[Breeder] Mark: Part One

[TheBreeder]

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Mark Sweeney lived just beyond the campus of a theological institution near the house where I grew up. His father was a minister who’d come to Richmond to teach at the seminary down the street. When Mark joined my class in the eighth grade, he was teased for the hair that his mother insisted upon cutting with a bowl to keep the ends even. I remember that hair more vividly than another feature—it was a light brown cap that hung around his ears and brow with perfect symmetry. He had small eyes that would disappear into lines when he smiled. He was small and slight. A good looking boy.

It was difficult for him to join us in the middle of the year. Our class was dominated by a group of pretty boys and girls whose popularity I craved and whose attention I always sought to avoid. They razzed him at first for the bowl cut and for having a minister for a father. He was teased for being a good student and for enjoying earth science. We shared most of our classes together and sat next to each other in band—he played trumpet and I played the French horn. The eighth-grade thugs, kings and queens of the school, would try to kick our instrument cases out of our hands as we slunk down the hallways. Both of us recognized the tortured look in each other’s eyes. We became friends.

The trumpet was Mark’s passion. At home and in his room, he would with reverence withdraw from its plastic sleeve his favorite Chuck Mangione album. He'd place it on the turntable and gently slip the needle into the groove, sighing with satisfaction when "Feels So Good" began to play. We’d performed “Feels So Good” in band that year so many times that I disliked it intensely. Mark loved the song, though. He wanted a trumpet just like Mangione's, he'd tell me as we listened to it over and over again, so that he could try to learn bits on his own instrument.

We read The Sword of Shannara together (I hated it, he adored it). When neither of us understood what was happening in Algebra II, our parents hired a tutor for us. Together we went roller skating. We belonged to the same clogging group. On weekends we were always doing something together.

The thugs went to a different school when we all started ninth grade. We didn’t have to dodge them in the halls anymore. Although we were on the low end of the high school food chain, we found the year much more relaxed.

Mark and I opted to take a swimming and lifesaving class at the YMCA in lieu of regular gym. We’d hop on the bus after school three days a week and travel downtown. I’d been having sex with men for three years, by that point, and the locker room of the YMCA was both a source of illicit thrills and mortification. Everywhere I’d look there would be full-grown men, naked, not seeming to care that their furry chests and private parts were on display. Naked, they’d talk to each other about the stocks and the Braves. They showered in the public area without turning their backs. I was skinny, ashamed of my body, and mortified to take off my clothes in front of anyone.

It’s funny. Sexually-active as I was at that point, I wasn’t at all worried at the prospect of becoming visibly excited at the sight of other naked guys. I simply didn’t want to be looked at. Not in the nude. Not in the gym. The context was all wrong. I feared I was too skinny and pale and smooth and that my ribs showed too much. It didn’t help that the boys’ swimming classes were all held in the nude. There was no escape.

Mark and I lived only one bus stop apart from each other. It was the spring of 1979 when I lost him as a friend. And it all started in the showers of the Y, after swimming.

After our lifesaving lesson, I’d left the locker room to visit one of the sinks on the other side of the showers. One of my articles of clothing—a sock, I think—had gotten soaking wet and I’d fruitlessly attempted to wring it out and get it dry with the hand blower. After giving up, I crossed through the showers again, and found Mark coming out from an alcove. The recess was on the showers’ far side and was something halfway between a closet and a forgotten nook; the janitor usually used it to stow his mop. The wheeled bucket and mop were already pushed out of the nook, though, when Mark stepped out of it. He seemed surprised to see me. “What’re you doing?” I asked him. I thought he was already done with his shower and was getting dressed.

He held his towel in a casual way that obscured his naked parts, and didn’t let it budge. “Just seeing what’s back there,” he shrugged. Then he hustled me away—but not so quickly I didn’t get a glimpse of a man emerging from the nook as we left the room. He was tall and lean, and much older than either of us. And he was hard, or had at least had been hard moments before.

Mark’s fingers were on my elbow. It felt as if bolts of electricity were flying across my skin, as I realized that Mark had been doing something with that older man in the privacy of that little enclosure. “What were you doing in there?” I asked again.

His reply had an edge I hadn’t heard before. “Jesus, nothing. Would you shut up?” he snapped. “Get dressed. We’re going to miss the bus.”

(To be concluded tomorrow.)

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