Time To Think (On the Bus)

Emery boarded the bus and crawled into a shadow by the window, slunk down in his seat to hopefully be unnoticed by the old perverts and crazies that rode the bus.  Sometimes they would stare at him, leer at him.  Once a man had shown him the erection bulging in his trousers.  Emery was at once amused and disgusted, attracted and repulsed.  Perhaps the old man had a cock like Brandon’s, but that wasn’t the point.  The old man was wrinkled and crude.  Where as it had taken a month of dating before he saw Brandon’s.

The attention and the stares were perhaps because of his look: eighteen, Hispanic, fashionable.  He knew he was exotic on the bus among people who intended to be common by the way they dressed.  Yet at the mall, at his work, he was not so exotic with his pink shirt, or his coat with the fur in the hood, the design cut in the back left of his hair, the homemade tattoo on his right wrist.  Others had gone to more extreme measures with facial piercings and large, colored tattoos and more stylish clothing.

He was headed there for his after school job arranging clothes at the GAP.  Unobtrusively he followed shoppers and cleaned up after them by refolding the clothes with which they had fussed.  Or else he was to arrange a new display, sweep the back room, or any of the other monotonous jobs like swapping security tags in the back room.  But the job was easy, and rewarding by paying more than what other kids his age made and the discount on clothes he wanted.

And the friends, everyone he worked with, was someone he wanted to know even if he didn’t like them.  To him people could either be friends or associates and in response people seemingly felt the same about him.  Very few people in his life ever disliked him, unless of course they were ignorant and hated him for his sexuality but as his ‘outness’ was new in his life this hadn’t given him much time to be disliked for this reason.  At three people he could still count them on one hand, still count on one hand the intolerance and hate he personally experienced.

Luckily his parents were not one of them.  Their reaction seemed to show that they had already known and tried to plan for it like children of elderly parents or a birthday party.  The rationalization that someone is one year older, more experienced, and different than the person they had been.  Since then he had decided to be who he was and everyone else could feel how they wanted.  This was only dangerous among the ‘common’ people like those on the bus, though they usually just treated him with disdain and apathy.

Not like the classmate, Maryanne, who upon learning he was homosexual, had asked the teacher to move to the other side of the room, “Away from the sodomite,” as she had put it.  This earned her a martyr’s trip to the principal.  A straight “A” student, cordial and Christian, he would not have expected this reaction from her.  She only got detention for the remark while he got sneers and laughs.

This had happened because earlier in the day, during sex education class he had asked if there was going to be any information about homosexual sex.  As the class of boys laughed he blushed a little but waited.  And waited as the teacher moved on trying not to notice what had been said.

Maryanne had never spoken to him before and only once since then as she handed out flyers for her After School Christian Group.  To the other people she smiled but to him her face became serious as she said, “repent.”  He had no choice but to take it as he had noticed who was handing them out and his fingers already pinched the paper.  Of course he threw it away immediately in the trash can within her sight.  He looked back to her but she had looked away as if she would only be able to see him again if he would repent and become normal, heterosexual.  But that wasn’t him.

He wouldn’t change who he was for other people because he knew what hell was.  Hell was the years of insecurity, the fear that everything in his world would disintegrate: friends would leave, parents disown him, and he wouldn’t be able to bear it.  He wasn’t about to go back into the closet, at least not intentionally.  There were still some times, particularly with his grandparents and relatives that he acted a little straighter, more butch.  They knew but many of them didn’t want to know.  And he wasn’t supposed to tell his nephews and nieces.

An Uncle commenting during the last family reunion that he shouldn’t be swimming with the other kids was the second moment of intolerance.  More specifically that he wrestled with them as they swam together.  There was no sexual feeling for any of them, they were as they had always been, neutral, familial.  There was only fun.  Until his Uncle’s comment as they all sat eating together and then there was a feeling of guilt that he had done something wrong.

