Leg, p.16
Leg, page 16
Once I was back at the house, post-pancakes, I peeled off my yellow shirt, showered, and returned to my bedroom, letting my bath towel fall off my knobby hips. I slipped on my student body president sweater from high school like an old wedding dress, flopped onto my bed, and flipped morosely through my senior yearbook. Miss Havisham at nineteen, with a hairy ass.
I couldn’t get Wynona’s question about my leg out of my head. Was I proud? I’d sculpted my body in the name of becoming myself: the leg surgeries, the constant exercising. For all the attention I lavished on my appendage, though, I was only proud of it when I could successfully conceal it, when I sidled into my seat at a basketball game or carried a chair across a lumpy lawn without detection.
Gail would never acknowledge being anything more than an ally in the fight for gay marriage because doing so would mean outing her boyfriend in a state that was so conservative it hadn’t allowed Pride banners downtown because they featured the words gender, sexuality, and justice. But having spent most of my life with at least one foot in a closet, I was beginning to distrust a world that demanded secrecy for safety, one where passing was a requirement, not a choice.
Our golden retriever puppy, Berkeley, had taken a bite out of the cover of the yearbook, but my presidential headshot survived the attack. It didn’t matter that my friends had hugged me and told me they loved me after I came out. They were my friends. That was their job. I dwelled on the rejection of acquaintances and strangers. I was the same person I’d been before announcing I was gay a few months ago, my smile broad and white, my cheeks covered in bronzer, but a lot of the kids who had voted for me and Gretchen would now be voting against me. And to think I’d done the salsa with them.
“You want to know why they hate you?” Mom told me at dinner, jabbing a fork in my direction. We were under the gazebo watching wasps carry away chunks of leftover flank steak. My parents had that awful Norah Jones album going on the CD player. “Because they’re total cocalos.”
That is Mom’s made-up word for crazy. Sometimes she claims it’s Basque but it’s not.
Dad knew I was having a tough time. I didn’t like Northwestern and now Utah didn’t like me. Playing tennis that night at the club, as the crickets tuned up for an orgy on the fairway of the ninth hole, he tried to comfort me in the only way he knew how: by bringing up Gina Jones. “I was dating a gal who didn’t give me the time of day and I thought I’d never find anyone.” He took a sip of water from a paper cone as I hugged my racket to me.
“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “The parking lot, the gold Firebird.”
“It feels weird now because it’s all new,” Dad said, shifting his tone to something more serious. “No really, Greg. Listen. It’s new for all of us and we’re all figuring it out. But you’re a great guy and you’re going to find another great guy and you two are going to fall head over heels for each other, just like your mom and I.”
“Your mom and me,” I corrected.
“And you know what, Greggo?”
“What?” I scooped up a stray ball using my racket and my shoe, refusing to look at him.
“You guys are going to get married.”
I wanted to say something snarky but when I went to speak I found that I couldn’t. I didn’t even have the energy to mock Dad with an amazeen.
In the fall, a few months after I returned to Chicago for my sophomore year, Prop 3 passed by a wide margin and President Bush coasted to a resounding electoral victory. I watched John Kerry’s concession speech in the basement of the student union, eating a soggy tuna sub. According to conventional wisdom, the success of marriage bans like the one I had fought against had cost Kerry the White House. They had gone eleven-for-eleven across the country. Utahns favored Prop 3 by thirty-two points.
“Thirty-two isn’t that bad,” Dad said over the phone as I staggered from the student union in the wind. “That means a lot of those girls from high school voted your way. You probably helped change their minds. Anyway, I don’t think you’ll need long johns tomorrow, but don’t forget an umbrella.”
Dad had the annoying habit of checking the weather in Chicago every day from beautiful Utah while I had to actually suffer through it. The phone shivered in my hand. “Dad!” I barked. “You know I don’t own an umbrella.”
“How about a clean shirt then?” he asked. “You never know who you might run into in the parking lot.”
