though honesty isn't something you can ask of him
i'm reading this book, which is rockstar times ten. it's called 'the brothers k,' by david james duncan, and it's about baseball but also more than that. the crazy thing is, my brother got it at a used bookstore in noe valley (who knows fogcity? anyone?), not because he knew the author or had heard anything about it, but because it had this written on the inside cover:
'Jess-
I want to take you to the ballpark and see your face on the Diamond Vision.
Love,
T.'
um! and then at the same time, why would anyone ever give a book with that written in it to a used bookstore? sigh. the ink's all smudged. i wanna laminate it and make sure it never rubs away for good. it's amazing, and i'm only a hundred pages in.
the oc has taken over my life.
listening to an awful lot of country and an awful lot of rap. which, like, what? it's the musical equivalent of being bisexual. or something. rock on!
it's a good thing i'm as smart as i am, man. good thing i'm going home in two weeks and dude, i fuckin miss baseball. fuckin MISS BASEBALL LIKE I'D MISS MY ARM.
this one's short. shorter. nothing i've ever written is short. actually, this part and the next part were originally one part, but i dealt and got over it and now it's two. i'm not . . . wild about this one. or the next. not to undersell or bust out the false modesty, cos you know how i hate that shit, but in light of the rest of it (and its awesomeness), i dunno. it's a pretty high standard i'm trying to get to, here.
okay, you know what part of the ambivalence is? fucking thing ends in a preposition. and it could, you know, not end in a preposition, but then i'd lose narrative voice and coherency and all that good stuff. so, yes, i know, it's grammatically incorrect. trust me, it's bugging me as much as it's bugging anyone. argggg.
i am running out of pictures with which to illustrate. at least, until we get to the bigs.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page.
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Fifth: Alone So Far
(sucker punch)
So they’re done.
They’re done and they’re both still young enough to think that done once is done forever.
Eric Munson goes back to school, throws himself headlong into his classes, wishing for the season to start and fill his life again. He fucks around for awhile, sleeping with just about every girl who’ll have him, but then he gets VD, goes on antibiotics and off women. His buddies slap him on the back and tell him it’s a rite of passage, congratulations, dude, your first sexually transmitted disease, but Munce just feels unclean, dirty and numb.
He doesn’t watch the World Series.
He wakes up in the middle of the night a lot, and can’t fall back asleep for hours. It’s not nightmares or anything like that, it’s just a shock like cold water on his face. He doesn’t really dream, these days.
Steve Scogin knocks on his door one night, shuffling in with his eyes down, and mutters an apology for reacting the way he did in Manhattan Beach, his hands jammed in his pockets as Munce sits on his bed and watches him impassively.
“Whatever . . . whatever’s going on, you guys are my best friends,” Steve tells him, his eyebrows clenched together and the words coming reluctantly.
“There’s nothing going on,” Munson answers, realizes with a jolt that that’s true, that’s actually true, for the first time in three years, maybe even longer than that. Chavez has been in love with him since they were fifteen, didn’t he say that? Is it possible that Munson’s been in love with Chavez for that long too, and never knew it? If he can’t say for sure how long he’s loved Eric, how can he say for sure he ever loved him at all?
Scogin kicks at the floor, scowling. “Whatever. You wouldn’t tell me even if there was.”
Munce cracks his neck, working out the stiffness. “Yeah,” he says to the ceiling.
“So, look,” Scogin says. “Let’s just . . . let’s get army about it.”
Munson squints at him, not getting it. Scogin grins. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, bro.”
Munce grins back, and they go surfing.
Later that night, when they’re drunk on Mexican beer with seawater crystallizing in their ears, Munson sucker-punches Scogin in the back of the head while the other man is waiting for their order at the bar.
Scogin cries out in pain and falls into the bar, crashing glasses and bottles everywhere, the crush of people jerking backwards. He whips around and Munson is already shoving an asshole-looking guy with a crewcut, shouting in outrage, “What the fuck, why’d you hit my friend, motherfucker!”
They narrowly escape getting killed. Scogin takes Munson back to dorms, treating him like a hero, grinning with red teeth, and Munson winces every time he smiles, his face bruised and his lip split. Scogin hands him shot after shot of tequila, tells everybody they see, “Eric, man, he totally didn’t even hesitate, got right after this dude who was, like, twice as big as him at least.”
Eric rubs his dislocated knuckles under the table. Punching Scogin in the head hurt him at least as much as it hurt Steve.
At the end of the night, Scogin fits a hand on Munson’s shoulder and says, “You’re a really good guy, man, I don’t want to get into bar fights with nobody else.”
Munson nods obligatorily and shows a gruesome smile, the cut on his lip opening again and blood inching down his chin.
Eric Chavez, for his part, doesn’t remember much of anything until he wakes up halfway through November with his television and stereo stolen, a litter of broken bottles and torn strips of cotton on the floor around his bed, finger-bruises on his throat.
This doesn’t frighten him as much as it probably should. He goes to the free clinic to get tested for everything, absently disappointed to find out he’s still clean, and buys a new stereo and television, top-of-the-line. He wonders, briefly, if the guy who fucked him raw and strangled him before stealing his shit might come back at some point, but can’t really get properly worked up about it.
He stays in Manhattan Beach, and gives serious consideration to becoming an alcoholic, as the situation seems to warrant, like, a Mickey Mantle kind of alcoholism, a Ruthian degree of it, ruin himself heroically the way a Yankee would, but if he keeps getting that fucked up, he’ll be dead by some anonymous West Hollywood trick long before his liver gives in, and he thinks about his family finding their good son with his face mutilated and his poor ten-percent-gay body curled naked and bloody on the kitchen floor, and cuts his fake ID up with an X-acto knife, throws the pieces off the deck into the wind. He never gets carded anymore, but it’s symbolic or dramatic or something like that, razor nicks on the tips of his fingers.
He watches a lot of bad TV and finds himself crying at random moments during the day, not feeling any worse than he normally does, just all of a sudden weeping at the kitchen table, on the couch, once getting dressed, pulling a shirt out of his closet, and hit with a crying jag so intense he fell to his knees on the closet floor and stayed like that for almost a half an hour, his coolest blue Lacoste totally soaked by the end of it.
He feels disconnected, disembodied, and decides that’s probably a good thing.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving, his dad calls.
“Hey, there, shortstuff,” Cesar says cheerfully. “How’s a boy?”
Eric sinks into the couch, pulling his legs up against his chest. “Good, Dad,” he says, proud of his voice for staying even.
But his father’s not so easily fooled, pausing and then asking, “You sure, Eric?”
Chavvy swallows, presses a fist against his eye. “Yeah man. Just . . . tired. Maybe I’m getting sick or something.”
