Murder on the Down Low (26 page)

“Reverend, I’m so sorry. I—”

“Son, you have to get your life in order. God has granted you His favor. Don’t you dare spit in His face like this.”

Reverend Sims stared at him with a harshness that Eugene did not want to acknowledge.

The reverend scratched his chin. “We need to have a serious talk, brother. Why don’t you finish making that coffee. I’ll be in the living room.”

Eugene joined him a few minutes later with two steaming coffee mugs and set them down on coasters on the coffee table. He realized he had forgotten to bring the pie, but he didn’t have an appetite for it anyway. He took a seat on the couch across from the reverend, still too embarrassed to look him in the eye.

“Brother, I have to confess that I truly don’t understand what’s going on here. It was my understanding that you had made a decision to turn away from this behavior.”

“I did . . . but I . . . I thought you were about to—”

“You’re not the first man I’ve counseled in this situation. It doesn’t matter what you thought
I
was about to do.” Reverend Sims pointed a stern finger at him. “You need to know where
you
stand.”

Eugene looked down at his hands, too embarrassed to respond.

The reverend asked him several pointed questions, then Eugene’s story poured out of him.

Even as a young kid, he’d always known his attraction to other boys, not girls, wasn’t acceptable. A voracious reader, he enjoyed accompanying his father to a neighborhood convenience store and browsing through the magazines. He loved the colorful pictures of beautiful black people on the covers. One particular day, when he was around eleven or twelve, instead of picking up an
Ebony
or
Jet
, he noticed a
Playgirl.
When he opened the magazine and saw all the attractive nude men, he felt a tingle of arousal like nothing he’d ever felt before. Soon, he started stealing the magazines by stuffing them down the back of his pants.

“Your parents never found them?” Reverend Sims asked.

“No,” Eugene said, his weary face drawn back to his youth. “I kept them in a big Corn Flakes box in the attic. My father would have skinned me alive if he’d known his only son got off on looking at naked men. I think my mother suspected I might be gay, but hoped I would grow out of it. Thank God they’re both gone now. I couldn’t handle having them exposed to everything I’ve been going through.”

“Okay,” the Reverend said. “So you considered yourself gay back then?”

“I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I couldn’t let anybody know I was attracted to boys.”

“Wasn’t there anybody in your family you could talk to?”

He laughed. “Absolutely not. Everything I’d ever heard about gays was evil. My family was Pentecostal. Since the time I was a kid, our minister preached that homosexuals were an abomination and would burn in hell forever. I didn’t want that to happen to me. So I hid what I was feeling.”

“You obviously stopped hiding it at some point,” Reverend Sims said.

Eugene took a sip of coffee. “I didn’t have my first sexual experience with a man until my sophomore year of college. I’d dated women up until that time. Sex with women was okay, but I still enjoyed looking at my magazines and, by this time, I had a pretty extensive collection of gay porn.”

Eugene felt embarrassed and only continued after the reverend’s nod of encouragement.

“I hung out with a lot of jocks at UCLA and even joined a fraternity. One night my roommate and I staggered back to the dorm after a party. We were so blasted I have no idea how we found our way back to our room. We were too drunk to even find the light switch. I dived onto my bed and Curtis fell on top of me. We didn’t even say a word. It just happened.”

Eugene didn’t think it was necessary to provide more details. “We were together until we graduated. Then he returned to Atlanta and married his high school sweetheart. I was his best man. The last time we were together was the night before his wedding.”

The reverend frowned. “So if Maya had not become ill, you planned to marry her and continue this type of behavior?” The reverend’s tone was an equal dose of amazement and condemnation.

Eugene lowered his head. “I wanted to be faithful to Maya and I planned to try. But I realize now that I would’ve failed. But I just couldn’t come out. My family would’ve disowned me. Maya’s cousin told my sister and aunt about how she became ill. They barely speak to me now.”

“I’m pretty liberal in my religious teachings and I don’t agree with the fundamentalist views on homosexuality,” Reverend Sims said. “But I do believe in honesty and integrity. And your behavior toward that young woman you were engaged to can’t be excused.”

Eugene looked down at his hands.

