Every Time I Think of You (9 page)

About a week later, a small box arrived in return. Fortunately, my parents respected my privacy and hadn’t opened it. Inside a large plastic bag was one of his jock straps.

Unable to top his gift, at least in its intimate audacity, I sent him a note with a newspaper clipping, an announcement of an open half-marathon that our school would be hosting in mid-May. Lots of people competed, some for fun, but I knew many of my cross country opponents from others schools, plus my own teammates, would think of it as a competition. I wrote, “I’m having my 18th birthday party that weekend. Hope you can be here for it.”

Only a few days later, he called.

I should explain the communications barrier, the situation that led to our letters and increasingly unique packages.

Everett had told me there were no phones in the dorm rooms. A bank of old telephone booths in a main hall next to their cafeteria had been updated to a somewhat antiquated system where each student could enter his own room number and have calls charged to his bill, meaning his parents’ bill.

I never got the impression that Everett wanted to hide me from his mother; quite the contrary. At some point, I realized that Everett planned to use our relationship to defy his mother, in the same way his sister had done, only without the trip to France and the subsequent aborted “tadpole.”

So I was a bit surprised to be awakened one Saturday morning in late February to my dad’s knock on the door.

“It’s your friend Everett on the phone.”

Still groggy and in my usual sweatpants and T-shirt, I tried to rouse myself to absorb the pleasure of hearing his voice for the first time in weeks.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I wanted to share so much; that I’d visited our little meeting place in the woods at least twice a week, that I was growing out my sideburns as he’d suggested, and yet he hadn’t even bothered to tell me about his birthday.

“It was no big deal. Some of the guys threw me a little party. My mom sent me some clothes. Dad just sent money and a tie.”

I felt stung, left out.

“I’m gonna try my best to get down there for your big day. There’s no bus, so I might hitch a ride with one of the other guys who live nearby. But I am not whining back home for any kind of limo service, so sorry if I’m late but–”

“I don’t know when, but yes, we will,” Everett said. “Hey, before that; what are you doing … wait, March twenty-something, third Saturday, I think?”

The Forrestville Country Club was an exclusive yet small estate set just across the county road from the wealthy neighborhood. Behind it, the sprawling expanse of the private golf course was opened to non-members for winter sledding.

“Yeah, the Spring Fling,” Everett continued. “It’s this corny benefit they throw every year, sort of a parent-kid party, like
American Bandstand
meets
The Lawrence Welk Show
. The old folks party with the kids. Mom turned it into this fancy fundraiser kid’s charity, like, before I was born. You don’t have to bring a date, like a girl, or anything.”

“Yeah. We can duck my parents after dinner. Besides, kids get in free, even though we’re not officially kids anymore. The tickets are two hundred bucks.”

I’d rarely worn it; most recently at a funeral for a distant aunt I’d only met a few times. I had stared at it in the car on the drive to my uncle and aunt’s home as it swayed on a little hook over a side window. Like most teenagers, I was uncomfortable with the mere idea of a tie and suit.

An image flashed in my mind, a version of that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott movie we’d half-watched that night at Holly’s. Would Everett take me in his arms, whirl me around the dance floor, defying and shocking an entire community of Forrestville’s wealthy elite? Would he propose on bended knee?

None of that would happen, exactly, but we would rather clearly exhibit our affection, and with our bow ties still on.

Chapter 12

But that pleasure began to blend in with the mental burn from an unanswered question. If Everett was running around with a chubby getting his picture taken, then who took the picture?

Polaroids didn’t have time delay settings, did they?

While I, an hour away, longed and pined for him even more as Everett sent these letters and packages, some other guy got to be with him, underwear close, boner close, shirtless little biceps-flexing close.

I sent him some generic birthday card I’d foraged from my mom’s collection, but refused to mention the photo.

A few weeks passed, and I heard nothing from Everett.

School became actually more relaxed, despite the rumbling internal engine of wondering what he was doing, how often he thought of me, and when I would see him next. I let it settle into a sort of comfort. Adored by him, I would be again, I hoped. Perhaps having no prior romantic experience was my saving grace. Perhaps I was just a fool.

Seeing couples holding hands in the school hallways, all opposite-sex pairs, of course, no longer annoyed me. I have that, too, I told myself. But it’s so special it can’t be shared casually between geometry and gym. So what if its consummation required sometimes difficult and unusual locales?

Then, postcards began to arrive almost daily, each with one word.

The images weren’t unusual; pastoral Pennsylvania, Amish farmlands, a few depicting his school. They weren’t the point. It wasn’t until most of them arrived that I figured out, of course, that they had an order. Everett was cleverly doling out our cryptic secrets, displaying them for the world, or at least the postman. My mother, who had politely left them on my bedroom desk, barely withheld her own curiosity.

One of the postcards arrived on a Saturday.

“Why is there only one word on this?” Dad said that day as he handed it to me while sorting bills.

