The Full Spectrum Page 22

  and when I

  click the link back to his page

  he'll

  be a candid smile

  a 5′7″ to 5′10″

  grad student and

  reader of not just

  FHM or

  Maxim or

  I don't like reading

  so I can click and drag

  to change my profile

  to in a relationship

  Jill Sobule and Four Other Torture Devices

  by Ella Pye

  One. French-Kissing for Girls.

  I am five and Katie is six. Her birthday is in September. Mine is in June. We are both in kindergarten, she in the p.m. class and me in the a.m., but we go to day care together. We are best friends. We both love New Kids on the Block. I like Jordan the best, and Katie likes Donnie. Katie's parents are divorced, and she and her mother move a lot. It seems exciting. I've lived in the same house since I was two. Katie lives in apartments.

  Today I am going to Katie's for a playdate. I have never had playdates with anyone before Katie. We listen to the New Kids and have concerts off the end of her bed. We like to pretend we're Paula Abdul, even though I guess we can't both be Paula Abdul. That's okay, though. We play Barbies, and hers have much better clothes than mine.

  Katie is wearing ugly blue shorts today. She is too tall and her clothes always look weird on her. We go to her room. Her room is round and the doors are double. It's really neat. You have to walk through her mom's room to get to it, though, and it makes me feel rude. We listen to Eagle 102.1 and talk about going to concerts. We chew New Kids on the Block gum. I thought each piece would be shaped like a New Kid face but they're not. Katie said they would be, but she lied. They're just pink and yellow dots in a plastic case with a New Kids sticker on the front.

  Katie pulls her shorts off. She is wearing blue and white polkadotted Hanes underwear, the kind that I have at home. They come in a three-pack with a matching blue pair and a matching white pair. She lies down on her floor and pulls her underwear off over her butt, and tells me to spank her because she's the baby and I'm the mommy. It seems kind of weird and she yells at me to do it. Then she makes me be the baby and she spanks me, too. She tells me that I should learn how to French-kiss because boys always do that, so she kisses me and puts her tongue in my mouth. I roll my tongue hot-dog style, because that is fun.

  Her mommy drives me home, and in the backseat of her white car Katie Frenches me again.

  We are in second grade now, and Katie still makes me practice Frenching her. It feels weird and kind of slimy. I am visiting Katie, and she has a new bike for her birthday. She is living in a new apartment and they don't have a good backyard. The whole thing is made out of cement and they share it with the house behind theirs. She rides her bike around the stones and falls. She breaks her wrist and tells everyone in our dance class that I did it. My mother says I can't talk to Katie anymore and I don't mind.

  Two. Jill Sobule.

  I am thirteen and my soul bleeds poetry. I hate the world and the world hates me. I want to start saving change so I can get my own apartment instead of living with my stupid parents. They think they know everything about me and can tell me what to do. I hate them.

  My best friend is Nicole now. It used to be Kim, but she's so annoying. Nicole moved here last year. I sleep over at her house almost every weekend, because my dad doesn't let me have friends over. Sometimes we skip school. I'm really good at faking my mom's handwriting. Once I wrote a note saying that I had to get my wisdom teeth out that afternoon. They didn't even notice. Then I just walked over to Nicole's, and we flipped her couch upside down and watched her dad's porn, which was weird.

  I overhear my dad screaming about me to my mom sometimes. He says that Nicole and I are dykes and that I shouldn't let the door hit me on the way out.

  Nicole's dad has this friend named Chris. He's really cool. He's eighteen and he comes over to Nicole's house to play Magic: The Gathering and drink beers with Nicole's dad. He usually spends the night, because Nicole's dad doesn't want him to drive home. Kim is sort of dating him. She thinks they're engaged. Nicole and I sleep in the basement, and Chris sleeps upstairs in the living room. He picks on us sometimes. He rips the head off Nicole's stuffed buffalo, Bill, because he's a total asshole. Sometimes he picks us up and won't let us go. We both like him, so we don't mind. We hate Kim, though.