“You’ve been sick about four times in your whole life,” Cesar reminds him, but seems content to let it go, continuing, “Well, we’re looking forward to seeing you for dinner on Thursday.”
Chavez involuntarily gags at the thought of all that food, and his family’s undiminished faith in him, but agrees, “Me too.”
“I tell ya, your mom’s going nuts. All her recipes are for six, and now she’s got ten. She’s been trying to use Casey’s big calculator to figure it out, but that thing, I can’t get it to make two plus two-”
“Ten?” Chavez interrupts him, his head throbbing. “Who else is coming besides us?”
His dad pauses again. “The Munsons, Eric. I told you that, when we talked last week.”
Chavez doesn’t remember last week. But he knows he’s not ready to see his best friend, not yet.
“Aw, Jesus, are you serious?” he says, a shade of desperation at the edge of it. The heel of his hand is against his temple, pushing hard, but it’s not helping.
The tone of worry is back in Cesar’s voice, stronger now. “Of course I’m serious. What’s the problem?”
“I . . . I don’t think I can make it, Dad,” Eric whispers, the roof of his mouth tasting metallic and sour.
“Eric?” and now his dad sounds almost scared.
“It’s . . . it’s nothing,” he chokes out, praying to every god there is that he won’t start to cry, not now. “I just . . . I won’t. Be there. Okay?”
“No, it’s not okay,” Cesar says, confused. “What’s going on?”
Fingers against one eye, thumb against the other, holding it back with his hands, Chavez tells him, “Me . . . me and Munson . . . Eric . . . we’re not really . . . getting along so good right now.”
“Why not? What happened?”
Eric shakes his head, digging his chin into his knees. “It’s dumb. It doesn’t matter. We’re not talking. Or seeing each other. Or anything. So I can’t be there.”
Cesar takes a long moment, piecing his way through that, and then says firmly, “No.”
“Dad?”
“No, I’m sorry, but you’re coming home for Thanksgiving. And you’ll see him, and work this out.” There’s no potential for debate in the way Cesar says it, but he doesn’t know anything.
“It’s not that simple,” Chavez tries to tell him, his back beginning to strain from the tension of staying balled up.
“Yes it is,” his dad answers unilaterally. “He’s your brother, and you’ll figure it out together.”
Eric makes a little falling noise, thoughtlessly refuting, “My brothers’ names are Chris and Casey.”
Cesar barely lets him finish, his voice sharpening curtly, “Their names are Chris, Casey, and Eric. He’s my fourth son. He’s your third brother. And I never want to hear you say different again, do you understand me?”
Chavvy swallows hard, amazed that he’s still not crying. “Yes.” He’s so fucked up, he can’t stand it. He tries to draw in a cleansing breath, but his chest is all cramped, nothing works right. “You don’t know how it is with me and him, though. It’s not . . . it’s not easy, this time. You . . . you don’t know.”
Horrifyingly, Eric feels himself on the verge of confessing everything, just pouring it out so that it won’t be inside him anymore: I love him dad and I’ve always loved him and he pushed me down and I don’t know what to do without him I can’t live like this.
And then, apocalypse.
Chavvy bites down on the side of his fist, keeps it down.
Cesar sighs, and says to him calm and sad and wise like dads are wise, “I know you’d die for him. And him for you. That’s enough for me. It should be enough for you, too. There . . . there are brothers you’re born with and brothers you find, Eric. If you’re lucky, you get to have both. And to lose either . . . that’s a terrible thing. A heartbreaking thing.”
That’s it. That’s, yeah, that’s it. Eric starts to cry, trying to keep it quiet, hidden from his father, snuffling against his knees and wiping his eyes on his arm, but probably his dad sees right through him over the phone lines, his way-too-smart dad.
Cesar doesn’t say anything about it, though, whether he knows or not, just tells him gently, “You come home and you fix it with him, short guy. And it’ll be good again.”
Chavez covers the receiver with his hand, sobs, and then takes his hand away, says as steadily as possible, “’Kay, Dad, I’ll see you then, I’ll see you soon, bye,” and quickly hits the button to hang up, crying so hard and doing his best not to think of the true answer to his father, the only right answer, because it’ll never be good, not ever again.
He’s nineteen years old and stubbornly attached to his heartbreak, living in a world of extremes, and nothing anyone says will convince Eric Chavez that he’ll ever stop hurting this badly.
*
(come home and see me sometime)
Thanksgiving, what a cruel fucking joke.
Chavvy goes home resentfully, his face scrubbed clean and his hair combed. He’s got an awful clawing sensation of dread, way down deep in his stomach, like the moment he first sees Munson, one of them will just die on the spot, and the other will be left to explain it to their families, and then go through their stuff after the funeral, and realize that their life isn’t something that can be divided from itself.
Munce’s big red truck is already parked on the street, and Chavez has a sniggering juvenile-delinquent moment when he thinks about keying it, or crunching the back fender, or getting the bat out of his trunk and taking the side mirror to the opposite field.
He parks behind the truck and trails his hand along it as he walks to the house, watching his funhouse reflection bend in the shiny contours.
Inside, his mom fusses over him and Chris screws up his hair, saying, “Who you tryin’ to kid, you’re no grown-up.” He hugs Brandy, lifts her off the ground and spins her, her legs flying out like propellers, one sandal winging into the wall. He gets a proud clapped-back embrace from Steve Munson and a smudge of lipstick on his cheek from Dora, and gives Shelly the necklace he got for her in San Francisco, silver and copper thinly braided.
Cesar’s in the living room, watching football with Casey, who thwacks Eric with a couch cushion in greeting. Cesar stands, and as he hugs his father, Chavvy realizes that he’s taller than the older man, for the first time.
Cesar pulls back and inspects him, testing Chavez’s arms. Chavvy makes a smile, and Cesar’s eyes soften.
“He’s in the backyard,” Cesar tells him, and Chavez blinks fast, nods.
He steps out the sliding door, pushing it closed behind him. It’s getting cold, a pulled chill in the air. It’s the space between sunset and nightfall, the light gone but the sky bruised lavender, the stars invisible behind the veil.
Eric Munson is sitting on the low branch of the fort tree, the planks of their never-completed tree house above his head, water-swollen and turning green, the nails pushed out and leaving small scarred indentations behind. Munson’s legs are swinging loosely above the mulched brown of the dirt, and he’s drinking Dr. Pepper out of a glass bottle, bought in Mexico with Spanish on the label because it’s a special occasion.
Eric Chavez looks down, stuffing his hands in his pockets. His throat is thick, and he shivers unexpectedly, his shoulders twitching.
“Hey.”