He could distinctly remember looking down at his partially eaten food, a paper plate with samples like he had been to a buffet, and wanting to cry.  The strain in his back, the sudden awareness of his breathing, and the pain behind his eyes, if he felt his throat close then he knew that would be it.  He didn’t want to cry, to storm off and have his family ask questions and circulate rumors.

But then his mother spoke up and said to him in a low threatening voice, “Aw stuff it.”  His Uncle’s lips quickly puckered together.  And for a slow moment he thought he would still cry as the tension released from his body but then he smiled and the moment passed.

He had cried the third time but he wasn’t so ashamed because he had been beaten with real fists and kicked with real sneakers.  That was a man’s pain and he only cried at first.  They had attacked him long enough that he could compose himself amongst their force.

The violence had started in the locker room because the question during Sex Education Class had turned into repetitive mocking and name calling until he couldn’t take it anymore.

Jorge stood mooning him, teasing him.  The other boys, nameless boys, taunted him to fuck right there.  Then the teasing changed as they began to suggest that he was the one who liked to get fucked.

“I bet you’re a catcher,” a boy said with a fist to his shoulder.

Angry, he tried to keep his focus, to stay in control.  He wouldn’t look at Jorge’s ass though he could barely see the round, muscular cheeks shaking loose.

“I bet all the old men love you,” Jorge said before pulling up his pants.

That’s when he said, “You should know Jorge.  I’m meticulous about who I fuck but I’ve seen you give your ass up to any old coot who wants it.”

Then there was a silence and he realized life didn’t come with a soundtrack.  There was only the slow laughter of the other boys.

Jorge turned on him.  He knew what Jorge was going to do that there would be no stopping him.  Jorge was strong and fast, a top baseball player.  He tried to step away, to put up his hand to protect himself.  He didn’t have the mind for fighting.  Whatever aggression he had had was used in that one reactive phrase.

Knocked to the floor he pulled into a ball instinctively to protect his face.  The punches began to feel dull on his back and he knew he would survive this.  He was most surprised by was when he fell and the others joined in hitting him.  That’s when he felt them pulling at his shirt and pants, the seams of his shirt burst and began to part and he began to cry.  Then when he thought he was numb to the pain he felt it in a new way as his muscles shifted throughout his body.

Finally they stopped and feeling returned to his body and that’s when he felt the pain where they had hit him, muscle spasms and bruised tissue.  His head tilted down to the concrete floor, his skin barely touched the cold surface.  Everyone was leaving and he knew he had to get up, to escape before the gym teacher found him.  In some collapse of thought he collected his things, happy that he had dressed before the fight started, and made his way to the hallway.

He shuffled to the boy’s restroom.  At first he thought it was empty but then he saw the closed stall door, the feet and the trousers around a stranger’s ankles.  He had to see the damage so he looked in the mirror and his life was surreal.  He lifted up his shirt, the skin had already begun to turn.  He could estimate where the bruises would be.  There was shifting behind him.  He winced as he touched his skin.  He wanted to report what had happened but didn’t want to tell anyone.  Bruises would heal, there was no long-term damage but the shirt had cost him thirty dollars.  He was mad about the shirt.

The stall door opened behind him, an unfamiliar face looked back at him from the mirror.  The face was young, probably a freshman, it was a face not unlike his own.

“What happened to you?”

“A fight,” Emery answered.

He watched as the freshman washed his hands and dried them with the air drier.  Then the freshman hiked up his pants before exiting and looking back said, “Sorry man.”

That was it, “sorry man.”  Emery looked in the mirror at his reflection and decided he would go to the nurse and ask to go home.  He would plead with her not to tell the principal.  This little incident of ‘gay bashing’ could be erased from history, from his life and he would not care.

All of that was in the past, Emery thought.  The bus doors hissed open and several people boarded.  Emery had barely kept track of where he was.  The buildings, the signs, and the motions of the bus had become so familiar that he didn’t need to pay attention.  His exit was soon.