My Best Man Read online

  I continue. “My boyfriend, Matthew …”

  When the rock-solid guy in the Texas Rangers baseball cap hears me, he looks as if he’s going to puke. When I pause to take his drink order, he looks at me in disgust and shakes his head. I keep forgetting that I’m not insulated by academia anymore, that some people in the real world won’t take a drink from a gay person.

  “Matthew was one of those phony-baloney people who majored in psychology so he wouldn’t have to deal with his own feelings. My dad’s body is barely cold, and my boyfriend doesn’t think a thing about breaking up with me. Drink, ma’am?”

  The woman declines, not because I’m gay, I think, but because she’s creeped out by talk of my dad’s dead body. “What about your momma?” Amity asks. “She’s already remarried,” I answer.

  “G’yaw, Bubba. People move fast around you! Beverage, sir?” The gentleman orders a hot Bloody Mary.

  “One spicy B.M. coming down the pike,” Amity announces as if the peanuts are working on her.

  “My mom is one of those resilient Midwest women,” I say. “Onward and upward. She wastes no time.” I hand out two Pepsis and notice that my drawer of peanuts is empty. “I need poop inducers.”

  She happily throws me two bags, I catch one, miss the other. “Gay guys can’t catch!” she yells. People turn in their seats. I’m embarrassed, but there’s something so honest about her I know she’s not trying to harass me. Somehow, I ignore the stares. We move on.

  By the time we get to the last row, I’ve poured out more of my innards than I have soda, juice, and coffee. I’ve explained that with my father gone, my boyfriend gone, and my mother’s new surname and life, I feel left behind. Lost. No family. No school peers. Nobody to hang with. The only thing I’ve edited is the existence of my brother. I just can’t stand to talk about him right now not since the reading of the will. Through it all, Amity is an extraordinary listener, as if everything I’m saying is absolutely fascinating, She has an instinct for when to be quiet and when to make a joke, and even though I’m a little needy now, she’s cool enough not to make me feel like some pathetic washout. I’m grateful.

  Near the end of the flight, I stand with Amity and Jacqueline in the rear galley. Amity breaks open a bottle of champagne she’s taken from first class and pours rations into three Styrofoam cups …… so no passenger will know what we’re drinking and we toast to “New friends!” as Amity warmly puts it. The flight attendant at

  the front of the plane, in first class, ignores us. “How come she hasn’t come back here?” I ask.

  “She’s one of those girls who makes the mistake of thinking that, because she’s working first class, she is first class. Misguided.”

  I laugh. We down the champagne. I learn that Jacqueline and Amity are roommates, both twenty-six years old. They share a house near the DCU campus in Dallas. They each give me their phone numbers to their separate phone lines, and I tell them that I’m in the process of moving and will call with my new number. The truth is, Matthew ended it so quickly that I have nothing set up.

  When the flight lands, I politely say my goodbyes at the front door and tell Amity it was nice to meet her. She agrees, then yells, ” “Bye, Harry! Love your guts!” Once I’m off the jet I decide to wait until Amity deplanes and ask her if she’d like to go for a late lunch. I’m standing there, in the gate area, when she exits the jetway, and just as I’m ready to approach her, this really hot guy in a khaki-colored business suit takes her into his arms and kisses her lips and then her neck. He picks up her luggage, and they stroll away while the loudspeaker announces the departure of a flight bound for Memphis.

  Good for her.

  “Hey,” a guy says. He’s also in a suit, also sexy. I recognize him from the flight. He’s very tall and lanky with sandy hair and an almost blond beard that is trimmed close to his face. “Sorry to hear about your boyfriend.” He must have been listening to our in-flight conversation. “Want to go for a beer?”

