Leg by Greg Marshall

Author:Greg Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

I’d come to Croatia to try to salvage my college experience. After an initial dash of exuberance at telling the world I was gay, I’d found no one cared. It was like the emergence of Chicagoland’s cicadas every seventeen years: anticipation and then mild disgust and indifference.

My first full year out of the closet was so lonely it was almost funny. I’d somehow managed to become a rising junior without making a single friend. This is a real achievement considering that I lived among thousands of nice-enough kids on campus in Evanston. It didn’t matter what courses I took or how many classmates I friended online. I never had anything to do but go to the gym on Saturday night.

It was no mystery why I was floundering. Coming out had made me more self-conscious about my leg. Studious to a fault and always solo, I was too formal for my peers, too paranoid about preserving my dignity to let my guard down. Good manners felt like the only thing I could trust. With girls out of the way, it was time to get physical and I couldn’t so much as walk beside someone. My footfalls made potential mates turn in terror at me, the campus Igor. My ass was writing checks my leg couldn’t cash, or maybe it was the reverse. My early years in the closet could be characterized by an obsession with AIDS; coming out brought a different horseman of the apocalypse, this one riding in wearing distressed cargo shorts and flip-flops. To call him “body image” would be too banal. Instead, let’s refer to him as Abercrombie &/or Fitch.

My diet of gay books and movies, my classes on Shakespeare’s comedies, Greek mythology, human sexuality—they only reinforced the idea that gay boys were preppy fuck machines, cruising the world for D. Sometimes these guys were the embodiment of physical perfection à la Brad Pitt in Troy (I was fresh off an English Department award for a poem about Patroclus, Achilles’ lover), and sometimes they were just regular human-gorgeous like the guys jumping on the bed to George Michael’s “Faith” in The Rules of Attraction. Gays may get sad, may even hurt themselves, but never because there was anything wrong with their smoking bodies.

Making matters more humiliating, my hair had started falling out in the shower, ropy strands that covered my bottle of Tea Tree shampoo.

When you consider the amount of Sun In I’d used, I should have been grateful it had hung in there as long as it did, but Dad maintained that I wasn’t going bald. I just needed to relax and have some fun. “It’s the stress, Greggo,” he said. “Get out of your head. Go to Europe. Get a rail pass and have an adventure.”

Because I’d dropped out of my one quarter of college French, and NU had a foreign language requirement to study in Western Europe, a return to Paris was out of the question, but Eastern Europe was still a possibility. The Prague

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