His homophobia survived intact through a good part of college—Stockton State in the early eighties was no hotbed of progressive thinking—until he met Scott D’Alerio. This was in the spring of his junior year, at a time when Tim had stopped going to classes and pretty much resigned himself to flunking out. Scott was his neighbor, a stoner goofball with long hair and a mellow personality; he wore a black watch cap indoors and out, twelve months a year, and hosted a late-night jazz fusion show on the college radio station. They ran into each other all the time around the apartment complex—Scott seemed to have as few academic obligations as Tim—and gradually fell into the habit of hanging out together in the afternoons, smoking dope and listening to music at Scott’s place.
One day, out of the blue, Scott put his hand on Tim’s leg and asked if he could suck him off. Tim sat up in stoned bewilderment—he’d been sprawled on the couch, contemplating the monstrous genius of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—his mind lagging a second or two behind the action.
“Dude,” he spluttered. “What did you just say?”
Scott was kneeling on the rug, gazing up at Tim, his face bold and vulnerable at the same time.
“I asked if I could suck you off.”
A dopey, one-syllable laugh escaped from Tim’s mouth. “That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking,” Scott assured him. He had these long pretty eyelashes that Tim had never noticed before. “Nobody else has to know.”
“You’re wasted. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“It’s just a blowjob,” Scott replied, in a weirdly peevish tone. “Just close your eyes and pretend I’m a girl.”
Tim grabbed his weed and rolling papers off the coffee table and stood up.
“Dude,” he said. “I better go. You’re freaking me out.”
“Oh shit.” Scott clapped his hand against his forehead and started moaning. “Fuck. I’m really sorry.”
Tim took a couple of uncertain steps toward the door.
“Don’t go,” Scott called after him.
“I think I better,” Tim replied.
“Come on,” Scott pleaded. “Don’t do this to me.”
Tim wasn’t sure what made him turn around. Maybe the shakiness in Scott’s voice. Maybe just an unwillingness to be the kind of person who walks out on a friend when he’s begging you to stay.
“Please.” Scott sounded like he was on the verge of tears. “I really didn’t mean to offend you.”
“It’s okay,” Tim told him. “I’m not offended.”
He was surprised to hear himself say this, and even more surprised to realize it was true. He was shocked and embarrassed for both of them, but he wasn’t angry.
“It’s just—” Scott stood up. He tried to smile but it didn’t really work. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot. Like all the time. Sometimes, I don’t know, sometimes I think I’m in love with you.”
“I didn’t even know you were gay.”
“I don’t wanna be,” Scott assured him. “I just fucking am.”
They went into the kitchen, drank a couple of beers, and talked for a long time. Scott said he’d known the truth about himself since he was a little kid, though he’d resisted it as best he could. He’d even had a couple of girlfriends in high school, but it was all for show, like acting in a play. He said he’d never had a real boyfriend, but that he went to bars sometimes, places where straight-looking college guys were pretty popular. When Tim finally left, they assured each other that everything was cool between them, that they were still friends, and that they’d go on as if the whole episode had never happened.
It didn’t work out that way, of course. They tried hanging out a handful of times after that, but there was always a thick cloud of awkwardness following them around, a troubling new set of possibilities in the air. In the past they’d sat together for long periods of time without talking, content to be stoned and grooving on the music—at least that was how it seemed to Tim—but now they felt compelled to break the silence with lame stabs at conversation, each one trying to make sure that the other was okay, wasn’t feeling self-conscious or uncomfortable. After a while, it just got easier to make excuses. Tim started playing a lot of ultimate Frisbee; Scott suddenly had a shitload to do at the radio station.
Tim dropped out of school at the end of the summer, and never saw Scott again. But he thought about him a lot in the years that followed, whenever anyone made a fag joke or said that gay men deserved to get AIDS. Sometimes, if the circumstances were right, Tim would challenge the speaker, ask if he—in Tim’s experience, it was always a he—had any friends who were gay. Almost always, the guy would say no.
“Wait till you do,” Tim would tell him. “That’s when you’ll realize what an asshole you used to be.”
PASTOR DENNIS normally began the sermon right after the Praise Team vacated the stage, but this morning there was some sort of holdup. After two or three minutes of staring at the empty podium, people began checking their watches and glancing around uncertainly, wondering if somebody should do something, or at least make an announcement.
The audible sigh of relief that greeted the Pastor’s sudden arrival—he came hustling down the center aisle just as Youth Pastor Eddie was shuffling onto the stage with a grim expression on his face—quickly dissolved into murmurs of confusion and concern at his disheveled appearance. Instead of the neatly pressed khakis and light blue polo shirt that had been his preaching uniform for as long as Tim had been coming to the Tabernacle, he was wearing a rumpled, ill-fitting gray suit with a torn sleeve. His striped tie was loosened and askew, his shirttail partially untucked; he could have been a businessman slinking back to his hotel after a night of hard carousing in a strange city. The fact that he was limping slightly and cupping his hand over his right eye only added another layer of mystery to an already unsettling situation.
