Commencement - 2. Scarred Straight

With mom out of the house for the week, I thought that I would have been happy. But being all alone just made me even more depressed! It seemed that nothing I did could make me happy. I hated feeling like shit all the time. I was losing weight even when I ate. I was waking up at night covered in sweat. I was thirsty all the time. Even when I’d drink a pitcher of water I’d still be thirsty. It sucked and it was getting worse. I felt like I was slowly dying, but that was just me being melodramatic. Of course I wasn’t dying! I wasn’t going to waste time by telling my mom about it. She would just tell me I was fine and I should just get over it. Fuck her. She was happy to run off with her brand-new husband on a weeklong getaway. She was probably getting a good wholesome Christian fucking at that very moment. I couldn’t tell Brett about it either. He would just tell me to stop complaining and cheer up.

Nobody cared.

I spent most of the time mom was away sitting in my room in my underwear watching porn and jerking off. I hadn’t showered in days, and my room smelled almost as bad as I did, like dried spooge and week-old sweat. I hadn’t talked to Brett since the wedding. I’d tried calling Emily to apologize, but she never answered the phone when I called. Oh well, fuck her too! And fuck caller id while we’re at it!

Anyway, so mom had given me two hundred dollars for the week while she was gone. I would have found a way to buy booze with it, but I couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol. Beer tasted worse than piss to me. I’d had maybe two beers in my life. I didn’t get the appeal. So instead, I was drinking Red Bull and eating way too much pizza every day. The only time I got dressed was when I pulled on a pair of pants to answer the door for the delivery guy from Donora Pizzeria. A pile of empty pizza boxes had formed in the corner of my room. It added to the overwhelming clutter of my room. What had once been piles of dirty clothes, books and papers had become such a mess that now there was just a path through the rubble from the door to my bed and from the bed to my computer. Everything else was covered in garbage up to my knees.

I thought about what Brett had said to me at the wedding. I couldn’t believe that he had suggested that I go talk to Dustin. I knew Brett was getting tired of my bullshit. It’s not like I wanted to live like a disgusting slob! I just couldn’t motivate myself to get better. Really, I had no idea where to even start! It was all so overwhelming. I felt like I was drowning in my own shit.

I hadn’t talked much with Dustin since my dad’s funeral. I was very impressed that he made it that day. He’d left his rehab to be there. He had looked so much better that day than the last time I’d seen him. His hair had grown out from the buzzcut he’d been given when he was in the hospital. My hair was half as long back then. We talked a little bit at the funeral, but it wasn’t the same. You could still feel the tension between us. Our relationship was pretty much destroyed when he discovered that I had known about him being a rent boy and not told him or tried to help him. He told me that day that he was going to move in with his sister in Pittsburgh. It was like a knife in my chest. I was sure that if he stayed around that we could work it all out and be friends again. But after that day he was gone. I’d lost my dad and my best friend in a week. Oh, we’d talked a few times since then, but never for long and never about anything important. We hadn’t talked in months when Brett told me that he was moving home. I wondered why he would want to come back to a place that had caused him so much pain. All I thought about was leaving.

I had my second meaningless ejaculation of the day while watching porn. It was all so robotic and empty, a spasm and a mess. I couldn’t even enjoy masturbation anymore. I was a living, breathing Green Day song. I grabbed the rag next to my chair that probably had enough of my semen on it to impregnate half the girls in my school and wiped up yet another load of cum from my belly and sat there naked. I continued watching the movie on my computer screen. Thrust after meaningless thrust filled the screen. The actors might as well have been jacking off. There was no passion, no intimacy. It was all so pointless, just randomly fucking each other for my entertainment. There was another pull out, another load wasted and spilled all over the bottom boy’s way-too-perfect ass. I shut it off.

I thought about taking a nap. Even though I hadn’t done anything but masturbate all morning, I was tired. I was always tired. I thought about Dustin. Brett had told me to go talk to him. That had been days ago. I wanted to go, but I didn’t. I wanted to see him and talk to him again, but I was afraid. What if he was still mad at me? Talking to him would just fuck things up.

