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I spent days alone in the room next door to Sloane and his addiction. I tuned the noises out as I dealt with thoughts of sex which seem to fire in my brain on a regular schedule. That schedule was the disease which was going to have to be overcome if I was ever going to go back to being Christobal, the name I'd been given at birth. It had been so long since I had even thought of myself as a Christobal, but it was time to return. It was time to become clean again.
But the throbbing temptation continued to pound at me, minute after minute. Thoughts of Pedro and other men flooded my mind and I had to keep something in my hands at all times to keep from touching myself. Knitting had become my new obsession.
A warm Saturday, the newest sweater for no one completed, the synapses overflowed with the bad, bad thoughts. I opened the door of the apartment (for the first time since Pedro had walked out that same door) and made my way down Creighton Avenue. I was telling myself that I was going to have a nice lunch, but my feet were headed to the gay porn theater; not to my favorite diner. The excitement building was a bit lower than my stomach.
The errant path I was on took me by a non-denominational Christian church. A group of men around my age were playing basketball on an outdoor court. As I walked by, one of the men said, "Hey, we need an eighth man to make the teams even. Want to play?"
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Not since I was a teenager had I even held a basketball. I did remember the feeling of satisfaction from swishing a jump shot. Then a vivid memory of my two older brothers, one fall afternoon after school, playing basketball at the local playground, flooded over me in a wave of sudden clarity. This shook me because I don't think I had ever remembered this before. If so, it must have been years and years. I must have successfully repressed this day in my past. No wonder. I broke out in a sweat as I saw that afternoon as clearly as if it were on a movie screen and I was alone in the theater. I had wanted to play so badly with them and the other big boys. They noticed me watching from behind a hedge row, and one of my brothers said, "Look at the little pissant over there. He's been watching every day this week. Let's let him play; you guys want to?" I realize now there must have been a wink and a couple of nods as they said, "Sure."
"C'mon, Christobal. You can be on José's team. Throw it in." I threw the ball to José and made my way to the top of the circle. I fully expected that this would be the last time I'd get the feel of the roundball, but just as soon as I got near the foul line, José yelled, "Heads up!" and I turned to see the ball coming to me. I caught it and turned to face the hoop and realized that I was unguarded. "They must be playing man-to-man, and my man is missing!" I thought excitedly. So I drove for the hoop and as I jumped to shoot the lay up, my other brother grabbed my shorts. I jumped up and the shorts went down.
There I stood in broad daylight with my shorts and my underwear down around my ankles and the boys were laughing and pointing at me. "Look at the teeny little chile on this girl! Is that a second belly button or a verga? What a shriveled pito!" I started crying, feeling so humiliated and lost, and that's when one of them (one of my brothers?) threw the basketball and hit me in the side of the head. Hard. I fell down, half unconscious, and a couple of them started kicking me in the stomach.
I never told anyone about this incident, and that's probably one reason I was able to suppress the memory so effectively. There were plenty of other incidents of comparable trauma which I had remembered very well. My brothers always disliked me. I guess two is company and three is a crowd when it comes to male siblings. My father was no help, either. He was not an evil man, but I think two boys was all he cared for, as well. I could never remember him touching me in any nice way during my entire childhood. Every time his had reached for me, it was in anger to jerk me away from something he feared I would break, or to slap me. Any hugs I could remember came from only from my mother and my grandmother and my aunts. All women.
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I looked at the man who asked me if I wanted to play basketball. He was smiling at me in a way which was unusual. What was it? Oh, yes. It was a smile of friendship and not one of, "I'm about to plug your ass with a load of hot jism." I hadn't seen a smile of friendship in what seemed like forever, so it took me aback. It took me by so much surprise that I found myself saying, "Yes. Yes, I would like to play, if you don't mind."
These seven men and I spent two solid hours that mid-day, playing game after game to 21, swapping teams, joking and laughing. Clean jokes. Clean laughter. After we were too tired to play another game, they asked me if I'd like to come inside and have lunch. Their wives had volunteered to clean up the church that day and had promised to make lunch for them. They were to do the hammering and sawing and painting that afternoon to fix up a couple of Sunday School classes. I ate with them and they asked me about myself and my life in Mexico. I told one lie after another, but I lied with such a clear vision of the past I wished I had lived that it all seemed OK. And they never seemed to doubt my stories.
That night I sat in my apartment and cried into my hands for what seemed like forever. I lost myself in the love I had been shown that day, and I realized that my whole life had been a frantic search for the love of men. The only way I had known to find the love of men which had been missing from my childhood was sex. I had forgotten how to find the love of men in fellowship and clean, honest interaction. My father who never touched me with love; my brothers who wanted me to quietly die and disappear; my classmates who taunted me and called me a queer, just because what few friends I had at school were girls; and the senior high drama teacher who had been the first to show me how men make love to each other, without my full consent . . . . All these memories were gelling now and showing me the reason I had lived as I had. My life had been formed into a monstrous, misshapen, unnatural longing for what most boys take for granted: Friends of the same sex. And I had gone about this in the only way that I knew how.
There was another way open to me now. And I was going to do my best to find the beginning of that path and follow it wherever it might lead. I would start by attending this church where these men played basketball on Saturday mornings. As this decision became crystal clear to me, Sloane and Sondra knocked on my door.
I opened the door and Gordon said, "You OK, fuckwad? We were getting worried about your sorry ass, in here all holed up and weepy. Have you not heard from Pedro?"
"Pedro is gone. He will not be coming back. And neither will I. I am moving tomorrow to a room on the fifth floor, where I don't have to trifle with the sounds of animals each night. And, Sondra, I'm going to church this Wednesday night. Would you like to go with me? I really think it might do you some good."
Sloane was speechless as a smile crossed Sondra’s bruised face.
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