What is most incredible to me now, if not entirely laughable in retrospect, is that the first intimacy I experienced, the first occasions of awe and uninhibited joy I can remember, all happened on the same day, the day my dad decided it was also time for me to shoot a gun.
It was a frigid Saturday in mid-January. I was scarcely nine years old. My birthday halved the interval between Christmas and the New Year, when even my relatives lacked the reserves of energy to celebrate me. That winter, I must have cajoled my parents, finally, into letting me invite a few friends to sleep over, to commemorate my last single-digit year.
A few months earlier, my family had moved even farther away from the nearest village after my great-grandfather had died and willed his farmstead to my father, the family’s oldest surviving male. Not long after receiving this inheritance, my dad had left home.
Dad was then a journeyman electrician and a lineman. He wanted to quit the farm and leave Ohio in the hopes of securing a better life for us all in Michigan. He also wanted more distance between himself and the squabbles with his nine siblings over his inheritance. So he spent his weekdays in a bachelor apartment in Dearborn, attending business classes and studying for an exam to become a manager at a car factory north of Detroit. He intended, for the first time, to promote himself beyond physical labor through books.
Dad was straight-backed and reserved, if not wholly restrained, like most of the other men where I was from. They had not elected silence; they were stifled by lifetimes of drudgery or the perennial threat of violence. I also knew the latter, but I had learned to fill my disquiet with an interior din.
I read books, especially the set of encyclopedias my mom had bought on installments, because so little of the immediate world made sense to me. The men in my family, the other men in that town, often chided me to put away those books, which I tried to sneak everywhere I went. Perhaps that is why, reading alone in my room, the subject in which I found the greatest comfort was astronomy. I felt more warmth from distant stars than neighboring men.
After spending the weekdays in Michigan, Dad would return home to Ohio late every Friday, so I saw him only on the weekends for much of that year. He usually atoned for his absence by cramming a week of parenting into those two days.
During our weekends together, dad could be unusually jovial and chatty. He would often wake me early and take me to breakfast in town, to preach the value of labor and the importance of family to his only son. He had come to recognize the utility of learning from books, but he still needed me to understand where he was from and my place in it. He felt compelled to impart what he had learned about what it meant to be a man.
That Saturday, the day of my belated sleepover, the only full day I had with my dad for the entire week, he scheduled my final lesson. It was the one I never wanted, the one for which I was never prepared.
In the early afternoon, Dad and I collected my friends in his rusty pickup. I scooted over for each friend, so by the end of the trip I was the nearest I had been to my stolid father in a long time. We were so small, the five of us boys, that we fit easily on the upholstered bench next to him, wearing our winter jackets but not our seatbelts.
Dad drove us cozily, the vents spewing dry heat. We chattered away while he stared down the unswerving road toward home. Dad did not, however, stop at our house. He took the gravel drive around our house and alongside our barn, toward the back fields and the pen where sheep and cows grazed once grass replaced snow.
I cannot recall if the rifle then laying in the bed of his pickup truck was a gift, for either my birthday or Christmas. It was probably for neither. Dad sometimes bequeathed his possessions to me, when he thought me ready to receive them, regardless of how ready I felt or how keen.
My friends and I routinely wielded plastic weapons against imagined enemies, but I always lacked the mettle for actual steel. Thankfully, I had not yet needed it. Most of my friends went hunting with their dads; mine did not hunt. He had no time for trophies, he said, although the mercies of the farm did require shooting varmints and wounded livestock.
Dad had always known better than to seek my participation in such mercies. When he and my grandpa once invited me to go fishing, I asked how many books I could bring along and whether I had to touch a worm. When they returned with their catch, in a styrofoam cooler that had formerly held their beer, I was still reading at home. I refused even to enter the kitchen while they fileted our supper.
There was no urgency I can recall to wielding a gun on that festive weekend. Dad had exalted me as the man of the house while he was away in Michigan, but a caretaker and my uncles did all the slaughtering in his absence. If my dad did graduate to a job in Michigan, we would be leaving the farm anyway. I would not need to handle a weapon, mercifully or not.
