Never Ending Struggle - 1. Never Ending Struggle

Ten years ago, two young men met in college. It would affect the rest of their lives.

Henry Kelley was struggling through his second year of college, having barely passed his freshman year. This was largely due to the merciful natures of his professors. Henry knew he was barely hanging on and felt insecure about his abilities. He knew his eyesight was worsening. When he was a child he received a Macular Degeneration diagnosis. He needed increasing magnification every trip to the opthomologist, and his corrective eye-wear had grown increasingly thicker and heavier. He knew it would only be a matter of time before his vision is completely lost. His roommate during his first year was far from being sympathetic and disrupted Henry’s studying and sleeping schedule with dorm room parties and sexual experiences, forcing Henry to do his studying and sleeping in their floor’s common room.

Andrew Sully was an athletic boy, who oddly enough had very little interest in his chosen sport of Football. He received a scholarship to play as a running-back for the college Division III team, which simply was him running in a straight line through several other football players trying to stop his forward momentum. His family had high hopes for him to succeed in that sport and become a professional, but he knew he was not good enough and was dreading the moment when he gets injured ending their cherished dream. He had no ambitions or interests in any of his courses, nor what his future may hold even after college.

That all changed, when they became roommates during their sophomore year.

10 Years Later

(Henry Kelley)

Teaching kids is a hard job, you make very little money and get a lot of flak from parents for either not doing enough or doing too much for their child. However, on the best days like graduation or when a child visits years later, you are reminded what all the sacrifices are meant to accomplish. That is why many people promote educators as prestigious members of society.

Tragically, I am not a teacher, I am a paraprofessional, the unsung sidekick in a classroom setting. While teachers have low starting salaries of $30-40,000, people with my position make around $20-30,000 without any prospects of improvement, since we are barred from the lucrative teacher labor unions. I help prepare lesson plans, create photocopies for kids, and supervise the kids with special projects. I don’t stick with a teacher forever, nor even with the same school. I work in one school for a few years, then rotate to another within the district. There is always another young teacher who needs my services to assist them. Teachers, despite being great at educating, need the help of administrative people like me to keep their lessons organized, the classrooms clean, and break up fights among kids, especially kids in the younger grades and those with special needs. Special Education, derogatively called SPED kids, by parents and even teachers in private, have a fundamentally different way of approaching the world and learning. A single apple is red, round, and a fruit to everyone with sight, hearing, and standard mental perceptions, but not all kids approach the world in that way. Some may not see the color or shape of the apple, like myself, but have to address the concept of color and roundness differently. Some may not understand the sound of an apple upon eating it is a crunch, because they have never heard what crunching is. There are even kids, who cannot understand why we consider it a fruit, because their minds cannot categorize items or associate groups of items. Yet, among all these different issues and kids, their teachers and paraprofessional must find ways to helping them relate to the world. The teachers will receive the praise for all the work, which honestly is well deserved, but people like me are often forgotten as we head to our next assignment, when a school year is done and one school’s budget gets cut so another can get the meager funds society has allocated to a school district. All I can hope for is I’m making a small difference.

Today, we were working on the multiplication tables. I had copied a lesson plan and gave every child a bag of mini-M&M’s candies. Each bag contained about 100 pieces, so we should be able to teach all the kids how to measure their candy supplies up to 10 x 10. I had also prepared double the amount of candy, just in case the kids were extra hungry; though, we were having this lesson after lunch for a reason. The teacher and I worked with each student individually on getting the correct method down for counting and understanding the value of the multiplication table with each candy combination. The lesson was going very well, when two of the kids, Mattie and Drew, began to argue, so I went to the back of the class.

“Okay, boys, what is the issue here?”

Matt jumped to answer, “Mr. Kelley, Drew took 10 of my M&M’s, I only got 90 when I counted. I just took mine back from him.”

Drew chimed in, “No, Mr. Kelley, I didn’t take 10 of his M&M. Matt took 10 of my M&M’s and now I am stuck with 90.”

