O Hideous Monstrosity Morning

Then this guy -- I couldn't think of his name for anything -- said that I shouldn't be living with Matt, then, if I hated him so much.

Hated Matt?  I must have looked at him like he was crazy because he kind of rolled his eyes when I told him I never said that.

This guy was an old roommate of Matt's, and his name was right there, right there.  We were riding the bus and I guess I was talking about some of the things that bugged me about living with him.  His weight, his forgetfulness, his paint everywhere all the time.  But I didn't say I hated him.  I didn't use the word 'hate'.

(Something slightly geeky with an "H" ... Howard?  Harold?  Herman?)

On the walk from the bus stop to home I  thought of an answer to that, in case anybody ever asked me that question again.  I'd say, "Put it this way.  I hated what Matt became."

I was home early from school because I thought we were going to a concert together.  God knows I couldn't be sure.  He said last month he was going to buy us two tickets to a Chinese drumming band but not a word about it since.  So I skipped my evening class and hoped that he hadn't forgotten again.  And there he was sitting in his usual place on the sofa, reading with his feet under him, both knees to one said and all this flab hanging over his lap.  Ten years ago, when I was dating him, you could run your hand over his abs and count the ripples.  Of course, ten years ago he lived on coffee and cocaine, too.  But when he got off the coke, he totally let himself go.  He blimped out from like, a 30 pants waist to a 34 practically overnight.  I totally swear.  I know because I snuck into his room one day when he was at work and looked at the sizes of all his pants hanging in his closet.  I was surprised  that he was only a 34.  I had guessed he was a 40 or 42.  That made me kind of wonder if that fat guy was maybe hiding somewhere inside him.  You know, back then while he was dating me.  Creepy.  I know I'm thin and short and even skinnier now after the last episode of pneumonia, but I pride myself on never going to be with sad fat slobs.  The only reason I lived with him at all was because the two of us used to be friends and he gave me a pretty good deal on the rent.  Which I seriously need now that I'm finally going to college.

So.  I was home early.  He was plopped on the couch reading a book and I didn't look at him when I walked by.  It was a matter of principle, for some reason, that I always waiting for him to say hi first.

"Hey Berny," he said.  A polite person would ask how your day was.

"Hey," I said.

"I made you a grilled cheese sandwich.  It's on a dish in the microwave if you want it."

"Thanks.  I already ate," I said even though I hadn't.  Since moving in with him I started this kind of super-gross experiment.  I started to think that maybe eating food was the most important thing in his life, so I'd deliberately leave food around and then see how much time it would take for him to get to it.  I doubted that grilled-cheese would be long for this world.  I walked to my room.

"Your bud Aldon who thinks he's straight called," he hollered at my back.  This is why he's so fat, I thought.  He's too lazy to get up and come over and talk to a person like a civilized human being.  Even if it is his house, I think it's rude to just yell at the back of a person's head.

"Weldon," I yelled back.

"What?" he screamed.  I rolled my eyes.

"His name is Weldon.  And he IS straight," I yelled and laughed.  I know his opinion of  Weldon and my other straight guy sex partners.  How straight can they be if they have sex with men?  They just are, I say, and he ever has a smart-alec remark for that.  His eyebrows would arch up when I'd talk about all the girls Weldon sees besides me, like he didn't believe it.  Like having sex with straight guys wasn't politically correct enough.

Matt's biggest worry in life was being politically correct.  He wore the awfullest gay tee shirts.  "Gay and proud."  "Gay and out."  "I'm not gay but my boyfriend is."  There was one that he made himself that only said "GAY is YAG spelled backwards."  Nobody who laughed at it understood it, but that was his not-funny sense of humor.  And he would march or picket or demonstrate in anything gay, the stupider the better.  So I didn't toss and turn at night worrying that me sleeping with straight men wasn't politically correct enough.

I shut my bedroom door.  If he really wanted to talk to me, he'd have to get up off his big back porch and actually like, move.  Because it was important now for him to stay healthy.  He finally tested HIV positive this year.  Two years ago at an ex-cocaine addicts' Christmas party he met this unbelievably gorgeous guy Francisco, and I guess they wanted to know if he was negative so they could throw away the rubbers.  He wasn't, so that ended that little fantasy.  I've been dealing with it for nearly nine years now, so I nodded and said oh gee, sorry, when he told me. But I knew it was just a matter of time. For Matt, I mean.  As long as I've known him he was ten times more promiscuous than me.  Some of the dogs I saw him go home with, too.  I remember these different weird things he'd say all the time back then, like "As long as his attitude isn't bigger than his dick."  Like he was seriously proud of  his low, sad standards.  I'm the opposite.  I've always had high standards for the men I went out with.  I mean, I couldn't be like Matt for anything.