Shooting a gun was simply the local sacrament, the rite of passage into a manhood I could not refuse.
Dad parked behind the silent barn and, as our brood scrambled from the cab, he fished empty bottles and cans from the bed of his truck. He arranged them, ceremoniously, on a fallen tree, far enough from the house and the road so no one would see but everyone would hear our reverberations. Dad counted paces as he walked back to us kids and, at twenty, he handed the rifle to my closest friend.
Dad knew the boy was adept with a gun despite being shy. That boy’s grandfather, our former neighbor, had lost much of his voice to a foreign bullet, in defending our freedom during WWII. He, too, had reared his grandson on the lessons of weaponry and sacrifice.
My lanky friend removed his gloves, spread his legs, pumped the rifle, brought it to his shoulder, closed an eye, took a breath, and sniped a bottle from the fallen tree without so much as a flinch. He handed the firearm, stock first, to my father, who asked if I wanted to try next. I did not. I did not know how to say no, but I knew when to be silent.
I took my time, stalled by fear. I pumped the rifle, lifted it to my eye, squinted down the barrel, and watched the guidelines wobble with my unease. I was burdened by the rifle’s weight, surprised by the pressure of its spring trigger as I began to squeeze. Dad yelled at me to stop.
“Think about what you’re doin’,” he said. “You’re gonna hurt yourself shootin’ like that.”
He did not then instruct me on the proper form or on how to avoid injury. His only son was to pay attention, to mull, to know from one example how to shoot. When Dad had taught me how to swim, at two or three years old, he had lifted me by the back of the neck, as if I were a kitten, and thrown me into a pond.
I raised the weapon again to my eye and I felt my brain disconnecting from my cold body. I could not have conformed my limbs to the proper stance, even if I had figured out what that stance was. Dumb, I looked down the rifle and prepared to shoot regardless. My best friend said quietly that I should spread my legs and put the rifle’s butt against my shoulder, not my elbow. Dad situated my limbs.
I aimed. I closed my eyes and shot and missed and felt a jolt of pain in my cold shoulder. I nearly dropped the rifle when it recoiled. That recoil would have dropped me had Dad not staggered my legs.
I was to have intuited the reaction to every action, the nature of a force, the law of the conservation of energy and momentum, after watching my friend shoot once. I would later learn to name these principles, from books at school, not lessons at home. Dad smirked after my performance and asked if I wanted to shoot again. Silent, I pointed the rifle, nearly my equal in size, erroneously toward the heavens and handed it to him. Dad passed it to another of my friends.
Even as a man, I would never match my father’s stature. I was then, as I am now, the shortest, meagerest boy I know. My dad, at that time, was in his late twenties. He was not only brawny, after a boyhood on the farm, he was more than a few inches over six feet tall and more than 200 pounds. He was a state-champion wrestler, a former linebacker. He even owned a hefty buckle for his formidable leather belts to commemorate a performance at a national rodeo. I played baseball, the only sport for which my size was not yet a disadvantage.
My other friends took their unnecessary turns with the rifle after I did. Everyone shot twice but me. Once they had finished, after they had cheered each other’s reports, dad took the rifle and picked off the remaining bottles and cans on the log, pumping vigorously after each shot. He asked what I wanted to do next. I wanted to leave.
We all bounded into the truck and sat rigidly, warming our hands between our knees, as dad drove us into town. We stopped at the Rainbow Party Shop, which was not so much a misnomer as a deceit. It was a mirthless, cinderblock shack—a rainbow featured in neither the signage nor the decor. There was, in fact, no color inside, that I can remember, but for the mélange of Hostess cakes, some lurid beer promotions, and a few sodium lights. It was a drive-through corner store—what locals called “a carry-out”—where men could buy a case of beer without having to leave their cars. In that village, people caroused, but they usually did so at home in front of their TVs after dinner. Bars were an improvidence they either could not afford or would not abide.
