Taking Chances (15 page)

I had been so good, coming home early—well, early for me, at least—and had been dead set on seeing my son and spending some time with him during actual daylight hours at least
one
time before the end of his senior year in high school.

That was the plan until Brandon and his friends came by after the bars had closed. And then the plan went to shit.

The smoke almost immediately calmed me down, but I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with the nicotine and more to do with the routine. I had smoked since before I was Kyle’s age, and by this time it was the ritual—shaking the cigarette out, tamping the end down on the package, clamping my lips around the filter and lighting up, the sound of the butane igniting as clear as a bell, then the snap of the top of the lighter accompanied by my first deep drag—rather than the actual drug that calmed me down. Brandon had brought a bottle of something and his friend, Dan I think, had some weed, which only made everything worse. I vaguely remembered we might have done something stronger than weed, but I couldn’t remember what. I know we had talked before I ushered them out the door just as the morning news signaled the start of the day.

I needed a shower and some food before I was even close to being able to face how bad I had screwed up last night. Kyle had taped a note on my door telling me he was with Brad and would be back later. That was Kyle’s way of telling me he was hurt about my behavior but not the least bit surprised.

I was on my way to the shower when the phone rang. As always, I prayed nothing had happened to Kyle.

“Hello?” I answered, trying to sound as awake as possible. My eyes complained when I forced them wide open, but at least I felt more alert.

“He’s leaving,” Tyler choked from the other end of the phone.

Without hesitation, I said, “Come over.”

Thirty minutes and a shower later, I opened the front door in response to a faint knock. The saddest man in Foster, Texas, stood there.

I’d known Tyler since junior high, and there had never been a time I didn’t love him like a brother. There had been something just slightly off about him, something I was too young to identify when we first starting hanging out, but something that kept me from lusting after him since I first understood what boys were for. Always the cutest boy in our group of friends, Tyler was the bronze ring of the carousel ride that was high school. Trust me when I say more than a few girls were chasing him in big, bad way.

To me he was always just too sad for words.

Someone glancing at him for a few seconds might easily have missed the clues, but the sadness lay there, visible in his eyes. To me, Tyler always seemed to be on the verge of tears. I opted to be his friend since there was no chance in hell I was going to wade through all that crazy just to jump his bones.

We were out cruising First Street in his father’s old Chevy when what made Tyler different—and so sad—finally clicked.

The Wallace brothers were walking out of the Vine Theater. Let me assure you, when the Wallace brothers walked out of, into, along, or across
anywhere,
people stopped and watched. Years later, all I can remember when I think of them is faded 501s, beat-to-hell sneakers, and a trio of lettermen jackets that looked as if they had been tailor-made to show off their small waists and wide shoulders. Damned if I could describe their individual faces, but I didn’t really need to. There was something so male about them that to me, and most of the girls I was friends with back in the day, the Wallace brothers were the closest thing we had to porn.

That afternoon, when I pulled my gaze away from them, I noticed Tyler was still watching them walk away. The sadness on his face had gone to war with another emotion I couldn’t figure out at first. Want, longing—suddenly, Tyler made sense. I didn’t say anything at the time, but a few weeks later, I admitted to him I had figured it out. I spent the rest of the night assuring him I had no intention of telling another soul. It would have broken people in half to learn Tyler Parker liked guys, but as every woman knows as she gets older, the hot ones are always fucking gay.

“What did you do?” I asked before I had even closed the door.

He fell back into the oversized chair that was Kyle’s favorite place to watch TV. I wasn’t shocked to see a bottle covered by a paper bag in Tyler’s hand, but I wasn’t too thrilled with it either.

“Why do you automatically assume I did something?” I completely disliked that he took a good, long swallow of whatever bottle was hidden in the bag.

