1 Chapter 1
The first man I ever fell in love with was my
best friend’s dad. Mikey didn’t know it, of course, and neither did
Mr. Pierce.
The dad was nothing like the son. I’d known
Mikey since kindergarten, when he pushed me off the swing set on
the school playground and had to sit in time-out for the rest of
recess. When the teacher made him apologize, he stared at his
sneakers and mumbled, “Sorry.” It was only later, when we were
leaving for the day, that he approached me at the coat rack and
sounded a little more sincere when he added in a breathless rush,
“I’m sorry I pushed you off the swing. That was rude of me.”
I had looked up, surprised, but someone
behind Mikey caught my eye and my gaze continued to travel past the
kid to the imposing man who stood behind him. Mr. Pierce wore a
dingy wifebeater beneath a half-buttoned, dark blue work shirt. His
belt buckle seemed to be twice the size of Mikey’s head, and the
hem of his undershirt was caught in the fly of his dark pants.
I saw that little gleam of white peeking out
from between the silver teeth of the zipper and fell for him, right
then and there. At six years old, I was in love.
Without looking away from those stern, black
eyes, I whispered, “It’s okay. Thanks.”
Mikey knuckle-punched me in the shoulder and
laughed. “Smell you later!”
The next day he pulled his sleeping mat over
beside mine at naptime and we were friends ever since.
Over the years, Mr. Pierce never seemed to
change. Throughout elementary school and junior high, he was an
imposing figure on the edge of Mikey’s life. He knew my name, of
course; he hadto—I was Mikey’s best friend growing up. But
whenever I visited Mikey’s house, his dad always referred to us as
simply, “You boys.” It was, “You boys turn that TV down” when we
watched cartoons on Saturday mornings while Mr. Pierce tried to
sleep in, or “You boys stop running through the house” when we
chased each other with light sabers, or “You boys get to bed up
there!” when I spent the night and he heard Mikey snicker at my
latest dirty joke.
Mr. Pierce had a hard voice, rough, burned
out from too many late evenings with his friends huddled around the
dining room table, cigarette smoke stinging their throats and
watering their eyes as they played hand after hand of poker. If I
stayed over one of those nights, Mikey and I were confined to his
room upstairs, out of the way, though not out of earshot. The men’s
raucous laughter and coarse language made us envious. To be old
enough to join in with the adults! How I longed to have Mr. Pierce
call me a dirty bastard one second, then clap me on the back and
roar with approval at something I’d said the next.
On those nights, long after Mikey fell
asleep, I would lie awake in the darkness and listen to the game
wind down, imagining myself among them as a friend. The dining room
table was a thick slab framed on either side by weathered benches
and I could see myself so clearly seated on the bench beside Mr.
Pierce, sitting so close that his knee pressed into my thigh. In my
mind’s eye, I thought it wouldn’t take much to get one of those
large, calloused hands to drop from his cards onto my hip. I’d
wiggle a bit, scoot in closer, and sooner or later, Mr. Pierce’s
hand would be in my lap, doing delicious things that mirrored what
my own hand did beneath the blankets in my makeshift bed on Mikey’s
bedroom floor.
* * * *
Mr. Pierce was nothing like my own father,
who went to work in a starched shirt and tie. My father worked in
an office all day, pushing papers from one side of the desk to the
other, and wouldn’t last two hours in the plant where Mr. Pierce
worked as an electrician. When something broke around our house,
the extent of my father’s handyman knowledge was to know who to
call to fix it. Once Mikey and I became friends, he took to calling
Mr. Pierce, no matter what the problem. Mikey’s dad could fix
anything.
Whenever Mr. Pierce came over, he looked so
out of place in my home, so incongruous with everything else in my
life, that I couldn’t stop staring at him. I hovered in his shadow
as he tinkered under the sink or fiddled in the fuse box down in
our basement. I was the first thing he saw when he glanced back,
reaching for his tools. My persistence paid off, usually with a
gruff hand tousling my hair or a half-smile that only drew up one
corner of his mouth. “Hey, kid,” he’d say…maybe he didn’t
know my name, but I didn’t care. When he asked for a tool just out
of reach, I scrambled to retrieve it for him, and if he wanted a
glass of water, I rushed upstairs to pour one.
