Defining Us: The Calvin & Eric Story (69 Bottles) (2 page)

Somehow he’d always manage to make it up to me and I’m naive enough to believe that he has a part to play. We all had our parts to play in school. Play it straight, don’t let them know.
 

“Hssss...shit, don’t fucking stop,” I growl as his hands and mouth furiously work up and down my rod, enticing an orgasm from me.
 

Growing up in middle of nowhere, Northeastern Iowa means plenty of farm land, plenty of conservatives and way too many devout Christians who think their shit doesn’t fucking stink. Being gay is the ultimate crime against family and family values.
 

“Shit. Someone’s coming,” I say as I try and back away from Billy, just enough so that I can…

“What the fuck are you doing?” I hear my father scream from the far end of the barn.
 

I freeze. Billy casually stands up, all calm and collected, turning toward my father before he strolls right on out of the barn.
 

“You dirty ass son of bitch, what the fuck are you doing?” my father growls as his face turns as red as a radish. “How dare you force someone to suck your pathetic excuse for a dick.” My father reaches me then, leaning over and pulling me up by my shirts.
 

“He volunteered,” I say back. Years ago my father intimidated me like no other man, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown taller and far stronger than him.
 

“No wonder none of ‘em girls come ‘round here, you fucking faggot.” My father continues his verbal tirade and I see Billy out of the corner of my eye. The son of a bitch has the balls to mouth “sorry” to me before he takes off for his truck.
 

My momentary distraction is what my father was waiting for as I feel the sharp sting of a slap right across my face. My head jerks to the side and before I can compose myself enough to fight back, he manages a kidney shot. I double over from the blow. My vision swims in red and I fight to breathe, calling on all my strength before I finally manage to fight back.
 

The next day, walking into school is a total disaster. My face is bruised, though nowhere near as bad as I expected it to be, my rib cage is a mess. He refused to take me to the doctor when we were done, but it didn’t stop him from running off to the bar for the night, the same place he’s gone every night since Mom died. Regardless, I cleaned myself up and crawled into bed. I’d heard him come home somewhere around four in the morning, but I paid him no mind.
 

As I strolled through the halls of our little K-12
th
grade school, I could hear the comments and commotion about my appearance. When I hit the jock squad, one of the running backs says, “Well, would you look at that, he really is a pussy if he looks like that.”
 

Then someone else said, “The faggot probably hit on the wrong guy.”
 

“Shut up,” I hear Billy say. “For fuck’s sakes, how old are you idiots? Grow the fuck up.”
 

Despite the swollen, cut up lip, I manage a small smile as I pass by them. Being thankful that it was about time Billy finally stood up for me.
 

The weeks passed and I started to heal up once again. The bruises faded away into ugly ass green and yellow splotches. Everyone knew that it was my father who beat me, but in a town like this, in this day and age, it’s not at all uncommon. After that fight, I’d managed to stop looking at Billy when we were working together. Though I could feel him staring at me regularly, neither one of us advanced it beyond that. I had a hard time forgiving him for running away, not once, but twice, and I wasn’t going to go back down that road again.
 

So I got my hands on a fake ID and would drive about forty five minutes into another small college town called Decorah. It was far enough away from home where no one would know me and I could easily blend into the college scene.

It became a great stomping ground and I managed to find myself hooked up with a few really great looking guys. Most of them knew I was a minor, but they never seemed to care. I didn’t turn into a slut by any means, but here seemed to be the one place I could be myself. So I was.
 

“It isn’t something I can just turn off.”
 

“Bullshit. You can and you will, or you will get the fuck out of my house.”
 

Those were the last words I heard before my father knocked me the fuck out, breaking his hand and my jaw with one punch. It would be the last time my father would hit me. At that point in my life, everything changed. Years of confusion, years of frustration and misunderstanding finally came to fruition, only to be beaten out of me at regular intervals by my father.
 

After that, I tried to suppress my natural desires and turned them into false ones in order to please him, but it proved to be too difficult.
 

That was until he caught me kissing a boy I’d met at one of the many bars I frequented.
 

It was at that point that he realized his fist was no longer punishment enough and his own right wing views were aided by doctors of a similar mind. Doctors who believed that being gay was a choice and that, with intensive therapy, they could “cure” the gay from who I was.

FOR me, picking up girls has never been easy. Hell, I was lucky if I could manage to carry on a conversation with them, let alone get in their pants.

Until I joined 69 Bottles.
 

Whether we were performing in a bar in the middle of some Podunk town or some major arena somewhere, the chicks threw themselves at us. Picking up chicks became easy for an awkward, sexually repressed man like me. It was easy enough that I could manage to talk very little and get what I was after, though ninety percent of the time, I ended up in the bathroom spewing my guts out into the toilet when it was over.
 

“What about her?” Eric says to me as he points out some chick. I shrug it off like I’m not interested. In fact, I’m not interested, not tonight.
 

