Pay It Forward (23 page)

Trevor couldn’t allow the silence to stand.

“You know this means I only got one more to do.”

“One more what?” Arlene asked.

“One more person to help. I got Mrs. Greenberg, and now you two. That only leaves me one more.”

“You’ve done plenty, Trevor. Hasn’t he, Reuben?”

Reuben was still busy wondering if Trevor would ever match this day. “I think you can be proud of what you’ve already done, Trevor.”

“Maybe. But I’ll do one more. Somebody else’ll need something. Right?”

Reuben and Arlene and Frank all had to agree that it seemed like a reasonably safe bet. Someone always needs something.

T
o Gordie, Sandy was a bear of a man. A sweet bear. From a wolf to a bear, he thought. In one easy lesson.

Nothing angry or dangerous. Not that kind of a bear. Just big and husky, a somewhat shaggy, unrefined appearance that overpowered his conservative dress. He’d met Sandy on the Capitol Mall. Sandy was almost forty-two, which gave him a quarter of a century on Gordie, but that didn’t matter much, if at all.

Sandy said Gordie was beautiful.

Gordie looked in the mirror sometimes, in the evening before bed. With the door to his room locked. Standing naked in front of the full-length reflection. He appeared wispy and thin to himself, something the wind could carry away. But in another respect, Sandy was right.

Gordie wondered why he had never been given credit for beauty before. Why no one else’s eyes had stretched to that truth.

Sandy did not hit, and because he weighed well over two hundred pounds, no one else felt inclined to hit Gordie while Sandy stood close by.

Come live with me, Sandy had said, and Gordie agreed.

He brought no clothing, so his mother and Ralph would not
see immediately that he had left for good. Sandy said he would buy more clothes for him later, nice things, and he did.

Sandy gave Gordie another present, a high-quality fake driver’s license, making him twenty-one overnight. Sandy frequented upscale bars and key clubs, wearing suits with pilled sweaters for a vest underneath. He wanted Gordie on his arm. He liked to see Gordie dress extravagantly, femininely. The knowledge that Gordie was male underneath his lipstick and silk only added to Sandy’s appreciation for him.

It was almost like coming home.

On Saturday nights, Sandy took him dancing. They danced slow and close to a live band, and Gordie had only to follow, which relieved him, because he had been tired. All he really wanted for the time was to follow.

This Saturday, May Day, as Sandy called it, they danced at a bar and grill with an overwhelmingly gay clientele. A uniformed security guard in blue and gray stood at the door and nodded respectfully as he came through on Sandy’s arm. The guard didn’t have a gun, as far as Gordie could see, but he made a statement by virtue of his presence.

Gordie decided the guard was probably straight. Maybe he didn’t even like or approve of the men he protected, in the most personal sense. But if that was true, he was careful not to show it. Men like Sandy paid his salary, in a roundabout way, and sometimes tipped him on their way out the door. So he appeared to view the male clientele as his professionalism dictated he should. As things of value, to remain unmolested at any cost.

Gordie smiled shyly as he slipped by.

S
ANDY BOUGHT HIM A STEAK DINNER,
and Gordie chewed carefully and watched the men dancing. Halfway through the meal they were joined by Alex and Jay, friends of Sandy’s, both of
whom worked as congressional pages. Neither cared to eat; both felt they weighed far too much already.

“Gordie doesn’t have to worry,” Alex said, lightly pinching Gordie’s waist. Gordie smiled at Sandy because he liked Sandy just the way he was. Not fat, but big, overwhelmingly big, and Gordie didn’t mind being overwhelmed by someone gentle.

Gordie remained silent, unsure of his ability to join the conversation.

“How the hell do you sneak him in here, Sand?” Jay stage-whispered under his breath.

“What do you mean?” Sandy replied, unfazed. “He’s twenty-one.”

Jay sprayed a sound between his lips, a kind of hybrid between a laugh and a Bronx cheer. Then he leaned close to Gordie and whispered in his ear.

“Youth is so
attractive,
” he said.

Gordie smiled and watched Sandy buttering his roll. No way was he ever going back home now.

From
The Other Faces Behind the Movement

I was just getting happy. I was finally happy. But then, I’m happy again now. I think everyone is happy now.

