Boy Erased. Garrard Conley
He clicked his mouse several times with his too-big hand, a hand that could take apart a carburetor but whose rough edges and burned skin made it difficult for him to operate a personal computer.
SEVERAL YEARS before I was born, my father had stopped on the side of the highway that passed through our hometown to help a man whose car had broken down. As my father crawled beneath the engine to check for any abnormalities, the stranger turned the key to his ignition, igniting the gas that had been leaking from the carburetor, an ignition that spread third-degree burns across my father’s face and hands. The burns left his nerves burned and dead so that now he could cup his hand over a candle flame for thirty seconds or more until my mother and I would scream for him to stop. When I was a colicky baby, he would comfort me by sitting in a wicker rocking chair with me and bringing a candle close to my face. He would press his palm flat against the open O of the glass holder until the fire almost fizzled out, repeating the act until I grew tired, my head falling against his chest while he quietly sang me to sleep with one of his many made-up lullabies.
He’s a good old friend to me
As simple as can be
He’s a good old pal
He’s a good old friend
He’s a good old pal to me
At certain moments in his life, my father must have asked himself why the stranger had turned the key. He must have asked himself why anyone would turn the key.
“Whatever you do,” my father had said, stepping around the stranger’s car to examine the motor, “don’t turn the key.”
There must have been some hiccup in communication, something in the stranger that said it was all right to start the engine at the exact moment the Good Samaritan crawled beneath the bumper of his car. Whatever his motivations, the stranger didn’t hesitate.
My mother later told me that when my father showed up at the front door, his clothes covered in ash and his face half burned and his whole body shaking, her first reaction had been to ask him to stay outside. She was vacuuming the carpet. She assumed he was simply caked with dirt.
“Go away,” she said. “Wait till I’m finished vacuuming.”
Hours later, standing beside my father’s hospital bed, waiting for his hand to heal so she could at least hold on to some part of him, what she felt in the place of love was pity and fear. Pity for a man who would risk his life for strangers without a second thought, and fear for a life lived with a once-handsome man, a twentysomething former quarterback with the cleft chin and deep dimples of a Saturday Night Fever John Travolta now transformed into—into what? No one could tell exactly. The bandages would have to be removed weeks later, and only then would doctors know if the grafted skin would resemble anything of his former face.
“TOO MANY earthquakes to keep track of,” my father said, tossing the mouse into a stack of papers beside him. He popped each of his knuckles. “But you don’t need shelter when you’re wearing the Armor of God.” He pointed to the Bible in my hand.
“Sure don’t,” I said. I pictured armor-plated locusts swirling in corkscrews from the clouds. Scores of unbelievers with their bodies run through by silver-plated scabbards. And somewhere in my conscience, the beginning of an idea that had recently begun to plague me: that I might be one of them.
AT EIGHTEEN, I was still very much in the closet, with a halfhearted commitment to my girlfriend, Chloe, whose predilection for French kissing ran a cold blade through the bottom of my stomach. A week earlier as we sat in my car outside her house, Chloe had reached for my leg. I had shifted away from her, and said, “It’s so cold in here,” flipping the lever for the heat, sliding back into the passenger’s seat, wishing there was an eject button. I had experienced my own Armageddon fantasy in that moment: the depressed button of a radio controller, a hooded insurgent walking calmly away from our flying debris, pieces of my flannel shirt flying through the air on flame-tipped wings, a thick-necked policeman picking through the charred remains of the explosion for Chloe’s purple hair scrunchie.
“Besides,” I said, thinking that this moment might lead to more intimacy than we had ever allowed. “We should wait until marriage.”
“Right,” she said, removing her hand. Since we had already been together for a year and a half, the church congregation was expecting us to marry before too many years of college could change us. Earlier in the summer we had traveled to Florida with my mother and my aunt. As we were leaving for the trip, Chloe’s mother leaned in through the driver’s-side window to stage whisper into my mother’s ear. “You know everything’s going to change after this, right?” she said. “All of you in the same hotel room. E-ve-ry-thing.”
But nothing had changed. Chloe and I sneaking out at night with my aunt’s wine coolers to sit by the neon pool and watch its waves ripple across the plastic lining, an angry tide pulsing somewhere in the darkness ahead. I had started to think we didn’t need anything other than friendship. Chloe had made me feel complete in a way no one else had. She made it fun to walk through the school hallways, to see the looks of approval on people’s faces. I could see in her eyes a real love I might one day be capable of returning. When we’d first met in church, her smile had been so genuine that I’d decided to ask her out right after the service, and we’d quickly settled into a happy routine. Watching movies, listening to pop music, playing video games, helping each other finish homework. It seemed there hadn’t been anything to confide until that intimate moment in the car, and suddenly there was this new pressure between us.
MY FATHER and I left his office to join the other men at the foot of the couch, each of us sinking to our knees on the cold tile. Above our heads hung a sign that read: NO CUSSING TOLERATED—THIS IS THE LORD’S BUSINESS.
The man to my left, Brother Hank, clamped his eyelids shut until faint white ripples appeared above his red cheeks. My father’s number one car salesman, Brother Hank could tailor his speech for any occasion. “Dear Lord,” he began, “give this boy the strength to deliver his message this morning.” He wrapped his heavy arm around my shoulders and tucked me close to his ribs. I could smell the sharp scent of menthol and, beneath that, the earthy smell of his farm, a place I had seen only in passing during one of my long walks through the forest paths surrounding our house.
Brother Hank continued: “Bestow upon him Thy divine grace and mercy.” He paused for a moment, allowing the distant ticking of my father’s chrome clock to sober each man’s mood. A few of the men groaned encouragement.
“Oh, yes, Lord,” they said.
“Yes oh yes oh yes oh yes oh yes Lord,” they said.
Brother Hank lifted his hand from my back and left it hovering above my hair, the way my father used to do before cracking an imaginary egg on my skull and causing the imaginary yolk to trickle down my cheeks. “Let him be a vessel for truth. Let no falsehood spill from Your blessed fountain. Amen.”
“Amen!” the men shouted, rising to their feet, knees popping.
We settled into a circle of chairs around the couch, Brother Nielson and my father taking up the middle. Brother Hank removed a stack of Bibles from a nearby desk drawer and fanned them out like a deck of cards, each man choosing carefully, examining his book before flipping open the cover.
“Tell me something before we begin,” Brother Nielson said, removing his own Bible from behind a couch cushion. His name glittered in gold on the front, along the bottom of the cracked leather cover. His cracked Bible said one thing to all of us: Here is a man whose fingers have creased and uncreased each page for the past twenty years. Here is a man who has quietly sobbed into the open spine, allowed his tears to wet and wrinkle the red letters of our Savior. “I’ve been talking with the men here,” Brother Nielson continued, “and I want to know one thing, boy. What’s your opinion on the Middle East problem? What do you think of our president’s decision?”
I froze. The existence of Chloe had shielded me from