I am the last person to criticize someone for drinking too much. But in Tyler’s case, when he started drinking that early in the day, he was headed for trouble, and he knew it. I drank more out of habit and because I didn’t know how not to be drunk. Tyler drank when he was sad, angry, or both, and all alcohol did was make the situation worse. When we were still in high school, he had been picked up by the local police more times than anyone else we knew. Because he was a football star, the cops gave him a pass. I know that when he was in Florida, he had the same thing happen a few times, but again his status as a star football player gave him a level of immunity from the consequences.

After his knee got hurt, his protection was stripped away, and he ended up spending more than a few nights sobering up in a Foster jail cell.

He got better after his parents moved away. Running the sporting goods store had done him a world of good; but this thing with Matt looked like it was going to blow all the improvement out of the water.

“You’re a man. Problems are always your fault,” I joked.

“He’s a man too, so why isn’t it his fault?” he replied, trying to sound angry but ending up just coming across as miserable.

“Because I’ve known you too long, and this is about the time you start to throw wooden shoes into machinery,” I answered plainly.

A few seconds later his head popped up. “Come again?”

“In the fifteenth century, workers used to wear wooden shoes called sabots. When they began to revolt, they threw their shoes into the machinery, hence the word sabotage,” I said, trying to figure out if I had anything to actually eat in the house. If I wanted him to sober up, he needed food in his stomach.

He stared at me for almost thirty seconds before asking, “How the fuck do you know that?”

I shrugged, sitting across from him. “I know stuff.” He continued to stare unbelieving at me. “What? I do know stuff.” More silence. “Fine, it’s from one of Kyle’s movies, but don’t change the subject. What did you do?”

He hung his head down as he stared into his coffee. “I broke his window last night and didn’t tell him.” That caused me to pause for a moment, I knew he had been buzzed last night when he left, but breaking windows was new for Tyler. He saw the expression on my face and began to explain.

It was much worse than I thought.

I
LIKE
to think I was a good father to my three sons when they were growing up.

Of course, I’m sure Harry Truman thought he was a good president, but that just proves you’re always the last person in a room to know you’re an idiot

I raised them all to be honest, brave, and, above all else, to respect the people around them. A person never knows when he’s going to need the kindness of strangers. I taught them how to shave, how to properly knot a tie, and I took each one out to learn the secrets of changing a flat tire in the middle of nowhere.

My oldest, John, assumed the responsibility of being the oldest boy the same way some men took joining the Marines. Almost everything he did or said, he did with a seriousness that never failed to look five different types of cute in a boy of his age as he lectured and taught his younger brothers. John was the boy every father thinks he wants when they find out their wife is pregnant. He was a boy in every sense of the word; and I never once worried about him.

William, or Billy—the nickname he’s never grown out of—is only a year and a half younger than John and has spent his entire life trying to be John. A few years back, I saw that Austin Powers movie on cable, and though it was nothing like the actual ’60s, Mini-Me made me immediately think of Billy. If John had a Mini-Me, it would have been Billy. If John was lifting weights, Billy was there trying to lift as much. If he was under a car changing the oil, there was Billy right next to him, in the way. Every sports record John achieved was one Billy tried to beat, not a girl John liked that Billy didn’t wink at, and not a stitch of clothing John owned that Billy didn’t try to borrow. I never said anything aloud because when I say teenage boys have no humor about themselves at all, I learned from experience. My image of John and Billy is like a duckling waddling behind the mother duck, trying its hardest just to keep pace with it. I never worried about him either because I knew as long as John was flying straight, Billy was fine.

In comparison, there has never been a time I didn’t worry about Matt.

People in this world say a lot of stupid things. Stuff like “If you support welfare you believe in socialism,” if you disagree with the reasons we are in a war it means you are anti-American and, my favorite, being gay is a choice. As someone whose father survived the Great Depression only because of the assistance by the United States government, let me tell you, the only people who complain about federal welfare are the ones who have never needed it. As for war, I served my country for eight years active and another four reserve duty, and I am the most antiwar person you will ever meet. I did everything in my power to make sure my sons never had to answer that call, and if that makes me un-American, I dare you to come up and say it to my face.

