The Good Guys

One night we sat near the quarry lake smoking cigarettes.

“What was it like to be blind?” he says.

“Dark. What was it like to be in the Manor?”

“The same. Darkness.”

I have the strangest dream that night. It’s all darkness. My dreams are usually in semi darkness at least. I am traveling with my father, and my mother has left us to join the circus. But my mother is not my mother. My father is not my father, and I am not me. We are traveling on the road and we come to Kentucky. But Kentucky is a college dormitory, and we come in there and there are boys and many boys. I have been here before. I’ve dreamed about half dressed boys, and there’s even a boy on the john. I apologize as I pass him.

I do not know how I end up in the large dorm room with all the boys. They are all white. They have Oxford blue shirts on, khakis. They look like the nineteen fifties, like Tab Hunter or Dobey Gillis, but not in black in white. There is this one boy. He’s so white and pretty with blue eyes and shaved blond hair. And he is my best friend. We take all of our clothes off and lie down together under a blanket.

“We will travel the whole world,” he tells me.

“Why do I feel like I know you?”

“Because you’ve always known me, silly,” he says, grinning, and looking so in love with me.

We begin traveling, and it is only after a long time that I realize that I am a rabbit, or a hare. The boy looks at me and says, “You have the longest most beautiful ears.”

He kisses them and then kisses me on my rabbit mouth, and it does not hurt even though he has a beak and is now a bluebird. We travel to the hole where we live. I look in there are the spider eggs, all the shape of little glass marbles. Waking, I’m not sure that spider eggs look like that at all, but in the dream I say, “We’ve got to get the eggs and take them with us. Winter is coming. We have to travel back up north where it’s warm.”

When I wake up I am tangled with Michael. Who is not pale or blond or blue eyed, who is the only man I’ve ever wanted and who, somehow is still this boy and this bluebird I have dreamed on. I am at home in his slumbering body, in his arms that are never too warm to hold me despite the summer. I can smell his breath a little, which smells like milk, and he says, his eyes closed, “You were moving and talking in your sleep.”

While I am awake enough to tell him the story, I do, and when we get to the boy he says, “But was he me? I mean, did he look like me?”

I am about to lie and then I say, “No,” and describe Dobey Gillis. I tell the rest of the dream and Michael says, “If I was the bird I must have been the boy.”

“What in the world does it mean?”

“I don’t think it has to mean anything. But if you want it to,” Michael says, “It means that it doesn’t matter where we go or what form we take it, we’re always together. Maybe Dobey Gillis was right. Maybe we’ve always been together.”

“We’re not the only people like this,” Michael says.

I want to be facetious, to say I know that there are gay couples, guy on guy couples all over the world. You see them on TV, white middle class, sort of rich and sexless. I know they’re there. But when he says it I also feel like we are alone, like I don’t know any other couples first hand, living this life, fueled on this superheated love.

So I say, “Whaddo you mean?”

“I didn’t understand it when I heard it,” Michael says. “Didn’t even understand how it made me feel. But I got this cousin up in Rhodes—”

“Near Sandusky?”

“Yeah. He’s from the Jewish side of the family, and he was married to this nice girl, Catholic like us. But he had this best friend. Black. I met him. Even a little like you. Anyway, apparently they’d been secretly in love for a long time, and after my cousin was married to this girl, they both realized they wanted other things and my cousin Isaac… he got with this guy, with his best friend. Now they’re together, and his first wife is with someone too, and shit seems to have worked itself out. I didn’t get it back then, but…. It’s nice how shit works itself out. How love will work out. If you let it.”

Michael’s father came home at eight, and he was glad I was staying. So when we start making love, I was worried about waking him. Michael does not care. He says his dad sleeps deeply. He grins at me with that lopsided grin. It’s a cool night, but it grows hot as we screw hard under a sheet, the backboard hitting the wall again and again, the mattress creaking furiously. Michael grits his teeth and almost shouts Goddamn! as he comes. I am so caught up in his coming, trembling with his coming, feeling the slick heat of his semen flood between out stomach, his long hot limbs splay out, across me, bunch to me, I have scarcely realized that I have come too.

WINTER

It is the first cold day. Mom has already made her coffee and I am making my cup, mixing a little bit of cocoa powder into it. The sky has a different tone when it is autumn, a little clearer, and I reach across the little island and take one of her cigarettes.