“What’s crawled up your ass and died?” Dex shoulder checks me.
 

“Forget it,” I grumble and put my hands in my hair. In an exasperated huff, I get up from the couch and head for the back door. I feel trapped inside this bar. Trapped inside myself.
 

Something about today has triggered this uncertainty. Something about today has me on edge, and I don’t quite understand it. I feel like beating the shit out of something, or forgetting my name with pussy or drugs.
 

I rub vigorously at my arms, attempting to scrub away the creepy, ants under my skin feeling, but it’s pointless.
 

I’m restless and I’m itching…twitching, desperate to wash the memories of the past away.
 

I’m gay
.

I’m gay
… Eric’s words when we were in New York continue to ring through my head. The words that I somehow desperately needed to hear him say without knowing that I needed to hear them. Words that have brought back everything that I’ve ever desired, along with the reasons why I can’t have it.
 

Eric and I had talked that night, after the concert. He pulled me into a quiet room at the bar we were in and…

“I have to tell you something,” he tells me.
 

“Dude, you’re gay, I get it.”
 

“No Calvin, listen to me, please?” he pleads.
 

“How drunk are you?” I ask him and he smiles.
 

“I’m not. I just feel…” he shrugs and then starts pacing around the room, it looks like an office area, there are filing cabinets and yeah, whatever, it’s not important. “…Free,” he finally finishes.

“Free of what?” I take a pull on my beer.
 

“Everything, all the burden of wondering what people will think, free of the fact that I no longer feel I need to hide who I am from people.”
 

I snort, “Dude, you’ve never hidden who you are with us. So you like the dick, no big deal. Honestly, Eric, we all knew.” I shake my head dismissively at him. It’s not entirely true that we all knew, I suspected, of course, but… I shiver involuntarily and fight the bile that rises in the back of my throat and my blood runs cold with hatred, hatred of myself, and of my father. Hatred that this conversation is going to turn ugly faster than I’m sure Eric intended it to.
 

“Did you?” he asks.

I give him a sideways glance as I take another sip of my beer, hoping that it will wash down the bile and give me something else to think about. Yes, in a way I did know, in another way I truly hoped I was wrong. I could deal with loving someone when I didn’t think they could or would love me back. I could easily sit back and let him have his own happy life while I sat quietly in love with him. It was easier for me to admit my love for Eric when I thought nothing would actually happen between us.
 

He shrugs off my glare and goes back to pacing. Without saying anything.
 

I was safe without knowing for certain that I really was in love with a man who didn’t stand a chance of loving me back. How is it possible that I could be attracted to someone who wasn't capable of feeling the same way toward me?
 

That was how I rationalized all this until now.
 

My inability to talk to Eric drove him mad and he stormed out of the room, leaving whatever he came in here to say unsaid.

Sex is something I take a lot of pleasure in, until I come.
 

Orgasms are the trigger of conditioned therapy. A belief that was ingrained in my brain for far too long. So much so that the idea of giving into being with a man, I have to swallow the bile rising in my throat, is enough to set off the little triggers my body and mind were conditioned to have as a response.

The never-ending knot I get in my stomach anytime I’m around Eric, alone with Eric or I’m really struggling with holding myself back, returns with a vengeance and I keep attempting to swallow back the bile that keeps creeping up the back of my throat as I pace behind the bar.

Why do I have to be in love with someone I can’t fucking have?
 

How did I ever manage to fall in love with someone without once connecting with them on a deeply personal level?
 

The answer really isn’t all that simple. I honestly can’t tell you at what point in our friendship, pseudo relationship, that I actually fell in love with him. I just know that I did. A feeling that, until his coming out back in New York, I’d been able to ignore. I guess there was a part of me that wondered if he’d try and make a play for me after coming out. Sometimes I wonder if he’s still trying to figure out exactly how to do just that.

“Goddammit,” I growl as I kick at an imaginary rock on the ground.
 

“Care to talk about it?” I hear Eric’s sympathetic voice and I slouch. All the fight I felt moments ago drains from my body in a rush. His voice carries a calming effect with it. A voice that has always managed to calm me down, addicting to the rolling waves of emotions running through my fucking body. Emotions that will send me running in the opposite direction, looking for a place to hurl, if I even attempt to act on them.

Denying who I am is much easier than admitting to myself or anyone else, the truth. It is impossible, physically and mentally, to give in. I have no choice but to let something so unbelievable wipe out any and all ability to love and be loved by the one person I want and the only person I know I need.

“No,” I finally manage to work out past the rising lump in my throat.
 

“Okay then,” I hear him say. Despite looking away from him, I have no doubt that he shrugs behind me. He doesn’t leave, though I never expected him to. Eric has a way of quietly probing, a strange way of making sure he gets what he wants, or at least what he wants to hear. But, he also knows me well enough that if he probes me, in his silent, ‘I’m here, I’m listening’ kind of way that I will more than likely start talking.