The antique upright desk phone in my room rang so loudly that I almost imagined its base shaking. Thank God, I thought. I was afraid I was going to die of boredom. I stretched out from where I was reclining on my bed toward the edge of my dresser where the old-fashioned phone sat. Pulling the earpiece off the arm, I scooted my body close enough on the bed to be heard by the receiver that was part of the phone’s base. “Hello?”
“Oh, man. Get off that stupid old phone,” said the voice on the other end of the line dejectedly. “I can barely hear you most of the time, like you’re on speaker phone.”
I grabbed the base of the phone and pulled the receiver close to my mouth. “That better?”
“Yeah, except now you’re too close, all echoing like you’re in the bottom of a well or something.”
“Well, deal with it,” I finally said in exasperation. “So what’s going on?”
The voice on the phone was my friend Brad’s. He went to my church and we were also in the same class at school. “Pretty much nothing.”
“Same here,” I replied. I stared at the posters on my wall, zeroing in on a new one I had just gotten in the mail from Florida earlier that day. Is that straight? The left side might need to come up a little. I let my eyes float around the room towards the other wall decorations, as if they could somehow relieve my boredom. No such luck. “You doing anything?”
“Just my spelling homework. You get it done yet?”
“Nah. I did most of it in class while she was talking about it. The rest I’ll do Sunday night. What I’ve done already wasn’t too hard,” I said dismissively.
“Except for the copying,” he chimed in. “I think it’s stupid that we have to copy each of these words three times. It’s like we’re being punished.”
“Yeah. It hurts my hand every time we do ‘em.” I paused for what I felt was an appropriate amount of time before asking, “When do you think you’ll be done?”
“Oh a few minutes, maybe half an hour at the most, if all this copying doesn’t break my wrist first,” Brad said. He paused then too, waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he finally spoke again. “You wanna come over in a while?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said nonchalantly. Inside I was turning cartwheels. “When should I come?”
“Probably better wait about half an hour.”
I looked at the clock on my dresser. “Cool. That’ll be right in time for Kids in the Hall.”
Brad sighed. “See ya in a little while.”
“Yeah, see ya,” I said and dropped the earpiece back into the arm, hanging up the phone. He didn’t act too glad that I was coming, I thought as I placed the phone back on the desk. Wonder if he’s mad at me.
Going over to Brad’s house was pretty much a nightly ritual for me during my seventh grade year. Brad’s mom helped run a group at my church called the Puppets of Praise, which Brad and I were both members of. We would go to various churches, nursing homes, or schools in the area and perform puppet shows laced with religious messages at least once or twice a week. When the school year began, I only went over to Brad’s on the nights when we got done early with a performance. On those nights many of the other group members, a lot of whom were high school students, came over as well, and Brad and I started hanging out with them more and more, even on weekends too.
Then shortly after the school year was in full swing, an incident occurred that sent me over there on a daily basis. At the beginning of the year, my dad had decided that he no longer wanted to pay for us to have cable. So for the next few months following that decision, we could only get the local station C-13, and all it played was syndicated reruns of old shows like Green Acres. We couldn’t even get the local PBS station that carried episodes of Dr. Who every Sunday night. At least C-13 shows Next Generation every Sunday night.
Brad’s family had cable, including HBO and Cinemax. Hope they show a nudie movie tonight after Kids in the Hall. They also had a fridge that was always stocked with Pepsi, while my house had Vess Cola. Brad had a computer too, and we would often play games like Zork or some role-playing games on it. Doesn’t hurt that his older sister’s a babe too.
The Kids in the Hall was one of our absolute favorite shows, and to miss it was almost like sacrilege. It was a Canadian sketch comedy, and we held it almost as high in rank as Monty Python. Like Python did, the show often featured the male performers dressing up like girls and pretending to be gay to get a laugh, which it never failed to do with us. Maybe Brad forgot it was on tonight and that’s why he was acting weird on the phone.
