Chapter 20

"Where the hell were you?" My pops wasn't really asking. His voice was even and sure as he demanded an explanation for why I was strolling in the front door as the sun peeked out over the horizon on that Sunday morning in Babylon. I was fifteen. I had been out all night. At a rave. In Brooklyn. But did he know that? What did he know?

I stopped dead in my tracks when I realized he was sitting in his recliner in the corner of the living room, the same recliner in which I'd been lounging when Gina danced with her friends on TV just a few years earlier, on a show being filmed in Philadelphia. The same day he blew his fucking lid about my teenage sister ditching school and taking a series of trains across state lines without asking or even telling anyone where she was going. The same day the cracks started deepening in the foundation of our once apathetically happy family. The foundation was only waveringly strong to begin with.

But that morning, he wore plaid flannel pants and a gray T-shirt, the most casual I'd ever seen him look. At the very least, he wore slacks and a button-up, maybe khaki shorts and a polo to mow the yard. But usually, he stayed clad in his work clothes, a suit and tie, only losing the jacket when he sat down at the dinner table to eat. He was clearly pissed. His tone was intensely calm, and his relaxed posture in the recliner gave way to the fact that he had long been stewing over what he was going to say to me when I finally got home. He must have been sitting there for hours.

My friends and I had pushed ourselves through the rusted door of that nondescript warehouse, almost falling over each other on some industrial-looking side street in Brooklyn, not having any idea what time it was. The sky was still black, the stars barely visible through the light pollution of the city, and the street was quiet. The muffled sound of the music pumping just inside could be heard from the dirty sidewalk. Smashed paper soda cups and empty water bottles fell from a pile of black garbage bags that had been chewed open and sifted through by street rats or pilfered by a homeless person looking for cans to turn in for pocket change. Steam rose from openings in the manhole cover at the end of the block, wafting down the street. A few people passed by, weaving through us on the sidewalk as Donny checked his beeper and Corey glanced down at his Swatch watch, bright yellow. The passersby were laughing. Drunk. Or high. Just like us.

"Shit. It's five o'clock."

Five thirteen, actually. It was summer, and the thick humidity mixed with the cool morning air made for a soft, comfortable landing as we exited the party, still rolling and covered in sweat. The rave would continue for a few more hours, and there were still at least a thousand people inside gnashing their teeth and bouncing around in front of the mountain of speakers that had been illegally constructed along one wall.

The vibrations from the bass bins had rattled everything in my body as I danced that night, and I was having a hard time finding my balance now that I was back out in the real world. My knees wobbled like rubber, and I felt my shoulders bopping up and down, my stomach empty, still pounding with the boom of the bass. The music was so dark but somehow freeing, even uplifting. Maybe it was the pill. Maybe it was the fact that I'd located one more piece of the puzzle of who I really was that I'd been trying to put together for years.

"Where'd we park?" Ricky asked, hands shoved in his pockets to keep himself from fidgeting.

The next few minutes were spent walking around darkened blocks, attempting to find Donny's brother's car, which none of us were licensed to drive. The walls and roller gates in the neighborhood were covered with colorful graffiti. Covert street artists had tagged anything and everything stationary, as high as they could reasonably climb. I loved the way it looked. And I didn't think much about it until years later when it had all been cleaned up and the kids that still painted had to find more discreet places to express themselves, under expressway overpasses and more far-flung train yards.

"Under the tracks," Corey answered.

Donny rebutted, "No shit, smartass. Where are the tracks?"

It was a miracle we'd been able to find the party in the first place. Donny's brother had a flyer with some futuristic graphic, a list of DJ names, a date, and a phone number. He had to work at the garage first thing in the morning, so he couldn't go, but he told Donny about it to see if he wanted to try to sell some pills. He sold a few, made a few bucks for himself and his brother, but that wasn't the point. We went to party.

We called the number earlier that night, and a recording gave us the address. We'd learned that calling any earlier would do no good. The addresses would change over time to throw off the cops. But it took stopping at three different delis to ask for directions before we found the fucking place at one thirty in the morning. Our pills had already kicked in, and we were desperate to find a place to expel some of that pent-up energy.

Back at the house five hours later, my oversized T-shirt was stretched out around the neck and reeked of weed and cigarette smoke. My black baseball cap was worn backward and twisted to the side. My pops hated it when I wore it that way. He said I looked like a thug, which made me laugh. The baggy jeans I wore slightly below my waist pissed him off even more, the lengthy belt strap hanging halfway down my thigh, the gold chain around my neck the icing on the corrupted youth cake I'd been baking for the past few years.

