Bits And Pieces
There are so many stories that teach us that what we go through in life and our battles and confrontations will lead us to have more strength and fortitude and be more victorious in the end, and I don’t think that’s true for the majority of people on this planet sometimes what go through just makes us weaker and sadder and more pathetic and we don’t necessarily gain any fortitude or strength from what we go through.
-Patjim Statovici
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.ç-T.S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi, 1927
Part One
“It’s alright to cry cause it hurts, but don’t cry cause someone called you what you are.”
- Dylan Mesda
THAT AFTERNOON, Sheridan Klasko and Brendan Miller arrived at the apartment on Magnolia Street. Sitting on the sofa, hosting them, with a lift of the finger like Fenn, Dylan Mesda told them, “The roast will be ready in under an hour. There’s plenty to drink, but you won’t get too drunk. After all, you’ve got a kid and you have to get home.”
“We’d love if you stayed the night,” Lance said beside Dylan.
Elias Anderson, on the floor, shook his head.
“That’s not even possible. They’ve got to get Rafe to school.”
Elias was clasping hands with Rafe, playing a game of clap with the boy.
Dylan asked if they drove.
“We did,” Sheridan said.
“If you had taken the El you could get as fucked up as you wanted to. We could walk you there, put you on the train, and it would take you almost right to your door. You’d have to wait for the Purple Line a little bit, but…”
“I wonder if a couple with a son wants to wait on a platform for the Purple Line in early winter on a Sunday night,” Elias said.
“We’ve done it,” Dylan said.
“It’s different,” said Elias.
Looking around Brendan Miller saw the house altar Dylan always kept caticorner to the long picture window overlooking Magnolia Street. It was accompanied, but not incongruous to a Nativity scene.
“Did Lance’s family send that?” Sheridan says.
“Nope,” Dylan shook his head. “Dad. Fenn.”
“I remember it!” Fenn put it out every year, old, well crafted, humble at home beside a menorah or a Krishna.
“I wonder how he does it. How you do it.”
“Huh? Dylan had only half heard Brendan, then looking to the little steepled crèches, the Marry and Joseph kneeling on either side of the, as yet empty maner, he jested, “Well, now, Bren, I didn’t make the crèche. I just set it up.”
“No,” Brendan said. “I meant how you make peace with things, find your own way. Deal with God.”
“I think,” Elias noted, rising to return the kitchen, “Bren is referring to his struggle with Catholicism, with that thing that better Catholics than I have ever been talk about so much.”
“Well, I guess the answer to that is I was never much of a Catholic—or a Christian for that matter,” Dylan said. “Whatever struggling there was,” he shrugged, “”Dad sort of did that. If anything, growing up with him was too much choice, not too little.”
Dylan frowned and shook his head.
“No, I take that back. There’s no such thing as too much choice. Is Chay still having that Christmas party next week or what?”
“It’s Saturday,” Sheridan said, and Brendan blinked this time. He so often forgot that people he was bound to had their own links to each other. When Dylan was born, Brendan was already on his way to college, and Dylan’s childhood had been Brendan’s twenties, when he was struggling with building a life for himself. It had been Sheridan and Chay who were to Dylan what he had been to them, big brother figures, boys who, when Dylan was given a rough time, had his back.
“Do you need us to watch Chay?” Lance leaned forward, grasshopper like, clasping his knees.
“Rob is, actually,” Brendan told him.
The very handsome lance, with his dark curly hair, scowled like an old man.
“Rob is coming all the way from Rossford,” Elias stuck his head out of the kitchen, “when we are right here?”
“Right here with your own lives,” Sheridan said. “And Rob already offered and it will be good for him to get out of town.”
“And Rossford is only an hour away,” Brendan added, sounding to Dylan Mesda, more and more unsure.
“Your choice,” Dylan shrugged.
“What?” Sheridan blinked at his old friend.
Dylan said nothing.
Lance Bishop was not so kind.
“Rob,” Lance pronounced, “is flaky as fuck.”