“It’s kind of a running joke I have with Everett,” I said as I glanced at another corny autumnal image, and written on the other side, BABY.

I’d pieced together that Everett had written the first lyrics from the song in
The Sound of Music
where the cute Nazi bike messenger and the older daughter get to sing and dance and make out in a gazebo on a rainy night.

I knew with every postcard Everett imagined just such a gazebo, except we were two cute little bike messengers, without the girl, or the Nazis, or even the bike, but definitely the rain.

Outdoors in the rain; we’d have to try that some day.

Chapter 13

Kevin Muir’s kiana shirt, a wide-collared profusion of lime green and hot pink swirls, clung tightly to his muscled chest. His jeans, bell-bottoms wide at the cuff, held tightly to his waist, pressing out in the expected areas.

He sat down across the table from me with his tray of food. Like me, he had cut his hair short for fall training, but it had grown out to the typical long style similar to mine. Unlike me, Kevin was popular and knew it, but he didn’t lord it over anyone. One of the aforementioned cool dudes from the track team, he drove us in his van to the rock concerts (Kansas, Electric Light Orchestra, and Foreigner). A pretty amazing pole vaulter, and one of few guys at school who could get away with such daring outfits, Kevin Muir was beyond criticism.

‘Shot’ was Gary Hendershott, who had become a bit too intimate with his girlfriend, Tammy Krebs. He usually ran a good second at most distance events, did better in the two-kilometer races. He’d dropped out and gotten a GED since becoming an expectant father rushed into becoming a husband. His sudden disappearance, similar to that of a few other students each year, became the subject of a lot of gossip. The stories had left me more relieved than isolated for being the only gay guy I knew of at school, other than a few of the kids in the Drama Club.

“I dunno, Kevin. I’m kind of focusing on my SATs and college, you know? I mean, I’m training a bit for the half-marathon in May, but that’s just for fun.” Actually, encouraged by Everett’s upcoming visit, I had been training on my own more than usual. I wanted to place well for him to witness.

What I didn’t say was that while the track team’s distance runners were an okay bunch, some of the others, sprinters and field guys, thought of themselves as rock stars, and acted like it.

In my sophomore year, I had joined the track team the spring after my previous meager success in the fall cross country season. I didn’t consider the track antics, mostly comprised of homophobic names and swearing, to be any sort of threat, just annoying.

With the guys on cross country, there wasn’t any locker room banter because we usually just went home to shower, at least at home meets. We didn’t travel as a pack on school buses, just a few cars. Distance runners had nothing to prove. We were usually too exhausted to bother anyone else.

Kevin was an exception, one of the most casually popular guys I knew from the track team. His father owned the largest car dealership in the county. Muir Autos billboards welcomed drivers to Greensburg at each of the town’s major entry roads with the catchy phrase, ‘Get More at Muir!’

Yet Kevin wore his elite status with a cool resolve, always greeting me in the hallways if he wasn’t too distracted by his latest girlfriend. His family lived in Forrestville, just down the secluded street from Everett’s family. That Everett had mentioned being his childhood friend made me see him in a new light.

“Come on, you’re good,” Kevin said. “Besides, you’re getting a bit chunky, doncha think?”

It was an old joke, how the loosely knit clan of rangy runners would complain about gaining an ounce or two, as if we were supermodels.

“I’ll have to think about it. When’s training start?”

“Two weeks. But we got some indoor training goin’ on at the college.”

The local branch of Penn State had open days at an indoor track. The ramps and humming florescent lights annoyed me. When I had trained there as a sophomore, I toyed with lapping straight-aways with my eyes closed, just so I could pretend I was running outdoors, which was my original reason for joining cross country.

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll teach ya how to pole vault,” Kevin teased.

Part of our coach’s spirited early training my sophomore year had involved his encouraging all new guys to try events they hadn’t done before. The only requirement for attempting pole vault was putting on a smelly old scraped communal football helmet. Despite the advantage of using pole vault as a way of befriending him, I passed then as well.

“No thanks. I prefer my skull in its original shape.”

I couldn’t deny that watching Kevin compete in pole vault was fascinating. What beguiled me, and no doubt a few others, was the frequency of his jock strap bulge –and occasionally some of its contents– popping out of his shorts mid-leap.

Kevin talked about some other things, but those memories of him stuck. Under the table, I furtively adjusted the pronounced tightening in my pants. I wondered if he actually wanted to strike up a friendship, or if any of that was just a ruse to get me to join the track team.

I wanted to mention Everett, but knew that our little romance would at least be deduced by him, if not admitted by me. But more important, the mere mention of our connection, there in the school cafeteria, felt out of place.

Instead of parting ways, we chatted until the bell rang. As we left, Kevin added, with an oddly affectionate shoulder pat, “Think about what I said.”

Up until then, I hadn’t thought much about deception, or false intimacy, or any kind of second-guessing of people. But with Everett in my life, or at least in my memory and mailbox, I had begun to consider the ulterior motives of other people.

Chapter 13

Spring, 1979