I was taking a lecture course called Gay and Lesbian History in America that quarter. I’d turned from doing figurative homework on being gay to doing actual homework in the form of term papers about George Chauncey’s Gay New York, the myth of isolation, and the social construction of the closet. Most of the material was jubilantly affirming: bathhouses, cruising, imaginative uses of Crisco. Plato liked guys, some Indigenous Americans revered androgynous or intersexed tribe members as two-spirited shamans, and Abraham Lincoln shared a bed with another man for most of his twenties. For Halloween, our professor, Lane, a tall, slim man who did yoga, came to class in a Lycra wizard costume. His TA, Deb, showed up as Smee.
The post-election lecture was more somber. Lane slid red and blue transparencies on the overhead projector and pointed out that Bush’s victory map had the same contours as the Confederacy. He turned out the lights and told us that we were going to watch a documentary about San Francisco’s first out city council member, a man with the funny name of Harvey Milk.
Lane warned us that the movie was a little dated but he couldn’t have known how precisely dated for me. Harvey Fierstein’s gravelly voice came on over a porny dirge of synthesizers, flutes, and keyboard, and I was sucked through a wormhole and found myself sitting in Mrs. Palmer’s Life Science class. I realize now that the Afterschool Special took its inspiration from the documentary, not the other way around, that one is schlock and one is a classic, but with the lights out in that lecture hall on north campus I felt the sugary breath of serendipity tickling the back of my neck, making my shoulders shudder. That voice.
Sitting there, my stupid summer of clipboards and pamphlets and having doors shut in my face took on new significance. Harvey Milk talked about the necessity of coming out and I had. I’d come out to my high school friends and the lady who worked at the naughty card store and to the one at the Estée Lauder counter. I’d come out to strangers at free concerts, rodeos, arts festivals, parades. I’d come out because I knew people like Gail—people who didn’t know me, people who annoyed me, people I made fun of, people who weren’t even my friends—would have my yellow-shirted back.
Walking to my single-cell dorm after class, a Counting Crows album on my MP3 player, I imagined my own misadventures being whispered into a microphone. If the voice in my head began as the crackle of Harvey Fierstein, it soon morphed into someone else’s, mine but not exactly. We weren’t part of any one campaign or candidate but about a candidacy, a movement, like Milk. I may not have had muscle tees with piping around the neck and sleeves, may not have waved from the back of a convertible in a Castro parade, but I’d found a sense of purpose, of we-ness, even if it wasn’t the kind I was looking for. Some days that had meant phone banking and knocking on doors and other days it meant sitting in a quiet office above a bridal shop, sharing a rack of Oreos and waiting for other volunteers to trickle in after a long, hot parade.
SEKSI
Some combination of Delta, Lufthansa, Air France, and Croatia Airlines lost my luggage on the forty-five-hour flight from Salt Lake City to Dubrovnik, but neither lost luggage nor prudishness can account for wearing my jeans into the Adriatic. Stripping down to my reindeer boxers wouldn’t have raised a balkanized eyebrow, not in this coastal nation of Mediterranean climes and attitudes where, if my Frommer’s travel guide was to be believed, topless women ate oysters and rode Jet Skis from islands to shady bays.
Nor was it a lack of alternatives. A freckled tuba player named Nick had offered me his spare trunks. I was too shy to take them, picturing my genitals tangled in the netting like some pink urchin. When I cheerfully turned him down, rolling up my jeans and saying I was going for the Tom Sawyer look, the disturbed expression he shot his girlfriend, Christina, a poli-sci major also on our study abroad trip, was all too familiar. “O-kay,” he said, pulling Christina closer.
As we strolled through city streets to the beach, I intentionally hung two paces back and feigned utter absorption in my surroundings. Was that a palm tree? A convenience store where they sold water and stuff, just like back home? I’d learned that stealing even a glance at my feet was a dead giveaway. It worked until it didn’t. Nick asked if I was hurt. Was that why I didn’t want his extra swimsuit? “Were you worried you’d get blood all over it?”
My leg went stiff.
“Nick, stop,” Christina said.
“Sorry, no, I walk with a limp,” I said, apologizing for him.
“Permanently?”