“And there’s something else I need to say. I know you’ve been seeing the head of our new members group, Belynda Davis. She talks about you constantly. And until tonight, I thought that was a good thing.” His eyes burned with disapproval. “I pray it’s not your intent to continue this type of behavior. Because if it is, I won’t sit by and let you destroy another young woman’s life.”

V
ernetta had no idea what to expect when they parked outside what looked like an abandoned building on Hawthorne Boulevard. On the way over, Jamal had given them the 4-1-1 on the best gay hangouts in L.A. Most of them were underground clubs only insiders knew about.

Jamal led the way into the building, having promised Vernetta and Nichelle an entertaining night on the town. Once inside, the place looked like nearly every other nightclub Vernetta had visited. Loud music, low lights, nicely dressed people. Here, though, most of the couples on the dance floor were of the same sex. The crowd was about seventy-five percent black.

Vernetta slowed near the bar, struck by the droves of handsome, masculine-looking black men everywhere she turned. There were also a good number of lesbian couples. Two men were kissing near the bar. A few guys were flamboyantly dressed in leather and chains, but most wore stylish clothes suitable for an office setting. What Vernetta was seeing took her stereotypical image of
gay
and turned it upside down and sideways. If she had met half of these guys on the street, she would have assumed they were straight.

Jamal nudged her. “You okay?”

Vernetta smiled and nodded, embarrassed that she was standing there with her eyes bugged out.

Nichelle did a three-sixty turn. She was just as confounded as Vernetta. “This is something, isn’t it?”

“Follow me.” Jamal led them through a pack of men toward the back of the club. There was a high energy level in the place that didn’t just come from the music and dancing couples. Everybody looked carefree and happy.

“You haven’t really partied until you’ve partied at a gay club,” Jamal shouted over the music. He stopped in front of a booth that had a reserved label on it and slid in. “I know the owner,” he bragged.

Just as they sat down, Nichelle pointed at a man in drag. “Now that’s something I don’t get. Why would a gay man want to be with a man dressed up like a woman?”

Jamal spread his hands, palms up. “To each his own. But that isn’t my thing.”

A young white guy walked up and Jamal introduced him as his stockbroker. When he found out Nichelle and Vernetta were attorneys, he asked for their business cards and started offering them investment advice.

Two muscular men in doo rags, white tank tops and baggy jeans moved past their table holding hands. They looked like gangbangers, Vernetta thought. A popular rap song with some hard-core anti-gay lyrics drew a rush of men to the dance floor.

“I can’t believe they’d play that in here,” Vernetta said to Jamal, as she tried to square her image of gay with the two men who had just walked by.

“Nobody’s listening to the words,” he said. “The beat is slammin’. Lots of rap songs refer to women as bitches and ho’s,  but women still dance to it. Same difference.”

As Vernetta continued to take in the scene, she could feel an air of abandon. She gathered that this was one of the few places where these men could be exactly who they wanted to be without fear of being hassled or condemned.

Vernetta watched a gay couple hugged up in the booth next to them out of the corner of her eye. Nichelle took a quick look and turned away. She seemed a lot less unnerved by this whole experience.

“So,” Vernetta asked, after Jamal left to flag down a waiter and order drinks, “is your research going well?”

“Yep. Look at these guys. You’d have no idea that most of them were gay.” She pointed to the right at a man who looked like a bouncer. “If I had run into that hunk of beef over there on the street, I would’ve been dying to take him home.”

She elbowed Vernetta, just as Jamal returned. “Check out the guy at ten o’clock.”

Vernetta turned and spotted a very well-known and wealthy rapper.

“He’s gay?” Vernetta asked.

“I hear he’s bisexual,” Jamal clarified.

“Isn’t he afraid of being seen here?”

Jamal laughed. “No. Men aren’t like women. We don’t run and tell. What goes on here, stays here.”

The rapper’s tight Lycra T-shirt enhanced his rippled muscles. He had a shaved head, a shiny gold chain around his neck, and huge—grossly huge—diamond earrings in both ears.

“Wanna dance?” Jamal extended his hand to Vernetta.

“Uh . . . I’ll pass.” Vernetta wasn’t proud of the way she was reacting, but she couldn’t help it. Nichelle gladly sauntered off to the dance floor with him. Jamal had a smooth, sexy dance style. They step-danced as if they had been partners for years.

