Tom Mendicino - Probation

We sit knee to knee, talking about inconsequential things. I stumble from one faux pas to another. He squirms when I ask how he likes school. He wants to talk about me, wants to ask about when I was eighteen, his age.

“Did you ever do anything crazy? Really crazy?”

I tell him about hitchhiking alone to D.C. to see the Stones. He’s impressed. “Yeah, they were great, it was great, best night of my life,” I say, lying.

A hip-hop psych tech, not much older than Robert, announces that visiting hours are over. Robert grabs my arm and asks if I’ll come back tomorrow. He doesn’t tell me why he wants to see me. I don’t have to ask.

“If you like.”

“I’d like,” he says. When I shake his hand, he grabs and squeezes me, then breaks away quickly, not knowing how I might react, not trusting that I won’t push him away. He’s unsure of the world these days.

He’s quiet when I return the next day, absorbed in a television movie. But when I stand up to stretch, he grabs my elbow, not letting me wander from the sofa. At the end of visiting hours, he asks if I’ll be back tomorrow. Maybe, I say. My minimum-wage obligations back in Charlotte are looming. Please, he says, hopefully. Sure, okay, I assure him. If Barnes and Noble won’t accommodate me, I’ll take my skills across the street to Borders.

Bobby’s wife isn’t the type of woman comfortable with tears, but the events of the past few weeks have broken her down. I’m not that comfortable with emotional outbursts either and, if truth be told, I would rather she not start crying when I tell her I’ll hang around a little longer. She’s overwhelmed by what she thinks is my kindness and generosity. I let her believe my motives are selfless. Why should I tell her the truth, that I’ve failed everyone around me, my wife, my father? Christ, I couldn’t even be at my mother’s bedside when she died. Now they are all gone and I’m alone and, if not entirely unloved, then, at least, unneeded. What twist of fate has dropped this kid in my lap? Why now? Bobby’s wife has it all wrong. Kindness and generosity have nothing to do with it. I’m doing this for me.

Besides, I genuinely like the kid. I knew the bare bones of the story. He’s eager to talk, but reluctant to be the first to speak. On my third visit, the charge nurse makes a special dispensation so Robert and I can have a little privacy. We sit quietly in his tiny room. He fidgets on his mattress and offers to change places with me.

“That’s okay. The chair’s fine,” I say. He looks at me and sighs. I’m going to have to make the first move. I make it easy for him to open his heart and pour out his soul. I confess I know all about WrestlerJoc and OnMiKnees4U, about Cary, about whom I had been both wrong and right.

“Cary, Cary, Cary,” he repeats, feeling a rush of liberation just being able to speak the forbidden name.

Cary wasn’t the dreaded predator I feared and ended up being pretty much the package presented over cyberspace-twenty years old, in the throes of first love and infatuation, the type of boy on whom Robert had harbored secret crushes since junior high. Still, just like I predicted, he ended up smashing Robert against the rocks of reality by abruptly announcing he really was straight, was only really comfortable with girls, that being around Robert now made him feel a little creepy. Maybe Robert shouldn’t call or hang around his dorm, and probably he shouldn’t acknowledge him if they happened to run into each other on campus.

This sudden change of heart happened after (and, as he will realize when he’s a little older and wiser, because) Robert, emboldened by the power of true love, placed a classified ad in The Daily Tar Heel, participating in some phenomenon called National Coming Out Day by sending a public mash note using his real name to the Love of His Life, a man, yes, a man, he identified only by the initials CAL. In a gentler, kinder world, Robert would have been allowed to quietly retreat to lick the wounds of rejection, and, over time, learn to love Cary less and less.

But, of course, fate would intervene in the form of Mandy’s older brother, the beneficiary of a UNC wrestling scholarship, who clipped the disgusting announcement from the paper, folded it, and tucked it in his wallet, saving it to share with his bitter little sister when he went home for Thanksgiving. Little sister, drunk and betrayed, threw the crumpled piece of paper in the face of my cousin Bobby when he answered the door.

To say he beat the boy to a pulp wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration. Robert crawled back to Chapel Hill that night with a black eye and facial abrasions and a sharp pain in his rib cage where his father kicked him for good measure after knocking him to the floor. The dormitory was empty except for a couple of Chinese kids who didn’t speak much English and kept to themselves anyway. By the time halls started to fill up again on Sunday, the swelling had gone down and he told anyone who asked about his eye he’d been in a car wreck, nothing broken, just knocked around a bit.

“Have you ever felt as if you were living in someone else’s body?” Robert asks me. “Did you ever touch your skin and couldn’t feel it?”

“All the time,” I admitted. “Not so much now. But it hasn’t been so long ago since I felt that way.”

He called his mother, told her not to worry, he was all right, they’d talk about it later, decide what to do, where he’d go, after exams. He stared at the open book on his desk, unable to read, not even seeing the print on the page, finally closing it. It was pointless, his father was cutting off the money and he wouldn’t be returning, at least not until he could earn some cash. Barely eating, unable to sleep, not bathing, he wandered the streets until daylight, talking to himself, he counted down the days-twenty, nineteen, eighteen-until they closed the dorm for winter break, leaving him nowhere to go.

He paced outside the library, open all night during exams, arguing with himself, swearing he wasn’t going to give in to temptation, finally losing the battle and ending up in the men’s room deep in the bowels of the building. Locking himself in a stall, he waited, not wanting sex actually but needing to feel something warm-a belly or a crotch-against his face, hoping someone would slip into the next stall and a foot would slide across the tile and nudge his, the blossoming of romance.

He sat for hours, his ass and thighs turning to cold lead, hearing nothing but piss against porcelain, an occasional turd plopping in water, flush and run. Just when he was about to give up, go home and pull the sheets over his head, he heard the sounds of procrastination at the sink, hands being washed and dried, then washed again, a brief, hushed conversation, and then belt buckles slapping the floor in the next stall. Robert leaned forward and saw suede bucks and familiar red sneakers with black racing stripes. His knees buckled and his stomach heaved when he stood to pull up his pants. He tripped over his own feet, cutting his chin on the edge of the door, and, bleeding, ran as fast as he could, away from the banging and thumping and hands slapping the stall, from the grunting and groaning, from Cary ’s voice, begging the boy in the suede bucks to do it harder, go deeper, harder.

He waited until nine in the morning when the dorm was empty. Then, alone in his room, he slipped a pocketknife in the pocket of his robe and walked the corridor to the shower room. Once the water was scalding hot, he pulled the shower curtain behind him and slashed first his left wrist, and then, before he passed out from shock, gouged his right, not as prettily, but effectively. The blood came in spurts and the last thing he remembered was it swirling around his feet and disappearing down the drain.