Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

 Now that he had been with Jack, he had a language to talk about being with Sara and Nicole before. And after he and Sara had broken up and become friends, he had a language for the few women who came after. Being with women was like a performance. He had to find his role in the thing, and whatever that role was, it was the opposite of what she was. How good was he? Could he please her? How long could he last? Was it time to pull out? What did she like? What did she see? Who did he tell? For Sunny, sex with women was filled with a sort of performance anxiety that, contrary to what he had thought, always gave him an erection. There was some weird reward he gave himself for not coming to soon, for making her come first, for being the man she desired, a clap on the back he gave when she just wanted to please him.

When he had been deployed, on his ship there was an annoying guy named Mitch. Sunny was sure that Mitch was one of those people who, without the military, would have been a real mess. He wore wraparound shades and smoked cigarettes angrily on the deck and laughed too loud. He reminded Sunny of a time bomb.

They’d had an on land assignment and Mitch, in his fatigues and beret, had murmured something about wishing they were Navy and never had to set foot on land. But that day there had been a conflict and Mitch had saved his life. Mitch had saved all of their lives. He’d killed someone and he had done it judiciously. Everyone thought Mitch might go off on anyone or anything. Sunny, hearing his Indiana accent, thought he might kill anything brown despite his constant chanting rap music under his breath.

When they did get back on ship that night, Mitch was real quiet, and Sunny screwed up his nerve and went to talk to him. When he found Mitch on the deck he didn’t say anything. They just sat together.

“I never killed anything before,” Mitch said, at last. “Not even a bug. I used to see my sister put a magnifying glass on ants and I’d yell, you stop doing that. I never killed anything.”

Sunny, who had still never killed anything, thought it was best to be quiet, and he let Mitch continue.

“I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish we could have done anything else. Why are we here?  I wanted to protect people. I wanted to save peoples’ lives. I didn’t want to kill anyone. And we might have to do it again. Sunny, I don’t ever want to be a killer again.”   “Yeah,” Sunny had said. “Me neither.”

He had seen the light go out of that kid’s eyes. He had seen the blood blossom on his chest. He hadn’t pulled the trigger, but he felt like he had.

“Why can’t we… why can’t we be better to each other?” Mitch was saying, looking at his hands.

“I wanna be different,” he said. “This isn’t me. I’m tired of being hard. I’ve been hard all my life. I went into this to be hard. Maybe I didn’t do it for other people. Maybe I wanted respect. Or something.

“But I just want to be gentle. I want to be gentle. And tender. I just want to be gentle with someone. Why can’t we be gentle?”

Mitch hadn’t been looking at Sunny. He’d been looking away from him, but his hand had been moving toward Sunny, and his fingers were resting on Sunny’s knuckles.

“Why can’t two men be sweet with each other?” Mitch said, and when he said it, whatever had been rising in Sunny became a throbbing, and he slipped his hand into Mitch’s. Mitch looked over at Sunny.

“I knew you were like me,” he said, quietly. “I knew you’d understand.”

And then Sunny said. “We’re still on leave. You know, there’s that hotel we passed. The bar’s still open. We can go there… Talk. If we drink too much, I’m sure there’s a room we can stay in for the night.”

“A room?”

“Yeah.”

“We should do that,” Mitch said, nodding his head and taking out his cigarettes.

“Let’s go over there and get a room.”

With Mitch, as with Jack, there had been no role, no side to be on. There had been no expectation, and no true anxiety, just great longing. There was not the idea of what should be done, but what they both longed to do. If they hadn’t both been so hungry maybe it would have been different. If they had not worn so much baggage and so much armor, maybe they wouldn’t have needed so badly to get rid of it. They had killed and been in front of killing, and so there wasn’t any shame in exposing themselves to each other. They wanted to be exposed. In the night, while Mitch clung to him, the spare muscled bronze haired boy from Indiana said, “I just wanna hold someone. I just wanna be held.”

They made love all night and Sunny realized he wanted the same thing. It had been like this with Jack, the opening and being opened, the flowing in and out of each other, the surprise relief of pressing together, coming together, and in the end exhaling, sighing with the peace of what had just passed.

Back in California, Sunny lay in Jack’s arms and Jack stroked his hair.

“You’re going to Ohio, aren’t you?” Jack said.

Sunny said, “I have to.”

“I gotta stop seeing him,” Avery Kominsky said, shaking her head and exhaling cigarette smoke. “I gotta stop seeing him. That son of a bitch says all of a sudden he can’t come and I’ve been preparing all day.

“And do you know what preparing means?” she asked her son as Sunny stood in the kitchen making a sandwich and half looking at her through the window cut into the kitchen wall that looked onto the living room. “Sure you do? It’s a lot of a work for a woman to get ready for a man—or a man to get ready for a man too, I guess. And then you just say, oops I can’t come over.”

“Well,” Sunny came into the living room with a sandwich for himself and one for his mom, “I don’t even know why you see him.”

“You’re twenty-five, you’ve been in the Army.”

“Marines.”

“Right.  You’ve had girlfriends… And a couple of boyfriends too. You know exactly why I’m seeing him.”

“The sex,” Sunny said, his mouth full of sandwich, almost as if that made the word more tenable.

