[Breeder] Mark: Part Two

[TheBreeder]

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(Continued from yesterday.)

My mind was racing. I was pretty sure I knew what I’d seen in the showers just moments before, but I couldn’t believe it of Mark. Innocent, sweet-looking Mark. Of course, I knew I appeared innocent, myself. I'd traded on my guileless veneer many times to entice men to pull down their pants.

Perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe I’d been projecting my own sex secrets onto him. I shut my mouth, dressed, and left the YMCA with Mark trailing behind. I distinctly remember that it was warm that day. Warm enough that I’d pulled back the city bus's window, once we'd paid our fare. Mark and I sat apart, not speaking.

When the vehicle turned onto the long avenue leading to our homes, my hair was still half-wet. I'd spent most of the trip letting the breeze dry it and staring out the window. My mind was still in shock from what had happened a few minutes earlier, but I came out of my absorption to realize the bus was approaching my stop. I pulled the cord.

That's when I turned and noticed the man opposite me, sitting in one of the sideways-facing seats like my own. He was handsome and in his thirties. Curly, curly brown hair. He wore a mustache with its tips pointed down, seventies-style. His blue eyes stared at the back of the bus with an intensity that caught me off-guard. He sat rigid, every motion arrested. His eyes were hungry. It was a look of sheer lust. I followed his gaze to see who had captured every particle of his attention.

It was Mark. When I saw him, he was just lifting his eyelid from a slow wink. His tongue flicked out to taste the corner of his lip. His hand was stroking the inside of his thigh—not obscenely. Almost unconsciously. Mark was flirting with a man on a public bus, a mere half-hour after I’d caught him emerging from the shadows with a naked older man at the Y.

Mark was like me, I realized.

Just as the bus pulled to a stop, Mark’s eyes brushed sidelong in my direction, as if he expected me still to be drying my hair in the window. He saw me staring at him, and then back at the man who wanted him. He must have known what conclusion I’d drawn.

I bolted through the opened back doors without a word. Mark propelled himself after me. When I looked back, the man had crossed the bus to stare at us through the window. He never took his eyes off Mark. Then the bus wheezed out a cloud of exhaust and eased away.

“It’s not what you think,” Mark said instantly. I crossed to the children's hospital at the end of my street and began walking in the direction of my house.

“I don't think anything."

“I’m not a fag. I’m not!”

“I didn't say you were.” I remember clearly the emotions that ran through my muddled head. Anger at Mark for keeping his desires from me. Relief that I wasn’t alone—that I wasn't the only one like myself. And most of all, rage that he used that ugly word to describe us both.

And oddly, I felt longing. Not for Mark. Not on a sexual level. I felt longing for a friend to share with. A real friend with whom I could do something as simple as talk, and share my secret. It’s okay, I wanted to tell him. I’m that way too.

"That guy was looking at me. I could tell he was one of them. I was just teasing with him to see if he was a pansy." Mark almost whined with desperation as he spun the story. "And he was. That's all there is to it. You've got to believe me. You better believe me."

But I didn't believe what I was hearing, and I definitely didn't want to listen to more. I started walking down my street at a fast pace, red-faced and speechless.

“Stop!” His face was flushed, too. He kept yanking at my arm, savagely. “I’m not a faggot! You can ask anyone! You can ask Rhonda. I made out with her by the Coke machine in Lingle Hall!”

I shook my head and wrenched out of his grasp. More than anyone, I knew that kissing a girl didn’t make a gay boy straight. He misunderstood my silence, though. Mark assumed I didn't answer because I thought he was a liar—and he was right. I did. I hadn’t witnessed flirting for the hell of it. That was advanced cruising. I knew the signs. I took the rest of the short journey home at a run.

He chased me into my back yard and shoved me up against the bricks of my house. “You better not tell anyone,” he growled, spitting the words in my face. I'd never before seen anyone so angry, or so desperate. “I’ll fucking kill you if you tell people lies about me!”

“I’m not going to tell anyone!” My longing disappeared. I’d wished I could have confided in him the things I’d done and the way I felt. I’d wanted to say something to let him know he wasn’t by himself. A sadder, wiser part of me knew, however, that if I admitted how much alike we were, he’d tell everyone I was the gay one. I would have said so, right to his face, and in his frantic state of mind, he wouldn’t hesitate to use my words against me. In the time it took for a look, a glance, a motion, we’d become enemies. “I don’t care, all right? I’m not going to tell anyone anything.”

"You'd better not." He let go of me. "You'd better not." We parted without another word, our expressions hurt and hostile. Nothing would ever be the same.

We’d based our friendship on books and music and play. Neither of us was equipped to talk about sexual feelings in a rational and adult way. We couldn't negotiate the tricky, mine-laden field of discussing gay desire. Even had we managed to stop feeling shame and anger at each other, we still would have searched fruitlessly for the words to say what we needed. We’d simply never been given the vocabulary. The concepts were supposed to be beyond us for years and years.

Yet we surely could have used the vocabulary, that afternoon.

I saw very little of Mark after that day. We stopped meeting on weekends and after school. At the YMCA he’d make certain to rush out after class and take an earlier bus, so we wouldn’t have to ride together. I’d always linger until I was certain he was gone. He immediately found himself a girlfriend who let him paw and kiss her whenever I was around. Every time his lips would meet her cheek he would look at me in sullen, challenging defiance. I’m definitely not one of those fags! See?

I would turn my head and pretend not to see.

His parents moved in tenth grade and he attended a different school. It wasn’t until I was in college that I saw him again. I was working at King’s Dominion theme park between my freshman and sophomore year, unfurling tissue paper flowers at a funereal pace while I waited for people to buy them. He passed, stopped, then called out my name.

We talked for a while. He told me where he was attending school and caught up on each other’s families. There was no mention of girlfriends. He was very pleasant in his conversation—I hadn’t expected it from him after we'd sent each other into exile and left scorched earth behind. I certainly didn't expect anyone to admit knowing me, in my polyester work costume with the enormous floppy collar, selling oversized tissue paper flowers to ten-year-old girls in an amusement park. “We should get together,” he said to me. “We should talk sometime. Catch up?”

I agreed. It would have been good to talk.

Tim Sweeney, his younger brother, called me the following autumn. He and his family were going through a list of all Mark’s old friends, he told me. He thought they ought to know.

“Know what?” I asked.

Mark had been killed in a car accident on his way back to school in Tennessee a few weeks before, Tim told me. A truck had smashed into his little car head-on; the driver was drunk. There had been no way he could have survived.

Sometimes when I try to make sense of my life and the lives around me, I reach a point when all I can do is extend my arms by my side in a gesture of futility. So many wasted opportunities. Wasted lives. Posturing that needn’t have been made. Arguments that never should have happened. Fears that all seem so pointless in the end.

Such a lot of waste.

These losses throw into sharp relief the things we have, don’t they? The relationships we should be celebrating. The little joys that come to us, day by day. They’re a reminder of all the words we’re leaving unsaid, but shouldn’t, or the things we say too easy, but ought not. Life’s short. We don’t always get a second chance to make amends. We don’t always get to practice hard-won crafts like forgiveness, or understanding. We just don’t.

And yet . . . we ought. We almost always know it too, don't we?

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