“Where’s your lighter?”

She hands it over.

“Now you’re not working too hard?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I mean, I can have a job and go to school. But we need to pay rent.”

“Well, you need to finish school too.”

“We can do both at the same time.”

My mother nods.

“Curtains,” she said as she took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled.

“Huh?”

“Curtains. You all need curtains. That apartment should look like a home.”

“I don’t disagree with you.”

“That might be a Christmas present.”

“How about for a Christmas present you get me a Christmas present, and not something you decided I should have that I didn’t ask for?”

“Well,” my mother says in a tone I know.

We’ve been having a lot of these wells lately, since I left home. I realize for nineteen years she’s said ridiculous things, and I’ve simply listened to them. What else could I do? I realize… but right now it doesn’t really do to rehearse grievances and near grievances, to go over shit that’s driven me crazy when soon Michael will be here to pick me up from his job at the furniture store. We will go back home, and all night on opposite ends of the living room we will read for class the next day, work on papers. We will put together something like a meal, but probably not until ten.

I love my mother, but she will never understand what I was about to say, so I inhale the cigarette and exhale from my nostrils.

What I want to say is, “I am happy. I am so happy now.”

What she would say was, “You weren’t happy before?”

I would say, “But you knew that I wasn’t,” and she would say she did the best she could and things would become all about her. She can’t help herself.

Dad comes in and says, “Is that Michael’s car that just parked outside?”

“Who’s getting out it?”

“Michael.”

I don’t want to sound like a smart ass, so I don’t say a thing. I get up and go to the the thin black stone foyer and open the door that hangs off the driveway to let him into my parent’s ranch house. He doesn’t kiss me. That’s so much explaining. He just grins down at me, and I say, “I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

We sit with Mom and Dad drinking coffee. It’s always weird because Mom and Dad never act like themselves around white people. They are never rude or tired. They are always proper and Mom’s voice raises an octave and she repays lame stories with operatic laughter. They sit up straighter. I have an urge to belch out loud or fart in my seat. We’ve been here a while when Mom says, “Michael, do you want some dinner?”

Knowing me very well, Michael says, no and that we need to get home.

“Did you know,” Michael says, as he puts his hand on the door and outside we see evening sky turned pink and violet, “this is the sixth month since Tony died.’

“Tony,” my mother says.

“The guy who killed himself, who went to our school.”

“Oh!” Mom says. “My heart breaks for that poor boy.”

This is why I do not call myself a good guy, because Mom, whose heart doesn’t break for very much in front of her eyes, always has her heart breaking for some asshole she has never and will never and in this case can never meet. Whatever she means by this phrase, it doesn’t have any relation to action, and I know I’m kind of cunt for thinking this.

“Yeah,” Michael says. He gives a small grin that only I can see, “I ran into Ted Landford.”

“Ted Lanford?” I frown.

“Yep.”

Well, now he was an asshole too. But I say, “What did he want?”

“To say hi,” Michael said. “He’s changed. I guess some people do. He said he wished he’d known what was going on inside Tony. That if he had know underneath that… attitude—that’s not the way he phrased it, but that’s what he menat—what was going on, then maybe he could have reached out, been a better friend. Maybe Tony would still be alive.”

I think, four months since Tony’s funeral is four months since Michael just barely avoided suicide. This is four months since I lost my virginity, four months since the first time Michael and I made love. Four months since he stopped being severely depressed and we became instead of drowning friends, lovers moving toward a real and happy life. And let me be very clear, this wondrous power of two nineteen year old boys who love each other and have sex all night has not saved me from my old sadness. My radiant smile has not saved Michael from that exhaustion which is beyond despair. An arsenal of drugs and a lot of steady therapy is there too, but he never got serious about that shit, he never resolved to live until we knew each other, and I never resolved to make a life for myself either until I knew I could love. All of that, all of this shit began four month ago, since Tony died, since I got the phone call, since we knelt in a church looking at his casket.Four months have passed since the world was born.

“I bet,” my mother said in that slightly sentimental voice that only comes out in front of white people, “you two also would have done something to keep him alive if you could.”

And I am not one of the good guys because instead of even pretending to a yes, I kiss my mother on the cheek, touch my father on his shoulder, and say:

“Goodnight.”