Both boys had no vision and cognitive issues, they sat with each other and usually were very close friends due to their shared physical disabilities. I doubted Matt would have taken Drew’s M&M, or vice versa, nor would they have eaten them as a snack. My eyesight is extremely bad, I no longer can read or write normally without the assistance of technology. However, I do understand the concepts of spatial awareness from the training I received over the years. It sounded like Matt may have misplaced his 10 on his own table. Considering this was a nice way of teaching both boys the importance of spatial awareness and memorization, I went around both of them and held their hands.

“Alright boys, let’s try to count the M&M’s on Matt’s desk…100,” then I went to the adjacent desk. “Let’s count the M&M’s on Drew’s table…90.”

Drew begins to argue his point again, “See, I only have 90…”

“Wait Drew, continue to hold my hand as we return to Matt’s desk. We know where his pile of M&M’s is. Let’s use our finger to search the desk.”

In seconds, we found the missing 10 M&M’s pieces, which were hidden at the top of the desk under a ruler, where a depression for holding pens and pencils allowed the small pieces to slide under without Matt’s notice. Matt apologized for the error to his best friend and returned the M&M pieces, so they could continue their lesson.

This incident brought a smile to my face as I recalled how Andy and I had our first fight over my missing wallet.

10 years ago

The semester seemed to have started a little better than last year. At least my roommate is kind of quiet and doesn’t throw crazy parties or sex exile me from our room. I was kind of worried. He is a big football player and I’m secretly gay. I keep dreading the stereotypical gay bashing scenarios, but overall, Andrew doesn’t seem that bad. He’s quiet most of the time, brings a few football friends over, and drinks a few beers moderately with an order of cheap pizza. I usually didn’t drink alcohol and while I do like Pizza, it’s usually gone. Football players have ravenous appetites. If I was lucky, I could grab a slice, but usually not more, even after putting in $5 for a medium pizza. They weren’t obnoxious about it though; I just didn’t want to speak up and was deadly afraid of them finding out I was gay.

Then one night while I was busy working on a term paper for Professor Markus on Napoleonic British history, Andrew came over to me to ask if I wanted to chip in for pizza. I heard the vacuum earlier, so he must have been cleaning up the room. I didn’t answer him as I was trying to get my paper done and needed complete focus. After not getting a reply from me he grabbed something and walked away. It took me three hours to finish my paper and I was exhausted. I noticed Andrew was on his bed with his laptop computer, he was mostly naked except for his boxers. Even with my vision degrading, I knew Andrew was a beautiful man and sometimes I wished...Well, it’s wishful thinking.

The student cafeteria may be closed, but I could still grab a cold cut sub or bag of chips from the annex. It’s not covered in my meal plan and cost me money I really don’t have as my parents can only afford to give me a thousand dollars a semester, but it beats going hungry during these late-night writing sessions. I kept their money in my wallet as well, since I had no bank account. As I reach for my wallet, I couldn’t find it on my desk. The memory of Andrew taking something from my desk flashed in me. It pissed me off that he’s literally stealing from me.

I storm over to the asshole, “You son of bitch, give me back my wallet and my money.”

He turns to me, “What Henry? Like I never took your wallet.”

Anger bubbled in me and I flipped out, “You don’t get it. That’s all the money I have. My parents can’t afford to give me more. I don’t say anything about you and your friends wolfing down my share of the pizza. You might be cute and I might be afraid of you bashing me for being gay, but I don’t care. That’s my money.”

I realize too late what I had said out loud. It felt like the room was completely quiet for hours, but it must have only been a minute. At some point, Andrew shut the lid of his laptop and moves to stand in front of me. He is bigger than me, I am lanky 5’8 and he is muscular 6’7. My mind begins to fill with nightmarish scenarios of him hurling homophobic insults, being bludgeoned to death, and him joking about all of this with his football buddies over pizza from my money. Andrew didn’t touch me or speak to me, but instead went around my desk. He crouched down and began searching the crevices of my desk’s elevated base. He pulled out my wallet.