Or worse, what if he forgave me? Would it force me to see that no matter how life sucked that there was always hope? Would it force me to change? Did I really want to stay in my dark shit-filled room jerking off and having meaningless orgasm after meaningless orgasm until my spooge rag was more cum than cloth?

“Okay, I’ll go,” I said to no one. I had to convince myself to get off the chair. I was kind of stuck to it by sweat. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. Goddamn, I looked like shit. I don’t know how I managed to lose weight after a week of sloth and gluttony, but it looked like I had. My ribs and hip bones were showing. I could almost put my hands around my waist. I had to piss, so I followed the path through the debris to the door of my room. Even the light in the hallway was too bright for me. I walked across the hall and stood at the toilet. I pointed my dick toward the water below and unleashed a dark yellow stream. It kind of hurt to piss after abusing my penis for so many days. Still naked, I walked out to the kitchen and rummaged through the refrigerator. I snatched the pitcher of water and drank about half of it right out of the pitcher. I don’t know why I was always so thirsty. It seemed no matter how much I drank it was never enough.

It was depressing to walk into the living room and not see dad’s beat up old chair. Mom hadn’t wanted to have it in her nice living room, so I claimed it and now it was buried somewhere in my room under a pile of clothes. For a while, I would just sit in it and think. It smelled like Salem cigarettes and Old Spice aftershave. Oh god, how I missed that strange mix of scents in my life! Of course, after spending a year in my room the chair had lost its aroma. Now it smelled like the rest of my shit.

The door to mom’s room had been locked since she left with Dave on their trip. I wondered why she bothered to lock it. I certainly wasn’t interested in what went on in there. It was so funny to me that she was so intent on keeping me away from Brett, and yet she and the vanilla douche had been fucking since at least January. I mean, it wasn’t difficult to figure it out. There are some noises you never want to hear coming from your mother. And yet, I’d heard those noises, and long before she was officially allowed to make them by God’s blessing. It made me shudder just thinking about it again. What a hypocrite!

Well, I wasn’t any closer to going to see Dustin than I had been in my room. I went back to my room and was tempted to sit back down and watch more porn. But I didn’t. I needed to get out of that house. I grabbed a pair of underwear off the floor and pulled them on. Who knows how long they’d been laying there? Oh well. I really should have taken a shower before getting dressed, but I didn’t want to go out with wet hair. I pulled a shirt on and a pair of dirty jeans. I found my glasses on my desk and then my last pair of clean socks, which I tugged on to my feet. I slipped my shoes on at the back door and began the long walk into the woods behind my house and up the hill toward Dustin’s house.

I was so out of shape. I had no energy. I was exhausted by the time I made it to the intersection where I could either go to Brett’s house, Dustin’s house, or the park. I had to rest for a few minutes and then take a piss before I could continue. I made the left turn onto the path that led from the top of the hill down to Dustin’s house. That path hadn’t been used in so long that it was becoming overgrown.

When I emerged from the woods I was surprised to find Dustin in his back yard at work on his old dirt bike. Dustin had been trying to get that old dirt bike of his running for as long as I’d known him. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I was impressed by how well his body had developed in the last year. He had looked absolutely emaciated the last time I’d seen him, but now he looked like he’d put on some weight and had filled out nicely. It looked like the weight he’d put on was all muscle. He was wearing an old Donora Pizzeria Pirates baseball cap turned backwards. He hadn’t noticed me when I walked out of the woods. I walked up behind him and stood there for a minute, just admiring him. Dustin had always been a lanky and awkward kid. It was impressive to see how he had finally matured into his body. To be honest, I didn’t want to stop looking at him.

“Still working on that piece of crap?” I asked.

Dustin spun around with a start. I should have known better than to surprise him from behind. He held a hammer in his hand and looked like he was ready to use it on whoever had startled him if he had to. But once he saw it was me he instantly relaxed.

“Oh, it’s you!” Dustin said, relieved. “Yeah. I brought it out of the basement this morning and started messing around with it. You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that.”

“Sorry. I’m kind of surprised to see you back here. I heard you’re staying for the school year.”

