Why didn’t you cry?
 

He didn’t deserve it.  He didn’t deserve a single one of Claire’s tears and he sure as hell wasn’t going to get any of mine.  I hated him.  He hated me.  Perhaps not… at the end.  Perhaps he did used to love me.  But he had a fucking strange way of showing it.  He’d get drunk.  The stink of that bar… that was the stink of my father.  He’d get drunk and hit me.  Maybe I’d be in his way.  Maybe I was using the can when he needed to.  Hell, if he got too drunk that wouldn’t stop him, he’d just piss on me.

He didn’t deserve it.  He never wanted me.  One kid was costing him the equivalent of twenty bottles a week – what a waste, right?  A second kid would just cost him more booze money.  I was an expense that he didn’t need and he fucking resented me for it.

Sometimes I thought of telling him about me, telling him I was gay.  I could almost feel the blows as I imagined they would rain down.  I used to have nightmares that he found out and cut my dick off to teach me a lesson.

When I did tell him… he didn’t have the balls to hit me.  Not then.  He was old and sick.  And I’d grown up.  I was the strong one.  I was the one with the strength.

I never told you did I?  My sixteenth birthday?  He bought me a box of cigarettes.  When I didn’t say ‘thank you’ he hit me.  And I hit him back.  He never laid another finger on me.

I thought, I should have hit him before.

I envied you, Mikey.  You didn’t have a father to be an asshole to you.  I couldn’t understand why you wanted one so badly.  You could have had mine, but I wouldn’t have wished that on anyone.  He didn’t deserve one shred of grief, Mikey.  And deep inside you, you know that.

*

Don’t leave.  I’m sorry.  Please… don’t leave me alone with his ghost.
 

I won’t leave.

I love you, Brian.  You know I’ve always loved you.  From the moment I laid eyes on you in class.  When I found out… when you told me one night what your Dad was doing, I didn’t believe you.  How could I believe you?

You’re right.  I wanted a father so badly, I envied you having one.  To know he was hitting you, hurting you….  That just didn’t tie in with my fantasy.

I’ll stay, Brian, you don’t have to ask.  But I don’t want a drunken fuck.  I want more than that.  Even now.  I thought being in love with David would change my feelings for you, but they haven’t changed.  Nothing’s changed, despite how hard I’ve tried to deny how much I need you.  I hunger for you like I’ve always done.  Only difference is that now it doesn’t hurt as much.
 
 

Do you think of me when David fuc… makes love to you?
 

Sometimes.  Okay, often.  He knows, I think.  One night he asked me who I was thinking about.  You and me, we’d been dancing at Babylon, all close and sweaty.  You’d done it deliberately to annoy David.  I knew what you were doing.  But I let you do it anyway.  Because you were turning me on like crazy that night.  Like you always do.

*

Brian, please….  You’re self-destructing over a man you hated….
 

But he was still my father, right?  Still the man who fucked my mother and gave me life.  Does that earn him the right to my respect? to my grief like Justin thinks it should?

No.  He isn’t getting anything from me, Mikey.  He never gave me anything….

That’s not true.  He gave me life.  And bruises.  A miserable childhood?  No, that’s not true.  I was never miserable.  Except for when it was really bad.  I had me.  I had a secret.  From the moment I was born I knew I liked guys and something about that idea… gave me an inner strength.  I knew myself….  Jeez, Mikey.  Don’t ever tell anyone you heard me talking like this.

My father made me who I am.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I fuck everything that moves because my father hit me as a kid.  That would be like those pervs who claim they fuck kids because they were abused as children.  Or those dicks who take guns into schools because their fathers beat them up.

I fuck everything that moves because I want to.

But I’m a shit to you because of him.  Because I know you’ll love me whatever, will always love me and I have to have that.  So I test that again and again, test it to destruction because I have to know I’ll never lose you.

Yet along with the times I treat you like shit go the moments when I treat you like the most precious thing in the world.  You are the most precious thing in the world, Mikey.  Always remember that.

For all my shitty insults and accusations, all my teasing and taunting, without you, I would be empty.  Instead of a warm heart in a steel cage, I’d have a steel heart.  I’d fuck without thought.  I do think when I’m fucking.  It’s not always mindless.

Although I know you don’t want to hear it, you made Justin and I possible.
 
 

What is it with Justin anyway?
 

It’s… the way he looks at me.  The complete adoration in his eyes.  I see the same in yours, but I see lots of other things too, complicated emotions that I can’t cope with, so I push you away.

Justin won’t love me forever.  He’ll go to college, meet other guys.  He’ll finally realize that I’m just an old pervert, way too old for him.  But until then, he’ll continue to look at me in that way of his.  And when we fuck, it’s different, better than fucking complete strangers.

Don’t look at me like that.

No, I don’t love him. …. Okay, I might love him.  But I’m not in love with him.  Not that I know what that feels like.  Thanks to you, I will do one day.  When you look at me, you look through me, you see everything and you have no idea how frightening that can be.  And yet… I know one day I’ll embrace that.  I’ll want it, I’ll need it.

One day, one day soon, I hope… I might start waking up to you looking at me like that.  Every morning.
 
 

Am I hoping against hope, Mikey?  Will that dream ever come true?
 

…

Of course it will.

I think… maybe David knows that now.

Maybe not.

*

Think you’ll ever cry?
 

Not for him, Mikey.  Not for my son-of-a-bitch father.  There are people around me much more deserving of my tears.
 
 

fin
elfin