As for being gay as a choice….

We knew Matt was different by the time he started kindergarten. I am in no way saying he was girly, but he was the least manly boy I had ever seen. Where kids his age lived for things like mud and bugs and farting, Matt would have none of it. He was fastidiously neat and did not care who could spit farther, pee longer, or run faster than anyone else. I wasn’t sure at the time why he was so different, but when he hit puberty, it became clearer to me and his mother that the difference went deep. He tried too hard to be like his brothers and their friends. It wasn’t an obvious thing. The only reason we noticed was when you watch a child from the first moment they open their eyes to the night they’re standing in the hallway fumbling to put a corsage on a girl’s wrist, there isn’t much a parent doesn’t know.

If you asked me when I was younger how I would react to one of my sons being gay, I can assure you more than a few curse words would have come up and the strong possibility of one of us limping away would have been in the cards. Instead, I found myself becoming more protective of Matt. I actually had to fight the constant urge to keep the world away from him because of the fear that it would turn its ignorant hatred to focus on him. I had to force myself to treat him exactly as I’d treated his brothers, but I watched and I worried. I shouldn’t be so proud that my love for the boy never wavered so much as a second, but I am.

But we always knew Matt was born that way.

We had grown used to the various shades of miserable that seemed to make up Matt’s life over the years. It couldn’t have been easy growing up in Foster with no one to talk to about being gay and what to do and all, so it came as no great shock that Matt tore out of town the second his high school diploma was placed in his hands. His mother was hurt, but she understood—this was not the place for him to find happy, and as parents, all you ever want is for your kids to be happy. The problem was that he was no happier in California than he had been in Foster. Every time we talked to him on the phone or saw him when he came home for Christmas, it was blatantly obvious the boy was as, if not more, miserable than he had been here.

And there was just no talking to him about it.

I know he is a grown man, but every time he rebuffed our attempts at trying to talk to him, all I saw was him at three insisting he was old enough to go to the potty by himself because he saw John and Billy doing it. Matt had backed himself into a bad corner. On one hand, he thought that if he admitted he needed help, he’d look less of a man than his other brothers. On the other hand, he couldn’t wrap his mind around the fact that he was trying so hard and was still a sad person. John and Billy relished being able to cry on our shoulder when things went south, but not Matt. There were nights I lost sleep wondering if I had created an unobtainable model of masculinity by not acknowledging his sexuality, and only now were we seeing the results of that fucked-up choice.

And then Beth’s friend Frances told her about her gay son and how miserable he was in Foster.

Everyone knew Tyler, of course. He rushed for over five hundred yards in one game his junior year and everything changed for him. Nearly every boy around these parts plays one sport or another growing up, but few are gifted with the talent that Tyler Parker showed on a hundred yards of green grass every Friday night. He was a good-looking young man who seemed to have the whole world ahead of him when he was eighteen.

And then lost all of it at nineteen.

I saw the game where his knee was blown out; and I am not ashamed to say there were tears in my eyes when he did not get up after that hit. The way he lay there, his arms clutching that one leg—there was no doubt what had happened, and I just knew he was never going to play again. That Monday I saw the sporting goods store was closed, which meant the Parkers had flown out to Florida to check on their son. For a moment, I thought I couldn’t have been more miserable if one of my own sons had been hit. Then the thought of how it would feel to watch one of my boys not get up on national television and being aware that I was hours away from being able to help him hit me. I almost threw up on First Street.

Anyway, when my wife, Elizabeth, told me that Tyler had come out to his parents, I could see the little gears in her mind turn over and begin to spin. I tried to explain to her that to men, a mother’s endorsement was not the grand slam she seemed to think it was. In fact, if my mother had tried to set me up on a date with Beth, I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have turned it down completely out of spite. I imagine that it has something to do with dating eventually leading to sex, and no man alive wants his mother within fifty degrees of separation to the woman he’s having relations with.