  One night Chris kisses me in the dark on Nicole's living room floor. It's after five in the morning, which I know because I watch the clock the whole time. His mouth is huge. I've never kissed a boy before. It turns into a habit, and sometimes Nicole and I lie in sleeping bags on either side of him, pretending we don't know that he has one hand up each of our shirts. Once, Chris has his hand in my pants and asks me if I'm awake.

  Kim has sex with Chris on her kitchen floor one night in December, and Nicole and I want her to die. I swear privately to starve myself until Chris calls me again. I last about three days.

  Nicole turns fourteen, and at her birthday party we play a game called Suck and Blow. You take a business card and pass it down the line on each other's mouths, sucking in the air to hold it to your mouth, and then blowing it to get it on the other person's mouth. The card falls between Nicole and Kim and they touch mouths for a minute. Kim freaks out, probably because she saw a character in a movie act this way, and wipes her mouth and spits for like fifteen minutes. When we get back to school someone tells, and then the whole eighth grade knows, but they blame me instead of Kim and everyone calls Nicole and me dykes.

  We have Language Arts during fifth period, and for almost a month, every time we come in the room a bunch of kids starts singing “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule. I start cutting my arms with a razor blade in the bathtub. No one understands me except Nicole, who cuts her arms, too. The kids who sing Jill Sobule at us start calling us Satanists as well as lesbos. The girls won't sit next to us because they think we're lesbians. This lasts for the rest of eighth grade. I hate myself.

  I leave my schoolbooks on the table one afternoon, and my dad writes “Ella loves Nicole” on the covers of all of them.

  The January after I turn fourteen, I am at Chris's house with my pants off and my sneakers on while the movie Twister is playing and I am losing my virginity. It hurts and it never gets better. When I get home there is blood in my underwear. I refuse to acknowledge that it hurt, because then I would be a wuss and sex isn't supposed to hurt, anyway. I tell no one. Chris talks to me on the phone for a few days afterward, but it is the last time I see him for a year. On Valentine's Day the next year, he invites me over and while we are having sex, another girl calls. He drops me off on a street corner and I walk two miles to Nicole's house to cry. Kim is there and I can say nothing. The next time I see Chris, passing him outside of the high school, where he has no right to be, he glares at me like I've done something to him. Later, he is arrested for molesting an eight-year-old boy.

  Three. “Exile in Guyville,” Track Ten.

  I am going to be seventeen in three weeks. I am madly in love with Noah, and for the weekend we go to the beach with his best friend, a case of Heineken, and a lot of weed. I don't know where he got the Heineken. In the car on the way there, someone drives on our ass and I am afraid that we will get rear-ended. I imagine the beer spilling out onto the highway unceremoniously, bottles of Heineken spraying all over the asphalt. Noah seems unfazed, singing along to a song about a guy who finds out his girlfriend is a lesbian with such passion and dedication that you would think this happened to him frequently.

  One night when we are drunk, Noah whispers, “I've got a condom, what do you say?”

  I say yes. He hitches up my black skirt right there on the beach. It hurts and he doesn't kiss me, and I don't think it's good at all. There is something wrong with me. The next day we don't exchange more than two sentences. We get so drunk and high that we pass out on the beach for seven hours and I get third-degree sunburns on my legs. Later, they turn blue and ooze pu
s from blisters that I pop with safety pins.

  He drops me off at home when we get back, and I don't talk to him again. I write him a long letter. I apologize for being bad in bed, for being fat, and hope that he will understand my deep pain and speak to me again. Nicole and I egg his car.

  He kills himself several years later, and I don't find out until he's long gone.

  Four. Vermont.

  I am twenty and she is twenty-eight. She is smarter than me, better-read than me, wittier than me, classier than me. Essentially, she's everything I'm not and everything I wish I was, and I want to crawl inside of her to be closer to her. Love doesn't even seem like an adequate word. We make grand and indecent plans to build log cabins in Vermont—twin cabins beside each other, with a crawl tunnel between so that we can access each other easily but still have our separate space. It's an odd fantasy, but we find it somehow perfect. I want to make blueprints.

  She makes me feel beautiful, succeeding where no one else has tried.