“It’s no big deal. It’s just tight ten—”
“Wait, is your leg fake?” Nick hiked his hip and began swinging it in a wooden half-circle under him, pirate-style. That was not at all how I walked. Was it?
Christina broke away from Nick’s big dumb grip and whacked him on the back of the head.
“Ouch?” Nick said, all that boyish full-of-beans joviality going out of him. It was up to me to save the vibe, so I gave my thigh a playful punch. “Not fake!” I could feel my leg wanting to come up short, like I’d stubbed my toe. I guessed we still had a good twenty-minute walk to the beach and I had no clue where I was going. “I was born with it. I’m not in pain or anything.”
“Shit, my bad,” Nick said, chastened at last. “I wouldn’t have asked if I thought, you know . . . I just wondered if something happened on the plane or whatever. I dunno, how they lost your luggage and everything.”
“I get stiff, is all.” I felt like I was about to cry. The trip had just started and I was already off on the wrong leg. Didn’t matter. What did I care about some fire crotch’s opinion of me? When we made it to the beach, I dropped my backpack, took off my shoes, and trundled into the surf before anyone could stop me.
Alas, I swam in my jeans because I didn’t want Tyler Townsend to see my leg. Tyler Townsend, past whose lifeguard stand I had limped countless times back on campus, always on my way to grind it out on a treadmill that looked out onto the ice floes of Lake Michigan. Tyler Townsend, whose lips knew how to accommodate a whistle, whose Popeye arms knew how to pull in a lane line, who was this very second stripping off an Axe-scented pink polo shirt (at least I thought I caught a downwind note of Dark Temptation) and unfurling a beach towel. On the shorter side, he had the stocky stride of a circus strongman. His aquiline nose and unmoving coif could have been swiped from a Roman bust and though only a white boy from the Northeast, his skin already radiated the golden hues of buttered toast. If I had a type, I was looking at him.
Hell, maybe I swam in my jeans because I wanted Tyler Townsend to save me.
What was it that made someone capable of obliterating shyness, of laying out like his limbs were counterfeit Coach bags he was determined to illegally hawk?
Not having tight tendons, for one.
By age twenty, I occasionally trotted out the terms “hemiplegia” and “hemiparesis,” but “tight tendons” was still my go-to in casual conversation. I liked how it sounded tossed off, like nothing. And in a funny way, it fit me best. Spending my childhood and teens in physical therapy had introduced me to gyms—treadmills, thigh presses, stationary bikes—and turned me by degrees into the most dogged kind of athlete, one in competition with himself.
Like gay guys who hit the weights to develop beefcake bods and dispel notions of sissyhood and illness, I worked assiduously to make tight tendons the truth. My tendons were skinny and tough from working out, that was all! I’d never play intramural sports but if my legs were going to be sore, it’d be because I’d just run my regular five miles on the tread, not because I had a disability. If I was tired and needed both hands to hoist myself up from a chair, if I had to lean my hip against the sink to brush my teeth or keep at least a knuckle on the wall as I walked up stairs, so be it. I earned the “pulled” muscles the term “spastic” implied.
This internal tug-of-war—between fitness and physical limitation—may sound high-minded, but it played out in the form of run-of-the-mill social anxiety. No matter how in-shape I got it was never enough to make my limp disappear, or even improve. For as much as I could transform my body, one appendage I just had to accept. But I would not. I approached every interaction with my face contorted in concentration, like I was holding in a fart. If I merely came across as serious, I counted it as a success. While every toe drag brought renewed worry that my friendly cohort of Northwestern Wildcats would call me handicapped or some variation therein, Tyler filled his social calendar, racking up more besties in one afternoon at the beach than I had made in two years at our alma mater.
Like me, Tyler was a journalism major, but unlike me he was not on the gray newspaper side of things but in Broadcast, and he had the clean-cut look and highlights to prove it.
In the one broadcast unit I’d taken so far, the professor had pulled me aside to tell me I had talent but that I needed to stop tilting my head to the left on camera. We’d used old-school video editing machines that were too confusing for me, and I’d heard that the broadcast kids were responsible for every facet of production, lugging what were then heavy over-the-shoulder cameras to wherever a story was taking place and setting up their own shots. I didn’t think I could manage it, technically or physically.