I climbed down off my bed and went into the living room to make sure my mom said it was OK to go. Don’t know why I even ask any more, though. She always says yes, every night. If I didn’t need a ride, I probably wouldn’t even bother.
I came into the room and stood slightly to the side of the couch where my dad and mom were sitting, watching our one channel. “Hey Mom, is it OK if I go over to Brad’s?” I asked the question lazily, without even looking at her, as if the answer were a foregone conclusion.
But this time Mom hesitated, turning to me fretfully. “What are you going to do over there? It’s not another one of those video projects, is it?”
Oh geez. “No Mom, it’s not. Don’t worry.” The past few days some of my friends had been getting together at Brad’s house because they had a video project due for their biology class. The video we were making was about environmental issues; at least, that’s what the assignment was. But in reality it was just an imitation of most of those sketch comedies we loved so much. And like in The Kids in the Hall, we had dressed in drag.
This portion of the video project had been a sticking point with my mother when I explained it to her the next day. She didn’t see the humor in the situation and was worried that people might make fun of me, assuming that what they had seen on the video was true. I tried to reason with her, but she stood firm and forbade me from participating in the video project anymore. If she wanted to save me from embarrassment, that wasn’t the way to do it. What did she think was going to happen when I explained to my friends I couldn’t be in the video anymore because my mommy wouldn’t let me? It was almost as bad as when I told them I couldn’t play D&D because she thought it was Satanic.
“You swear you’re not going over there to make that movie?”
“Yeah, Mom, geez. I swear.” Why won’t she just see my side of it? “Besides, it was no big deal. Nobody’s gonna think I’m queer just ‘cause of some dumb joke.” And it’s not like I’m getting girls anyway.
My mom’s face fell. She looked incredibly sad all of a sudden, for no reason I could discern on my own. Then my dad suddenly decided to join the conversation, saying, “You shouldn’t use that word.”
“What, queer?” I asked, rather oblivious. “They say it on TV.”
“Steve,” my mom said then with weights on her words. “You need to sit down. There’s something we need to talk about.”
My dad suddenly looked surprised, like this situation had caught him off-guard. “Are you sure you should…”
“Obviously so.”
I got nervous. This isn’t going to be another one of those sex talks like they gave me last year, is it? I don’t think I could take that again. I walked around the edge of the couch and sat on the far left side, while they sat on the far right. The distance between us seemed to stretch the length of a football field while I anxiously waited for one of them to speak.
My mom opened her mouth twice to talk but nothing came out except her breath. It sounded struggling in its release, like something in her throat was choking her and she needed the Heimlich. This looks bad. Am I in trouble? Should I start apologizing? I don’t even know what I did.
It was my dad who finally began, starting with a question. “Steve,” he asked and paused while he groped for words in what seemed to be total darkness. “Have you ever wondered… why Uncle Wes is sick all the time?”
Uncle Wes? What does he have to do with anything? “No, not really.” Spit it out already! If I’m in trouble, I’d rather get it over with.
“Or how about… have you ever wondered why Dan and Uncle Wes live together?”
Only, like, all the time! “I guess so. Why?”
“Well…”
And that’s how he told me. He started with “Well…” and went from there, muddling his way through like he was walking a minefield in clown shoes. He explained to me all about why Uncle Wes would want to live with Dan, leaving the most intimate details to my imagination, however. He told me why Uncle Wes had caught his “bird disease,” using five-dollar words like “opportunistic infection” as if they were a normal, everyday part of his vocabulary. He told me what it meant to have an infection such as this, how it meant your immune system was depleted, and what that was called.
I calmly took in my father’s words, looking at him and my mother only once during the entire speech. I felt like I was looking at them through a telescope, like they were still sliding away from me. I chose then to look at something closer to me for the rest of the very one-sided conversation; I stared at my hands sitting in my lap.