He hands the wallet to me, then ruffles my hair, “Like, it must have fell and I pushed it into the desk. I am sorry Henry about everything. I didn’t realize me and the guys were taking advantage of you like that. I just thought you were a light eater. How about I treat you to Pizza tonight, extra-large, your choice of toppings.”

I was baffled by the sudden turn of fate and felt embarrassed for not only attacking my innocent roommate, but also coming out to him about being gay and attracted to him. I wish I could afford to do a roommate transfer; this semester is going to be really awkward with Andrew now. Still, I am hungry and he did offer a free pizza of my choice, so I will take him up for it. The pizza came and I began eating it in my bed. Andrew took a seat next to me on my bed, just watching me eat.

After I had my fill, Andrew asks me, “So you think I am cute, huh? Like I think you are cute, too.”

Surprised by his admission, I stammer “I…uh…I…gay…”

He laughs, “Yeah, I get it, we’re both fags and into each other.”

A scowl formed on my face, “Don’t use that word, it’s kind of a putdown and has very little redeeming value. You wouldn’t want me to use the N-word on you.”

Andrew nods, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s a force of habit from where I grew up. I don’t know many gay guys and the ones I do know are nothing like you or me.”

I respond sarcastically, “A skinny blind Irish idiot and a muscular black football god are rare among the gays! Seriously, that’s news to me. Maybe we can be on the cover of Time magazine or something.”

We didn’t have sex or do anything crazy that night. We just talked about our lives, being gay, joked around about what we thought of other guys, and kind of drifted off to sleep on my little twin-sized bed. We would get sex and a bunch of other things in the next few nights. His friends did not visit us as much after that, and when they did Andrew forced them to make sure my pizza was properly allocated.

10 Years Later

(Andrew Sully)

Selling insurance is hard work. It’s also incredibly sleazy and cutthroat. You make minimum wage and only truly make money based on 10% commission with a sale. I am on the phone for about 12 hours a day. I am lucky if I get 20 answers and just 1 insurance plan purchase. I have a quota every week of hitting 5 new accounts. If I miss more than a month’s worth of targets, I am terminated as an “At-Will” employee. These targets mean in a month I have to get the insurance company 20 new active customers. Lucky for me, I am good at sweet talking folks into getting an insurance plan. I have already doubled my monthly goal and am on track to hit the monthly bonus, which will put another two thousand dollars into our joint bank account. Henry says it’s my smooth confident soothing voice, but he also compares me to Morgan Freeman in terms of voice quality.

Selling insurance is a multi-prong sales pitch, it involves a lot of research even before you make a call to someone. First you have to identify their psychological needs, desires, and personal beliefs based on a narrow fact sheet provided to you from some research firm that spits out spreadsheets. Data-mining doesn’t happen at insurance companies, we outsource thework to the same guys who can identify the type of food you eat through GPS tracking and electronic payment records on un-secure servers. People like me take that data and use it to craft our pitch to the target. It’s not a coincidence that sometimes we start off talking about boats, golf, or Thai food in our pitches to potential clients. We get that information from data-miners. We also need to figure out weak points about certain personal behavior, say a person has an inordinate amount of traffic to a casino; I’d pitch them an auto and casualty plan with the idea of it being to “protect” themselves from losing jackpots and if the worse happens even getting a large jackpot for themselves and their families. Of course, the insurance company will not pay out $1 million plan to gambling addict caught in a car accident heading to casino. There are plenty of insurance Actuaries, who will go in front of judge and prove the client doesn’t deserve a penny. I know essentially liability insurance is more or less a scam that promises protection in case of damages, but in the end, it will leave its insured with little to none in return.