I couldn't bring myself to look at him. I knew I was in trouble. It was just a matter of how much trouble. It wasn't the first time I'd snuck out of my bedroom window and shimmied down the side of the house, tree branches providing support and assistance on the way down. It also wouldn't be the last. But my pops, who had grown quieter, more reserved ever since Gina defied him, had something to say that day. Something to prove. He should've been asleep. He was always asleep at that hour. Sunday mass didn't start until ten thirty, so what the hell was he doing up?

As I stood there, frozen, the Ecstasy decided to wake up from its slumber and hit me again. Perfect timing. A wave of heat and misplaced euphoria washed over me, causing me to break a sweat right there in my living room. I wished there'd been music playing, but the house was silent. I wiggled my fingers and ground my teeth together, hoping it would satisfy my desire to move. It didn't.

"Sit down," he insisted, his hands together at his chin, fingers tightly woven as though he would lead us in prayer.

I floated my way to the couch and bounced down on the far end, as far away from him as I could possibly sit. It felt like I was sitting on a cloud, and I couldn't help but crack a bit of a smile. The rest of this pill was fucking wasted on this moment. I wanted to stare out the picture window behind the couch that faced out to Roosevelt Street and watch the sun rise over the trees while I listened to chill music, to witness that light blue sliver turn pink, then orange, as the world woke up. Then I would drift off to sleep. That sounded like a much better scenario than the one I'd just become a party to.

"Where were you?"

"We were just over at Donny's, watching a movie. I got tired and fell asleep there." Sure, that sounded believable enough.

"Who's we?"

What the hell was he asking me? He knew who we were. We had been us since elementary school, always the same people.

"Me, Ricky, Corey."

"Not that Julio kid?"

"Nah," I scoffed defensively. "It was just us four."

What made him think of Julio anyway? The only time Julio had ever been mentioned in our house was when Gina falsely accused me of messing around with him when I was a preteen. That had been years ago. Sure, Julio and I got high together every now and then, but we weren't even really friends. I simply knew he sold weed. Had my pops been stewing over the imaginary thought of his son fucking around with another guy for the last few years? Did it really bother him that much?

He sat up and looked me directly in the eye. It was still mostly dark outside, but the table lamp next to him was turned to the dimmest setting. A dull orange glow washed over the room. I slowly turned my ball cap around so the bill would cast a shadow over my eyes. I'm sure it looked like flying saucers had landed on my pupils.

"Are you on drugs?" he interrogated, sitting up, leaning in closer.

"What? No," I lied, probably playing a little too much defense.

"I swear, Brandon." He pointed at me. "If you're doing drugs, you won't leave this house again until you graduate."

"I'm not on drugs, Pops," I again lied. At least it was getting easier. "I'm just tired."

He relaxed back into his recliner, resting his hands on the arms of the chair to gather his thoughts. "Well, I think you're lying about where you've been all night. And there are three things I won't put up with in this house. Disrespect and drugs are two of them."

"What's the third?" I immediately cursed myself for asking, but the Ecstasy was making me antsy, chatty, and, apparently, a smartass.

My pops looked at me with disgust, his face almost contorted, his features melding and meshing into a gargoyle-like stare. His eyes squinted, his lips curled in, his entire face hardened as though he could barely stand to say what he was about to say. I honestly thought he was going to go with drinking, or defiance, or dishonesty, clinging to the theme of D words I was only partly paying attention to but apparently really good at doing. Instead, he changed course on the alphabet of deviant behaviors. "Faggots."

The word hit me hard, like a brick that had been thrown at my chest from close range. Inside, I choked and coughed, trying to find my emotional balance. I wasn't surprised by his sentiment. My pops had made it clear over the years that he didn't particularly care for homosexuals. It was the word he used to describe his feelings that scattered my thoughts and sobered me up. Any last bit of chemical indulgence forcing its way through my veins quickly disintegrated as the weight of my father's words hung over me, pressing me into the couch with all five fingers on my chest.

It wasn't like I was clueless. I knew who I was, what I was. I hadn't found my path yet though. Admitting to myself that I might be what my pops had so coldly uttered, maybe even accused me of being, hadn't yet happened. The only other person I knew that might be was Julio, and he'd never said anything to me about it, so I had no help, no guidance, no role model. I would one day—soon—work myself through it, but why the hell was my pops bringing it up? What did he know?

