Fire Shut Up in My Bones (30 page)

I figured then that if I could indeed go both ways, one way didn’t quite prefer to go all the way.

I would come to know what the world called people like me: bisexuals. The hated ones. The bastard breed. The “tragic mulattos” of sexual identity. Dishonest and dishonorable. Scandal-prone and disease-ridden. Nothing nice.

And while the word “bisexual” was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself, in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate. It reduced a range of identities, unbelievably wide and splendidly varied, in which same-gender attraction presented in graduated measures—from a pinch to a pound—to a single expression. To me it seemed too narrowly drawn in the collective consciousness, suggesting an identity fixed precisely in the middle between straight and gay, giving equal weight to each, bearing no resemblance to what I felt. In me, the attraction to men would never be equal to the attraction to women—in men it was often closer to the pinch—but it would always be in flux. Whenever someone got up the gumption to ask me outright, “What are you?” I’d reply with something coy: “Complicated.” It would take many years before the word “bisexual” would roll off my tongue and not get stuck in my throat. I would have to learn that the designation wasn’t only about sexual histories or current practice, but capacity. Nonetheless, when saying the word, I’d follow quickly with details meant to clarify.

Few people would be open to the idea of men like me even existing, in any incarnation. To many, I would be something like the Bigfoot from Boggy Creek—a loathsome thing some believed was real but most did not. Even the otherwise egalitarian would have no qualms about raising questions and casting doubt. Many could only conceive of bisexuality in the way it existed for most people willing to admit to it: as a transitory identity—a pit stop or a hiding place—and not a permanent one.

Whatever the case, folks would never truly understand me, nor I them.

To me, their limits on attraction would seem overly broad and arbitrary. To them, I would be a man who walked up to the water’s edge and put only one foot in, out of fear or confusion or indecision. I would be the kind of man who wanted it all—clinging to the normative while nodding to difference.

But that’s not the way it works within me. I wasn’t moving, the same-gender attraction was. Sometimes it withdrew from me almost completely, and at others it lapped up to my knees. I wasn’t making a choice; I was subject to the tide.

I wouldn’t always get things right—I wouldn’t always find the courage to tell people the whole truth about myself, or do so before their love had already reached through my secret and touched my shame—but at least I learned to move in the right direction. I wouldn’t lay the weight of my shame down all at once, but a bit at a time over many years, like forks of hay pitched from the back of a pickup truck, until the bales dwindled and the load was made light.

I would get married fresh out of college—to Greta, the champagne-colored girl, the greatest love of my young life—after we both stopped pretending there was any other we would rather be with. I confessed to her my past and my proclivities, as fully as I understood them at the time, including the story of my encounter with the shoe importer, though not as soon as either of us would have preferred. We figured that our love was greater than my complexity. We had three beautiful children—an older boy and girl-boy twins—in rapid succession, but the marriage didn’t survive the seventh year. We grew apart. Still, the marriage confirmed for me that extended fidelity was in fact possible, not by focusing on denying part of my nature but on submitting the whole of my heart. Monogamy was a choice. That was a side I could pick.

After Greta and I split, I decided to give male intimacy another try. The male attraction was still there, running alongside the female one—not equal, but there. I assumed my first failure might have been the result of youth and nerves and a mixed match. But now, again, my body sometimes failed to respond. Other times I was able to engage more fully, but almost always with the aid of copious amounts of alcohol, me barely able to remember the encounters and often wanting to forget them. This felt fraudulent to me, and opportunistic, and it was dangerous.

Still, no matter how much I drank, no matter how altered my consciousness, I couldn’t completely rid myself of the unease of being intimately close to another man’s body, hard and hairy and muscular and broad by the shoulders, more stem than flower—too much like my own.

In those moments I was acutely aware that I missed the primal tug of the female form, the primary sensation and the peripheral ones. The look of soft features and the feel of soft skin. The graceful slopes of supple curves. The sweet smells. The giggles. The thing in me that yearned for those sensory cues from a woman wouldn’t quietly accept a substitute.

I once even found myself trying to imagine that a man who was interested in me was in fact a woman, so that I could get over my unease. That, to me, was going too far.

I had to accept a counterintuitive fact: my female attraction was fully formed—I could make love and fall in love—but my male attraction had no such terminus. I didn’t think of men as romantic interests, and I would come to see my inhibitors around same-sex intercourse—whether congenitally imprinted or culturally constructed or some combination of those forces—as so high that I would quickly tire of trying to overcome them. To the degree that I held male attraction, it was frustrated. In that arena, I possessed no desire to submit and little to conquer. For years I worried that the barrier was some version of self-loathing, a denial. But eventually I concluded that the continual questioning—and attempts to circumvent it—was its own form of loathing, or self-flagellation. I would hold myself open to evolution on this point, but I would stop trying to force it. I would settle, over time, into the acceptance that my attractions, though fluid, were simply lopsided. Only with that acceptance would I truly feel free.

Furthermore, I’d come to understand that I sometimes confused the need for attention with a desire for sex. For much of my life I would crave attention with a carnal intensity. From anyone. From everyone. That feeling of being chosen. I would flirt with anyone who was congenial and amenable—a ravenous, indiscriminate flirtation, or a feather-light, barely-there one—or allow myself to be flirted with, by women and men alike, to cover the emptiness I felt or to fill in the hole, the desired culmination being not so much physical intimacy as emotional affirmation. The boy who had once felt invisible would forever ache simply to be seen.