  Good for me.

  t’s 12:01 A.M.” and the pain is excruciating. I’m doubled over, riding in the passenger seat of the lanky guy’s car. After ten minutes that seem like twelve hours, we turn into the circular drive of the hospital, and he helps me out of his car and through the electronic doors. The emergency room is incredibly bright, and my agony is highlighted by the nuclear glow of a thousand fluorescent bulbs. As I limp toward the admitting desk, while leaning on the arm of this guy whose name I can’t remember, I notice a woman with a bloody broken nose who’s waiting in a chair beside a man. His cologne smells like Wife Beater he’s even wearing the white tank top underwear shirt. There’s also a guy who’s having some kind of allergic reaction; his head is redder than a ripe tomato while the rest of him is as white as a marshmallow. He uses a single fingernail to scratch his nose. And in the corner, a couple hold a sleeping child in both their arms and rock it back and forth as if it were in a hammock. Add the Duran Duran song playing in Muzak, the out-of-date National Geographies strewn about the room, and the noisy motor of the drinking fountain, and this place is a real party.

  Our hostess, the woman at the admitting desk, looks like Divine’ s stunt double, with her big perfect hair and cat-eyed makeup. Her

  motionless forearms lay on the table like hunks of yeasty, rising bread dough. But her fingertips fly around the keyboard like manic hummingbirds. She looks like a huge thrift store mannequin that’s retaining water. I never want to come to one of her parties again.

  “Age?” she asks, not looking at me. “Twenty-three.” “Height?” “Five-eight.” “Weight?”

  “One forty-two.”

  Eyes brown, hair brown, shit brown. Come on, lady, can’t you see I’m dying here? All you people care about is whether a guy has insurance anyway.

  “What is your complaint?” she asks.

  The pain strikes my lower abdomen like lightning. “Oh, my God!” I shriek, falling over. I can feel something explode inside of me.

  “I’ve got to go,” my new former friend nervously tells the admitting gal. He beelines for the door.

  “Wait!” she calls. “Are you family? Friend?”

  “He’s got an insurance card in his wallet. I checked!” the guy yells over his shoulder before slipping out and into the night.

  What’ swrong? Why is he fleeing the scene? Did he do something to me? We just had good old normal sex, as any two guys would. But now the fireworks are in my stomach, and they’re burning me up. As I start to pass out, I see a nurse and an intern running toward me.

  When I wake, I hear a TV blaring the All My Children theme and see a curtain between me and my roommate. I discern I have a roommate because the scrim like curtain makes silhouettes of the bloated, large-headed creatures gathered round his bed, and when they raise their fat hands to gesture, or eat fried chicken (I can smell it), their hands appear to be webbed. When they move slightly and allow me a view of the silhouetted patient, all I see is a large stomach on a slab. The visitors standing at the foot of his bed, beyond the curtain, all have big, wide, matching bottoms, so I figure they’re all cursed with the same genetics and must be the poor sap’s family flesh from the lake bed.

  One of the creatury shadows speaks. “That little gal is evil.” Ayvil.

  “She sure is.” She shore iyuz.

  The biggest shadow creature, the one who looks as if she’s got a spark arrester on her head, says, “Erica ain’t dumb. She’ll catch on.” Ercka aint doom. Shill kich own.

  A voice escapes one of the butts at the end of the bed. “That guy ever wake up over there?”

  The tremendous buttocks turns, I assume so that whatever is connected to them can look at me. Oh, God, get me out of here. I close my eyes, pretend I’m asleep. I’ve seen the bumper stickers stuck to tailgates of those dusty pickup tracks the moment I crossed over the state line: SECEDE! and us out OF TEXAS! I just don’t take the citizens of the Lone Star State to be the kind of folksy neighbors who will shower goodwill upon a Yankee homosexual who
is probably hospitalized because he got knocked up by someone who wasn’t his own cousin. At best, they make jokes, the way they do about blacks and Mexicans. Nigras and Mescuns. And at worst, they’ll throw stones, read me scripture, and make me watch PTL with Jim and Tammy Faye.

  I keep my eyes closed for at least another hour. All My Children ends; One Life to Live begins. A nurse comes in to check me, and even though I’m starving, I pretend to be asleep. Finally, the puffy lake people become bored with the schizophrenic Nicki/Vicki story line on One Life, so they decide to wallow back to the estuary.

  I ring for the nurse. She appears. Nurse Carbonada. She’s a hundred years old and smells like broiled meat. “How are you feeling?” she wheezes.

  “Fine.”

  “Your girlfriend was in here this morning. Wants you to know she’ll be back this afternoon.”