Chavez pulls his eyes up. It’s getting dark quickly; soon they’ll just be shadows. Munce is watching him from the tree, rolling the bottle between his palms. Chavez goes over, hikes himself up onto the branch. He takes the Dr. Pepper from Munson and finishes it off, Munson’s eyes on the movement of his throat.
“Hi.”
They sit there silently for awhile, the pale yellow-green matchlight of the last fireflies of the year switching on and off over the grass. Chavez tocks the empty bottle against his knee, and Munson asks, “How’re you doing?”
Chavez glances at him, but Munce isn’t letting anything show. Chavvy breathes out, rubs his eyes. He’s so fucking tired of lying, so he admits, “Pretty awful, man.”
“Yeah,” Munson says, sounding sad. They’re quiet again.
“Look,” Chavez says, and then stops. He picks at the tree bark, scratching his nails, his starfish hand pallid against the branch. He wants there to be something in between never wanting to see Munson again and never wanting to let go of him. He’s sure there’s got to be something, a middle ground, if he can only find it.
“You can take it back,” Munce tells him suddenly. Munson’s hands are on his own legs, fingers pattering nervously. “Any time you want, we can go back to the way it was.”
Chavez lets the bottle trip off his knee, rolling across the grass. He cracks his knuckles, squinting at the warm house, foggily skewed through the glass. “The way it was before the World Series or the way it was when . . . when we were kids?”
Munson sighs, and takes his time. “It’s weird, you know?” he says introspectively, not looking at Chavez. “I figured . . . figured I’d miss being friends with you the most. Like, just hanging out and stuff. But it turns out . . . in real life . . . all I can think about is sleeping with you again. Which is pretty fucking warped, I guess.”
Chavez shrugs, his face pleasurably warm, and thinks that he probably shouldn’t feel so excited to hear that. “It’s not warped. I can understand. What with me being all freakishly hot and everything.”
Munce smiles against his will, snatches a look at his friend. Chavez has got his head angled to the side, his eyes down, and there’s the shape of a perfect leaf on his forehead, like a charcoal sketch. Munce swallows, drags his gaze away.
Chavez works his way through it. It’s close to full dark now, and he can hear the safe sounds of the house, the rise of laughter, one family.
“I miss you,” he confesses. Munson’s head jerks, the whites of his eyes like marble. “I mean, you fucked me up pretty bad. Or . . . I guess I fucked myself up. Something. But it feels like . . . like I made a mistake, even though I, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I’m pretty sure it was the right thing to do, but it still feels . . . stupid.”
Chavez exhales noisily, pulls his hands through his hair. “I don’t know, man,” he sighs. “I don’t think I want you back, not right now. And you don’t want to be friends if we’re not fucking, so-”
“No,” Munson cuts him off, reaching out and touching three fingers to Chavez’s forearm, his pinkie curled back, like taking his pulse, but the wrong spot for it. “I didn’t say that. Don’t make stuff up. I want you. Any way I can get you.”
Chavvy looks at him with his eyes huge, and Munson’s face is hidden, just the flat wet color of his eyes, dimly made out. Munce shrugs, the hard tips of his fingers scraping on Chavez’s arm. “If you just want to be friends, then I’ll thank God for that.” He pulls away, mumbling too low for Chavez to hear, “Still more than I deserve.”
Chavez just stares at him for a second, then launches himself at his best friend, flinging his arms around Munson’s neck and slamming his forehead on Munson’s cheek. Munce oofs a surprised noise and tries to get his arms around Chavvy, but he loses his balance, tumbles out of the tree, both of them thumping to the soft ground, Munson’s wind gone.
He gasps in air, his chest hollow, and Chavez pulls him up, awkwardly positioned and hugging him tight enough that Munson fears death for a moment, neon bursts on the backs of his eyelids.
“You’re so cool,” Chavez babbles into his shoulder. “Swear to God, you’re the coolest motherfucker, you’re the best.”
Munson smiles, Chavez’s hair in his eyes, and feels his breath return, his heartbeat evening out and his mother’s voice calling out the window, “Boys! Dinner!”
They go in, sit next to each other at the long table, kicking at each other’s shoes, stealing pieces of cornbread off each other’s plate. They listen to Casey rambling enthusiastically about homecoming, waving a fork around perilously, and they watch Chris and Shelly trade barbed flirts the way they’ve been doing for about a decade now. Cesar smiles benevolently at the chattering group, and Dora beams to see them all together again, her eyes candle-lit. They talk over each other and trail off into giggles, surreptitiously feeding bits of turkey to Cheech, who nuzzles against their legs and slobbers on Munson’s hand adoringly.
When the time comes to go around the table and say what they’re thankful for, Chavez’s hand on the back of Munson’s neck squeezes warmly as Eric grins at his family and says, “Everything. I’m thankful for everything.”
*
(x-marks-the-spot)
They go back to being best friends.
Munson doesn’t come out to Manhattan Beach as much as he did before, and more and more often he makes sure that someone else will be there too, Steve Scogin with his tamped suspicions, some of Munce’s USC friends or their old buddies from Mt. Carmel.
He’s not quite comfortable, alone with Chavez out on the cliff, Chavez who still turns golden sometimes, flashes silver. Munce isn’t sure if he trusts himself to keep his hands off the other man, in those moments when Chavez is strange and perfect.
For the first time since they got their driver’s licenses and convinced their dads to stop coming along with them, it’s not just the two of them in the desert for New Year’s, but five cars full of kids, a shantytown of tents, a bonfire rung with coyote howls.
Munson gets mindlessly drunk way early on, and watches Chavez shyly kissing a blonde girl on the other side of the fire, tipping her chin up and his hand on her drawn-up knees. There’s concentration in Chavez’s face, his eyebrows pulled together, his cheeks hollowed, and Munce wonders if that’s what Chavez looks like when he’s kissing him.
Munson burns his hand, that night, reaching over the fire to hand the marshmallow stick off to someone who likes the burnt ones, and it’s too cold to even feel it. He thinks that a scar shouldn’t count if getting it didn’t hurt. He’s in an unsteady morbid frame of mind, these days, but he tries not to dwell on it too much.
It gets kind of easier, as 1998 picks up speed. Munson starts having a lot to do, getting ready for the season. There are team workouts and strength training and endless rounds of batting practice, until his shoulders throb bone-deep and his legs shake from overexertion as he lies in bed at night, too strung up to get to sleep.
He talks on the phone with Chavez, though his best friend is still just a half hour away even at rush hour. Sometimes, when Chavez invites him over to watch movies or hang out on the beach or something, Munson begs off, claiming something for the team when he’s actually got nothing planned. Chavvy believes him every time, though, so it doesn’t seem to matter.