“Yeah. It was nice of my sister to let me stay with her, but I wanted to come home. If I had to stay with her any longer we’d have probably killed each other. Mom was bugging me all year to come home, and my dad moved to Cleveland for good, so I decided to come back.”

“You sure it’s a good idea to stay here? You know… Where everything happened?”

“You mean where my dad raped me and I tried to kill myself? It’s okay to say it, you know. Naming the issue helps to get control of it.”

“Well, I didn’t want to bring back any bad memories.”

“The bad memories are always there whether you mention them or not. Why let them control my life? Bad things happen to everybody, not just me. It just didn’t feel right last year being away. I felt like I was running away from everything. I couldn’t let things end that way. I wanted to come back and maybe make amends for some of the things I did. I’m tired of running.”

“Well, you’re a better man than me. If half the stuff that happened to you happened to me, I don’t think I’d be very forgiving. I wanted to kill your dad myself.”

“I know you did. But why let someone else have that kind of control over your life? I could go through the rest of my life being resentful and hating everybody who hurt me, but what would that do to them? Nothing. I’d end up all bitter and angry and it wouldn’t do a thing to hurt anybody but me. That’s no way to live. All it would do is make me miserable. I’m tired of being miserable. I have a chance to get my life back. I want to make the most of it.”

“I wish I could feel the same way as you. I’ve just been a wreck lately.”

“Yeah, no offense, but you look like crap too. You’re even whiter than me.”

“Oh, I know. I don’t want to feel this way. I can’t help it. I feel like everything is fading into darkness.”

Dustin sat down on a lawn chair. He took off his hat and laid it on his lap. His red hair looked nice. “Look at this,” he said. Then he showed me his wrists. Whiter than the rest of his flesh, I could see the faded scars which remained from his attempted suicide; Three smooth lines on each wrist that you’d only know were there if you were looking for them.

“This is what happens to somebody who refuses to get better. This is what happens when you let other people decide how you live your life. When I did this to myself, I felt nothing but emptiness and hate. I felt like I deserved to be miserable, like I deserved my pain. Some days, I still feel like I should have died, not because I wanted to, but because I deserved to. But I didn’t. I didn’t deserve what happened to me. I survived. I survived because people refused to give up on me. You wouldn’t let me die. My sister and Emily wouldn’t let me die. Reilly wouldn’t let me die. You guys carried me. I mean, you literally carried me, but you all carried me through the worst period of my life. It took me a long time to realize it and appreciate it. I can’t waste the opportunity I’ve been given to take back my life and live it to the best of my ability. I can’t let other people decide whether I get to be happy or not. And the same goes for you, Billy. It sucks that your dad died. I know how much he loved you. It’s bullshit that he’s dead and my dad is still using up perfectly good oxygen. And maybe you think it sucks even more that your mom remarried. But you have to decide what you do with your life. It’s not your parents’ life, it’s yours. Nothing that anybody else can do to you can make you live your life any way you don’t want to live.”

“You make it sound like it’s easy,” I said.

Dustin just laughed. “Easy? Dude, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do in your life! It took me a year of therapy to even start feeling like a human being again. When you saw me in that hospital all I felt was hate. I hated you. I wanted to blame you for everything that happened to me, even though it wasn’t your fault. My hatred and anger were going to destroy what was left of me. But it didn’t. You’re right, getting to a better place in your life is freaking hard. But it’s better than letting your anger destroy you, which it will. I think maybe that’s part of why I came back. I watched you self-destruct once already. Maybe I’m here to keep you from punching any more mirrors.”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I even have the strength to hurt myself at this point. I couldn’t bust a mirror if I tried. I’m too weak. I don’t want to hurt anyone or myself. I don’t feel the rage I felt like I did back then. This feeling is so much worse. It’s like I don’t feel anything at all. I’m just numb. I can’t think. I can’t eat or sleep. I have no energy. I don’t even have the will to do anything to change. I would welcome feeling angry about something. It would be better than this. I’m just existing. I feel…”

“Empty?” Dustin suggested.

“Yeah…” I sighed.

“You remember when you visited me in the hospital? You remember how I told you I felt?”