I stared at him blankly, my arms crossed over my chest, my heart pounding, ball cap shielding my eyes. Was I supposed to say something? Respond in some way? Was he trying to drag some coerced confession out of me, or was he simply stating his feelings? Maybe neither. I was the one who'd asked, like an idiot. But something had sparked this conversation. Something had made him wake up early or not go to sleep or check in on what he ultimately discovered was my empty bed. Something had brought us together for this meeting that probably neither one of us wanted to have.

"Okay." It was said with just enough sincerity to be misunderstood, just enough sarcasm to seem like I was brushing him off. He just stared at me. My response was not satisfactory. And not even really a response. Simply an acknowledgment.

"People have been talking, Brandon."

"About what?"

He abruptly sat up again, his words terse. "I'm not na?ve. I know about these all-night rave parties that have been going on. The repetitive music and the drugs. The neighbors have seen you sneaking out. And people have seen you hanging out with him around town."

"Hangin' out with who?"

"That Julio kid. There are rumors about him, Brandon. Don't act like you haven't heard."

"Pops, I told you. I fell asleep at Don?—"

"I'm not stupid, Brandon." He raised his voice that time, cutting me off. "You hang out with wild kids. Their parents aren't home. They have no rules, no boundaries. God only knows what you get up to. And I swear…"

I was getting frustrated. My pops knew Donny and Corey, even if just from meeting them a couple of times. And Ricky may as well have lived at our house when we were younger. He knew him. He knew his parents. He let me go to their cottage upstate for a week. And if people had seen me hanging out with Julio, they'd seen me smoking weed. Which part was he mad about? What the fuck was all of this?

"What?" I smarted back.

His eyes narrowed once again. I wasn't sure if it was due to the way I responded or if it was for dramatic effect. He stumbled through his next words, gritting his teeth, seeming to think carefully, "If you're getting… cute… with any of those boys…"

"Cute?"

"You know what I mean."

"Nah," I smarted again. "I don't think I do."

"Brandon, we raised you to be a man."

"Are you sure? Because from where I stand, you haven't really raised me at all."

It was a jab, for sure. And it was said from the cuff. But it wasn't false. When Gina and I were young, he was there. He would come home from work at night, and we would roughhouse and play. But something happened along the way. Something that made him distant. I always thought it started when Gina snuck out. But maybe it was something else, something in the world. Was sin becoming too mainstream? Were the gays becoming too visible? It seemed anything could have set him off over the past few years. And just as much as he'd been involved when we were younger, he'd been disengaged during my adolescence.

At least Gina had gotten out, moved to Brooklyn for college after graduation so she wouldn't have to deal with his leering disdain, his hands-off approach to being hands-on. When he drove to work, she was too far off his route for him to stop by. When he didn't, the train sailed right past her neighborhood. And she knew it.

"I won't stand for this backtalk," he continued, pushing himself from his recliner to literally stand in front of me.

Hypocrite, I laughed to myself.

"You're on the wrong path, and I'll be damned if I have some drug-riddled, hippy-dippy cocksucker living under my roof."

My blood boiled, and I nearly catapulted from the couch to tackle him. In my mind, of course. Realistically, a physical response wasn't in my nature, nor was it possible at that moment. Maybe it would have made him respect me more, but the marijuana and Ecstasy would have made it impossible for me to keep my coordination. Instead, I stood, turning my ball cap back around to the position I knew he hated. The position that made me look like a thug. We were just a couple of feet away from each other as I stared into his eyes. I don't know why, but I felt like I needed to respond. It was the logic of a fifteen-year-old kid who couldn't stand baseless insinuations and being called names without reason.

"Fuck you!" It was said calmly and directly but my volume was elevated. In retrospect, it was the wrong thing to say to my pops at that point in time.

I immediately got the back of his hand across my mouth in response. It was swift and reverberating. At first, I couldn't figure out what happened. I saw him standing in front of me, blurry and fuming. His nostrils flared, and his face was red. His breathing was heavy, chest heaving with anger. My thoughts were still clouded, my ears ringing. I was unsure which reality I was in at that moment, but when the back of my hand pulled away from my face after dabbing my lip, my knuckle was covered in blood.

My lip had split. No, my pops had split my lip. I deserved it. Not his disdain but his response.

It didn't change the fact that he called me what he'd called me though. It wasn't true. I had never sucked cock. That would come later. It was an assumption based on years of him telling stories to himself, replaying an imaginary scene in his head, over and over, I'm sure. Had he even discussed it with anyone else, or was it all based on something Gina had said out of spite years ago? Did he talk about me to my ma? Did he talk about me in confession? To some self-righteous priest that made him believe I was the devil incarnate? For being gay by association?