At the end of the day, my unit boss sent an email to all the associate sales team members to gather in the conference room. I know what this is about, he’s getting promoted and will choose his successor. The unit boss is in charge of supervising the talents, hitting corporate quotas for each quarter, and handling high end client accounts. Basically, he makes about ten times what average associates make. It’s a great job and if the world were equal and fair, I’d probably be in that position right now. However, despite having the best numbers for the job, I knew I wasn’t getting picked. Two things told me this: first, the current unit boss knew I was too good at picking up the volume to let me be promoted without finding someone of equal capacity, and second, I am black, which Corporate despite being an “equal opportunity employer” has a tight quota in place that prevents too many people of a certain racial group from being promoted to junior management positions. Yeah, I know it’s BS and racist as hell, but the money is good, despite the work being soul crushingly bad.

The new guy was Shawn Cranston, who had the 2^nd best numbers in our units next to mine and was really good friend. He smiled at my soon-to-be former unit boss and then made a simple speech. Before we left the conference room to pack up and leave for the day, Shawn came up to me.

“Andy, like I am so sorry. This should have been your gig. It’s totally racist what they’re doing.”

Frowning, I looked around to make sure we weren’t being overhead, “Shawn, I know you mean well, but don’t mess this up for yourself or Sonya and your kids. Leave it alone man, it’s not worth it.”

“You and Henry deserve just as much as me and Sonya. I’ll try to keep this position for you, when they promote me up.”

I knew Shawn meant well, but this kind of stuff happens. I remember the time, when I tore my ACL and couldn’t play football anymore my senior year of college. I can settle for meaningless stuff like career or money, but there’s only one thing in my life I cannot compromise on.

8 Years Ago

Well, my professional career prospects are either limited or gone. I knew it would happen eventually and I am actually glad it happend now. The scouts were sniffing around the campus and my coach said I was going to get invited to the combine for draft day. Everyone was happy for me, except Henry, who was still my roommate and secretly my boyfriend. Unlike many sports, there’s no active gay athlete in American Football. Sure, there were rumors and there were tons of innuendos, but it’s all just talk. If I played professional football, Henry would have to be my kept boy or something worse. God, it would have been horrible on both of us. While I still could probably recover in time to attend the combine and get a low draft pick, or end up in one of the CFL teams, this wasn’t what I wanted. Playing football isn’t what I want to do with my life, it never was. The injury might have been blessing in disguise; without the pressure of a draft or a football season, I can finish school and live my life.

What we made together shouldn’t have worked, but his insecurities are endearing and his work ethic is something I can appreciate. I never was very focused on school before the night Henry came out to me. We sort of began being more than roommates after that night with the deep talk and sex, but before we accepted each other as boyfriends, he had already changed me. Henry has been going blind for years and he has developed a lot of coping mechanisms to help him get through his daily life. He can read a thousand-page book in a night and somehow remember details from it without having it written down. He taught me how to visualize what I read in a book, an essay, or an article into pieces and parts within my mind, then use mnemonic association with each part of what I am reading. That’s how I got through a lot of my business classes and chose business communications as my major. At least, I got something to fall back on after college.

My parents are pissed off at the college, at my coaches, and at me for screwing up their plans. They had plotted out my life from my days in flag football to selecting the correct college program in order to get me noticed by scouts. They rarely visited me even before the injury; I was just a means to their ends. They didn’t care about how I had to walk on crutches due to the ACL tear. Henry, on the other hand, was happy to help me out with his small frame shielding me. We walked to classes and took baths together. At first, we used the excuse that he’s blind and I’m crippled, when people noticed, so it would just be buds helping each other out. We weren’t closeted, but it’s our business and no one should care what we do with each other except ourselves. Of course, I was fucking him every chance I got when we were in our room together alone. That boy has an incredible gift for bottoming.

Things changed, when the entire dorm floor had left for winter break after exams, Henry and I had stayed behind to enjoy the privacy. We were fooling around with each other openly after a shower with towels hanging by our necks. He held onto my dick and I did the same with him. We opened our dorm room door and kissed each other passionately, our erections hardening in anticipation. My parents had come earlier than expected to bring me home for the Christmas holidays.