When Dylan was Mesda was fifteen years old, he had been a fool, and he would spend the rest of his life making up for such foolishness. He had been loved, utterly, and he had turned from that love to be with someone else. For seven years Dylan, who had in his early youth put no bar on his sexual curiosity, had been completely faithful, and never looked outside of the strange relationship he shared with two men who shared their lives with each other.
There were three of them. Anyone who came close to them, and few did, eventually had to understand that, and they had to understand that this was not the same as an open relationship. Some jested that it was three times as nice, but they always jested back that, keeping faith with two men instead of one was not three times as nice, but twice as hard. And what no one seemed to understand was that, at the end of the day, you were still waking up to the same person, persons.
“But threesomes, surely,” someone had said when they had tried to join a gay group on campus. That was the assumption, that they were promiscuous, they must be, that three of them were screwing in a bed, that life was a porno.
“That’s not how it is,” the youngest of them, Elias would say.
But then most people never saw all three of them together. Most people saw them two at a time, Lance and Elias, Elias and Dylan, Dylan and Elias. Three of them rarely belonged in the same place at the same time.
To Dylan, the person who mattered the most, who it counted that he understood, was his father. Dylan proudly jested that he was second generation gay. He had two dads. They had been together and broken up. Years later, when they had both found other people, Dylan’s mother had dropped him as an infant at the home of his sperm donor, Dad One. Dad One had, for complicated reasons, chosen Dad Two to adopt him and raise him up, and Dad Two, Fenn, was the only mother Dylan ever knew. Fenn’s home was, in some ways, the true home, and it was in this home he had been discussing things.
“I would like to have company.”
“Ruthven company?” his father had said, “because I don’t like Ruthven company.”
“No,” Dylan had said, “I told you, Papa, Ruthven is over.”
Fenn looked as if he was about to say one thing, weighed it, and kept silent.
“Then who?”
“Lance.”
“Lance!”
Dylan was surprised by the way his father smiled. Fenn had always implied that Lance was a bit of an idiot, but apparently his replacement had softened Fenn’s feelings toward the tall boy with the broad shoulders and big head.
“We’ve been talking again,” Dylan said. “No, you don’t have to look at me like that. He was just my best friend, Dad. He is my best friend. Next to Laurel. And I love—we still care about each other. So I really want him to come over, Friday. If it’s alright with you?”
“Of course its alright,” Fenn said. “Call him over right now.”
Dylan was sixteen, just driving, he had let his hair grow a little, so that he sort of looked like a Beatle, and it hung in his face, covering his embarrassment.
“Dad, it’ll be fine if we wait till Friday.”
“He can stay the night,” Fenn had said. “Lance is a friend. He can stay the night,”
But Lance was more than a friend, and they both knew it. Fenn had never pressed for the specifics of the relationship between the boys. By the time Dylan was thirteen, he told his father that he knew he was gay, just like his parents, just like half the people he knew. But he did not tell his father that his friend, Lance, had taken his virginity one night while they were having a sleepover, that it had been mutual. His father must have believed that what happened between a thirteen and fourteen year old boy when the door was closed on a Friday night was not to be inquired into. Nothing, after all, could come from it, and nothing had until Dylan was midway through his fifteenth year. Fenn had discovered the two of them together, in the midst of sex, and so Fenn knew that they were a couple, he knew what was going on. Eventually he knew, slowly, and painfully, many of the details of Dylan’s sex life that the boy would have kept secret from his father, that embarrassed him with shame to be brought out into the light of day. So even though Fenn had only said, “Lance is a friend, he can stay the night,” Dylan understood that this was a stealthy way of saying all that might happen between he and Lance if Lance stayed the night, he accepted.
He certainly didn’t accept it with his last boyfriend. That one was not allowed in the house after dark, and while the relationship had gone on, Dylan wasn’t allowed out after dark. Fenn was no fool, this didn’t stop sex from happening, but it made sex very hard. For starters, the relationship with Ruthven had begun in the midst of being on serious punishment. It wasn’t possible to do anything but see him, talk to him in rooms where the door was open. There had been three months of this. What was more, Ruthven was too afraid to demand anymore than this. It would have to be Dylan who made a plan.