Sandy recovered fully. A couple of cracked ribs and a concussion. We nursed each other back to health.

I just wish the Boy had picked somebody else to help.

But if he had, maybe I wouldn’t be here. Unless we’d stayed home that night. But you’ll make yourself crazy with that kind of thinking. Isn’t it bad enough how many other people used to beat me up? I have to pick up where they left off?

When people read my part of the story, I really hope they’ll understand.

I’ll tell you as much as I can remember. It’s one of those things,
though. It happened so fast. The shock sets in so fast. It played out like a dream. So I’ll just tell it like a dream.

It happened, though.

H
E HOOKED HIS ARM THROUGH
S
ANDY’S
as they stepped out into the night. A warm spring night. Gordie turned his head to smile at the guard, but the guard wasn’t there.

Then Gordie saw him, off to the left of the awning-covered entryway, his back pressed to the brick wall of the bar. Holding strangely still. A skin-headed young man stood close, pinning him against the brick. The guard’s chin jutted out and up, exposing the white of his throat. Gordie’s knees felt watery and warm at the flash of the blade. Long and mean and curved, bright with use and care.

It occupied his attention until he heard the sound of Sandy’s breath. The sudden evacuation. And felt Sandy’s arm pull free as he crumpled away.

Two men stood before Gordie in baggy, low-slung jeans and gang colors. One tapped a baseball bat against his palm. His military-short hair stuck straight up from his white scalp. One eyebrow had been scarred by a cut and had healed back together mismatched.

“Oops,” he said quietly, his face so close that Gordie could smell tobacco on his breath. “Look what happened to your boyfriend.”

Much to Gordie’s surprise and relief, he found the ability to detach had not abandoned him. It would be another beating, like so many before. He would watch it from a distance, and his skin and bones would heal. Or maybe this time not. But he would be elsewhere as it happened, shut down. When you don’t care anymore you deprive them of the joy of hurting you. Hard to hit somebody where they live if there’s nobody home.

He closed his eyes, not wanting to see the bat swung.

It hit him across his soft underbelly, doubling him. A hand around his throat brought him up straight again, and the bat folded him again.

He was going to pass out now, and then it wouldn’t matter.

Noises reached his ears through a tunnel. Like the noises in his grandmother’s house, where he’d had to sleep in the living room. Sounds that leak through a veil of half sleep, jarring in a distant, disconnected way. Filtering through the no-man’s-land of semiconsciousness.

Just before he sank into it, before muddy gray behind his eyelids turned black, he heard a different sound.

A shouted word.

“Hey!”

It could not have come from either of his tormentors. The word started at a high pitch, the voice of a child, then cracked halfway through. The way Gordie’s voice had, the way all boys’ voices will when they are changing.

The sound of the bat clattering on the pavement.

Gordie felt himself turn liquid, boneless. Unsupported by himself or his attackers. He fell softly on what he knew by feel to be the big form of Sandy. A comfort. Sparing him from the hard pavement. They would rest here together.

Somehow he remembered feeling Sandy’s breathing. Perhaps because its presence was something he really needed to feel.

“S
ay good-bye to Frank, honey.”

“Good-bye, Frank.”

They stood out on the curb in front of the Washington Arms Hotel, in the light of the street lamps. A warm, comfortable spring night.

“Come on, Trevor,” Frank said. “Let’s help the doorman get all your stuff into the trunk.”

In addition to the baggage they’d brought from home, Trevor had three new heavy boxes, a complete set of encyclopedias he’d received as a birthday gift from the White House. The doorman could surely have handled it all, but Trevor helped supervise as the gift made its way into the trunk of a hotel limousine bound for the airport.

Arlene took hold of Reuben’s hand and led him to the front of the car.

“Are you still feeling sick?” he asked her. She seemed down somehow, distracted, her mood altered by something he couldn’t quite name or touch.

“No, I’m okay now. I just need to talk to you about something.”

“Now?”

“I kind of need to get this off my chest.”

“You’re not seriously sick, are you?”

“No. I’m just pregnant, is all.”