"You're grounded, you ungrateful little shit." He scowled, waving his stupid finger in my face. "Other than school and work, you're not allowed out of this house. You'll come home, finish your homework, eat dinner with your mother and me, then you'll go to your room. No music. I've had enough of that noise in this house."

Again, I stared. Oddly enough, I was no longer afraid of him. The back of his hand on my face was an awakening. My pops was a scared little boy, afraid that the ideal of his childhood, the dreams he once held for adulthood, were slipping away with a new generation, one that he didn't understand. Nothing I could do would fix that. I could be the straightest boy in the world, the best student, the most well-dressed, well-intended young man, and as long as the world progressed, as long as I had my own interests, it would never be enough. I would never be him.

My clothes would always be too big, my music too loud. My life would always be too fast, and my dick would always point in the wrong direction. He needed to control something he had no way of controlling. Maybe he hated faggots. Maybe he hated himself. Maybe he just hated the world in which he lived. But I didn't have to respect a man that had no respect for me.

"Yes, sir." I saluted with my bloody hand as I turned and ascended the stairs that led to my bedroom. My maneuver was intentional, my gait militant. And the sarcasm was not lost on him. At the top of the stairs, I turned to face him again, my stature relaxing, my tone softening. "What happened to you?"

His expression didn't change, but behind his cold, beady eyes, I could see disappointment in himself. I witnessed a sad realization play out behind those eyes, a realization that he'd lost who he'd once been, that he'd lost the ability to empathize, that he'd hit his own son in a fit of self-righteousness. That was his demon to slay though.

Before falling into bed, I stopped in the shared bathroom upstairs to wash my face and, hopefully, disinfect my busted lip. Staring into the mirror above the sink, removing my baseball cap to reveal a thick head of mussed, black hair, I got a glimpse of how messy I looked: tired, sweaty, and high as a kite.

Maybe my pops had a point about sneaking out. I'd give him that. But my appearance was the look of a jilted generation, the destiny of youthful expression, of freedom and untamed energy. Besides, he wasn't mad about my sneaking out. He was mad about what he thought I was doing once I was out, true or not. He was furious at the idea that I might be gay and how that would reflect on him. I felt sorry for the old man. He'd never know his kids. Not really.

I closed my bedroom door gently behind me. I didn't want to wake up my ma and be subjected to her brand of guilt too.

Kicking off my sneakers and letting them land where they would, I fell backward onto the bed and grabbed my Walkman from the shelf above my head, hitting the Play button as I pulled the cushy headphones over my ears. The spindles on the preloaded Beastie Boys tape spun, providing me with just enough anger to blow off some steam, just enough chill to keep it to myself. I wished I had had a loudspeaker, a subwoofer the size of my bedroom to blast that shit from, wake up everyone in the neighborhood, just to piss my pops off even more. By the time "High Plains Drifter" started to play, I'd fallen into a silent sleep, the effects of the pill finally leaving my system, serenaded by the very music my pops could only refer to as noise.

My ma never asked about my lip, even though it took weeks to heal. Cut, swollen, and bruised. She probably assumed I deserved it, whatever had happened. I doubted my pops spilled to her about hitting his own son, but had she been there, she probably would have smacked me too. From that point on, I kept my distance. Gina and I weren't the most well-behaved kids on the planet, but we weren't monsters. We did a lot of dumb shit, just like most kids do. I didn't blame my folks for being disappointed in us, but the way they simply dismissed us was cold.

In a way, living with them was like being in an abusive relationship. At first, everything was great. We were all innocent and excited about life. Then, over time, there are disappointments and tragedies, and the state of things changes. Instead of trying to work through those things as a team, our folks forced our hands, guilted us, manipulated us, blamed us, then left us out to dry, wondering what went wrong. Questions were never answered, and reasons never given. At one time, we were theirs, a happy family. Then, we were orphans living in a house that provided but never nurtured, demanded but never explained, needed but never asked. After that busted lip, I was a teenage adult. And my pops was a ghost, an absent shell of guilt and remorse.

I wanted to yell at him, to give him a piece of my mind, to explain to him that Gina and I were products of our environment. Maybe if I'd been able to express my feelings back then, I'd be more well-adjusted now. Not so jaded. Unable to love, to give love, to be loved. It was simply easier to keep my feelings to myself, to move past my pops in silence as he did with me. If we spoke, we would fight, so what was the point?