“I have to be at school by eight, and I leave at three,” he said. “Both of my dads are serious about homework being done before dinner—it’s always at six—and at this point in time I’m not allowed out after nine.”
“What about when you stay with Tom? Would Fenn know?”
“Fenn always knows. Plus Tom’s still with Lee and Lee is Fenn’s cousin. I’m surrounded.”
“Oh,” Ruthven said in a defeated voice.
Dylan wished that Ruthven could be a little smarter, offer up a few ideas. He felt exhausted and, frankly, a little trashy, thinking of ideas for how to hook up on his own. But Dylan was determined, and Dylan was increasingly horny, and the idea of getting around his father’s iron tight rules made him say: “I can get out at lunchtime. That really seems to be the only time.”
“I’m at work in the tire shop.”
“I know that, Ruthven,” Dylan said… tiredly. “I can skip lunch, say I want to go to confession, come out the side of the church like the juniors and seniors do when they have free lunch period. You can meet me there.”
So Ruthven had. That first time they had gone to the tire shop and they had taken turns blowing each other in the backroom. The next time the shop had been busier and they had gone to the Burger World across the street and fooled around in the stall. By now, Dylan felt it was time for something more intense, and the truth was that night was better for everything. Fenn, who had strict rules, did not spend much time enforcing them. He was no jail warden, and if you wanted to go out of your way to disobey them, take extraordinary actions, well then good for you.
Dylan was willing to take such actions. In the house by nine, in bed by ten with the locked door his father and stepfather chose to respect, by eleven no one would thinking of calling good night, or of him coming out to talk to them, and by eleven he could climb out of his window or, better yet, have Ruthven park a block down, sneak across the side yard, and crawl in. If Dylan went out, then Ruthven had the keys to the tire shop, and they could do whatever they wanted in that place. There were nights when Dylan sat on the computer desk, his hands in Ruthven’s hair, looking out on Salem Street while cars passed by in the night and Ruthven went down on him greedily, ate him out till he cried out.
If Ruthven, tall, broad shouldered, climbed into his window, then they undressed quickly, and placing the mattress on the floor, fucked till three in the morning, until they were both sweaty and sore, and in the darkness, alone, once Ruthven was gone, Dylan rehearsed their lovemaking and went stiff again.
By the time Fenn had released his tight hold on Dylan, Dylan had already been carrying on in secret places with Ruthven for months, and it was tiresome. For Ruthven never had a single idea, and there wasn’t really any place the two of them were allowed to go together. Ruthven never made much of an effort to explain himself or defy Dylan’s parents and in the end, tired, Dylan had let Ruthven go. He was public about it, and loud, because he sensed that letting him go would gain him more freedom, and he was right. Between that freedom, and the stealth he had learned, the desire in Dylan, his natural affection toward other boys, sex was a regular part of his life. As a tutor, he regularly seduced other boys, having them on the sofa in the living room, the floor of his library or in his bed afternoons after school. He had fooled with three of them, one for each month Ruthven was gone, when Lance Bishop sat down across from him in the cafeteria of Saint Barbara’s and Dylan realized that he was not over him.
The sight of Lance, so tall, and blue eyed with his strong forehead and brunette curls, burned the memory of the other boys to ashes. No, this was the real thing. It always was. This boy was the boy high up in his thoughts. He always had been. He had heard that Lance had been with this girl over at the public high school. It hardly mattered, right now Lance was here with him, and it didn’t matter that they were only talking, talking was the one thing they’d never done enough of. Lance began showing up at his locker, waiting for him to go to lunch, and now Dylan had invited him over for Friday night. Not that he had never stayed over, of course he’d done so many times, but this had the feel of a first time.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” Dylan told his father, who had an all too hopeful look on his face.
“Lance used to be here all the time, and now he isn’t, and how he will be again,” Fenn said. “Of course it means something.”
“I just mean…” Dylan had been wearing his glasses that day, and looked very small and uncertain. “He isn’t my boyfriend.”
“He’s your friend, and he’s a boy.”
“Do you want him to be my boyfriend? I never thought you liked him.”
“I always liked Lance.”
“You thought he was stupid.”