In the silent moment to follow, Reuben heard the sound of a disturbance, distant, maybe off on the next block. A light scuffle. It didn’t really sink in, any more than her words had.

“Could you say something please, Reuben?”

“How far along?”

“I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?”

It seemed odd to imagine she would. He didn’t know what he was thinking, or even if he was thinking. He could only feel his focus on the sound of her voice, and Trevor’s voice behind them, and the shouts and thuds on the next block, as if to decide, in a detached way, which seemed more real.

“You’re thinking, was it that time I came over in the middle of the night to your house? Or was it right before Ricky left?”

“I forgot about that.” He hadn’t forgotten that night, far from it, but it hadn’t occurred to him to factor it into this discussion. He had not for a moment considered the idea that this pregnancy could be any of his doing. “So? Which was it?”

“Well, they were only a week or ten days apart, so it’s a little hard to tell.”

“So, how do we know?”

“Well, I guess we don’t. Look, if it’s too much for you, I understand. I mean, it’s not what I want. You know that. I got this ring back now, I’d sort of like to keep it. But I had to tell you, right? But I’ll understand, I mean, if you want to wait till we know. I mean, later, you know. Then we’ll know.”

But in the confusion of the moment, even having to say whether or not it was too much for him seemed too much.

A split second later Frank appeared at his shoulder. “Isn’t Trevor up here with you?”

Arlene seemed more distracted than alarmed. “No, we thought he was back there with you.”

“Well, he was just a minute ago….”

With a bad dawning that must have been more intuition than observation, Reuben turned his head in the direction of the noises, the muffled shouts and grunts he’d been hearing without attention, without focus, as a backdrop to this confusing exchange.

He saw a small group of figures at the end of the block, outside a restaurant or bar with awnings on the windows. Two men against the building, one on the ground. Two or three standing over the felled man. A baseball bat raised over a head.

And Trevor, running fast in their direction. With a good head start.

Reuben took off after him at a dead sprint.

At the edge of Reuben’s vision, the brick facade of their hotel slid by like a dream, a blurred, distorted image through a wide-angle lens. Why couldn’t he reach the end of it? He could feel his legs, his heart, opening and straining, yet the distance seemed to stretch out.

Why couldn’t he close the gap to the boy?

“Trevor!” he screamed. Screamed. Bellowing, echoing from his lungs, pure panic. Heads turned.

Trevor’s head did not.

Reuben’s chest ached and burned. How could he be so short of oxygen so fast? He could see Trevor’s untucked shirttail flapping out behind him as he ran.

Trevor streaked past the two men pressed against the building. Reuben could see them now, he was almost that close. One of the men wore a blue and gray uniform, like that of a security guard. The other wore baggy jeans, his head shaved, and he seemed to have the guard pinned to the building somehow.

The light from the street lamp glinted off something metal between them, a flash of light in Reuben’s eye.

Both men turned their heads as Trevor flew by. The man with the raised bat turned with startled curiosity to watch Trevor’s approach.

Without putting on the brakes, Trevor slammed into the man and knocked him down. As he tumbled, he fell against the legs of his accomplice, who also went down. Their second victim crumpled to the sidewalk, untouched, as if an imaginary wind had blown him over. The bat clattered loudly on the sidewalk as Trevor scrambled to his feet.

Reuben had almost drawn level with the men against the building when Trevor turned suddenly, started back in his direction. For what? To head back to Reuben? Or did he think he could knock the last man down?

The skinhead spun away from the guard to block Trevor’s path. Trevor’s impetus carried him forward to that meeting.

They came together just a foot or two from the end of Reuben’s hand. Just a car length from the security guard. Either he or Reuben could almost have reached out and grabbed the man’s jacket, if it hadn’t all happened so fast.

Almost.

Then, just as suddenly, the skin-headed man ran off into the dark. Past his two partners, who scrambled to their feet and sprinted after him, sliding into the night like a river. Just that fast. Someone threw a switch and they were gone.

Reuben remained the best witness to the sudden collision, yet he failed to comprehend it. He saw it but could not explain it.

It would take him minutes to know what had happened, days to accept that it really had. Most of his life to understand.

1994 interview by Chris Chandler, from
Tracking the Movement