My father growled furiously, “What the hell are you doing Andrew?”

I place my forearm in front of Henry defensively and mustered the courage to reply, “Well, I just kissed my boyfriend.”

My mother was shaking her head in confusion, “You…You cannot be…did he seduce you.”

I snorted a laugh. “If anything Mom, I seduced him.”

My father screamed, “I did not raise you to become a faggot!”

“No, you raised me to vicariously live your Pro-football dreams, Dad. Well guess what, it didn’t work out as planned on that front either.”

This was a bad situation and my snark was making it worse, but I didn’t care anymore. I am not hiding. Henry and we were both going to come out to both our families soon anyway. Henry had already told his family he was gay, but they didn’t accept it as a fact and actively questioned him about my relationship with him. I was still on my crutches and Henry pointed out the fact that I was the vulnerable one in our relationship, not him, at this point and he loved me. They didn’t understand him or me, but they accepted it as it was. There was no hostility towards Henry, maybe a little towards me, but overall, it felt more like confusion and disbelief. Henry was brave and stood his ground for me.

With all Henry had to go through with his family, how could I not do something like this? My dad wanted to throw a punch at me, but he knew my injury had more less healed, plus despite being naked, I was still a well-built football player with two hundred-fifty pounds of muscles. He and my mother stomped out of the room. They said nothing and left us.

After we both dressed in our room, Henry stares at me, “Are you okay Andy?”

I nodded, looking longingly at the picture of my family, “I don’t think I’ll see them again for a while, babe.”

Henry looks down, “You didn’t have to come out like that, you know. I would have been okay if they thought of me as your roommate or something.”

I grab Henry in a deep hug, “That’s what I want to make sure they and anyone else, including you, understand. I’m not going to compromise on this like sports. I love you Henry and you should never be a compromise for me.”

8 Years Later

At the end of their long day of work, Henry and Andrew return to their small one-bedroom apartment. It is not the most stylish home, nor a pauper den. They’ve been married for a little over seven years now, since their graduation from college. They had very few attendees to their ceremony, but those few friends who accepted them came and rejoiced for their union.

Both men began to cook dinner. Henry mixing a salad of leafy greens, plum tomatoes, radishes, and croutons. Andrew pan seared some pork chops with onions and peppers. The meal was simple and inelegant, but neither men needed anything sophisticated between them. They told each other tales about their day, their triumphs and their tribulations as they have for the last ten years. After a brief period of television, they settled on their couch, readying for their nightly activities.

Henry grasps Andrew’s hand, “Do you regret this life? Like you could have been a world class athlete, made millions, and probably find a hotter gay movie star boyfriend or something? It’s almost like I dragged you down with me. I was always going to be a loser. My progressive blindness and lack of accomplishments meant I could never be trusted with high paying jobs. Being a paraprofessional is crap and will never improve, my work may help a lot of kids do more with their lives, but like me, all they can look forward to is a minimum wage job or worse be stuck on monthly social security checks for the rest of their lives, because society doesn’t understand or respect them, despite what everyone tells themselves.”

Andrew understands his partner’s insecurities well, “No, I would have been miserable without you or I would have felt like a fraud if I had to keep you hidden. The odds of me surviving long term on the professional level were slim, even if they drafted me. I’d end up selling insurance like I am right now. Your blindness helps you get a better grasp of what the world really is rather than what people want it to look like, you can’t be deceived by image versus reality. As good as I do my job, I know I probably will be stuck in this same place for years, despite what Shawn said today, because the very system that was meant to help people like me get a shot, has been turned into the reasons why I cannot move forward. Life isn’t easy and fairy-tales don’t often happen to people. What we have between us though is what makes all of it worthwhile. Enjoying life together with money, fame, and family would have been great. Knowing you have someone to come home to every day is worth all of that and more.”