  My girlfriend? That guy who brought me here? Gee, Nurse

  Carbonada is awfully hip. “Hungry?” she asks. “I guess. A little.”

  “You’re restricted. I’ll bring in what I can.”

  Before I can ask her what happened last night, she’s gone. There’ snothing lonelier than being in this hospital by myself and not knowing what circumstances brought me here. Strangely enough, I have the immediate longing for family. But who can I call? My father? Moot point. Although maybe he’s already here, watching all this from above. I can’t help but wonder if he loves me now, if he understands me in a way he couldn’t before. Is he some divine spirit who’s stopped passing judgment? He was good to me when I was a kid. Never physically affectionate, but always interactive. Showed me how to toss the tennis ball while serving. Bought me the best golf clubs and demonstrated the right wrist action when chipping onto the green. Taught me everything he’d learned of horses as a boy and bought me a wonderful gelding and schooled me into a knowledgeable equestrian, counseling me on form and helping me train my horse and enter horse shows.

  I’ll never forget the night everything changed. We were seated around the dining room table, eating dinner, my mother rambling on about “those jakey Carters” and how the White House had become a “hillbilly retreat for poorly dressed beer drinkers” when I said I had something to say. And my mother joked, “If you’re going to announce that you’re dating Amy Carter, I forbid you to speak.” Which was absurd because Amy Carter was ten years old at the time, but I saw my opportunity for the perfect segue.

  “No,” I said, “I’d rather date her brother Chip.” It wasn’t true. Chip was kind of goofy looking and his jeans fit too low on his ass for him to be gay, but it got the point across.

  My mother knew the moment I said it that I was serious, and she quickly retracted. “With a little makeup, that Amy could be a lovely girl.”

  But it was too late. And with only a little further discussion, in which Winston was quite silent, my father as well, I explained that I was gay and I didn’t see any sense in lying about it and politely declined to see the therapist my mother recommended who’d done wonders convincing the Westholt’s daughter that she didn’t want to be a longshoreman and hopefully life would go on.

  And just when I thought I would get out of my confession alive, my father rose from his chair and slammed his fist down so hard he broke two wineglasses, and decreed, “We are the Fords, goddamn it. The Kansas Fords! We’re the most powerful oil-and-gas family, not to mention majority landholders, in the state of Kansas, and we will not be taken down by teenage faggotry,” which I thought was a magnificent use of the word, and he assured me that, if I was going to live a gay life, then I would live a miserable anonymous gay life. And so I did. I stayed in my room most of the time and wrote anonymous poetry and daydreamed about my anonymous invented relationship with the tennis player Guillermo Vilas.

  I could call my brother. But do I really want to speak to him? Forget it. He’s so fucking smug since the reading of the will. It was just like when I was ten years old and he was twelve and my father called a family meeting to inform me that I would not be allowed to attend summer camp in Colorado, as Winston would, since I’d thoughtlessly ruined my mother’s brand-new white Berber carpet in the living room with my greasy cowboy boots. I’ll never know how he crammed his feet into them or where he got the grease that was smeared into the soles. I only know that he trudged around the whole room until it was completely defiled, then cheerfully turned me in for the crime. He sat there, the chosen son, the good son, barely containing himself, as Father decreed I would stay home for the summer, not even allowed to ride my beloved horse. And

  he sat there, almost fourteen years later, barely containing himself, as our family attorney, Sam Johnson, spelled it out, the one condition upon which my financial future depends. I think Winston knew all along .I think Dad told him about the stipulation before he died that he stood to inherit my part of the trust if I’m not married by my twenty-fourth birthday. “Legally married,” Sam Johnson stressed, looking at me, “for a continuing period of ten years.” Winston knows I’ve been up on my soapbox since the age of seventeen, and that I’m too openly gay to sell out for the money, even if my little share is multiple millions. He’ spractically salivating at the thought of autumn ushering in my next birthday. I don’t want to speak to him. Now or then.