  We are nerds, and I am comfortable with that. We quote books and cult television shows together, saying how much we belong to each other. She is my best friend, and I feel like she is the only one that I have ever had.

  At work, they ask me if I am seeing anyone, and I say yes. They ask if he lives with me. They ask his name. I make things up, because I am a coward. I feel like I am punching her every time I do it. One day my supervisor says that another employee is “a little bit faggoty,” and I don't feel nearly as guilty.

  When I have loved her for more than a year, I write my mother a long letter. She knows how to read the language from The Lord of the Rings, I write. She makes me feel beautiful. I am terrified to give it to my mother. Finally, in a cop-out, I e-mail it to her. We agree to discuss things over dinner. I order chicken fajitas and a Long Island Iced Tea. The food takes forever to get there.

  My mother and I sit across from each other at the table, and I fold and refold my straw wrapper. I sip my drink, and my mother bursts out with the oddball question that she has apparently been yearning to ask: “Does she like cats?”

  It is okay, after that. My mother asks how she is every now and again, and although I will never be comfortable talking about it with my mother, she does not stop loving me. She does not tell me that it is a phase. She does not cry behind a closed door. She does not tell my father.

  This is how my worst broken heart goes: She is smarter than me, better-read than me, wittier than me, classier than me. I start feeling stupid and inadequate. She doesn't want me to touch her anymore, and I feel like a rapist when I do. I am jealous, wildly, and I am immature. She quotes Shakespeare to me, and I am left feeling clueless as to what it means. I tell her that I feel stupid, and my nagging insecurities annoy her.

  I am dumped seven months later, and I am too embarrassed to tell my mother that all of the things I wrote (I know that you probably think I'm too young to know whether or not I'm in love. This is real) were wrong.

  Five. History.

  It is 2004. Nicole is my best friend, and one night we go to one of the bars in our town. I mean to tell her about how my ex has a new girlfriend, imagining us gabbing like all girls do, though this has not happened once during the other few times I've talked about my ex. When we get to the bar, nearly everyone there is a boy we went to high school with, the boys who called us dykes and sang Jill Sobule in our faces. They are still friends, much as we are. Nicole lives with her boyfriend now, and is probably unaffected by their presence. I am terrified that they will laugh at me and declare that they were right all along. I wonder if I would have turned out this way if not for eighth grade. If it's like when someone calls you fat and you overeat in response.

  In movies, the ones who were picked on forget about high school and go on to be successful. The nasty, popular kids are the ones who dwell upon their glory days, while the geeks they tortured have forgotten all of it in their newfound success. In the real world, the popular kids are still just as popular, just as lighthearted, and they don't recognize the geeks. The geeks recognize them, remember every name.

  The guys at the bar don't even look at us. They have lost none of their confidence, and I have found none. I hightail it out of the bar and never go back.

  Gaydar

  by Jesse Bernstein

  I saw Simon's profile on Gaydar, a popular international gay Web site, and immediately became excited. I was in Cape Town at the time, and had just learned that I would soon travel to Cairo to work for an organization that helps refugees with their asylum claims. Being a single gay man, I decided to check out the Egypt personals section of Gaydar, and it was there that I found Simon.

  Simon is British, and under the occupation section he had written that he worked for a refugee-related NGO (non-governmental organization). Finally I had found a gay man who had interests similar to my own; refugees, human rights, and social change—all of these were mentioned in his profile. I immediately e-mailed him, telling him that I, too, was working for a refugee-related NGO. I asked what NGO he worked for, and just generally proclaimed myself. In an instant, I had it all planned out: We were going to meet, fall in love, and travel the world together doing refugee work. It was a wonderful thought to relish, a thought that surfaced without my even having talked to the guy. Simon returned my e-mail, and we continued an every-so-often correspondence until we eventually met in Cairo.

  It turned out that he was working for a United Nations agency that decides asylum claims, and I was working for an organization that advocated for the rights of refugees to be respected. In essence, Simon was the judge, and I was the defense. There was an immediate conflict of interest, but I thought we would work through it. Our exchange of e-mails showed that Simon was warm and welcoming. He spoke of past work in Cairo helping gay prostitutes, and of knowing many gay Egyptian men. Most importantly, he suggested that upon my arrival I would meet all of his friends. I would have a community ready and waiting. I could not wait.