Avery had only been eighteen when she’d had Sunny, and he got his pile of curly golden hair from her. She was not bawdy, but she was direct. She wasn’t immoral, but she was honest. She had eyes and didn’t think it was right to make her son tell her things she could see on here own. She could put two and two together when he’d been sleeping with Sara and she didn’t think too much of it when she was sure he’d been with Jack. When he said veiled things about boys being beautiful, or special relationships he had in the Armed Services, she was good enough to see through them, and though she’d never had a life where Sunny would wake up and find a strange man at the breakfast table, or hear noises coming out of his mother’s room, she didn’t hide the realities of her sex life, either.

“Truthfully, he isn’t very good. It’s only that he isn’t very bad, and he was a sure thing.”

“He’s an idiot.” Sunny shook his head, knees apart.

“He is,” she agreed.

“Do you know when you’ll be back?”

“As soon as I learn what happened to Blake.”

They were quiet now and continued eating in silence.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Avery said, at last.

“What?”

“I think you want to find out what happened to Blake, but I think you want to find out something else.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know,” Avery admitted. “You may not know, either.”

“Things used to make sense,” Sunny said. “They used to be…”

He had put down his sandwich and now his hands were like claws. He brought them together.

“Whole. Things used to be whole, and now they aren’t. And… maybe this will fix it.”

“Going by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“You were always a by yourself kind of person.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. You always had your friends, but you were always happiest alone.”

“Well,” Sunny picked a piece of lettuce from his sandwich plate. “Maybe.”

“You taking that goddamn motorcycle?”

“Mom!”

“I just want to know. You could have a real car and be safe, but you’re taking that goddamn Easy Rider looking bullshit, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Ma. I’m taking that goddamn Easy Rider bullshit.”

He left on a Monday, and at day’s end he found a motel somewhere in Nevada on the edge of the desert, which someone pointed out later was an accurate description for most of Nevada. Almost attached to it was a tavern where he went for a beer, hot wings and a quiet time. He got all three, but as the night progressed a woman, a little older, who said her name was Bree, introduced herself to him. She made her intentions known and a little later he was fucking her against a bathroom wall.

He went back to his seat, gathered up his things and paid his bill. The charm of the place was gone. The desert night was chill as the day had been hot, and he thought what a smart idea it could be to travel in the dark and sleep in the day, but more he thought about something that had just barely crossed his mind in the past maybe because, as smart and open as he thought he was, he never let it.

He had fucked Bree almost out of a sense of duty. She carried condoms and this was what men did, especially young men. It hadn’t felt bad, but it wasn’t great. He had deprived himself of Jack. He’d barely said goodbye to him and his rationale had always been, as it had been with Mitch, that being with Jack felt too good. It felt too right. It felt too special to do all the time. The feeling of being with a man was so good it was almost dangerous, so he put it at a distance. Sex with women… that could be done then put away.

“That’s so stupid,” Sunny said, shaking his head in disgust as he approached the one story motel.

“I’m not bi,” he said. “I’m gay. I’m gay.”

And he did something between a grimace and chuckle, almost as irritated and angry at himself for not understanding that as he was relieved at knowing it now.

He reached his room, unlocked the door, took a quick shower and jumped on the bed, almost instantly falling asleep.

It was as he reached Salt Lake City that Sunny realized not only that his mother had been right about taking a car, but that his idea of traveling by motorcycle was impractical as fuck compared to, say, a train or a plane. He had clearly been after some sort of experience and he wondered, as he approached the Great Salt Lake and the promised land Brigham Young and had found for his wandering people, how dumb he was, how much he’d hidden from himself. Memories of himself in white shirt, black pants and black tie, trying to redeem himself, trying to apologize for the loss of his virginity and make things up to a God who lived on a planet in outer space, flashed through his mind. When he ended up in Temple Square he realized he’d come here for sentimental reasons. It was night, and the lights flooded up on the two pyramid rooved towers of the the Temple that resembled the marriage of a post office and a Gothic church. He had found it sad to not be able to believe in certain things, to not have faith the way he once did, but suddenly he was glad to not believe in this. In the middle of the night he felt a great shame, and wasn’t sure what the shame was for.

He stayed at a hotel in what he knew was the gay area, and no one looked at him except, finally, one guy he’d looked at again and again. He seemed nice was what Sunny kept thinking, a nice guy you could have a nice time with, be nice too.

“Hello,” the guy said, coming up to him.

“Hi,” said Sunny. Then, “Are you looking for someone?”

“No… not someone.”

“Well…” Sunny was new to this. “Are you looking for… something?”

“I might be,” the guy said, merrily. “Are you looking for something?”

“Yes,” Sunny said.

“Should we… find it together?”

There followed, in Sunny’s room, an awkward and clumsy fumbling that resulted in ejaculation, a apology from the guy and laughter from Sunny.

“You’re new to this, right?” Sunny said.

“Yeah!”

“Me too.”

“I had no idea.”

“No one taught us, you know?” Sunny said, as they both sat on the side of the bed, naked. “I didn’t even say I was gay till like two days ago. No one ever taught us, so how are we just supposed to be good at it?”

The other guy laughed, feeling relieved.

“That’s right. I’m Laman.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“I know, right? I’ll never outrun the Book of Mormon.”

For some reason Sunny introduced himself as, “Alexander.”

The name had always been been a burden for  him. A burden for a burden. That seemed about right.