Excerpt Three from Becoming Real:

 

Hello, all! The book club this month is featuring my collection of coming out stories, Becoming Real. I will be live to chat on the 31^st, but for those of you who may not know what to expect from the work, I think I will post a few sample excepts. These are a personal sampling, and just meant to give you the flavor of the seven short stories through the lens of some of my favorite moments.

 

Please enjoy, and please leave comments if you have any.

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

From The Willmore Pizza:

 

Nick smiled. "Oh Yeah?"

 

The bartender shot a flustered hand, standing upright. "What, are you jokin', he's Hot for you Honey – and look at him!" He made a falsely high kind of grunt. "He's gorgeous!"

 

Nick glanced over to where the shaven man had looked and saw a pair of eyes look away from him. Feigning apathy, Nick said with pursed lips, "Yeah, not bad."

 

"Well Honey…" the man's hands gripped his hips "…if he looked at me like that, I can tell you, I wouldn't – " the bartender paused, a shadow moved over his bright countenance. "Who am I foolin'? He'd never look at me the way he does you." Then earnestly added, "So, go get him, Tiger!"

 

Nick laughed, and the entire second-floor bar heard him, for he had a big laugh. "OK, mom. I'll see what I can do to get you a son-in-law." He laughed again, and infectiously, people turned their heads to catch a sight of the mouth that made it.

 

 

"You know," Nick went on in a new light, a happier one. "You're really different from the boys I usually have to talk to around here."

 

Josh said, "I know, I've heard that before, and somehow I think people tell me things they'd never tell another person."

 

"That's not exactly what I mean. I mean, most guys say…" he mimicked a dimwitted caveman, with a lisp "…Dah…Let's fuck!"

 

Josh chuckled. He looked into the popcorn bowl, at the kernel he had been holding for the last few minutes, stymied to set it down, or to do something with it. It seemed so far away, yet so near.

 

Nick reached out to place his large hand around Josh's forearm as it rested on the table. He so wished Josh would speak to him; say something real, just one real goddamn real thing to him. He whispered: "What's up?"

 

Josh took the hand resting on his arm, and pulled Nick halfway across the table. With his other hand he tugged on the leather-clad shoulder and bent Nick's ear to his lips. Josh spoke as if to himself, "God, you're so beautiful – can we just get out of here?"

 

 

The glass-fronted pizza shop on Hampton Avenue was pick-up/delivery only; no tables. The whole operation was open to the street via continuous, floor-to-ceiling, side-to-side windows. On their side, the sidewalk; on the other were the ovens, kitchen, counter and waiting area. As Nick opened the door with a broad smile, and a grand hand gesture, he caught sight of Josh's eyes scanning the several teenage boys in the waiting area. Nick puzzled a moment why their presence seemed to instantly put his companion on guard.

 

Inside the shop, Nick rubbed his hands together and surveyed the surroundings and the five boys who eyed him and Josh with hostile apathy. Some were sitting, a couple leaning; all the conversation stopped the moment they saw Josh. One boy, a bit more suave than his buddies, leaned against the wall with a foot propped behind his back. He had long dark hair, half hidden by a knit cap on his head, dark soul-searching eyes, and a puckered mouth that made little indiscreet noises as he shifted a plastic straw from side to side. Nick could instantly tell, the other boys looked up to this one. In some way he was the leader, and the example to their image of how a seventeen-year-old sophisticate should model himself. 'Yes,' Nick thought to himself 'a teenage idol, ripe for the picking.' He smiled and nodded at the leader, who shifted his straw and nodded back, much to the surprise of the other boys.

 

 

"We're going to eat in a park?"

 

"Yeah, why not? It's nice there. They've got a lake or pond or whatever, and nobody goes there this time of night. And, they've got ducks."

 

Willmore Park is a little over a hundred acres, spreading itself along a curving riverbank, and topographically diverse. A hollow meanders along its eastern side housing a lake. Across the narrow part of the lake is a modernist footbridge in a low concrete arch and stylish handrails. Rising to the west of the water is a hill crowned with a red-roofed picnic pavilion. Here barbeque grills await the ever-elusive perfect summer's day.

 

 

Suddenly Nick's hands came around under Josh's shit to his chest. He pushed him back. Josh blinked. The droopy eyes before him had never seemed as lovely, the lips that Nick licked, so appealing. Nick's visage grew oddly determined. He looked to the right, then to the left. Holding Josh's gaze, his hands reached down to Josh's fly. As soon as he grabbed onto the zipper, Josh stepped back, out of his reach. Josh tried to control his voice. "No. Not here…"

 

Nick looked stricken, like he'd made some unforgivable mistake. His surprise raised his brows into questions marks, then returned them to relax into sadness. Nick threw his arms over Josh's shoulders, and he felt Josh hold on to him.