It’s weird. It’s like a dream.
Munson thinks he’s doing all right. He feels all right. He goes to class, reads books about the Civil War and William Jennings Bryan, the cross of gold and the drought years of reform. He practices with his team, grins and laughs and hazes the freshmen. He goes out with a girl named Rebecca, cheats on her a couple of times and then admits it while penitently hammered one night, earning a ring-cut black eye and a new ex-girlfriend for his honesty. He surfs, he whips a firetruck red Frisbee to his buddy across the green.
He’s not in pain, he’s not sad. Everything seems to be going along the way it’s supposed to.
There’s an echo sometimes. A train whistle hollowing in his mind.
The night before Eric Chavez goes to Phoenix for spring training, they’re standing on the deck drinking a toast to Dixie, and Munson thinks about kissing him, if only to say good-bye, but decides not to.
Munce starts out sleeping on the couch in the living room, because that’s what best friends who aren’t fucking do, but around four in the morning, he creeps down the hall, his socks shuffling statically, and cautiously pushes the door open with his foot.
Chavvy is on his stomach, one arm bent over his head, his hand twined in his own hair, and the other thrown out across the mattress. Munson stands there silently, the calm flow of Chavez’s back, the speed-bumps of his shoulder blades, buckled notches of his spine, the tangle of sheets around his legs. The window with its slender wooden cross separating the panes makes an X-marks-the-spot in faded shadow gray at the slope just above the waistband of Eric’s boxers.
Something’s changing in Eric Munson. Something’s falling down.
Munson pulls his shirt off, lets it puddle to the floor by his feet. He moves soundlessly across the room, kneels beside the mattress. Carefully, as slowly as possible, he eases himself onto the mattress, lying down next to his friend. He sinks in and is scared to breathe. He turns his head and Chavez’s face is a half a foot away, all coaly eyelashes dusting high on his cheekbones, peaceful mouth, unlined forehead.
Munce picks up Chavez’s hand, places it gently on his own chest.
Chavvy sighs in his sleep, his closed eyelids flickering, and curls his hand slightly, his thumb itching at Munson’s heart. Munce stares up at the ceiling for a long time, spiderwebs like woven cotton, and he doesn’t remember when he falls asleep, but he knows that he wakes up alone.
*
(sunk down)
Munson decides to get over it. He’s really got no other choice, but even if he did, getting over it is definitely the way to go.
Chavez is gone, he’s gone to Alabama, and Munson’s got baseball to fill up his days, falls asleep at night running stats in his head, the pitch signs and the flutter of his hand over his chest protector when there’s a runner on second.
He’s playing as well as he ever has before, better even than when he was in high school, because the pitching’s very good now, and he can still hit everything. His arm’s strong, he makes the throw across the diamond from his knees. He can read the ball off the bat perfectly, knowing when he has time to fling his mask off and get to his feet, learning the different sounds of contact, clipped bunts, chunked weak-hit grounders on the infield, cracked liners, the high pure thwack of a ball headed over the outfield fence.
He never lost his love for the game, but now he’s rediscovered some rare strand of it, something from when he was a kid, maybe five years old, long before anything, when he felt like he’d stumbled upon the greatest thing in the world, baseball, baseball, back when baseball was what he wanted most, all he needed.
He’s gone all the way back.
He’s not in denial, though. He spends too much time trapped in his own fucking head to not be aware of what’s happening to him. He makes sure to think it out, force it into clarity:
You’re in love with him and he’s not in love with you anymore. It took you too long to realize and now it’s too late. You fucked up. He’s still your best friend. You can’t go to Alabama and beg him to take you back. You’re going to get over it, because this isn’t something that lasts forever.
Eric Munson goes to class. He goes to the ballpark. He goes to the beach. He calls Chavez once, maybe twice a week, and waits for Chavez to call him back. They talk about dumb stuff and there are occasional anticipatory pauses during which Munson cannot help but wonder if Chavez is going to say, “and hey, listen, everything sucks without you, let’s try again.”
Munson’s pretty sure that once he stops waiting for Chavez to say that, then it’ll be behind him, he’ll be good again.
He thinks, ‘major league baseball,’ and he doesn’t want to see Eric Chavez in an Oakland A’s uniform, because he already knows it will be impossible to stay away once that happens.
And he keeps thinking, kinda plaintively, a futile push at the base of his skull, ‘but I’m not even gay.’ How can this be happening to him when he’s not even gay?
Munson tries to figure it out, he narrows his eyes and looks at other guys with determination, almost scowling, I will find you attractive, you will make me want to fuck you. This has to make sense or else he’s gonna go crazy, and if he could just see something in guys, someone other than Eric Chavez, it would make sense.
The guys playing soccer on the green, the ones that the girls watch unabashedly with their teeth lightly bit into their lower lips, the boys pulling up their T-shirts to swipe at their faces, their stomachs revealed and drawn taut, cupped belly buttons and maybe the slant of a hip if their board shorts are tugged down. The smart-looking guys who hang out at the coffeeshop in the student union, with cool shoes and complicated hair and bottle-green eyes. The boys in the art department who are almost too pretty for the name, cameo faces and long eyelashes, splatters of paint on their shirts, Walkman headphones around their necks. Munson trains his eyes on them and tries to force that hot slow-moving sensation to unroll low in his stomach, tries to make his mouth go dry and his hands start to shake. But it never really works.
Every time he imagines pressing his mouth to another guy’s, or pushing his hands up under a shirt onto a hard flat chest, he just feels kind of sick and wrong, like how thinking about touching his brother would feel. But he doesn’t have any brothers. Not real ones. So he closes his eyes and lets the random guy turn back into Eric Chavez, just so he’ll stop feeling like he’s about to throw up, and Chavez is always smiling at him, hooking a hand in his collar and snickering against his neck.
Eric Chavez is on the back of his eyelids and in every one of his memories and he’s not gay, but he is in love, really, terribly, impossibly in love. And he’s going crazy.
In Los Angeles, building up to the summer with nothing but postcard days, the nights getting shorter and household pets are going missing like before a big earthquake hits, and Eric Munson thinks about waking up on an island, waking up sunk down with small fish wriggling in his hair.
He walks around and he’s proud because no one can tell what’s going on, he’s gotten so good at this. He’s been taken to pieces and left ashamed, blank, so fucking alone, but no one can see it, and that’s really all that matters.
He can do this. He’s tough and he’s dealt with worse, though he can’t remember when exactly, but he’s sure he must have, at some point, he’s sure this can’t be as bad as it’s ever been.
Eric Munson hears his best friend in his head, telling him to stay, holding him down and fitting them together, and the rest of his life isn’t looking much like something he wants to be a part of.