How Father Tam Part 8

The next day, I was working from home when Justin asked me from the living room if I'd ever known Obie to walk around shirtless in skinny jeans with a backwards wide-brim 'homeboy' cap. That's one of those questions that is like  turning a familiar corner in your hometown to suddenly find you're in a 3-D Hieronymus Bosch painting, where people's torsos are made out of half egg shells and birdmen with Elizabethan gardening hats spit-roast decapitated heads.

"Wait ... what?" was all I could say.

He called me into the living room where he was peeking out of the curtain onto the condo parking lot.

"Look," he said.  I did.

There in the distance, walking around kind of aimlessly, was Obie, thinner by about 10 pounds, holey sneakers, a wadded up black tee shirt jammed into his back pocket, carrying a large backpack, and in the company of a very thin woman who had not washed her hair in a while. His own hair had magically grown at least 2 inches since we saw him yesterday.

"It's not Obie," I said.

"Duh. Of course not. But then who is it?"

"My best guess would be either Joel, Amos, or Micah.  And since Micah is Obie's twin ..."

We watched the two crane their necks to look at addresses on the surrounding buildings and just as they spotted ours, Justin opened the door and watched them walk up.

"Can I help y'all?" Justin called.

"Maybe," the guy said.  His baritone was a few pitches deeper than Obie's.  "We're looking for a dude named Obie."

We let them in. It was Micah, Obie's identical twin and his girlfriend Sarah. I offered them coffee but they politely declined and took two very tall cans of alcohol out of the backpack, cracked them open, and started sipping on them. They gave us the long story of Obie's banishment from their home.

Apparently, their father, Ignacio, banned Obie right out of high school from his home unless he "opted out of" his homosexuality. That much we already knew.

"Nacho [Ignacio] had no idea he was gay, which goes to show you how much he cared. Like, how can a father not even know his own son? Mom and the rest of us knew ... "

"Or at least suspected." Sarah said.

"Or suspected he was," Mike said. "And I shouldn't have said nothing, but I was just so mad, and scared, that I wanted to shift his focus away from me and onto Obie. I thought sure Obie would deny it and accuse me of lying. Or somewhere deep inside my brain, I knew he wouldn't. I feel bad about that."

I felt my mouth squeeze into a tight circle.

"Said anything? What do you mean?" As usual, Justin was clueless.

"Yeah, said anything about him being queer," Mike said. "I didn't mean to. I just blurted it out." He made his voice kind of raspy, sing-songy quoting himself yelling at his father, "Yeah well. It's just weed. It could be worse. I could be queer like Obi, your little favorite, perfect son. At least I don't suck dick."

In Mike's words, Nacho's rage blossomed like a mushroom cloud. He grabbed Mike by the arm and pulled him down the stairs to where Obi and his mom were making tamales. It was a week before Christmas.

'Tell your brother what you just said, you vile little liar.' Ignacio, still held Mike by the arm and pushed him in front of Obie.

'I said you were queer. And that's worse than smoking a little weed any day. Go ahead and deny it if it's not true.'

"You outed your own brother to your homophobic father?" Justin loaded every syllable with as much angry incredulity as he could pack in there.

"Yeah. It was a shitty thing to do. But I probably wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been drunk at the time.

"Obie just sat there for a second then looked at me with so much hurt in his face I couldn't stand it. Then all he said was that it wasn't my place, that he wanted to tell Pop himself when the time was right.

Their mom tried to stop him from speaking but Obie went on. "He's right, Pop. I'm gay."

The next day Ignacio told him to leave and not to come back unless he had a girl on his arm.

Mike and Sarah sipped almost daintily on their 10:30am beer while telling the story.

"Anyway, I guess I got what was coming to me because over the next seven years, I was arrested for drunk and disorderly five times, nearly beat a guy to death, but I was drunk and tweaking. I couldn't hold a job so Nacho kicked me out too. The last couple of years we been staying with Sarah's fam in Utah, but we got kicked out there too. So now we're here in Austin, looking for work and we got some pretty bad news to tell Obie."

"Isabella died," Sarah said.

"Yeah, that's our mom. Heart attack, I think."

"Pancreatic cancer, babe." 

"Oh yeah. That too. I didn't want nobody to tell Obie in an email. I'd rather do it in person. So we're on our way back to Houston unless we can find work here in Austin. Hey y'all wouldn't mind if we crashed on your couch a few days while we're job hunting, right? I promise no hanky-panky while we're here."

"Absolutely not," Justin said.

I jumped in. "We already have 3 people living in this tiny condo, and my boyfriend has been taking up the couch lately ... while his place is getting some remodeling," I lied.

"But we will offer you both a shower," Justin said as pointedly as he could.

Sarah cleared her throat. "Where's Obie right now? Maybe we ask him for his opinion?"

Justin's eyes were sparkling and not in the good way. I cut him off before he could explode. "He's working down at Our Lady of Prompt Succor today. They're having a pre-lent fish fry."

"Lady of Prom Sucker?" Mike snorted. "That's your church's name?"

"Succor. S U C C O R. It means help in Catholicese, I'm told." Justin said.

I'm going to help