 

Onto Josh's neck, Nick's breaths became choppy. Josh heard and felt the heavy voice come from the face he could not watch, "Oh God, I'll never see you again in my life…"

 

Josh pushed on Nick's chest so he could see him. "What made you say that?"

 

Nick sighed, a lighter look fell over him, the ends of his mouth flickered. "You're so beautiful – you don’t even know…"

 

"It's OK." Josh took him in his arms again; rocked him. "We have all the time in the world."

 

 

 

From In Six Hours:

 

Josh sat in the poolroom on the second floor of Blossom's. It was cracking on eleven, and most people had wandered down to the dance floor, or to other clubs. There were about eight guys left in this room with the four pool tables, but only the second table from him had a game on. There was something about the average-built guy with the light hair that worried Josh. It was an odd feeling, one he'd never had before, but it was almost uncontrollably strong. He felt he knew this guy. Not like they'd shaken hands at some point in time, but like he knew the man's deepest secrets; like he had lived a life with him. He shook his head: 'nonsense,' he thought, and stuck his hand in the popcorn bowl.

 

 

Sam pursed his lips, his fair hair shaking in the light from the streetlight outside. "I'd probably remember…" he stood up "…join us, if you want," he said, and walked away.

 

Joshua watching his retreating form, thought he was watching a corpse slip below the waves. Such felt the goodbye to one he had barely ever met. He thought he should go, not that home had any appeal to him, but he needed to get away from everything real for a while, and forget, maybe especially forget that he was 'gay.'

 

At the pool table, Billy made a couple of easy balls seem pained, missing a third as he examined the near tear-filled eyes of Josh, so close and seemingly so far way. He sank the cue ball.

 

Billy slunk back onto the stool across the narrow table. "Why do you like him so much?"

 

Josh thought he was going to cry, but he sighed instead. "I have no idea. In one word: connection."

 

Billy's grew suspicious, scanning Josh's features, but he saw only sincerity there. "Yes, he's very handsome."

 

"Handsome, yes, but if he looked like Donald Duck, I'd still feel the same way – I'm sorry! I don’t know what I'm saying…"

 

"Sounds like the truth to me."

 

"Yeah. It's the truth."

 

 

Sitting again, and Sam up for the second round, Josh continued with his last question for Billy. "Are you out to your parents?"

 

"I told them when I was seventeen."

 

"What happened?"

 

Billy smiled inanely. "They threw me out. Out of their house, and told me to do whatever I wanted as long as it wasn't near them." Billy drew in a sigh and tried to laugh it out. "I can still see it. There I was standing in the front yard. All the lights were on in the house and I watched my mom stomp from room to room, cursing at the top of her lungs. Then she went to my room, slammed my window open so she could throw my stuff out into the yard. And there I was trying to catch the incoming, pulling my clothes out of the dirt and praying she'd throw a suitcase, all the while, I was the one worrying what the neighbors would think. Fuckin' messed up." Billy shook his head from side to side. "My whole life had just ended, because I finally got the guts, for once in my life, to be honest, and the only thing I could think about was what other people thought."

 

'One step up,' Josh thought. 'Two steps down.'

 

 

Not many cemeteries are located on the top of a hill, but Josh knew of one. The ancient cut of the river gouged out the soft sandstone into tremendous bluffs that once served as the riverbanks carrying the melted Ice Age to the sea. At certain vantages, vistas cleared of trees opened up and looked down on the endless lights of city and suburbs. On nights like this with a new moon, the sky, and the dark landscape below the level of the ground, competed for the fairest show of sparkle and wonder. Josh's car was like a brooding lifeboat all alone on the South Pacific; the sky reflecting the water, the water the sky, and in the mode of conveyance the lowly survivors watched helplessly, and were not quite sure which way was truly up – the abyss above, or the one below.

 

Billy and Josh lay on top of a mover's blanket spread over the hood and windshield of Josh's car. Joshua had known about this quietly spectacular spot in the County since his high school friend had showed it to him a few years ago. The car was parked at the edge of the old iron gate protecting the blessèd precinct, and by getting on the hood, they could see over all the tombstones, which with the light coming from behind, looked like murky voids. The city lights stretched to the horizon away from their wheeled lifeboat on three open sides. This late in the night, the Milky Way arced rakishly across the western end of the sky and slowly threatened to retreat, lest the sun get a chance to melt it off from the east. The air was warm, and a gentle stillness pervaded where insect song had recently ripped it into incessant rhythm. Now, only the soft conversation of the young men lilted over the nightscape.