(end part five)
*
part six
'Jess-
I want to take you to the ballpark and see your face on the Diamond Vision.
Love,
T.'
um! and then at the same time, why would anyone ever give a book with that written in it to a used bookstore? sigh. the ink's all smudged. i wanna laminate it and make sure it never rubs away for good. it's amazing, and i'm only a hundred pages in.
the oc has taken over my life.
listening to an awful lot of country and an awful lot of rap. which, like, what? it's the musical equivalent of being bisexual. or something. rock on!
it's a good thing i'm as smart as i am, man. good thing i'm going home in two weeks and dude, i fuckin miss baseball. fuckin MISS BASEBALL LIKE I'D MISS MY ARM.
this one's short. shorter. nothing i've ever written is short. actually, this part and the next part were originally one part, but i dealt and got over it and now it's two. i'm not . . . wild about this one. or the next. not to undersell or bust out the false modesty, cos you know how i hate that shit, but in light of the rest of it (and its awesomeness), i dunno. it's a pretty high standard i'm trying to get to, here.
okay, you know what part of the ambivalence is? fucking thing ends in a preposition. and it could, you know, not end in a preposition, but then i'd lose narrative voice and coherency and all that good stuff. so, yes, i know, it's grammatically incorrect. trust me, it's bugging me as much as it's bugging anyone. argggg.
i am running out of pictures with which to illustrate. at least, until we get to the bigs.
Table of Contents
Pictures courtesy bradausmus12 and Jen's Baseball Page.
The Rest of Your Life
By Candle Beck
Part the Fifth: Alone So Far
(sucker punch)
So they’re done.
They’re done and they’re both still young enough to think that done once is done forever.
Eric Munson goes back to school, throws himself headlong into his classes, wishing for the season to start and fill his life again. He fucks around for awhile, sleeping with just about every girl who’ll have him, but then he gets VD, goes on antibiotics and off women. His buddies slap him on the back and tell him it’s a rite of passage, congratulations, dude, your first sexually transmitted disease, but Munce just feels unclean, dirty and numb.
He doesn’t watch the World Series.
He wakes up in the middle of the night a lot, and can’t fall back asleep for hours. It’s not nightmares or anything like that, it’s just a shock like cold water on his face. He doesn’t really dream, these days.
Steve Scogin knocks on his door one night, shuffling in with his eyes down, and mutters an apology for reacting the way he did in Manhattan Beach, his hands jammed in his pockets as Munce sits on his bed and watches him impassively.
“Whatever . . . whatever’s going on, you guys are my best friends,” Steve tells him, his eyebrows clenched together and the words coming reluctantly.
“There’s nothing going on,” Munson answers, realizes with a jolt that that’s true, that’s actually true, for the first time in three years, maybe even longer than that. Chavez has been in love with him since they were fifteen, didn’t he say that? Is it possible that Munson’s been in love with Chavez for that long too, and never knew it? If he can’t say for sure how long he’s loved Eric, how can he say for sure he ever loved him at all?
Scogin kicks at the floor, scowling. “Whatever. You wouldn’t tell me even if there was.”
Munce cracks his neck, working out the stiffness. “Yeah,” he says to the ceiling.
“So, look,” Scogin says. “Let’s just . . . let’s get army about it.”
Munson squints at him, not getting it. Scogin grins. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, bro.”
Munce grins back, and they go surfing.
Later that night, when they’re drunk on Mexican beer with seawater crystallizing in their ears, Munson sucker-punches Scogin in the back of the head while the other man is waiting for their order at the bar.
Scogin cries out in pain and falls into the bar, crashing glasses and bottles everywhere, the crush of people jerking backwards. He whips around and Munson is already shoving an asshole-looking guy with a crewcut, shouting in outrage, “What the fuck, why’d you hit my friend, motherfucker!”
They narrowly escape getting killed. Scogin takes Munson back to dorms, treating him like a hero, grinning with red teeth, and Munson winces every time he smiles, his face bruised and his lip split. Scogin hands him shot after shot of tequila, tells everybody they see, “Eric, man, he totally didn’t even hesitate, got right after this dude who was, like, twice as big as him at least.”
Eric rubs his dislocated knuckles under the table. Punching Scogin in the head hurt him at least as much as it hurt Steve.
At the end of the night, Scogin fits a hand on Munson’s shoulder and says, “You’re a really good guy, man, I don’t want to get into bar fights with nobody else.”
Munson nods obligatorily and shows a gruesome smile, the cut on his lip opening again and blood inching down his chin.
Eric Chavez, for his part, doesn’t remember much of anything until he wakes up halfway through November with his television and stereo stolen, a litter of broken bottles and torn strips of cotton on the floor around his bed, finger-bruises on his throat.
This doesn’t frighten him as much as it probably should. He goes to the free clinic to get tested for everything, absently disappointed to find out he’s still clean, and buys a new stereo and television, top-of-the-line. He wonders, briefly, if the guy who fucked him raw and strangled him before stealing his shit might come back at some point, but can’t really get properly worked up about it.
He stays in Manhattan Beach, and gives serious consideration to becoming an alcoholic, as the situation seems to warrant, like, a Mickey Mantle kind of alcoholism, a Ruthian degree of it, ruin himself heroically the way a Yankee would, but if he keeps getting that fucked up, he’ll be dead by some anonymous West Hollywood trick long before his liver gives in, and he thinks about his family finding their good son with his face mutilated and his poor ten-percent-gay body curled naked and bloody on the kitchen floor, and cuts his fake ID up with an X-acto knife, throws the pieces off the deck into the wind. He never gets carded anymore, but it’s symbolic or dramatic or something like that, razor nicks on the tips of his fingers.
He watches a lot of bad TV and finds himself crying at random moments during the day, not feeling any worse than he normally does, just all of a sudden weeping at the kitchen table, on the couch, once getting dressed, pulling a shirt out of his closet, and hit with a crying jag so intense he fell to his knees on the closet floor and stayed like that for almost a half an hour, his coolest blue Lacoste totally soaked by the end of it.
He feels disconnected, disembodied, and decides that’s probably a good thing.
A couple of days before Thanksgiving, his dad calls.
“Hey, there, shortstuff,” Cesar says cheerfully. “How’s a boy?”
Eric sinks into the couch, pulling his legs up against his chest. “Good, Dad,” he says, proud of his voice for staying even.
But his father’s not so easily fooled, pausing and then asking, “You sure, Eric?”
Chavvy swallows, presses a fist against his eye. “Yeah man. Just . . . tired. Maybe I’m getting sick or something.”