Nichelle returned to the table, leaving Jamal with a male dance partner. “Stop frowning,” Nichelle said.

“It’s just so . . .” Vernetta hated to say it, but it was the only word that came to mind, “weird.”

“To you. But not to them. We’re stuck on this image of gay women as masculine and gay men as feminine, and we refuse to recognize that they look just like you and me. The black community is going to have to recognize that condemning these guys because they’re gay is wrong.”

She took a sip from her drink, then gave Vernetta a look that was dead serious. “Once we do, maybe they won’t feel the need to hide who they are.”

F
or more than an hour after Reverend Sims departed, Eugene sat alone in his darkened living room, the minister’s words echoing in his head. Eugene was tired. Tired of denying who he was. Tired of living a lie.

Without giving it further thought, he did something he’d promised both God and Belynda that he’d never do again. He picked up the telephone and made the most important call of his life.

When Lamont, his ex-lover, rang the doorbell forty-five minutes later, Eugene had changed into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. After an awkward greeting, Lamont followed him to the living room couch. Eugene had cleared the mugs from the coffee table and replaced them with wineglasses. A bottle of Chardonnay sat cooling in a sterling silver ice bucket.

“I was surprised as hell to get your call, man,” Lamont said. They sat on opposite ends of the couch facing each other.

“Kind of surprised me, too. How’ve you been?”

“I’m cool. The gig at the new firm is working out. They don’t work us half as hard as Ramsey & King.”

Lamont was sporting a new look, a closely shaven beard. “The facial hair looks good on you.”

“Thanks.” Lamont absently shifted on the couch. “I heard you left the firm.”

“Yeah,” was the only response Eugene could think of. Lamont obviously knew all about the lawsuit. Who didn’t? He reached for the wine bottle and poured himself a glass. Without inquiring first, he poured one for Lamont, too.

“I heard about your girl. I’m sorry.”

Eugene nodded.

“And of course, I’ve been watching the news. I guess you’ve been through a lot lately.”

Eugene tried to smile, but his lips felt stiff. “You can say that again.” They sipped wine and engaged in small talk for another ten minutes.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Lamont said finally. “Why am I here?”

“’Cause I needed to see you.”

“About what?”

Eugene took another sip of his wine before answering. “About us.” He wanted to pull Lamont to him and bury himself in his arms, but he held back.

“So what about us?”

“I think we should give it another try.”

Lamont looked away. “Man, I’m getting too old for running the streets. I’m looking for a serious relationship. And I’m not trying to hook up with a guy who’s out there running women.”

“I’m done with that. I’m ready to commit . . . and to come out.”

Lamont responded with a skeptical look.

“Besides,” Eugene said, “my story’s been told from here to Timbuktu. I’d have a hard time staying on the D-L now. I can’t even go grocery shopping without some sister shooting me a nasty look.” He laughed.

Lamont did not. “So is that why I’m here? Because you can’t pull women anymore?”

“No,” Eugene replied. “You’re here because I miss you and because I want to be with you.”

“What about your family?”

“What about ’em?”

“I always figured they were one of the main reasons you never came out.”

“They were, but now they know. Anyway, it’s time for me to start living my life for me. Not them. So, I guess I’m asking whether you’re still down with me.” The desire rising inside Eugene was so strong it hurt.

Lamont set his wineglass on the table. His silence lasted so long that Eugene knew what was coming. Lamont was about to tell him it was too late. When he couldn’t take the silence any longer, Eugene decided to give him a break. “I understand, man. There’s no reason for you to take the risk of—”

Lamont held up his hand. “No, that’s not it. I wanna kick it with you, too. But uh—”

He paused. “There’s somebody else.”

“It’s cool. I understand.” Eugene tried to smile. “They always say it’s all about timing. I’m glad you found somebody who—”

“No,” Lamont interrupted, “it’s not that serious. At least not as serious as you and I were. Excuse me, as I
thought
we were. I’m just going to need some time to tie up some loose ends. The dude I’m with is kinda possessive. He’s into me way more than I’m into him. We’ve been living together for the last three months.”