My uncle lived next to this carry-out, and as soon as it was polite for me to quit our visits, I would shuffle between the idling cars to buy baseball cards inside. I was not only collecting my favorites; I was memorizing the career stats of every player.
Baseball had taught me the authority of math. It was, also, my one hobby that made my father proud. I was a pretty great player, especially for a nine-year old, and I had learned to calculate just how great my batting average was after each at-bat. More importantly, baseball was the one subject in my encyclopedic knowledge that dad could show off to his friends. At wedding receptions, the biggest parties in the surrounding county, he would dare them to try and stump me on players’ home runs and strikeouts. They never could. At least they appreciated a learning that did not come from books.
In the pickup truck outside the party shop, Dad handed each of my friends five dollars before he bestowed on me a ten-dollar bill. We ran into the carry-out, welcomed by a string of cowbells hanging from the door, and headed straight for the baseball cards. Next to them was a collectible I had never seen. One of my friends had noticed that box of Garbage Pail Kids and called us over. He had a bawdy older brother and told us how gross the characters on those sticky cards were: Potty Scotty, Corroded Carl, Fat Matt, Oozy Suzy, Adam Bomb. A pack of five was twenty-five cents. Baseball cards came in wax packs of seventeen with a durable stick of gum, for only forty cents.
I preferred baseball to the foul, yet my friend promised me the stickers were cool. I was carried away by that promise. I did not yet know algebra, but I could do some quick math to help us maximize the number of packs we could each buy with our cash.
My dad laughed when he saw the twenty packs of baseball cards and the eight packs of stickers I lugged to the counter. “Sure you want to waste all your money on those,” he asked. “There’s nothing else you want?”
There was, but it was a stimulant I knew he would never allow, at any price, even with my own money.
“Jolt Cola?” I sheepishly inquired. The can that boasted “all the sugar and twice the caffeine” of any other pop? I had never had it, but my friends all shouted, “Yeah!” in unison.
“What the hell,” dad said, and plopped a six-pack on the counter.
That night, despite the blistering cold, I insisted on sleeping outside, away from the prying eyes and the reactive ears of my parents. After my friends and I each had our Jolt, mom and dad no longer thought the idea ridiculous. Dad erected a dome tent in front of the barn. Mom found a few thick sleeping bags and a few dozen knit blankets and shipped us out with flashlights.
Under the glare of those spotlights, under the influence of so much caffeine, we giggled at our pulpy stickers and traded baseball cards for hours. We evaluated the men who played a game. We all had our favorites, we estimated their value beyond any measurable performance, we gave meaning to their flat representations. Once we had what we coveted, after we all refused any further trades, we put the cards away. We decided to play a game. My friend with the older brother suggested Truth or Dare.
I went first, I know, because it was my turf, my tent. It was also the first time I had ever played. I was anxious about the gauntlet of a dare, so I opted for the truth. I revealed whom I supposedly liked.
None of us concealed any gripping truths at that age, at least none we would yet know how to share, so we had no choice but to halve the game to Dare after a single round. It was my turn again. After conferring with each other, my friends commanded me to leave the tent and stand outside, in the dark, for five minutes without a flashlight.
The pitch of black on a moonlit night in rural Ohio is darker than any moonless night in any city or town in the world. And I do not remember a moon over me.
That night was likely the darkest I had ever been awake to witness. It was also the coldest. But what I remember, after realizing the scuffling noises I heard were just my friends trying to scare me or other animals trying to sleep, was that I was alone and unafraid.
I rubbed my hands together vigorously between my thighs—what the men in my family called “the Roebke rub”—out of habit rather than the need for heat. I had gloves, I felt warm already, I was breathing steam. I looked up, not to behold the heavens but to confirm some knowledge.