“You’ve been sick about four times in your whole life,” Cesar reminds him, but seems content to let it go, continuing, “Well, we’re looking forward to seeing you for dinner on Thursday.”
Chavez involuntarily gags at the thought of all that food, and his family’s undiminished faith in him, but agrees, “Me too.”
“I tell ya, your mom’s going nuts. All her recipes are for six, and now she’s got ten. She’s been trying to use Casey’s big calculator to figure it out, but that thing, I can’t get it to make two plus two-”
“Ten?” Chavez interrupts him, his head throbbing. “Who else is coming besides us?”
His dad pauses again. “The Munsons, Eric. I told you that, when we talked last week.”
Chavez doesn’t remember last week. But he knows he’s not ready to see his best friend, not yet.
“Aw, Jesus, are you serious?” he says, a shade of desperation at the edge of it. The heel of his hand is against his temple, pushing hard, but it’s not helping.
The tone of worry is back in Cesar’s voice, stronger now. “Of course I’m serious. What’s the problem?”
“I . . . I don’t think I can make it, Dad,” Eric whispers, the roof of his mouth tasting metallic and sour.
“Eric?” and now his dad sounds almost scared.
“It’s . . . it’s nothing,” he chokes out, praying to every god there is that he won’t start to cry, not now. “I just . . . I won’t. Be there. Okay?”
“No, it’s not okay,” Cesar says, confused. “What’s going on?”
Fingers against one eye, thumb against the other, holding it back with his hands, Chavez tells him, “Me . . . me and Munson . . . Eric . . . we’re not really . . . getting along so good right now.”
“Why not? What happened?”
Eric shakes his head, digging his chin into his knees. “It’s dumb. It doesn’t matter. We’re not talking. Or seeing each other. Or anything. So I can’t be there.”
Cesar takes a long moment, piecing his way through that, and then says firmly, “No.”
“Dad?”
“No, I’m sorry, but you’re coming home for Thanksgiving. And you’ll see him, and work this out.” There’s no potential for debate in the way Cesar says it, but he doesn’t know anything.
“It’s not that simple,” Chavez tries to tell him, his back beginning to strain from the tension of staying balled up.
“Yes it is,” his dad answers unilaterally. “He’s your brother, and you’ll figure it out together.”
Eric makes a little falling noise, thoughtlessly refuting, “My brothers’ names are Chris and Casey.”
Cesar barely lets him finish, his voice sharpening curtly, “Their names are Chris, Casey, and Eric. He’s my fourth son. He’s your third brother. And I never want to hear you say different again, do you understand me?”
Chavvy swallows hard, amazed that he’s still not crying. “Yes.” He’s so fucked up, he can’t stand it. He tries to draw in a cleansing breath, but his chest is all cramped, nothing works right. “You don’t know how it is with me and him, though. It’s not . . . it’s not easy, this time. You . . . you don’t know.”
Horrifyingly, Eric feels himself on the verge of confessing everything, just pouring it out so that it won’t be inside him anymore: I love him dad and I’ve always loved him and he pushed me down and I don’t know what to do without him I can’t live like this.
And then, apocalypse.
Chavvy bites down on the side of his fist, keeps it down.
Cesar sighs, and says to him calm and sad and wise like dads are wise, “I know you’d die for him. And him for you. That’s enough for me. It should be enough for you, too. There . . . there are brothers you’re born with and brothers you find, Eric. If you’re lucky, you get to have both. And to lose either . . . that’s a terrible thing. A heartbreaking thing.”
That’s it. That’s, yeah, that’s it. Eric starts to cry, trying to keep it quiet, hidden from his father, snuffling against his knees and wiping his eyes on his arm, but probably his dad sees right through him over the phone lines, his way-too-smart dad.
Cesar doesn’t say anything about it, though, whether he knows or not, just tells him gently, “You come home and you fix it with him, short guy. And it’ll be good again.”
Chavez covers the receiver with his hand, sobs, and then takes his hand away, says as steadily as possible, “’Kay, Dad, I’ll see you then, I’ll see you soon, bye,” and quickly hits the button to hang up, crying so hard and doing his best not to think of the true answer to his father, the only right answer, because it’ll never be good, not ever again.
He’s nineteen years old and stubbornly attached to his heartbreak, living in a world of extremes, and nothing anyone says will convince Eric Chavez that he’ll ever stop hurting this badly.
*
(come home and see me sometime)
Thanksgiving, what a cruel fucking joke.
Chavvy goes home resentfully, his face scrubbed clean and his hair combed. He’s got an awful clawing sensation of dread, way down deep in his stomach, like the moment he first sees Munson, one of them will just die on the spot, and the other will be left to explain it to their families, and then go through their stuff after the funeral, and realize that their life isn’t something that can be divided from itself.
Munce’s big red truck is already parked on the street, and Chavez has a sniggering juvenile-delinquent moment when he thinks about keying it, or crunching the back fender, or getting the bat out of his trunk and taking the side mirror to the opposite field.
He parks behind the truck and trails his hand along it as he walks to the house, watching his funhouse reflection bend in the shiny contours.
Inside, his mom fusses over him and Chris screws up his hair, saying, “Who you tryin’ to kid, you’re no grown-up.” He hugs Brandy, lifts her off the ground and spins her, her legs flying out like propellers, one sandal winging into the wall. He gets a proud clapped-back embrace from Steve Munson and a smudge of lipstick on his cheek from Dora, and gives Shelly the necklace he got for her in San Francisco, silver and copper thinly braided.
Cesar’s in the living room, watching football with Casey, who thwacks Eric with a couch cushion in greeting. Cesar stands, and as he hugs his father, Chavvy realizes that he’s taller than the older man, for the first time.
Cesar pulls back and inspects him, testing Chavez’s arms. Chavvy makes a smile, and Cesar’s eyes soften.
“He’s in the backyard,” Cesar tells him, and Chavez blinks fast, nods.
He steps out the sliding door, pushing it closed behind him. It’s getting cold, a pulled chill in the air. It’s the space between sunset and nightfall, the light gone but the sky bruised lavender, the stars invisible behind the veil.
Eric Munson is sitting on the low branch of the fort tree, the planks of their never-completed tree house above his head, water-swollen and turning green, the nails pushed out and leaving small scarred indentations behind. Munson’s legs are swinging loosely above the mulched brown of the dirt, and he’s drinking Dr. Pepper out of a glass bottle, bought in Mexico with Spanish on the label because it’s a special occasion.
Eric Chavez looks down, stuffing his hands in his pockets. His throat is thick, and he shivers unexpectedly, his shoulders twitching.
“Hey.”
