“I have chafing,” I whispered as he eyed me. His name was Quigley, a name that seemed right for a rabbit.
I could not believe the shit they were putting us through. It couldn’t be legal. Large people were crashing into me—farm boys, strong from hauling hay. There were yells and curses. I had no friends. Not even the Bible carrier.
After the second practice, I was exhausted. I told Betty I had leukemia. She was skeptical. I told her I dreaded waking up in the morning. I fell into despair, tried to break my own arm on the side of the tub and knocked the shower door off its tracks.
On the third day, when my father came to pick me up, he arrived early and watched. “Damn,” he said when we got in the car, “you are really terrible.” I answered, “I know. I am the worst player in the history of Paris R-II High. Can I go to boarding school?”
He said, “Maybe your mother would let you off if we could think of some other sport you could play.”
I asked, “How about bridge?”
One of the older boys was named Kevin, a junior or senior. He drove a noisy old car and taunted me. I imagined this automobile exploding, dismembering my most immediate nemeses and sending the Bible carrier flying toward the loving arms of his Lord Jesus. Every day after practice, as I waited for my father, Kevin drove by, and as he passed me, there on the steps, wondering if I was developing calcium deposits, he always screamed, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot. Fuck you. Fuck you.” I braced myself for it every day, listening for his car to come around the curve, the crack of gravel under the tires.
I knew it was true. What could I do? It was the pure hatred that shocked me, the rage, the bitter face in the driver’s seat. He began to do it more often. He did it every time we crossed paths on the field. He did it in the shower room. Some days, the heat was over a hundred degrees. One morning, on the field, sweat was running down my face and I felt the salt from it in my eyes. I had dropped balls, misunderstood plays, and been yelled at by everyone. Quigley was twitching. Kevin seemed to be everywhere with his usual greeting and I was tired, stripped bare; there was no pad in the world to protect the place where I was about to get slammed.
Kevin passed, kicked me hard, and yelled, “Fuck you, you fucking faggot,” as I fell on the ground in front of what seemed like half of America. Picking myself up, I couldn’t breathe. His words hung in the hot air and everyone turned toward me as, finally, it all became clear. I froze, could not move or speak.
I disappeared, just went away and returned in a moment, different. For a long time, for years, this scene came back and back again in my head—the air, my red-hot cheeks, his voice—in instant replay, like some champion’s great moment.
On the football field, I thought I was going to cry, but I told myself that whatever came, whatever happened, I could not do that. Not there. I didn’t. I swallowed my tears; I pulled them in. And they never came back. I cannot cry. Not since that day. Not ever. Not when Mammy died. Not when my father died. I joined my mother among the permanently dry-eyed. We have that in common. We do not cry. I think somewhere inside me my allotted tears are waiting. Maybe they will come when Betty goes. Maybe when it happens I will somehow be transported back to Kevin at practice, or keel over like Mama Cass eating that ham sandwich in her hotel room, waiting for her muumuus to come back from housekeeping.
Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away.
I think something happened at that moment on the field: Something shut down; something went into hiding, split off. Although it did not become clear for years, I suspect that from the minute I had that little break from myself, some part of me went inside and I began to watch myself, making certain to give nothing away. Nothing inside me showed. When people get sober they are told that they have to make their insides match their outsides. It sounded to me like something you would want in a Chevrolet.
I don’t think a coming together will happen to me in this lifetime. I am not sure I will ever again connect up—the watcher and the other unfiltered part of me—in the way other people do. There has been a rupture, and here, in this house, on these days when the sounds my mother makes seem especially loud, I feel it, see the cost of long-lasting silences.
There are, I have learned, so many ways that gay kids try to cover up themselves. I can see I have on many occasions tried too hard to get a laugh.
“You’re too clever by half,” someone told me once.
“I know,” I said. “It would be better to just be twice as stupid. Right?”