“Yeah, you said you felt empty,” I replied.

“Yeah. Full of emptiness. I felt like I’d never be happy again. But it didn’t last forever. It couldn’t kill me. I guess what I’m saying is that I understand what you’re feeling. Even if I couldn’t possibly understand completely what you’re going through, I get it. I guess you can look at me as an example that those feelings don’t have to win. You can get past it. You can heal. I almost had to die to learn that.”

“This is an evil town, Dustin. It’s even worse now than it was when you left. It’s been trying to tear us apart our whole lives. I hate this fucking place. I don’t know why you came back.”

“You know what though? It’s rough everywhere. I guess you discover that when you get out and see a little bit of the world. You don’t understand. I need to be here to get my life back. I want the life I had before everything was destroyed. I want the life that was stolen from me. I want to be that kid again who had hope for the future. I want to be the kid who saw the best in people. That’s why I came back. If I can see the good in this place, instead of the place that let me get raped and almost killed… Then maybe there’s hope for me. Maybe I’ll be able to see the good in people again. Maybe I’ll be able to let people touch me and not cringe. Maybe I’ll even be able to love again.”

“Maybe I’ll be able to do those things with you. God, I’d love to get over this funk I’m in. I know my dad is not coming back no matter how stupid and depressed I am. I know I’m pushing everyone who loves me away. I don’t want to be this way. I hate being afraid of everything and everybody.”

“Why are you afraid? Everybody already knows you’re gay. It’s like the worst kept secret in this town. I thought your mom had accepted you.”

“No, she hasn’t accepted shit. Maybe if dad hadn’t died she might have come around. But once he died, any hope of Brett and me being able to be open with our relationship died with him. She pretends to be nice to him and shit because Dr. Reilly has friends in places that she wants to be. But she doesn’t approve of our relationship. She wants me to keep it quiet at least, but what she really wants is for me to stop being gay. She wants to change me into something I’m not. And you know the worst part? It’s working. I feel like I’m losing myself and losing my boyfriend. Brett and I are barely together anymore. We haven’t had sex in ages. She’s winning.”

“That sucks, dude,” Dustin replied.

“Yeah… It’s like, how can you ask someone to stay with you if you’re just going to be a miserable jerk to them? And that’s what I’ve become. I know I’ve been a real asshole since dad died. Nobody likes me and I really don’t blame them. I don’t want to be a dick. I can’t help it. I’ve just been pushing everyone away. If you’d have been around last year I would have pushed you away too. I just feel so… I don’t even know how to describe it. Brett and Em say it’s like something inside of me died with my dad. Maybe that’s true. It just feels like my mom is suffocating me, and pushing Brett out of my life.”

“So move out,” Dustin suggested. “Go live with Reilly.”

“I can’t move in with Brett. Trust me.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I found out something about his mom that she didn’t want me to find out. If I had to live with Brett, he’d eventually pull it out of me, and then she’d hate me.”

“What did you find out?”

“You know I can’t tell you. I’ve been keeping it from Brett for a year. I think that’s another reason we’re having problems. It’s like he can read my mind. He knows there’s something I’m not telling him.”

Dustin sighed. “Jesus, what could be so bad that you can’t…” Suddenly he snapped his fingers. “You figured out who Reilly’s dad is, didn’t you?”

“How the fuck did you know that?!?!”

“Dude, what other secret could you possibly know that would cause so much trouble? So come on, what’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you that!”

“Is it someone we know? Oh god! Did I sleep with him?”

“No! Dustin…”

“Did you sleep with him?”

I laughed. “Eww! Oh god no! Why would you even ask that?”

“It got you to smile, didn’t it? Come on, when was the last time you laughed?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Then it was too long. Seriously though, don’t you think Reilly has a right to know who his dad is?”

“Absolutely! But you don’t understand.”

“That’s right. I don’t understand. You know who else isn’t going to understand when he finds out? Your boyfriend.”

“I know… Believe me. This has been eating me alive since I found out. The longer this drags on, the more he’ll hate me when he finds out.”

