As far as I know, we were the only two. I mean, we couldn’t have been the only two, right? But in a rural high school of 600 kids, who in the hell wants to come out of the closet? Hell, the femmy ones had it hard enough, straight or gay–one of ‘em committed suicide my sophomore year, but Cal and I could both pass as straight. Hell, we only found out about each other by accident, hanging out one night, drunk as fuckin’ skunks in the woods by ourselves, and he leans over and fuckin’ kisses me. That was so fuckin’ like him, and so fuckin’ like me.
We fucked all summer back then, like fuckin’ Brokeback. Fuck, that’s a hot movie, I have it on tape, even though the ending makes me sob like a fuckin’ bitch. But Cal, man…some of the shit he asked me to do. fucking and sucking, sure, whatever. But the piss. He’d ask me to meet him in the bathrooms during class, so he could drink my piss, or eat out my asshole. We almost got caught so many times, but he liked the risk, and I was stupid and so fuckin’ horny. I think he wanted people to find out, actually. He hated hiding, and he…liked being humiliated. It was…hard, being his friends with him sometimes. But we had each other. Or maybe we just didn’t have anyone else–but then…he left.
Look, everyone wants to leave shitholes like this. No one graduates from Riverwood High School planning on living here for the rest of their lives. We all had dreams and ambition, but it’s like fuckin’ quicksand. The poverty. The family. We stay…we stay because all that ambition and desire and imagination doesn’t mean shit when compared to fear and the terror of anywhere else. Of everywhere else. Hell, I’d never even been to a city before, I’ve still never been. I wanted to be a fuckin’ chemist, and instead started working with my dad on his construction crew. Just for the summer, I said to myself. Just so I could save money for college. And then I was stuck with credit card debt and sinking into the trailer park, eating away my fucking misery. Look at this fucking gut, right? I’m fucking disgusting.
But Cal left. One day, he was working at the grocery store, and the next he just up and fucking left. No one knew where, and…and he didn’t tell me. He didn’t take me. I would have gone with him anywhere, I fucking…I loved him, or something close enough that I could have not cared what happened to us. But he left, and I was here, angry, eating, working with my dad, who I fucking hate. Becoming a piece of shit trailer trash slob just like him, the kind of person that I always promised myself I’d never be. He wasn’t here, and I was alone, and it was the loneliness more than anything–I had no one else I could turn to.
I cruised. Trucker’s mostly. It helped that I could host. But they always just left too. An awkward fuck. Never completely attracted to each other, just two faggots slightly happy for a cock to suck, for a body that didn’t repulse us to share a bed with. Fat, stinking…you trick yourself into liking it, eventually. You tell yourself that you like “bears”, “real men”, “rednecks”, and maybe you fucking do. But really, you just don’t have a fucking choice. That’s all you got. It’s bears or celibacy. Raunchy truckers or another night with your hand.
But the world did change, slowly. No one could admit that I was gay, but they all knew why I never got married or had a girlfriend. I had my nieces and nephews, and I was “Fat Uncle Phil,” the little shitheads. And then we got the dirty video store–a video store run by a faggot named Kenny. He never could tell me why he blew into town, or how he could get all these videos, but I was too happy to ask. Finally, I could get porn in ways other than seedy mail-in offers from the back of Playgirl magazine. Kenny had some crazy tastes though–some of the crap he got a hold of was disturbing…
And then I found Cal. In this fucking german porno, some obese fucked squatting over his face, feeding him his shit. He had a mohawk, tattoos. He looked like he was having the time of his life, doing everything he had ever wanted to do with himself. And I wanted him…I wanted him so badly. I told Kenny to find every video he was in, that I’d pay anything he asked. They trickled in, out of order. Some of the earlier ones–he was so young, they m ust have been shot while he was still living here in town. Had he been going into the city without me knowing? Why hadn’t he told me about any of this? I was watching, from the future, the past that he’d kept from me for so long, and I realized, reluctantly, why he’d abandoned me. I was too tame. He’d cut his teeth on me, but I was too scared. He hadn’t told me what he’d done because…because I would have tried to stop him. I would have tried to keep him here, with me, where we could both live our sorry lives in trailers, fat and lonely in separate closets, colliding occasionally for sex and then breaking apart again. He didn’t tell me because he knew I was scared, of everything, but especially of being hurt by him.
Something I had forgotten came back to me. He’d asked me to choke him, really choke him, while he jerked off, and I couldn’t do it. In the end, he choked himself with a noose while I watched, ready with a knife to save him if he passed out. I cut the rope before he’d finished, and he’d been so angry–he didn’t speak to me for a week. In some of these videos, the later ones, men would tie him up, flog him, cut him, bleed him. I could only watch them in spurts, in the short moments where my horniness could push down my shame and terror.
And then Kenny got me the last tape. I hadn’t told him why I was obsessed with Cal, he just thought I liked him films, and he told me this one was the…the last one. I thought he’d meant the last one he could find, or the last one that he could find.
It was unmarked and untitled. The men in it were speaking German, like in a lot of the newer films. The quality was bad, almost amateurish. Cal looked beaten, his body cut, the concrete floor bloody. The men had tied him up, and I watched two masked men walk up to him, bind his balls, cut them off, and then cut off his cock. He didn’t scream, I don’t know if he was drugged or if he was…or if he just wanted it so badly. They showed them to him, and the look in his eyes…Then they sawed off his feet and hands, cut him from his bondage and watched him struggle to crawl around the room, a strange grin on his face, until he collapsed from blood loss. They fucked his corpse, every single one of them. They cut off his head, and fucked his throat the wrong direction, with his bloody face to the camera., their cocks bloody stakes.
I watched that video over and over. I couldn’t stop, I wanted to save him at first, and then I just stopped caring, I just watched that moment when his eyes lost that light I’d always loved. In the mirror, my eyes were already dull like that, already dead, here in this trailer, waiting for my body to catch up. Even as he was dying, Cal was more alive than I am. Than I have ever been. I watched all of his tapes in order, from first to last. And I couldn’t…I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d never see him again, and I thought about killing myself–but the terror that has always been my greatest complicity stopped me before I could even get the gun in my mouth.
It was…I was dark for a while. I don’t remember much. I got drunk a lot, I lost my job finally. I finally confessed everything to Kenny, and he was…he didn’t say anything, but I knew he…liked it, in some sick way. He told me about…about these encouragers. That I could make money with some videos of my own. The come to my trailer with Kenny, he sets up the equipment, and then they start force feeding me, stuffing me full, and…and I love it. And not because it’s killing me faster, who gives a fuck about that anymore? I spent my whole life terrified of death. I eat, because of the way they look at me. I eat because it helps me feel alive. I eat and eat, and I make more off my second career than I ever did working construction. I make enough that I could leave, if I wanted to. Six hundred pounds at my last weigh in, fuck. I used to think that this fear was me trying to protect myself. I let terror destroy everything I could have been, and I realize now all the courage that Cal must have had inside of him that, back then. At times, I think about everything everyone had always warned me about. Don’t do this, be careful, stay safe–for what? For fucking what?
Bracken's Corner 