“I thought he wasn’t as smart as you. I like his parents.”
“His dad thinks everything that comes out of your mouth is gold.”
“It is,” Fenn dismissed this. “But Lance is different from Ruthven. He’s different from anyone you’ve ever been with. He’s been your best friend since you were ten. He…”
Fenn stopped.
“I’m glad he’s coming over.”
“God, you’re tall,” Todd declared, rising to measure himself against the seventeen year old when he entered the room.
“Good God you’re like a giant puppy, all hands and feet and.”
“Fenn, we’re the same height, now,” Todd reported to his husband.
“I see,” Fenn, who was five eight.
He smiled broadly at Lance, who was in cargo shorts and wore an orange tee shirt stretched tight across his chest.
“You are getting huge.”
“I’m not,” the boy grinned, turning red and ducking his head.
“Don’t embarrass him, Dad,” Dylan said.
“Who’s hungry?” Todd asked.
“I could eat a horse.” Lance said.
“Yes,” Fenn assessed, “You probably could. We are having shrimp and grits.”
“That’s great. I love gumbo too.”
“That’s a surprise,” Fenn noted, and Dylan thought it was too. He had never pictured Lance eating gumbo.”
“My cousin made some once.”
Well, yes, this was Indiana. Everyone’s cousin was from the South.
“Well, today,” Fenn said, “Dylan is making it.”
“What?”
“Dylan’s an excellent cook,” Dylan heard his father say, and Fenn had already thawed the shrimp and handed Dylan a paring knife. As Dylan set to, peeling the shrimp one by one and Fenn deveined them, pulling out thin shit lines, and two of the thickest, greenest ,vilest ones Dylan had ever seen, his father asked, “What kind of sauce do you want to do with them?”
Dylan had been cooking all his life, all his life following his father into the kitchen, and though Fenn often left Dylan to cook meals, when he was cooking and Dylan was helping, Dylan was doing nothing but helping. Fenn never asked his opinion. Now he saw precisely what his father was doing.
“Uh… I think just clean them and then soak them in milk, of coarse.”
“Milk?” Lance interrupted.
“Uh, yeah,” Dylan said, blinking. “There shouldn’t be much of a fishy taste, but bathing the shrimp in milk for a bit takes out what fishy taste there is.”
“Awh,” Lance looked at him in awe, and Dylan felt himself going red.
“And then what?” he heard his father say.
“Salt, garlic, I think. Some pepper. Red pepper. We’ll just sit them in that not too long, just a little bit. Fry them in butter.”
“Lance, do you want to do the grits?”
Lance came to the cabinet, shrugging, and said, “Yeah, but I don’t know how.”
“God, you’re getting big,” Fenn shook his head. “Of course you know how. I’ll show you how.”
“Alright,” Lance agreed.
Fenn sat in the chair, smoking a cigarette, and directing Lance how to prepare grits.
“I’m sorry, but there’s no need for a stove, a microwave will do.”
Dylan smelled the faint burning of the hand rolled cigarette, which was nothing like the acrid reek in Todd’s office of chain smoked Pall Malls. Once, though, Dylan had asked his father if he could stop smoking at the table while they were eating. Fenn never did this, and that should have bee na tip off. Dylan’s father had not replied yea or nay. He only took his cigarette and stubbed it out in Dylan’s eggs, and Dylan never said a word about his father smoking in the kitchen again.
This close to Lance, their hands touched and they bumped into each other, and Dylan was aware of how tall Lance was, the heat of the other boy’s body, the smell of his teenage cologne, his nerves. Lance was, in his own way, just as nervous. Now and again, as Dylan prepared the skillet, he looked back at his father and his stepfather, but was surprised to see they were not looking at him.
Still he was so embarrassed, so ashamed. He didn’t know why exactly, and once, when Lance was pulling the grits from the microwave, his blue eyes looked at Dylan. It was a sort of conspiritary look, though Dylan wasn’t entirely sure what they were conspiring about, and he wanted to kiss him. He wanted to tell him everything. Lance brushed his hand, and he wondered if his father saw. If he did, his head was carefully turned away pouring milk when Dylan turned around.