My pops left me that day. It wasn't as though he'd been so present before. But after that night, we were two strangers living in the same house. He left each morning for work in the city, returning home later and later with each passing month. I came and went… to school, to my job, to my friends' houses. We often hung out at the Quik Mart, scoring booze and weed and sometimes helping Donny sell pills for his brother. We were townies. But we were kids. What were our other options?

On weekends, I'd continue to sneak out so we could hit up a storm rave or Caffeine. Maybe catch the train or drive into the city and hit up NASA or try to get into the Factory or Limelight. Eventually, when I realized it didn't matter what I did, that my pops was going to be disappointed no matter what, I stopped crawling out of my bedroom window and shimmying down the side of the house. Instead, I walked out the front door as my pops sat in the living room watching television, never saying a word. I'd return at some point the next day. Maybe they'd ask where I'd been. Maybe they wouldn't.

Gina rarely came home. She'd call every once in a while, and we'd talk trash about what it was like around the house and how school was going. Sometimes, I'd stop by her place in Brooklyn if I was in the city. I couldn't wait to get out of Babylon. My friends and I made our own fun, but I felt trapped in that house. Suffocated. There was a looming cloud of guilt and expectation that forever hung over that place, choking the life out of us all.

In my mind, my family unraveled when I was twelve, disbanded when I was fifteen, died when I left for college. My folks couldn't deal with the hard parts of having kids. I guess they'd never defied their own folks growing up. Or they had, and that's why Gina and I rarely saw our grandparents. But they couldn't understand our actions, our desire to experience a different life than the one we'd been provided. I don't know what their lives were like as kids. Neither of them ever talked about their childhoods. But we were expected to be grateful for the structured lives they gave us. At forty, I can appreciate that there was always food on the table, but at fifteen, I needed more than that: some well-intentioned guidance, a helpful hand with my homework, an emotional connection. But none of that was provided.

My sister pulled the thread, destroyed the sweater, as it were, but I didn't blame her. She just wanted to dance, just like all of us. She just wanted to be a kid. After years of being told no, she decided to give herself a win, even if it would result in a greater loss.

I was told that my very existence was a threat. That wasn't the other side of the same coin; that was a different currency altogether. Gina needed her free will—her youth—so she took it. I needed to exist, to breathe, to live, so I ran the streets. I needed an identity, one I didn't realize existed until I found the other party kids, the club kids, the kids whose clothes were too big and too bright and who listened to music that was too loud and too repetitive. The kids who munched on pills and realized that dancing with other boys wouldn't be the end of the world, wouldn't conjure the downfall of society, but could bring about an awakening to a life of love rather than one of oppression. I needed something to show me how to be me.

The dark rooms and the smoke and the neon lights transported me to a world in which wrong wasn't so wrong and right wasn't always so right. Under the guise of night, I was able to see myself from a different state of mind, from a different perspective than the one I was taught was singular as a child. The music wasn't so wrong. Love wasn't so wrong. Sex wasn't so wrong. How could a drug be so wrong if it made me see the good in everything, in everyone? When my friends and I discovered that world, we found a truth that much of the generation that came before us couldn't accept: that love was good, no matter how it was displayed.

I never came out to my folks. What would have been the point? My pops had clearly figured it out long before I had, and my ma would take her cue from him. My friends found out when they saw me kissing another guy outside Caffeine one night. More and more guys that seemed to be fluid with their sexuality ended up at that place over time. Or maybe it was that I started figuring out who I was, which made it easier to pick up on in others. Thanks to the Ecstasy, no one really seemed to care. My friends gave me shit, but it was all in good fun. After that night, I couldn't eat a banana in front of any of them without some stupid shit being said though. I told Gina one night when I trained into the city and dropped by her place. We went out for coffee. She wasn't surprised.

After I moved to the city for school, I struggled financially, but I figured it out. Coming out wasn't such a big deal to new people. They had no insight into my past. They never knew me before. It was like I started a completely different life.

My ma would call me occasionally to ask how I was doing, to find out if I needed anything, to guilt me for not coming home more often. My pops was absent, a tone-deaf leader of an army that housed no soldiers. We rarely spoke after that night he busted my lip.

And then, he died. He left my ma with an empty heart—not that it had ever been very full—and some medical bills that she desperately hoped his insurance would cover. At least the house was paid off. With his life insurance payout and her teaching job from which she refused to retire, she'd be fine. But would she know what to do without him? Would she know how to act? Would she know who she was? It wasn't like he was around that much, but he set the tone in that house. I hope he knew happiness as a kid. I hope at the very least that he had some fun when Gina and I were younger. Because he was marred by anger and loneliness in the end.

Just one more disappointment.