  My mother. I’ll call my mom and let her know I’m hospitalized, and when she asks me what for, I’ll just make something up. As long as I keep it light and breezy she won’t care. A wart removal. Liposuction. In-patient pedicure. Something she can relate to. She’s great at cheering people up under those circumstances. I turn to grab the phone and notice the flowers at my side. Somebody knows I’m here. As I twist and lift the card from the bouquet, my lower abdomen stings. I reach down and feel the stitches. I lift the sheets and look at the scar; it’s big enough to call five inches. God, what happened to me? The note reads:

  Darling,

  Out with the old, and in with the newt So happy you’re in good hands.t Your “special nurse” assures me there’s no need to fly down, but if you say the word I’ll be there.t

  Love,

  Morn

  Nurse Carbonada told my mother not to come? What the hell is going on?

  “Hey, Bubba!” Amity sings, gliding into my room, flowers in one hand, a bottle of champagne in the other.

  “Amity,” I say, surprised. “How did you know I was here?” She smiles, setting the stargazers down and fluffing them out. She puts the bottle of champagne next to them and turns the label toward me. It’s decent bubbly, too decent for a hospital occasion. She sits on the edge of the bed, pulls my paycheck out of her cleavage, and drops it into my hands. “Well, they say whoever brought you here kind of dumped you off. And after your appendix burst, they had to rush you into surgery.” “My appendix. So it wasn’t ” “What?”

  I look toward my roommate’ sshadow behind the curtain. “Never mind.”

  “Harry, who dropped you off here last night?”

  God, she has good instincts. She knows just where to fish. “I just met him yesterday. Some big, tall, lanky guy.”

  “Lanky? Darlin’, that’ sc ode for dick the size of a luxury sedan.” She starts laughing while smoothing out the bed covers. “For heaven’s sake, Harry, that lanky guy had nothing to do with it. It was just your little ole vermiform appendix. It doesn’t serve any purpose but to take up space in your life, live off your body, and then at the worst possible time go bad on you. There’re people like that, you know.”

  I laugh, and my stitches hurt like hell. “Shit! Don’t make me laugh.” I breathe in, exhale. “Amity, how did you find me?”

  “Well, besides your wallet and insurance card, there was the piece of paper in your pocket that had my phone number on it and Jacqueline’s too, but she wasn’t home, so they spoke to me,

  and I put them in touch with your family.”

  “My family? But “

  “Through the airline, Harry. Of course I don’t know your family, but I convinced the supervisor that you and I were good enough
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  friends that I needed to call your mother and assure her that every thing was simpatico. She’s a lovely woman, Harry. Just precious. I promised her I’d take care of you.”

  “See,” Nurse Carbonada says, shuffling into the room. “I told you she’d come back.”

  Man, life is fast. Yesterday I had an appendix; today I don’t. I have a new roommate whose family dwells in a lake. I have a prehistoric nurse who thinks Amity is my girlfriend, and no doubt my mother hopes Amity is my girlfriend, and Amity is acting like my girlfriend. I wonder where the lanky guy went.

  The nurse sets my meal tray down in front of me and leaves before she hears the guy on the other side of the curtain call, “Nurse? Nurse?”

  Amity draws back the curtain slightly, peers in, and says, “Vampira is gone, darling’. What can I do for you?”

  “Oh,” I hear the guy say nervously. “Never mind.” “Come on now,” Amity pursues. “What is it?” “No, really.”

  “This is a hospital,” she says in a motherly tone. “Don’t be shy.”

  “I need my bedpan emptied.” He chuckles uncomfortably. “No problem,” Amity chirps. She disappears behind the curtain and then reappears carefully carrying a metal bedpan out in front of her. She looks sideways at me and winks, announcing, “Peepee!” while walking into the bathroom with it. She empties it, flushes the toilet, walks past me smiling, and steps beyond the curtain to my compadre. “Fresh as a daisy,” she says. He thanks her and she returns to the bathroom to wash her hands. “Now, Harry,” she calls from the bathroom, “I have to run errands today and I may not make it back until after dinner. Are you going to be

  OK?”

  I hardly even know this girl and she’s treating me like a best friend. If it were any other time in my life I’d ask myself what’s

  wrong with this picture. But considering the state I’m in, this picture is frame able “I’ll be fine,” I answer, opening up the envelope that holds my paycheck. It’s still not enough money to get me started on this life in Dallas. And I can only imagine what the hospital bill will be.