
And there he was—Tom, his head bowed, sitting and shivering on my front steps.
“Tom?”
He didn’t answer. He was shaking. “I’m tired,” he whispered. He just sat there. He was all shadows in the light of my front porch.
I took him inside. He leaned on me, didn’t say a word. He looked like he hadn’t taken a shower in days. His face, scruffy and unshaven, his white shirt wrinkled and unbuttoned, his T-shirt soaked in sweat. He was trembling and hugging himself as he sat on a chair in my living room. I hadn’t known until then that Tom was an addict. I didn’t know what kind of addict, but he was definitely on something. “I need, I need more, I need—”
I took his hand and pulled him up from the chair. He didn’t fight me. “Let’s get you showered.”
“And then will you get me some?”
I nodded. I got him into the shower. His clothes smelled rank. I put them in the washing machine. I got into the shower with him and washed him and he let me. He kept his head bowed. “You’ll be okay,” I said.
He started sobbing and couldn’t stop.
“Shhh,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry, babe.” He kept whispering that. “So sorry, babe.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I said.
I dried him off and led him to bed. “I need some more,” he said.
I held him for a moment, tried to calm him. “I want some more.” He kept repeating that. I sat up in bed.
“Are you leaving me?” he said.
“No. I’ll be right back.” I walked into the bathroom and looked through my medicine cabinet. I found what I was looking for. I took out my bottle of Xanax. I’d had problems sleeping, though I’d abandoned the Xanax almost as soon as I began to take it. Made me feel like shit when I woke up. I walked back to the bedroom. “Take this,” I said.
He sat up naked in my bed. He had some bruises. He’d lost weight. It hurt me to look at him like that. “Put the pill under your tongue,” I said. “It’ll work faster that way.” He didn’t even ask what it was.
“Can I have a drink?”
“Sure,” I said. Bourbon and Xanax wasn’t a great idea. But it wasn’t going to kill him. I brought him a drink. He sat there, staring out into the darkness, and slowly drank down his bourbon with hands that couldn’t seem to stop trembling.
“Hold me,” he whispered. I held him until he stopped shaking. It didn’t take long before he fell asleep.
In the morning when I woke up, Tom was still asleep—dead asleep. I got up and took his clothes out of the washing machine and put them in the dryer. I put on some coffee and some music and read the news of the day online. I stared at the painting I was working on in my makeshift studio—a sunroom the previous owners had added onto the back of the house. It occurred to me that Tom would be hungry when he woke up so I went to the grocery store, bought a couple of steaks, some potatoes, some vegetables, a fucking cherry pie. I hated cherry pies. There was a reason for that. It had something to do with my father. But Tom—Tom loved cherry pies.
When I got back from the store, Tom was still asleep. He didn’t wake until that evening. I was reading a book and he walked into my studio. He looked at the painting I was working on. “It’s beautiful,” he said.
I looked up and smiled at him.
“You don’t know much about art, do you?”
He gave me a smirk and for a moment he looked like a boy, all innocent, not a trace of the life he lived on his face. “Al,” he said, “your painting is beautiful. You’re supposed to say thank you when someone gives you a compliment.”
“I didn’t get the memo.”
He just shook his head and laughed. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “You still have my toothbrush?”
“Yup. The red one. Your clothes are in the bedroom.”
“Yeah, I know. Nice and folded.”
“Don’t get any ideas. I’m not your fucking wife.”
He laughed.
We had dinner. We talked about stupid shit but didn’t talk about what he’d been up to. Finally he looked at me and said, “Do you want to know?”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“I do things that are illegal.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“No, Al, it’s not just that I do drugs.”
“You don’t do heroin, do you?”
“No.”
“Good. I hate heroin.”
He just looked at me.
“I lost someone,” I said.
“Who?”
“Do I have to tell?”
“Tell me, Al.”
“My mom.” After twenty years it still hurt. I felt the tears right there, right there, and I hated them, hated that they hadn’t forgotten me and still lived in me, hated Tom for reminding me of all those awful days, those days when love left me and all that remained was an addict mother and the cruelest father in the whole fucking universe.
Tom put his hand on my cheek. “I’m sorry, babe.”
“Yeah, well, life is a little bigger than all of us.”
He nodded. “I’m in over my head, Al.”
“I’ll help you stop.”
“No, you don’t understand. It’s not just about my little addict self. I got in with some people. I don’t think I can get out. I can’t tell you. If they knew, Al, if they knew I had someone like you in my life. If they knew. They’d hurt you, Al. Why do you think I got a divorce? That’s what I’m talking about.”
“Tom. What the fuck are you saying?”
In the morning, when I woke up, Tom was gone. He left a note:
Babe, for the past five years, we’ve been good, haven’t we? There wasn’t anybody else but you. Just you. First time I saw you sitting across from me at that dinner, you were talking to Susan, and there was something about you that was so beautiful and alive and perfect. The problem, of course, is that you don?
??t know that. Maybe that’s part of what makes you so beautiful. I’m sorry I’m so fucked up. But we’re all fucked up, don’t you know that? Maybe that’s the key to it all, that we’re all fucked up and the only way we survive is to do the love thing, you know? You told me once that you didn’t do the love thing. Yeah, I think I called it the hurting game. Yeah, love hurts, Al. And you don’t want to have anything to do with hurt. You don’t have a choice, babe. You don’t. Al, it’s not love that’s the hurting game. It’s life. Life is the hurting game. Don’t you know that, babe? Oh, babe, don’t you know that?
I didn’t know if I would ever see Tom again.
Sunday evening, I got a call from Danny. “I’m going away,” he said.
“Danny, you can’t survive out there.”
“My dad, he found me. I don’t know how he found out, but he found me when I was leaving my new school. He took me back home. He beat the holy crap out of me. Lucky for me that the sonofabitch got good and drunk and passed out.”
“I’ll call the police.”
“No. Screw that. I’m getting the hell out of this town.”
“They’ll find you.”
“No one can stop me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the bus station.”
“You don’t have any money, do you?”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’ll be right there,” I said. When I got to the bus station, I spotted Danny. His face was swollen and both of his eyes were black and blue. He kept holding his ribs and I knew that there were bruises everywhere beneath his clothes. I brought him home. He didn’t even have a backpack on him. “Can you trust me?” He nodded. “Good.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. I sent out for a pizza and he ate it all. Every fucking bit of it. When he finished, I said, “Let’s go to a hospital.”
“What?”
“Trust me.”
I took him to the emergency room. I wasn’t his guardian. The lady behind the glass window said, “Need parental permission. Can’t take him.”
“Look,” I said, “do you see him? I’m his high-school counselor. His father did that to him.”
I called Gina. She gave the woman a piece of her mind. So fierce and beautiful, that woman. They took care of Danny. He had a broken rib. The police were called. I was with Danny as he lay in a bed. God, his body, his poor boy body, God, I didn’t know how he’d managed to walk to a bus station, didn’t know how he’d managed to stay sane and good, but I did know that this boy wanted to live.