Here Lies a Father by Mckenzie Cassidy

Author:Mckenzie Cassidy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

DAD FREQUENTLY BRAGGED ABOUT bar fights he’d been in over the years, the donnybrooks, he called them. One night I remember he actually came home with a missing tooth and swollen jaw, blood all over his shirt. So when I told him about my nights at the boxing gym over the phone—when he’d first moved up to Albany—I half expected him to be proud, but he wasn’t. His reaction was to instead congratulate me on not being gay. “We were all a little worried there for a while,” he said, chuckling. I was furious, but only for a moment. I had no right to be angry. Fathers naturally worry about their sons and nothing I did ever put him at ease regarding which way I leaned. He never once saw me on the living room couch with a girl or sneaking one up to my bedroom. The currency needed for being a man in Wellbourne was measured out in pretty young faces.

What really got on my nerves was how every guy in Wellbourne was so obsessed with not being gay. Like how my father and the others believed a man wasn’t a man unless he was weathered and engaged in rough activities like football or fixing a car with his bare hands. Homosexuality was a virus that one caught living outside the prescribed vision Wellbourne had for its boys. Sign up for musical theater one time instead of the wrestling team and suddenly they all knew. But why couldn’t they do both? None of this was the reason I had started boxing in the first place, of course, but now that I was training regularly I didn’t feel more or less manly than I did before. I still couldn’t throw a football and if asked to do so, I couldn’t pop a hood.

From what I could tell, it was all a bunch of bullshit. Over the months leading up to Dad’s death, I started suspecting that many of the certainties I’d grown up with, including how guys I knew in school viewed the world, simply weren’t real. They couldn’t be, nothing was so cut-and-dried. Rick Sharp was one of the worst offenders and I noticed it the more he spoke.

“What’s the matter with you, are you a faggot or something?” Rick shouted one night in his basement, over the sounds of his video game, because I’d once again refused to accompany them to a party in the woods.

“Huh?”

Without saying another word, he hunched over and pulled an intricate glass bong from the side of his couch, tucked in next to the wood-paneled wall. The bowl flashed bright orange before he pulled a glass piece up and cleared the white smoke in one breath. He blew it out in my direction and I felt woozy.

“You’ve got to go,” Scott repeated to me on behalf of Rick.

So far I had been giving clever excuses, but my material was running dry and they had persisted.

“Where’s this party?” I asked.

“You should’ve seen this guy a few weeks ago,” Rick said, eyes bloodshot, crushing the buttons on his controller.

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