A man sat with his fists clenched so tightly that his palms burned. His eyes were glued shut because nothing around him made any sense and closing his eyes seemed easier. There was no reason why he should be here. Why had he come? Music blared through the busy, hazy space around him, so loud that the entire room seemed to shake. There was shouting that sounded happy but he knew it wasn’t because how could it be? Sweat ran from his upper lip. It was salty. This place made him feel so fake and helpless even though moments earlier he thought he would feel so alive.

Slowly, he opened one of his tightly shut eyelids to reveal the stage laid before him. Neon lasers bounced off the floor to the walls to the beat of the wretched music. A man, far too young and much too handsome, embraced the slippery, silver pole passionately, swaying rhythmically to the applause of the crowd gathered around him. His body gleamed with something that could not have been sweat because there was something glowing around him.

The man quickly forced his eyes to shut. He shook his head and remembered the sting on his upper thigh from the night before. It had felt so wonderful to slide the razor across his skin, but now he just felt silly. Like a child who had skinned his knee falling from the cookie jar, except where was his mother to scold him? This was the time, the man realized in one instant, that he was supposed to see God. There was nothing good about this moment, yet the man could sense a burning to open his eyes and see something holy and pure. His scrawny and pale figure must have looked silly in the dark. People probably would not even be able to see his eyebrows, which was saying something because his eyebrows are very prominent. The man cared nothing for his appearance except for these bits of hair above his eyes; they were always perfect and bold and talked-about.

His eyes were lifted open by some other force just as a boy, maybe eighteen or nineteen, reached out to tap his shoulder. There was a moment of awkwardness as the men gripped the hems of their shirts to stabilize themselves. The man was shocked by the intruder’s aura; he wore heels that had to be taller than five inches and had hair that stood up right like it was waiting to be told what to do. Too much time was passing by anyone’s standards but the eye contact did not rest. It was sort of like they were looking in a mirror, except all they could see was how their family saw them: denile and repulsion seem to go hand in hand much of the time.

“What can I do for you tonight?” Said the younger boy.

All the man could do was keep staring at his upper lip because he was confused. What did the boy mean? Did he want to slice off a piece of his mind for his keeping? God knows no one would pay any sort of money for those bits of nothing. He looked back down at his red, torn up hands and realized he had been working on his calluses. His mother had told him it was from the stress of his primary years of school and then became a habit, but he knew better.  There was something soothing about the rubbing and the burning that shot through his skin.

He remembered the startling conversation at hand, “I’m sorry, what?”

The boy smiled and raised his eyebrows so that his face looked even more youthful except for the wrinkles on his forehead.

“Would you like a lap dance? I’m new so my charge is only five dollars for three minutes.”

The man stared again at his lip, even more confused than before. The boy reached across the space and kindly hit the man on his shoulder and laughed, “I’m just joking, though people do always mistake me for a stripper.” He laughed but kept his hand on the man’s shoulder. He wondered why.

“Let’s do something crazy,” he said. “You look like you could use it.”

He grabbed the man’s hand and lead him to the center of the room where the lights were way too bright and music exceedingly violent. The room felt underwater at first as the man tried to sway his hips along with the motion of his new friend’s. He had trouble breathing because God had not given him gills.

Finally, the man saw what he might have come for. All the nights of laying awake, looking at the backs of his eyelids to find some sort of reason; maybe it was all for something. He was brought back to a time when his mother had brought hims a tricycle for his fifth birthday. All of the other children in his neighborhood were already experts at riding bikes, even some without training wheels. Nevertheless, the man had been thrilled to feel something so new. The sidewalk had been cracked and broken, but the pedals were pushed with urgency and the wheels moved with intention. One night, the summer before Kindergarten, he tried to drive behind a large hoard of second graders. Their legs were stronger. So were their egos.

The night was windy and the man’s legs were shaky while trying to pedal with all of his might. The other kids were yards ahead as the crosswalk approached but he did not seem to notice the change from sidewalk to gravel and by the time he heard the navy blue minivan, the man was halfway across the street. A second grader hollered with delight as he pounded the breaks and flew from the handlebars of his three-wheeled vehicle. Blood the color of shame and embarrassment dripped from his chin and down his neck until the nice driver of the minivan rushed out with a pack of wipes most suburban moms have at the ready.  

“What can I do for you tonight?” Her voice was wrong, it was too deep to expend from her small figure so he looked around to find they were absolutely alone.

There was nothing holding him back now that he had a few drinks in him; the boy had laughed when he coughed and spit out the better half of his fluorescent cocktail. Rude. Now, he was standing on the dancefloor looking at himself through a glass window pane before him. He could not honestly tell if it was really there or not because his head was fuzzy and his feet dense. A feeling of strange emotion flooded through his body but he could not tell if it was love or hate or sadness or intrigue. He stared up at the ceiling for a minute and wondered if anyone was looking down on him while these thoughts were rushing through his head. Surely there was because that’s what his mother said to him and his mother never lies.

“Now if you keep your eyes shut for five counts of sixty you will fall asleep.” His mother’s voice was soothing yet annoyed in another way. Her face was tight and lips pursed together because she had been crying moments before in the kitchen. The man had heard shouts and knew his father had drank too much with dinner and his mother had nothing at all: not even a grain of salt.

All the young man made out of the shouts were angry words from his father, “God knows I didn’t raise a boy to be… to be… anything like this.” The man who was once a boy had shut his eyes so tightly that tears ran from his cheeks.

His father yelled again.

“He can’t be anything like those people. He can’t be gay.”

That was the first time the man had ever heard that word. Was this about the letter he wrote to his best friend Michael this morning? Was there something wrong with wanting to hold Michael’s hand at recess?

His mother patted the man’s forehead and sighed.

“Will you stay next to me for the first three sets of sixty?” The man asked.

“Anything for you, my love,” and she sat at the bottom of his twin bed and rested her hand on his right ankle and hummed gently.

The man closed his young eyes that night thinking about Michael’s smile. He imagined his smile to be what church bells ringing early Sunday mornings would look like. There was something so incredibly holy about it. His mother shifted her weight and he remembered what she was here for. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. After the man counted to sixty five different times, he fell asleep thinking that Michael was lying right beside him, under the blue and yellow striped covers smiling softly with his eyes closed.