I found Polaris, the guiding star, hidden among the constellations, which I had read about in my encyclopedias. I then noticed, or perhaps admired for the first time, the slather of stars that bisected the sky. I do not believe I could yet name much of that milky collection. But I did understand all those stars, abruptly, not as points of light on a dark screen, but as massive blazes at different depths in an inky and unfathomable ocean. As beacons in the profound. As cousins to our sun, with their own planets and moons and other possible worlds. As objects to reach for, from here in the shallows. And in that dark, a dim light shone in my mind, I believe for the first time. One lit outside my books. There were worlds I might understand and even inhabit closer to home.
I already knew that I was unlike the many members of my family and my friends. That their pleasures were not my own. That I liked to read and felt no comfort in daily chores, no pride in the attainment of manual labors. I had no fever to shoot a weapon, mercifully or not. And, somehow, outside in the cold and under the stars that night, I knew my truth. My interests and my desires were reasonable, because they were mine. Difference could mean distinction. I need not live as others prescribed. I could find my place in the world, and it need not be here. I had realized, I think, the existence of elsewhere.
So had my dad, in his way, each week he spent in Michigan. But I had neglected this lesson from him. I had needed to learn it myself. I had needed to feel the need to leave within my own body.
My friends screamed when I had survived my five minutes and I returned to the tent. The game devolved into unoriginality thereafter. We challenged someone to run around the tent without his coat. We challenged another to take a lap in his underwear. We forced a third to run naked in the cold. We told the fourth to get naked and dance for one minute inside, while the rest of us strobed our flashlights. It was my turn again. I was instructed to get naked and wrestle with my closest friend.
These were also the games we boys played. At school, during recess, we often competed in an amusement called smear the queer. Someone would throw a ball into the air and whoever was nearest the ball when it landed had to grab it and run, else they received a beating. No adult ever discouraged either the phraseology or the practice, even after we returned to class with bruises and grass stains on our uniforms. Even though we all had one or two “peculiar” uncles and aunts, even in that village. No one ever told us our practice was wrong.
Nudity, however, we knew to be wicked.
I yelled that it was unfair, that I would be naked and my friend not, perhaps to end the assault. But the others decided we should both be nude. My friend said it was unfair that the others would not be naked, too, and he promised to make them all wrestle naked afterwards. We might as well all get naked and wrestle each other now, someone said. That logic somehow won, and the rest disrobed.
Someone made a rule that you had to wrestle while hard, a usage I learned immediately and intuitively. We set our flashlights down and someone yelled go.
Five naked boys giggled and yelped as they groped for each other in the darkness of a dome tent, shielded from the cold and the light of millions upon millions upon millions of distant stars and all their possible worlds and warmth above in the sky. One of those boys cackled as he fumbled with my dick and then with my friend’s. No one declared a rule against it. What began as a dare resolved into truth. I do not remember how our main event ended, I remember only that we exhausted ourselves and went to sleep, after talking excitedly for hours.
We had experienced, perhaps for the first time, a naked joy, a pure and exhilarating joy, one that we were already conditioned to think immoral. We were boys in a white, rural town, taught to hunt and shoot and work and compete, but never to embrace or touch or love, never to enjoy each others’ bodies or even our own. Never to emote. The greatest ethic we knew was work, the truest value was our labor. But I already wanted more than toil and sacrifice. I intended my body for more than work, for so much more than shame. I wanted to know greater pleasures, here or somewhere else.
My mind had always been my companion, but I had learned that bodies elicit joy and dispense it, too. A joy beyond any I felt in manual labor or sports, one akin to the results of my humble calculations and reading. We, my friends and I, had discovered such joy innocently and for ourselves, here, in rural Ohio. We found what our fathers must have known before they were forced into menial work, before they posed as men. That night, I learned the inverse of what I was always taught. A joy in the recreations of the body, a pride in the attainments of the mind. I learned what it meant to be a man, elsewhere if not here.
The next morning, the parents of my friends came early to gather their sons and take them home and then to church. They observed the sacraments, sought communion, endured the ritual sermon. I stayed home and read about the stars in my encyclopedia all morning and afternoon. We five young men never spoke of what happened that night. We didn’t have to.
A few weeks later, we spent the evening at my friend’s house and played our games again.
***
Rumpus original art by Zach Swisher
