ABSOLUTE ID
Flip Sanders wanted to be outrageous. Probably he wanted that all the time he was busy getting expelled from high school, but this had all been buried when he came to Saint Hugh’s, buried and honed into a fine point that came out the day he stood on stage in a blue dress and recited Dolores Claiborne. He hated not being outrageous. There was something in him that hated not being an outcast. He didn’t like to see kids teased. He didn’t like to people gang up on that one boy and whisper about him, and when Flipper came to his rescue, he didn’t like them thinking he was some good kid, some jock going out of his way. Couldn’t they see him? Could they not tell what he was?
Flipper came to Saint Alban’s on an athletic scholarship. He was a damn good football player. He moved out of the football dorm and into Gallihoo Hall without the potheads and weirdos. He was quiet most of the time with a little spot of black beard he’d cultivated on his chin, and he wore glasses now, black rimmed spectacles. He was a poli- sci major, but this put him in classes with English majors and a lot of classes with Ross Allan who was a philosophy minor.
It took weeks for him to have a conversation with Ross, chiefly because he didn’t understand you could just sit down with someone. Ross and Macy and Bernadette always ate together. and now and again there were some others, and Ross was upstairs in the lounge over the cafeteria, smoking a cigarette, and Flipper stopped and asked if he could bum one. They sat down and started talking about Siddartha, and soon the conversation had moved from that to laughter and when Macy and Bernadette arrived, Ross asked, “You wanna sit with us?”
But Flipper had already waiting for a friend on the football team and so Ross said, “Well, then my last class is at three, so why don’t you bounce on over?”
Flipper agreed, and he showed up with a bottle of red Fanta.
“How did you know I loved this?” Ross asked.
And that was the beginning of their friendship
“I see you,” Ross had said.
“Whaddo you mean?”
“I see you,” he said again. “It’s like you’re trying to tell the whole world you’re different. You’re trying to tell everyone about yourself and people either won’t see, or don’t want to see. It’s a very difficult thing to explain. It’s different here, you know. In high school if you were different they jumped on it and hated you. But here difference is a coolness.”
“You’re different,” Flipper said.
“Yes,” Ross acknowledged. “And in high school I paid for it. Now, I’m just interesting.”
“People don’t even seem to be interested,” Flipper said. “In me.”
“How do you want them to be interested? Being popular is a sort of being interested.”
“It really isn’t,” Flipper shook his head and clasped the bottle of Fanta.
“I feel like I have all of this shit to say and no one to say it to. Like no one actually knows me. And that’s selfish, you know. I mean, I don’t really know anyone else, either. We’re all buddies, but not friends. That make sense?”
Instead of saying if it made sense or not, Ross Allan said, “What would you tell someone if they were listening?”
Flipper shifted in his chair and laughed.
“It can’t be like that.”
“Be like what?”
“You can’t just ask, what would I tell someone if they were listening.”
“But I am listening, and you just said that, so what would you tell someone?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Flipper said. “You don’t just find someone and decide to start telling them stuff, to start being all honest.”
“That’s the only way it works,” Ross said, taking out a cigarette. “Ever.”
And then Flipper said, “When I was in military school, my roommate told me he wanted to kill himself, And I didn’t know what do to, but I told him not to do anything without telling me. I wanted to tell all of our friends, but he wouldn’t let me. So this put me in a hard place, right? One night I woke up and he started crying, so I turned on the light and asked him what was going on, and that’s when he told me he was still feeling terrible and I asked him why he felt so bad and he said all sorts of stuff, and then he said because he liked guys, and I was a little blown away by this and started saying how that wasn’t so bad and all that, but anyways, we were up the whole night talking, and then he said he felt better and I said I felt better too, and we went to bed.”
Ross, ever a good listener, nodded, and Flipper continued.
“So things went on differently now, like he felt better, but now I didn’t feel better because I felt dishonest, and when we were alone I felt kind of funny and so finally I told him that I sort of felt the same way, that I thought about it too. He asked if we could sleep in the same bed, because he really liked me, and I liked him too, and so I said yes. And I’ve never told anybody that, and I would really like it if you kept that to yourself.”
“Of course I’ll keep that to myself,” Ross said in a voice that sounded very old, the most sensible voice he’d ever heard, and when Ross offered him a cigarette, even though Flip Sanders wasn’t really a smoker, he took it.
It felt good to sit on the floor next to another boy and tell him things. It felt like love.
“I guess he was my boyfriend,” Flipper said. “I don’t want to get graphic, but things happened, and he graduated before me and there was no one else. After that I dated girls and thought it was a one off thing. Only now I don’t just want it to be a one off thing.”
“Is that a general feeling or like, is there somebody?”
“There might be an actual somebody,” Flipper said.
Ross nodded.
“But I might lose everything I have if I tell him.”
` Ross was quiet and sipped from his Fanta.
“It sounds like,” he said at last, “you need to see how much everything you and him already have is worth.”
Jimmy Nespres was not that one. Jimmy was a kindred spirit, a fellow hungry wolf, one of those lonely shiny creatures who found himself in Abelard Hall and beside Ross Allan, and even though in his life he’d never known Jimmy to talk about guys and half of their college career Flipper had never dealt with them, this morning hadn’t been a surprise at all. It had been sweet relief, and as the sun rose and his thigh was draped over Jimmy and his arms were wrapped about his narrow waist, Flipper said, “How about I shut those fucking blinds and get a blanket so we can finally get some real sleep?” And Jimmy, not opening his eyes, nodded in agreement.