The two Pastors embraced on the stage. After a brief whispered conversation, Youth Pastor Eddie retreated to his seat, while Pastor Dennis took his accustomed place behind the microphone.
“You’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t get to sleep last night. I was at a wedding, and there was a lot of drinking going on.”
He took his hand away from his eye, revealing a hideous green-and-purple shiner in full bloom.
“As you might suspect, this was not a Christian wedding. Oh, don’t get me wrong—if you asked the people there if they believed in Jesus, most of them would have said yes. But you and I understand that they only say that because they don’t know Jesus, not like we do. In fact, they wouldn’t recognize our Lord if he rang their doorbell, wearing his dazzling white robes—you know, the clothes the Gospel of Mark describes as being ‘whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.’ He could introduce himself as the Son of God, and explain that He’d died for their sins, and these Christians would just slam the door in His face and go right back to watching Desperate Housewives.
“So what was I doing there, you might ask? The easy answer is that I had no choice. The bride was my wife’s cousin, and she’d asked Emily to be one of her bridesmaids. So I went to the wedding with my wife, because we were invited. But the better answer is that I belonged there, among those drunken fools and faithless believers. This is exactly what Jesus told the Pharisees when they demanded to know why a holy man would stoop to break bread with sinners: ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.’
“Just so you understand the situation, I should explain that the wedding party got to sit at a big long table in the front of the banquet hall. That’s where Emily was, which meant I was flying solo. It turned out there were a fair number of unattached men at the wedding, enough that we actually got assigned a table of our own, stuck way in the back of the hall, by the kitchen. The stag table, that’s what the guys were calling it.
“My tablemates were just regular guys—one was an electrician, another sold cell phones, a couple worked with computers. All they really had in common was that they all l
iked sports and they all had come to the wedding with the goal of getting as drunk as possible. And I’ll tell you what, they succeeded. By the time dinner was served, a couple of my companions were already pretty intoxicated, and the others were well on their way. So maybe it’s not too surprising that they started discussing strip clubs right there at the wedding reception, though I have to admit I was taken aback, not having realized that this was an acceptable subject for conversation at the dinner table. Nobody seemed to think there was anything shameful about it—far from it. My tablemates weren’t ashamed! They were proud of themselves! They were so macho, so sophisticated, such men of the world!
“You wouldn’t think it could get much worse than that, right? But there was this one loudmouth at the table—Jay was his name—who couldn’t stop talking about Jenna Jameson. Now it’s my hope that most of you have never even heard of Jenna Jameson, and if that’s the case, I’m sorry to be the one bringing her to your attention. Suffice it to say that Jenna Jameson is the biggest whore in the world, and that she gets paid very well for her services. And this pathetic man couldn’t shut up about her. ‘I love Jenna,’ he said. ‘She’s the only girl for me.’
“Now, you can imagine how I felt about this vile nonsense, but I held my tongue, for as Jesus said, ‘I did not come to judge the world.’
But Jay must have sensed that I was withholding myself from the conversation, and it made him nervous. After a while, he turned to me, and said, ‘So, uh, Denny, you a big Jenna fan?’
“I told Jay I was happily married to a flesh-and-blood woman, and that I loved her with all my heart. ‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘What possible use could I have for a pig like Jenna Jameson?’
“Well, the other guys seemed to think this was hilarious, as if it were a sissy thing for a man to say he loved his wife more than some piece of trash from a dirty movie. ‘Who is this jerk?’ one of them asked another. I took the opportunity to tell them that I was a man of God, and that I preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen. And these idiots laughed even louder. Except for one thing. I noticed that Jay wasn’t laughing. He was staring at me with this angry, wounded expression, like I’d just insulted him.
“After dinner the dancing started up, and I would have been more than happy to shake the dust of that wedding off my feet. But I sat tight and bided my time. And when Jay got up to go to the men’s room, I followed him in. When he was in no position to run away, I stepped up beside him, and said, ‘Jenna Jameson doesn’t love you, but I know someone who does.’
“Jay told me he was in no mood for my Christian garbage, though, believe me, he used a stronger word than garbage. He even went so far as to suggest that I was gay. Can you imagine?”
Pastor Dennis paused, allowing the absurdity of this charge to sink in with the congregation. Tim couldn’t help chuckling, along with several other people around him.
“I assured him there was not a homosexual bone in my body,” the Pastor continued, “and that if there was, I wouldn’t hesitate to pluck it out, as the Lord commands. But he didn’t believe me. ‘If you’re not gay,’ he said, ‘why did you follow me into the men’s room?’
“‘Because I care about you,’ I told him. ‘Because I don’t want you to burn in hell.’
“He didn’t like that one bit, and I can’t say I blame him. His voice got all whiny, like I’d hurt his feelings. ‘Why would you say something like that? Here I am at my friend’s wedding, minding my own business, and you come into the bathroom to tell me that I’m going to hell? It’s just rude, that’s what it is.’
“‘I only say it because it’s true,’ I explained. ‘And because I have some good news for you.’