Inside of me ideas were churning. My father’s words danced around each other in my head and I couldn’t understand. I didn’t try to on a conscious level, but subconsciously my brain had started off with that starter pistol “Well…” and was on its way to achieving the three-minute mile. AIDS? He’s going to die we could all get it we could all die I could die I don’t want to die I’m not ready to go to heaven yet why would god let this happen? will he go to hell? is it punishment ‘cause he’s queer—-gay I mean gay oh god oh no I don’t understand why? what do they, how do they do, why would they want to? so gross so gross I don’t know why oh why?
But externally I was very calm. “Oh,” I said.
My mom had been calm until that point, almost as if her spirit was drifting away from our plane of existence. But then her out-of-body experience ended as she suddenly burst back into the midst of the conversation, blasting out her words anxiously. “You can’t tell anyone about it, Steve. You’re not allowed to, forbidden. It’s a secret.”
Before my brain could even start to wonder why, she had answered my unvoiced question. “Your grandma, you see, she’s afraid of what people will think, of what they might say. People are afraid of what they don’t understand, what’s different and strange to them. They’d not want to be around Uncle Wes, they might beat him up or make fun of him. Nobody can know. Nobody can know.” She mouthed the words more than anything else; the noises seemed to be coming from someplace else.
No one can know, I thought. But that’s stupid. It’s Uncle Wes; no one’s going to say anything. I—-
“Promise me you won’t tell anyone, especially not your little brother, he’s still too young.”
“I promise,” I said. My brain had told my tongue to utter something entirely different, but words from elsewhere were filling me as well.
For a moment we all sat there, Mom and Dad miles away on their end of the couch and me alone with my hands on the other. I continued to stare at my hands; they looked smaller than they had when I had picked up the phone moments before. I saw the hands of a child, decided they were something that needed further study.
“So will you take me to Brad’s now?” I finally said after I had counted the pores on each one.
My mom sighed and returned to normal. “I suppose.”
My father however erupted. “Brad’s? You go there every night! You should spend a night at home once in a while.”
Suddenly I saw the one thing left to me, the one safe ritual I still had, slipping from my grasp. “Dad, it’s a Friday! I can’t stay at home all night doing nothing!” You’ve got to let me go!
“I don’t care if—”
“Let him go, Jim,” my mom whispered to herself more than to either of us. “There’s no harm.” And with that she led me to the front door. I couldn’t believe she was taking my side and acknowledging that her fears were irrational.
Dad, even though he had given in, didn’t totally give up. “He should at least have to walk. It makes no sense that we should have to drive him there every night when it’s just a few blocks away.” But his heart wasn’t in the argument; he had turned back to the TV and was talking to himself. I shut the door behind me as I followed Mom to the car.
The drive those few blocks was slow and silent. My mom said nothing, leaving me to my thoughts. But they had apparently become worn out after carrying the burden there on the couch. There were no thoughts to be heard, no internal voices telling him the status of things with the world or even with myself. There was nothing. I got out of the car, mumbling a good-bye to my mother, and there was even less.
When I went in, it was like jumping into ice-cold shark-infested waters. I was greeted at the door by a shout of “You’re missing it, you geek!” I realized quickly that if I didn’t acclimate myself fast, I would be eaten alive.
“Yeah so what? It’s a rerun this week anyway, probably one I’ve seen hundreds of times,” I shouted right back as I removed my jacket and shoes to join Brad in watching TV.
One of our older friends was there, Scott. He was there most of the time, more often than any of our other high school friends. I couldn’t understand why he would want to spend a Friday night with two measly junior-highers, but there he was. “What took you so long?” he asked sarcastically. “You missed the best part.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, challenging him cautiously. “What was that?”
“The one guy was doing his bit where he plays a guy in a gay bar, talking about thtraight people,” Scott explained, adopting the same lisp the character had in the sketch. It was one I had seen a few times and had always gotten a kick out of.
“Yeth,” Brad joined in. “He wath telling uth all about thtereotypeth.” He accentuated the last words with a flip of his wrist, letting his hand hang loose from it when he was finished.
AIDS? I thought suddenly. I had no idea where the word had sprung up from. I laughed. Part of me wanted to join in their mockery but I couldn’t. So I just laughed. “I’m sorry I missed it,” I said.