  Upon arriving in Egypt, I met Simon at the fashionable Marriott Hotel, located in Zamelak, an island in the heart of Cairo that offers a quick getaway from the loud and bustling central downtown district. Zamelak has a large expatriate population, and many embassies, ambassador residences, Western-style food markets called Metro, a Pizza Hut, and even dry-cleaning delivery services. Elite restaurants and trendy bars are also located in Zamelak, all with English menus and signs, drunken Marines, and the occasional bewildered French cultural attaché.

  As my taxi approached the hotel, I saw a beautiful Christmas tree that reminded me of the tree in Rockefeller Center. Though this one was smaller, for me it symbolized the West and Western comfort—which I desperately needed. Cairo is a city of around fifteen million people; the majority of Egyptians reside within the city proper. Cairo and Mexico City are the two most polluted cities in the world; I would blow my nose and brown gunk would come out. Everything I wore got dirty. I was told that when crossing the street, I should not look at the cars about to hit me on both sides. They would eventually stop. And don't worry about the honking—all drivers in Cairo drive with their fists poised over their horns, it's just the norm. At times I wanted to throw myself at the American embassy and plead for salvation from the madness that was everyday life.

  The Marriott is a converted palace located right on the Nile. Once inside, I felt the grasp of Cairo slipping. The bar where I was supposed to meet Simon and some of his friends was on the other side of the property, necessitating a walk through the garden. It was wonderful to see green again, as everything in Cairo is brown: the sky, the streets, the buildings, the cars, the donkeys that pull vegetable carts—everything. This green garden had lighted trees, reminiscent of those around Tavern on the Green in New York City's Central Park. I would return here often, I thought.

  I immediately noticed people's clothes. The men's long simple robes were replaced by fancy black suits. Many women remained in traditional Arab dress, with only their eyes showing through small slits cut in their black v
eils. Still, Gucci, Prada, and Chanel were everywhere: Handbags and scarves dappled the orthodox body coverings. Most designer goods had been bought abroad, likely at a recent fashion fête in Dubai. It wasn't uncommon to see a Saudi prince, a Moroccan sheik, or the U.S. ambassador having a meal at the hotel's restaurant. Why didn't I see these people on the street? I wondered. They didn't walk—they all had drivers, who drive black cars with black-tinted windows, like any other elite group. Except here in this hotel the elitism was magnified. This seemingly multinational, trans-border, designer-wearing, religious class had fused together so many elements that an anthropologist would have a field day. I was having trouble making sense of my thoughts, I was experiencing visual overload, and it was only my first week in Egypt.

  I finally arrived at the terraced bar, which overlooked the warmly lit garden below. There was a lull, one that I would come to enjoy, an escape from the constant honking sound that I had become so used to. I looked around and saw raised bed-like benches covered with comfortable, colorful red Egyptian carpets. Men, mainly, sat around smoking flavored tobacco from hookahs. Every so often a Marriott employee would come around to replace the tobacco. He would also check the apparatus to make sure it was functioning correctly. I looked around for Simon and his friends and saw a group of men sitting in one corner. Although my gaydar was off due to this new cultural context, I suspected that Simon was amongst them due to their tight shirts, styled hair, and of course their stunning good looks. One of them was a short fellow with red hair and freckles. As I noticed him, he rose and approached me. “Jesse?” he said.

  “Yes, that's me,” I said in response. “You must be Simon?”

  “Yup. It's nice to meet you,” Simon said in a heavy British accent, maybe from the North. My colleagues at work were mostly British, so my ear was slowly acclimating to differing regional accents. We shook hands, and he invited me to meet the rest of his friends. Immediately I knew I wasn't attracted to him. He was short and stocky; I had imagined a tall, sexy, sleek, and cosmopolitan save-the-world type, but I told myself I could learn, that the attraction would come. As we walked to his table, I was excited—here was a group of men who liked men.