“Boy, you just keep making the same mistakes over and over. Don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re like one of those kids who is so smart, but you have no common sense. Dude, you’re doing to Reilly exactly what you did to me. You keep waiting for the perfect time, but it will never come. Eventually it’s going to blow up in your face like a grenade. He’ll find out that you knew without you telling him, and when that happens, you’re going to hurt Brett as badly as anyone’s ever hurt him.”

“You don’t think I know that? You just don’t understand! You don’t think I’d love to tell Brett everything? But if I do…”

“What? What will happen?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Neither will your boyfriend when he finds out. Trust me, I know. Love can become hate very easily. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out why you never told me what you knew about me.”

“Because I’m a fuck-up. Okay? I didn’t tell you because I’m a fuck-up and a lousy friend. Just like I’m a lousy boyfriend. I don’t know why I’m such a fucking loser. I should have told you. I’m sorry I didn’t. I have no one to blame but myself for being such a fucking pussy. I thought at the time that I would only make things worse by telling.”

“Just like you think things will only get worse if you tell Reilly who his father is.”

“I… No, that’s not… It’s completely different!”

“How?” Dustin asked.

“It… It just is!”

“You do realize I’m trying help you, right? I don’t want to see you do something you’ll regret forever. Brett’s a good guy. He deserves to know the truth. You should tell him what you know.”

“I don’t think I can,” I replied.

“Then you’re going to lose your boyfriend. But even worse, you’re going to break his heart. But think about this, you’ve already told me. If you can tell me, you can tell him.”

“You’re not going to tell him, are you?”

“Dude, I’ve got secrets in this noggin of mine that will make you lose your shit. I’ve got the goods on half the town in this old brain of mine. So don’t worry. I won’t tell Reilly. I might’ve told Mike back in the day, but since he moved out I guess you don’t need to worry about me telling him.”

“Yeah. I can’t really blame him for getting out of here,” I said, looking over the fence at the empty lot which once held the trailer where Mike Evans had once lived. It was just an empty field now. “I guess he moved to Wheeling.”

“Yeah. Going to go make something of his life. That’s good. I’m glad for him. I’ll miss the conversations. And the sex was okay too, I guess. But I’m giving that up. Going to find myself a girlfriend this year.”

I laughed. “Yeah right! You’ve had more gay sex than everyone in our school combined!”

“No, that was gay-for-pay, Billy. I only got fucked for cold hard cash, my friend!”

“So you’re saying you’re not gay, then?”

“Nah. I did that stuff for the money. I’m leaving that gay shit behind. I’m going to get myself some pussy this year.”

“And what you did with Mike?”

“That was practice,” Dustin replied. “It meant nothing. I told him I didn’t love him. If he fell in love with me that was his problem, not mine.”

“Sure,” I replied. “And what about when you kissed me?”

“Right before I tried to kill myself? Whoever that guy was, it wasn’t me. Speaking of not being yourself… Dude, what’s with your hair?”

“It’s a long story,” I replied.

It felt good to be able to talk to my best friend again. There are some bonds which can stand the test of time and the trials that come along. It felt like a piece of my life that had been cut off had grown back. After I used his bathroom to take a piss I took a long look at my own scars on my left hand, the ones I’d given myself when I’d punched the mirror in the hospital. My scars hadn’t healed nearly as neatly as Dustin’s scars had, and mine were older. I guess it was because Dustin had used a knife and my scars had been formed by jagged shards of glass. Inside my wrist, there was still a metal plate that had been used to put my wrist back together. Even though the bones had healed long ago, I still had that tiny bit of metal inside me. It would have been more trouble than it was worth to take it out. So I’d have to live with it forever – A reminder that I could be my own worst enemy.

I said my good-byes to Dustin and began the journey back home. I thought a lot about what Dustin had said. I began to wonder what would happen if I did decide to tell Brett about what I knew. I thought about it as I stood under the shower in my bathroom and let the warm water wash away a week’s worth of sweat and dirt from my body. I wondered what would happen if I told my mom that I wasn’t going to hide my relationship with Brett from the world anymore. Maybe it would upset things. Maybe she would kick me out. But I was already miserable. What could possibly make things any worse?