“He walked away from me, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. I followed him to the sink. ‘I can see you’re in pain,’ I told him. ‘You hate yourself, and you hate your life. But it doesn’t have to be this way.’
“Well, Jay lost his temper. He grabbed me by the shirt and slammed me up against the wall. ‘I’ll tell you who’s gonna be in pain,’ he said.
“I told him that hell was a place of eternal torment. ‘Think about that,’ I said. ‘The fire never goes out. You will just suffer and suffer and suffer.’ He screamed at me to shut up. I told him that the worst day of his life would be a picnic compared to one second in the lake of fire. And that’s when he hit me.”
Pastor Dennis reached up, gently probing the lurid flesh around his eye.
“It was a pretty good shot, too, definitely the best punch I’ve taken since I’ve started spreading the Word of God. But I’ll say this for Jay, he felt terrible about what he’d done. Before I could even offer to let him hit me again, he started apologizing. I told him that it was okay, that people who loved Jesus had been beaten and cursed and spit upon for two thousand years, and that we welcomed the punishment. And I quoted: ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Jay got a bag of ice for me from the kitchen, and we went outside and had a good long talk. I told him about my life, and he told me about his. We got to know each other pretty well. And when the sun rose this morning, we were on our knees in the empty parking lot of the Pinehurst Manor.
That’s why I was a little late for our meeting today. And that’s why I stand before you right now, and say, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep.’”
Pastor Dennis peered out at the worshippers.
“Jay, my friend, will you come up here?”
Tim turned, along with the rest of the congregation, and saw a prematurely balding guy in a suit as rumpled as the Pastor’s rise from a chair in the back row. Jay was younger than Tim had pictured him, in his late twenties at the most, a broad-shouldered ex-jock with a weak chin and a big belly. It was easy to imagine him sprawled on a couch in his boxers, staring slack-jawed at Jenna Jameson.
Tears were streaming down his cheeks as he made his way toward the altar, but he was smiling like a bride, nodding and saying thanks to all the well-wishers who were reaching out and touching him as he passed, offering their congratulations. Tim recognized the complicated emotion on his face. It was joy, the sudden knowledge that you have a chance to start over and do better, to salvage some hope and meaning from a life you thought you’d screwed up beyond repair. He leaned into the aisle and held out his hand so Jay could high-five him as he passed.
PART THREE
Coach Tim’s God
So Be It
LIKE ANY SEX EDUCATOR WORTH HER SALT, RUTH WAS A BIG FAN of latex condoms. They were cheap, effective, easy to use, and widely available. In terms of the misery they’d spared humanity over the years—the unwanted pregnancies, the horrible diseases, the disrupted young lives—she would have happily placed the humble rubber right up there beside antibiotics and childhood vaccines in the pantheon of Public Health Marvels of the Modern World. For the average high-school student, moreover, condoms were birth control—there was really no viable alternative. Ruth used to joke, in simpler times, that the entire ninth-grade Sex Ed curriculum could be reduced to three words: Condoms, Condoms, Condoms!
Which was why it was so galling to be “teaching” today’s prepackaged lesson, whose misleading and dangerous title she’d scribbled on the blackboard at the beginning of class with a shaky, self-loathing hand: “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SAFE SEX.” Well, of course there wasn’t, not if you defined safety as the impossibility of anything bad ever happening to anyone. There was no such thing as risk-free automobile travel, either, but we didn’t teach our kids to stay out of cars. We taught them defensive driving skills and told them a million times to wear their seat belts, because driving was an important part of life, and everyone needed to learn how to do it as safely as possible.
“The lesson plan calls for another role-playing exercise,” Ruth announced. “Any volunteers?”
To no one’s surprise, Dan Hayes’s and Courtney Brenner’s hands shot into the air. The class had done four of these skits in the
past week, and Dan and Courtney had played the young lovers in all of them.
“How about someone new? Someone who hasn’t had a chance yet?”
Ruth wasn’t optimistic about this request; she had learned long ago that role playing and Sex Education didn’t mix that well. Most teenagers were hesitant to get up in front of their peers and enact scenarios that were either painfully close to their real lives or even more painfully distant. The ones who enjoyed it tended to be experienced thespians like Dan or shameless exhibitionists like Courtney.
“Come on, guys. This is a class. We all need to participate.” Ruth let several seconds go by, but no one took the bait. “All right, I guess it’s time for another episode of the Dan and Courtney Show.”
The two stars rose from their seats and headed to the front of the room, happily acknowledging the applause of their classmates, which, for the most part, wasn’t meant sarcastically. Aside from being thankful to Dan and Courtney for letting the rest of them off the hook, the other kids seemed genuinely entertained by their performances, and Ruth could at least see why they felt this way, even if she didn’t completely share the sentiment. As annoying as they could be, Dan and Courtney did have an odd, counterintuitive chemistry, and they threw themselves into their roles with an enthusiasm and lack of self-consciousness that was highly unusual in high-school freshmen.