The room darkened as Flip pulled the shades, making sure the door was locked, and dragged the old quilt his grandma had made out of the trunk and to the bed. Under it heavy coolness, he and Jimmy snuggled together and turned around so that Jimmy sprawled across his back, embracing him and, at last, they slept.
Jimmy woke to Flipper getting dressed. He looked like he usually did, sort of endearing and deceptively dopey. In cargo pants and a thin green sweater vest over a white shirt with tails out, he was packing his cigarettes into his shirt pocket and putting on his black framed spectacles.
“I gotta go to class,” he said in a voice just over a stage whisper.
“Cool,” Jimmy shook his head and sat up. “I’ll go.”
“No,” Flipper said. “You get some rest. You were worn out. You need it. I’ll see you at lunch, okay?”
Flipper frowned and Jimmy thought he was about to say something serious, but instead he said, “You think I could drink a beer before class and be okay?”
“Uh—”
“I think I could. See you at lunch.”
“Flip!” Jimmy said.
“Yeah.”
“What about… What about this morning?”
“Uh,” Flipper shrugged.
“I’m bi. You already know that. And we’re friends and… I dunno. Does it change things for you?”
“Uh… I don’t know.”
“If you want to,” Flipper pushed his glasses up, and looked half savage half scholastic, “we can talk about it later. Like after class. But…I need my friends to be my friends and I expect to be there for my friends when they need me, and I don’t know. We needed each other last night, Jimmy so… let’s just be cool. Okay?”
Jimmy was still honestly exhausted and relieved to finally be this sleepy, and he nodded, putting his hand to his head, and thought he might drink a beer before class too. He sank back onto the bed which smelled like Flipper and Flipper said, “See you at lunch,” as he closed the door behind him.
Jimmy had been strangely maudlin last night. Often he didn’t think too much about the past, but he remembered losing his virginity, how odd it had been. He’d been restless and weird and strange ad not knowing how he felt, and he was in the big living room of his house, the house on Deavers Street his family had lived in for three generations and Shannon, who was two years older than him, had introduced him to sex. She went to Chamanade, the girls schools and was still in her uniform, and she took Jimmy by the hand, into that old basement where the laundry was hung, and she flipped off the yellow light over the washers and took down her panties and brought him to the floor. She lifted her skirt and unbuckled his pants and then pulled him down and he started rutting and she told him not to come, but he didn’t know how to stop it, and he spurted inside of her and felt all dizzy. His head cleared at once.
“You were just horny. That’s it, you know. You were tired of being a virgin.”
Last night he had thought he was tired of all the sex, but he’d been so goddamned restless, and maybe this is why he’d avoided Ross, whom he loved, whom he loved so much, and stayed away from other people, because he was so confused. And then, leaving Ross’s room with Flipper, that vague longing stirred to something more inside Jimmy, and he kept thinking about him in the shower, and then… He wasn’t reflective. He wasn’t deep and thoughtful and intentional like Ross. He just knew he felt in control, sort of like himself again when he was beating off in front of Flipper, and then he knew the two of them were alike, two sides of the same coin. And then Jimmy knew he wasn’t just the guy who liked to fuck, he wasn’t just the straight guy, he was the bad guy, the guy from the poem Howl who fucked in barns and cars and had gotten head in church, he was the one who crossed lines, and sucking on Flipper’s dick was the biggest line a regular guy could cross.
And then it just didn’t matter. They were both breaking down and there was so much to break down, and the whole weird pain of this night that he couldn’t get rid of was being gotten rid of. It felt so good to be in Flipper’s arms. Only Flipper would understand him like this, So good to kiss another guy and thrust his tongue deep into his mouth, to feel his hands and his hair and his eyes to just give himself to him. And it wasn’t short, and it wasn’t just once, and Jimmy passed from being his straight self, to being his bi self to being his naughty self to just fucking being. When you were free to be you were free to come, and they came, witnessing the shock of heat and softness in each others arms. They slept, peaceful at last.
When Jimmy woke, he wasn’t exactly sure what time it was, but he knew it was time to get up, and he pulled on his pajama pants, reached into Flipper’s fridge and took out a Red Stripe and a toaster pastry. He rolled a joint and decided to go to Wal Mart this afternoon to restock Flipper’s fridge. Smoking, he wondered if Flipper had told Ross. He didn’t want to say don’t tell him, and at the same time he hoped he didn’t. It wasn’t that Jimmy was embarrassed, it was more that Ross carried a lot, and people were always telling him shit and Jimmy felt protective of his friend and didn’t want to have to be one more fucking story for Ross to keep to himself or to come up with consoling advice over.
Jimmy felt like he still liked girls, and what was more, he felt like he didn’t really want to be thought of as gay, or even as bi. If he was honest with himself, he’d always had some feelings for Flipper, but didn’t really feel them about other guys. Maybe he would if he heard they were bi too, or if he was more adventurous. But he didn’t want to be more adventurous.
And then there was Flipper, his buddy, his friend, his apparent more than friend. Last night… no, this morning, had felt so good, so right, one of the rightest things he’d ever done, that it scared him. And Flipper was still involved with someone else, doing his own thing. There was no need to read too much into this. Flipper had said, and sounded very honest about it, that they were friends. This wasn’t the beginning of them being boyfriends. This wasn’t the start of something different. What was a boyfriend anyway? To another boy. No need to sweat it, Jimmy took a deep chug from his beer. He felt good right now, He felt fucking good.
He tried to imagine what his dad would say, or even his mom. Or Keith. He felt, for just a second, a chill in his stomach, but then the Jimmy who had spent the morning making love to another guy was so far from the Jimmy his father could rebuke, he felt strangely free
