Garrard Conley - Boy Erased

“Your wallet, please.”

I did as he said. My wallet looked so small sitting there, a tiny leather square containing so much of my identity: driver’s license, Social Security card, bank card. The boy in the license photo looked like someone else, someone free from all problems: a smiling face in a vacuum. I couldn’t remember how the DMV had gotten me to smile so goofily.

“Please empty the contents of your wallet and place them on the table.”

My face grew hot. I removed each card. I removed a small wad of twenties, followed by a torn piece of wide-ruled paper with the telephone number of the college admissions office I’d written down at a time when I’d been nervous about my chances of college acceptance.

“What’s the number for?” the boy asked.

“College admissions,” I said.

“If I called this number, would I find out you’re telling the truth?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t have any phone numbers or photos of ex-boyfriends anywhere on you?”

I hated the way he spoke so openly of past “boyfriends,” a word I had so carefully avoided because I felt that just saying it might reveal my shameful desire to have one. “No, I don’t have any inappropriate material.” I counted to ten, breathing out through my nose, and looked up once again at the boy. I wasn’t going to let this get to me, not this early on the first day.

“Do you have anything else in your pockets?”

His questions made me feel paranoid. Could I have unwittingly carried in some kind of inappropriate object? At the moment, it seemed as if everything about me was inappropriate, as if I might be banned from the premises simply because I was already too dirty. His tone suggested that I was desperately trying to hide an extensive sinful past, but the truth was that, although I did feel the weight of this expected sin, I had very little physical evidence, and even less physical experience, to account for it.

“Are you sure you don’t have anything else?”

I did have one other thing, though I hoped I wouldn’t have to give it up: my Moleskine journal, the one in which I wrote all of my short stories. Though I knew these stories were amateurish, that I was just playing around with serious writing, I looked forward to returning to them the minute the day’s activities ended. I suspected that the long descriptive paragraphs on nature, innocuous as they had seemed when I wrote them, could be construed as too florid, too feminine, another sign of my moral weakness. One of my latest stories even featured a young female narrator, a choice I knew was hardly gender affirming.

“There’s this,” I said, holding the Moleskine in front of me, not willing to put it on the table with the other belongings. “It’s just a notebook.”

“No journaling allowed,” the receptionist said, quoting from the handbook. “All else is distraction.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy took the Moleskine in his hands, as he laid it on the table and began flipping the pages back and forth with disinterest, frowning. I can no longer remember which story he found, but I can remember the way he ripped the pages out of my notebook, wadded them into a dense ball, and said, in a voice free of emotion, “False Image,” as if that was all they were.

“Well, that should be it,” the receptionist said. “Now I just have to do a quick pat down, and you’ll be ready.”

He patted my legs, ran his fingers beneath the cuffs of my khakis, worked his way to my arms, the cuffs of my shirt, and then, as if to comfort me, patted my shoulders—one-two-three—looking in my eyes the whole time.

“It’ll be fine,” he said, his too-blue eyes fixed on mine, hands still weighing down my shoulders. “We all have to go through this. It’s a little strange at first, but you’ll come to love it here. We’re all one big family.”

I watched as the blond-haired boy tossed my story in the trash. Lord, make me pure . If God was ever going to answer my prayer, He wouldn’t do so unless I became as transparent as a drop of water. Crumple the first half of the story and toss it in the trash. All else is distraction.

“FOR THE WAGES of sin is death,” Smid continued. Afternoon sunlight slanted through the sliding door behind him. Each time he walked past us, the shadow of the door’s central rail passed over him like the sluggish pendulum of a metronome, marking the slow tempo of his pacing. Our therapy group sat quiet and still, our breathing calibrated to the slow pulse of his legs, the casserole from our lunch break sitting heavy in our stomachs. There were seventeen or eighteen of us in the group. Some had been here long enough to know to abstain politely from the meat and processed cheese, while others had brought their own lunches, opening neon Tupperware lids that sent off a whiff of tuna and mayo. Watching the older members eat their lunches, the ones who’d been at LIA for two or three years, I’d been able to see how the receptionist was at least partially right, that this was a family, however dysfunctional. Crustless bread and ultramarine Jell-O: This was a group that knew how to tolerate the idiosyncrasies of one another’s food habits. People settled into their routines with little of the self-conscious buzz, of the surreptitious glancing that usually accompanies large groups who find themselves suddenly thrust into more intimate circumstances. I was the only one who seemed to be playing the outsider, scraping my fork through the Hamburger Helper as if I’d forgotten how to feed myself, hardly looking up from my plate.

To my left sat S, a teenage girl awkward in her mandatory skirt, who would later admit to having been caught smearing peanut butter on her vagina as a treat for her dog. “Pleased to meet you,” she’d said that morning, before I had the chance to introduce myself. She seemed always poised for a curtsey, thumb and forefinger twitching beside the folds of her cotton skirt. She looked down at my feet after the introduction, her gaze locking on the tile behind my loafers, and for a moment I felt as though I must have tracked in some kind of sinful residue from the outside world. “You’ll like it here.”

To my right sat a boy of seventeen or eighteen, J, wearing Wrangler jeans, a cowboy smirk, and a frat-boy part in his hair that tossed his dangerously long bangs over warm hazel eyes. J continually bragged that he had memorized all eight of the Bible’s “clobber passages,” so named because of their power to doctrinally condemn homosexuality and champion traditional straight relationships.

“I read them every night,” J had said, his voice serious but also a little playful. He gripped my hand in a practiced ironclad shake. There seemed to be a thousand handshakes behind this one, each of them gradually fortifying J’s grip until he was strong enough to pass this basic test of manhood. “I’ve memorized whole chapters, too.”

When our hands parted, I could feel his sweat cooling my palm in the downdraft. No hugging or physical touch between clients , I remembered from the handbook. Only the briefest of handshakes allowed.

“My favorite?” he said, smiling. “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.”

Later he would go on to tell me more about his interpretation of this “clobber” verse. “Abomination,” he would say, pushing back his bangs with the slow arc of his fingers, the white half-moons of his cuticles glowing large and bright. “Crazy word. In Hebrew, to’e’va . It can refer to shrimp as easily as it can to gay sex. All those little legs swimming through saltwater, it creeped the Israelites out, you know? They thought it was unnatural.”

The other members of our group included unfaithful married men and women, former high school teachers or educators of some kind shamed by rumors of their sexuality, and teenagers kept here against their will as part of the Refuge program, a controversial branch that targeted parents who felt that sending their children to the facility was the only option.