But that would all come later. That school year, in the winter after Chester called and I raced down the highway with a gun before laying my burdens down, after the holidays were over and just as 1991 began, I left the just-in-case pistol in Gibsland, never to handle a gun again, and packed the car with clothes, some books, and a radio. My mother, the only woman I was sure truly loved me, waved goodbye, and I struck out for an internship at the
Wilmington News Journal
in Delaware, which was quickly followed by the summer internship at the
New York Times.

I was finally headed up north, away from the places between places. As I snaked around the railroad track crossing arms, which were malfunctioning again that morning, I realized that I—the poor boy from the middle of nowhere, thrice betrayed—had made it, survived, rescued myself by dint of determination and the settling of my spirit.

After graduating, I took a job as a graphic artist at the
Detroit News,
where I practiced my own brand of visual journalism: combining reporting and writing with charts and diagrams. I would stay there one and a half winters—that was the way I counted it, because Detroit winters were the coldest this Louisiana boy had ever seen—before the
New York Times
hired me as a graphics editor. And, a few weeks before my twenty-fifth birthday, the
Times
put me in charge of the graphics department, making me the youngest newsroom department head the paper had ever had. I would leave the
Times
briefly for a stint as art director of
National Geographic
magazine before returning to the
Times
for a novel role created for me, producing charts and offering my written opinion about what they meant and why it mattered—a “visual op-ed columnist,” they called me. By a twist of fate, I found my way back to writing.

At Grambling, my fraternity was suspended after more hazing a few years after I left. The suspension would last until all the current members had graduated and the chapter could start anew. Chopper went on to become a prominent corporate lawyer, Clay became a successful banker and the godfather of my oldest son, and Kaboom a television producer and the godfather of my daughter.

In Gibsland, my mother became a pillar of the community even as the small town contracted around her. She continued her learning and teaching. In retirement she volunteered as a teachers’ aide and substitute teacher before running for a spot on the local school board, and winning.

Gibsland as I remember it has almost vanished, leaving not much more than another wide place in the road. All but one of the one-of-each-thing stores have shuttered their doors. The sweet potato farms have ceased production, and the upholstery shop is gone. The House with No Steps has been torn down, and my mother purposely burned Papa Joe’s house to the ground rather than maintain it.

White folks in town slowly moved away or died off, and black folks began to buy the vacated houses, a kind of integration by attrition, but the chain link fence separating the white and black cemeteries remains.

My four brothers stayed in the South, all within driving distance of my mother, and they have all become devoted fathers, like I have tried to be, although only Nathan, James, and I ever married, and only Nathan’s marriage survived.

Big Mama and Grandpa Joe have died. Aunt Odessa and Mrs. Bertha and Sun Buddy and all the old people with whom I spent my days are gone. Uncle Paul also has died. Folks have told me that Evelyn married a man named Loved a few months after leaving Gibsland with her baby. I never saw or heard from Chester again.

My parents have moved gently into old age. My mother has become the kind of grandmother who is quick to let her feelings show, saying “I miss you,” “I’m proud of you,” and “I love you” unguardedly. My father has become a doting grandfather—one who gives hugs and rides on his knees and who takes the grandchildren to the store to buy more candy than we parents allow. And he’s become a Bible-toting deacon at the church where I was baptized.

My parents have reconciled to some degree. They were never again romantically involved, but they developed a loving relationship. My father still brought food, even after my brothers and I were gone from home. My mother makes him plates whenever she has extra. She chastises him for being a scoundrel when they were younger. He takes it without retorting or retreating—his way of showing remorse. He has stopped squandering money, and occasionally shares a little. She does his taxes. A relationship that was afflicted in youth has become cured by age.

As their kindness to each other grew in the shadow of bad memories, they demonstrated the resilience of love, the power of forgiveness, and the possibility of moving forward and growing in grace.

When I called my mother to tell her about this book, as I was finishing it, and to tell her about Chester’s and Uncle Paul’s betrayals, and the way that I had come to consider myself, she asked rhetorically, her voice quivering and full of ache: “And you didn’t think you could tell me?”

She cried.

A couple of weeks later, my father called me for the first time in my adult life. I was sure that my mother had told him about our conversation, because I knew they now discussed things with civility and concern. But he didn’t let on. When I answered the phone, he said, “Char’es. It’s me. You jus’ run across my mind, so I needed to call and check on my boy.”

I cried.

As my parents transcended who they’d been, they provided a path for me to do the same. My role as a columnist quickly evolved, so that my prose held more weight than the accompanying visuals. I would write mostly about politics, because I had long been fascinated by it, but I would also allow the column to be a digest of my interests and experiences, sometimes extremely personal ones, all of me. I would highlight the plight of children like the one I had been—the poor, the lost, the most vulnerable. I would advocate for the equal and honorable treatment of those who thought themselves different, because I thought myself different. I would warn against the dangers of gun-saturated societies, because I had grown up in and operated in one. I would caution about the corrosive effects of hazing, because I’d participated in it. I would exalt teachers, because one had reached out and saved me. I would campaign against bullying, because it had nearly destroyed me. And I would write about parenting, because being a father gave my life profound purpose and centered me.

I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.