My failings left me humbly smitten with the Tylers of the world. He may have pledged Pi Kappa Alpha and been anything but out of the closet, but he made no apologies for the fact that he had a weakness for entertainment news. His minor was voice.
It was that lilting alto I caught wind of as I crawled to shore after my swim. My body went rigid, as if I’d been struck by an oar. Was that “hey” for me? The waves smacked my back side. Slimy rocks sucked at hands and knees. Denim rubbed in weird places. It took probably ten separate steps, squats, and little kicks to exit the ocean and drag myself to my feet, like a Russian dance in reverse. Trying to save face, I treated each move like a contemplative yoga pose. It didn’t help that the pebble beach hurt my overly sensitive feet. When I made it to the little pile of rocks Tyler was lazily building at the lip of the tide, he wedged himself up on an elbow, narrowed his pretty brown eyes, and asked if he could ask me a random question: Was I limping?
Jesus, this again. With a sinking feeling, I realized I’d inadvertently signed myself up for a six-week crash course in my least favorite conversation.
It was a compliment, being asked, I reminded myself. It meant Tyler thought I might have twisted an ankle or tweaked my back or been attacked by a stray dog. Something might have happened on the plane ride over, like Nick had imagined.
“I walk with a limp,” I said, trying to sound breezy.
“That’s what Nick said. I was just checking.”
I could try for over-jazzed, explain about surgeries, roll up my soaking jeans even more to show off my Achilles tendon scar, or I could just say what I felt for once. “Nick can go fuck himself.”
The words escaped me before I had time to consider their repercussions. Tyler rendered his verdict with a loud ha. “That’s what I said.” Next thing I knew he was shouting down the beach. “Did you hear that Nick? Go fuck yourself!” Other kids in our program picked up the call. Christina jumped on her boyfriend’s broad, pasty shoulders in the sparkling surf and repeated the phrase for his benefit. Playing the comic, Nick slapped himself with salt water, scrubbed his face, and flopped back onto a baby wave. “Fuck me!”
Tyler and I couldn’t help but smile at each other. He dropped down to his towel with a moan that sounded genuinely exhausted. It was the lifeguard in him, always making sure everyone was OK.
I’d come to Croatia to try to salvage my college experience. After an initial dash of exuberance at telling the world I was gay, I’d found no one cared. It was like the emergence of Chicagoland’s cicadas every seventeen years: anticipation and then mild disgust and indifference.
My first full year out of the closet was so lonely it was almost funny. I’d somehow managed to become a rising junior without making a single friend. This is a real achievement considering that I lived among thousands of nice-enough kids on campus in Evanston. It didn’t matter what courses I took or how many classmates I friended online. I never had anything to do but go to the gym on Saturday night.
It was no mystery why I was floundering. Coming out had made me more self-conscious about my leg. Studious to a fault and always solo, I was too formal for my peers, too paranoid about preserving my dignity to let my guard down. Good manners felt like the only thing I could trust. With girls out of the way, it was time to get physical and I couldn’t so much as walk beside someone. My footfalls made potential mates turn in terror at me, the campus Igor. My ass was writing checks my leg couldn’t cash, or maybe it was the reverse. My early years in the closet could be characterized by an obsession with AIDS; coming out brought a different horseman of the apocalypse, this one riding in wearing distressed cargo shorts and flip-flops. To call him “body image” would be too banal. Instead, let’s refer to him as Abercrombie &/or Fitch.
My diet of gay books and movies, my classes on Shakespeare’s comedies, Greek mythology, human sexuality—they only reinforced the idea that gay boys were preppy fuck machines, cruising the world for D. Sometimes these guys were the embodiment of physical perfection à la Brad Pitt in Troy (I was fresh off an English Department award for a poem about Patroclus, Achilles’ lover), and sometimes they were just regular human-gorgeous like the guys jumping on the bed to George Michael’s “Faith” in The Rules of Attraction. Gays may get sad, may even hurt themselves, but never because there was anything wrong with their smoking bodies.