Chavez pulls his eyes up. It’s getting dark quickly; soon they’ll just be shadows. Munce is watching him from the tree, rolling the bottle between his palms. Chavez goes over, hikes himself up onto the branch. He takes the Dr. Pepper from Munson and finishes it off, Munson’s eyes on the movement of his throat.
“Hi.”
They sit there silently for awhile, the pale yellow-green matchlight of the last fireflies of the year switching on and off over the grass. Chavez tocks the empty bottle against his knee, and Munson asks, “How’re you doing?”
Chavez glances at him, but Munce isn’t letting anything show. Chavvy breathes out, rubs his eyes. He’s so fucking tired of lying, so he admits, “Pretty awful, man.”
“Yeah,” Munson says, sounding sad. They’re quiet again.
“Look,” Chavez says, and then stops. He picks at the tree bark, scratching his nails, his starfish hand pallid against the branch. He wants there to be something in between never wanting to see Munson again and never wanting to let go of him. He’s sure there’s got to be something, a middle ground, if he can only find it.
“You can take it back,” Munce tells him suddenly. Munson’s hands are on his own legs, fingers pattering nervously. “Any time you want, we can go back to the way it was.”
Chavez lets the bottle trip off his knee, rolling across the grass. He cracks his knuckles, squinting at the warm house, foggily skewed through the glass. “The way it was before the World Series or the way it was when . . . when we were kids?”
Munson sighs, and takes his time. “It’s weird, you know?” he says introspectively, not looking at Chavez. “I figured . . . figured I’d miss being friends with you the most. Like, just hanging out and stuff. But it turns out . . . in real life . . . all I can think about is sleeping with you again. Which is pretty fucking warped, I guess.”
Chavez shrugs, his face pleasurably warm, and thinks that he probably shouldn’t feel so excited to hear that. “It’s not warped. I can understand. What with me being all freakishly hot and everything.”
Munce smiles against his will, snatches a look at his friend. Chavez has got his head angled to the side, his eyes down, and there’s the shape of a perfect leaf on his forehead, like a charcoal sketch. Munce swallows, drags his gaze away.
Chavez works his way through it. It’s close to full dark now, and he can hear the safe sounds of the house, the rise of laughter, one family.
“I miss you,” he confesses. Munson’s head jerks, the whites of his eyes like marble. “I mean, you fucked me up pretty bad. Or . . . I guess I fucked myself up. Something. But it feels like . . . like I made a mistake, even though I, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I’m pretty sure it was the right thing to do, but it still feels . . . stupid.”
Chavez exhales noisily, pulls his hands through his hair. “I don’t know, man,” he sighs. “I don’t think I want you back, not right now. And you don’t want to be friends if we’re not fucking, so-”
“No,” Munson cuts him off, reaching out and touching three fingers to Chavez’s forearm, his pinkie curled back, like taking his pulse, but the wrong spot for it. “I didn’t say that. Don’t make stuff up. I want you. Any way I can get you.”
Chavvy looks at him with his eyes huge, and Munson’s face is hidden, just the flat wet color of his eyes, dimly made out. Munce shrugs, the hard tips of his fingers scraping on Chavez’s arm. “If you just want to be friends, then I’ll thank God for that.” He pulls away, mumbling too low for Chavez to hear, “Still more than I deserve.”
Chavez just stares at him for a second, then launches himself at his best friend, flinging his arms around Munson’s neck and slamming his forehead on Munson’s cheek. Munce oofs a surprised noise and tries to get his arms around Chavvy, but he loses his balance, tumbles out of the tree, both of them thumping to the soft ground, Munson’s wind gone.
He gasps in air, his chest hollow, and Chavez pulls him up, awkwardly positioned and hugging him tight enough that Munson fears death for a moment, neon bursts on the backs of his eyelids.
“You’re so cool,” Chavez babbles into his shoulder. “Swear to God, you’re the coolest motherfucker, you’re the best.”
Munson smiles, Chavez’s hair in his eyes, and feels his breath return, his heartbeat evening out and his mother’s voice calling out the window, “Boys! Dinner!”
They go in, sit next to each other at the long table, kicking at each other’s shoes, stealing pieces of cornbread off each other’s plate. They listen to Casey rambling enthusiastically about homecoming, waving a fork around perilously, and they watch Chris and Shelly trade barbed flirts the way they’ve been doing for about a decade now. Cesar smiles benevolently at the chattering group, and Dora beams to see them all together again, her eyes candle-lit. They talk over each other and trail off into giggles, surreptitiously feeding bits of turkey to Cheech, who nuzzles against their legs and slobbers on Munson’s hand adoringly.
When the time comes to go around the table and say what they’re thankful for, Chavez’s hand on the back of Munson’s neck squeezes warmly as Eric grins at his family and says, “Everything. I’m thankful for everything.”
*
(x-marks-the-spot)
They go back to being best friends.
Munson doesn’t come out to Manhattan Beach as much as he did before, and more and more often he makes sure that someone else will be there too, Steve Scogin with his tamped suspicions, some of Munce’s USC friends or their old buddies from Mt. Carmel.
He’s not quite comfortable, alone with Chavez out on the cliff, Chavez who still turns golden sometimes, flashes silver. Munce isn’t sure if he trusts himself to keep his hands off the other man, in those moments when Chavez is strange and perfect.
For the first time since they got their driver’s licenses and convinced their dads to stop coming along with them, it’s not just the two of them in the desert for New Year’s, but five cars full of kids, a shantytown of tents, a bonfire rung with coyote howls.
Munson gets mindlessly drunk way early on, and watches Chavez shyly kissing a blonde girl on the other side of the fire, tipping her chin up and his hand on her drawn-up knees. There’s concentration in Chavez’s face, his eyebrows pulled together, his cheeks hollowed, and Munce wonders if that’s what Chavez looks like when he’s kissing him.
Munson burns his hand, that night, reaching over the fire to hand the marshmallow stick off to someone who likes the burnt ones, and it’s too cold to even feel it. He thinks that a scar shouldn’t count if getting it didn’t hurt. He’s in an unsteady morbid frame of mind, these days, but he tries not to dwell on it too much.
It gets kind of easier, as 1998 picks up speed. Munson starts having a lot to do, getting ready for the season. There are team workouts and strength training and endless rounds of batting practice, until his shoulders throb bone-deep and his legs shake from overexertion as he lies in bed at night, too strung up to get to sleep.
He talks on the phone with Chavez, though his best friend is still just a half hour away even at rush hour. Sometimes, when Chavez invites him over to watch movies or hang out on the beach or something, Munson begs off, claiming something for the team when he’s actually got nothing planned. Chavvy believes him every time, though, so it doesn’t seem to matter.
It’s weird. It’s like a dream.
Munson thinks he’s doing all right. He feels all right. He goes to class, reads books about the Civil War and William Jennings Bryan, the cross of gold and the drought years of reform. He practices with his team, grins and laughs and hazes the freshmen. He goes out with a girl named Rebecca, cheats on her a couple of times and then admits it while penitently hammered one night, earning a ring-cut black eye and a new ex-girlfriend for his honesty. He surfs, he whips a firetruck red Frisbee to his buddy across the green.
He’s not in pain, he’s not sad. Everything seems to be going along the way it’s supposed to.
There’s an echo sometimes. A train whistle hollowing in his mind.
The night before Eric Chavez goes to Phoenix for spring training, they’re standing on the deck drinking a toast to Dixie, and Munson thinks about kissing him, if only to say good-bye, but decides not to.
Munce starts out sleeping on the couch in the living room, because that’s what best friends who aren’t fucking do, but around four in the morning, he creeps down the hall, his socks shuffling statically, and cautiously pushes the door open with his foot.
Chavvy is on his stomach, one arm bent over his head, his hand twined in his own hair, and the other thrown out across the mattress. Munson stands there silently, the calm flow of Chavez’s back, the speed-bumps of his shoulder blades, buckled notches of his spine, the tangle of sheets around his legs. The window with its slender wooden cross separating the panes makes an X-marks-the-spot in faded shadow gray at the slope just above the waistband of Eric’s boxers.
Something’s changing in Eric Munson. Something’s falling down.
Munson pulls his shirt off, lets it puddle to the floor by his feet. He moves soundlessly across the room, kneels beside the mattress. Carefully, as slowly as possible, he eases himself onto the mattress, lying down next to his friend. He sinks in and is scared to breathe. He turns his head and Chavez’s face is a half a foot away, all coaly eyelashes dusting high on his cheekbones, peaceful mouth, unlined forehead.
Munce picks up Chavez’s hand, places it gently on his own chest.
Chavvy sighs in his sleep, his closed eyelids flickering, and curls his hand slightly, his thumb itching at Munson’s heart. Munce stares up at the ceiling for a long time, spiderwebs like woven cotton, and he doesn’t remember when he falls asleep, but he knows that he wakes up alone.
*
(sunk down)
Munson decides to get over it. He’s really got no other choice, but even if he did, getting over it is definitely the way to go.
Chavez is gone, he’s gone to Alabama, and Munson’s got baseball to fill up his days, falls asleep at night running stats in his head, the pitch signs and the flutter of his hand over his chest protector when there’s a runner on second.
He’s playing as well as he ever has before, better even than when he was in high school, because the pitching’s very good now, and he can still hit everything. His arm’s strong, he makes the throw across the diamond from his knees. He can read the ball off the bat perfectly, knowing when he has time to fling his mask off and get to his feet, learning the different sounds of contact, clipped bunts, chunked weak-hit grounders on the infield, cracked liners, the high pure thwack of a ball headed over the outfield fence.
He never lost his love for the game, but now he’s rediscovered some rare strand of it, something from when he was a kid, maybe five years old, long before anything, when he felt like he’d stumbled upon the greatest thing in the world, baseball, baseball, back when baseball was what he wanted most, all he needed.
He’s gone all the way back.
He’s not in denial, though. He spends too much time trapped in his own fucking head to not be aware of what’s happening to him. He makes sure to think it out, force it into clarity:
You’re in love with him and he’s not in love with you anymore. It took you too long to realize and now it’s too late. You fucked up. He’s still your best friend. You can’t go to Alabama and beg him to take you back. You’re going to get over it, because this isn’t something that lasts forever.
Eric Munson goes to class. He goes to the ballpark. He goes to the beach. He calls Chavez once, maybe twice a week, and waits for Chavez to call him back. They talk about dumb stuff and there are occasional anticipatory pauses during which Munson cannot help but wonder if Chavez is going to say, “and hey, listen, everything sucks without you, let’s try again.”
Munson’s pretty sure that once he stops waiting for Chavez to say that, then it’ll be behind him, he’ll be good again.
He thinks, ‘major league baseball,’ and he doesn’t want to see Eric Chavez in an Oakland A’s uniform, because he already knows it will be impossible to stay away once that happens.
And he keeps thinking, kinda plaintively, a futile push at the base of his skull, ‘but I’m not even gay.’ How can this be happening to him when he’s not even gay?
Munson tries to figure it out, he narrows his eyes and looks at other guys with determination, almost scowling, I will find you attractive, you will make me want to fuck you. This has to make sense or else he’s gonna go crazy, and if he could just see something in guys, someone other than Eric Chavez, it would make sense.
The guys playing soccer on the green, the ones that the girls watch unabashedly with their teeth lightly bit into their lower lips, the boys pulling up their T-shirts to swipe at their faces, their stomachs revealed and drawn taut, cupped belly buttons and maybe the slant of a hip if their board shorts are tugged down. The smart-looking guys who hang out at the coffeeshop in the student union, with cool shoes and complicated hair and bottle-green eyes. The boys in the art department who are almost too pretty for the name, cameo faces and long eyelashes, splatters of paint on their shirts, Walkman headphones around their necks. Munson trains his eyes on them and tries to force that hot slow-moving sensation to unroll low in his stomach, tries to make his mouth go dry and his hands start to shake. But it never really works.
Every time he imagines pressing his mouth to another guy’s, or pushing his hands up under a shirt onto a hard flat chest, he just feels kind of sick and wrong, like how thinking about touching his brother would feel. But he doesn’t have any brothers. Not real ones. So he closes his eyes and lets the random guy turn back into Eric Chavez, just so he’ll stop feeling like he’s about to throw up, and Chavez is always smiling at him, hooking a hand in his collar and snickering against his neck.
Eric Chavez is on the back of his eyelids and in every one of his memories and he’s not gay, but he is in love, really, terribly, impossibly in love. And he’s going crazy.
In Los Angeles, building up to the summer with nothing but postcard days, the nights getting shorter and household pets are going missing like before a big earthquake hits, and Eric Munson thinks about waking up on an island, waking up sunk down with small fish wriggling in his hair.
He walks around and he’s proud because no one can tell what’s going on, he’s gotten so good at this. He’s been taken to pieces and left ashamed, blank, so fucking alone, but no one can see it, and that’s really all that matters.
He can do this. He’s tough and he’s dealt with worse, though he can’t remember when exactly, but he’s sure he must have, at some point, he’s sure this can’t be as bad as it’s ever been.
Eric Munson hears his best friend in his head, telling him to stay, holding him down and fitting them together, and the rest of his life isn’t looking much like something he wants to be a part of.
(end part five)
*
part six