Mild to Wild in Massachusetts Read online

  Mild to Wild in Massachusetts

  By Paul Walkingsky

  Brett has spent twenty-seven years trying to be perfect for the Mormon grandparents who raised him. Unfortunately, doing so has meant missing out on lots of life experiences—and denying a major part of who he is. Now that his grandparents are gone, Brett is ready to make up for lost time, break out of the sedate façade he’s always presented, and do something he would have never considered before: attend a gay men’s spiritual retreat in rural Massachusetts.

  While trying to infuse some spice into his life with workshops like Erotic Massage, Body Painting, and Drag 101, Brett meets Boston nurse Karl, and it’s hard to deny the connection between them. But will Brett’s lack of experience and Karl’s insecurities end their romance before it can really begin?

  It might be a spiritual retreat, but Brett must learn to embrace his physical reality if he’s going to grab on to his chance at love.

  States of Love: Stories of romance that span every corner of the United States.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  By Paul Walkingsky

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Dedicated to my first significant other, Leon McKusick, who was in many ways the model for the character Zach. Leon served as a mentor to me as I tried to better understand myself and others. I heeded his advice in sowing my own wild oats, as he instructed me to do, and as he had been told to by his first lover. AIDS silenced Leon, but his story continues.

  Chapter One

  I WANTED to enjoy some “me time” while my grandparents were away after throwing me the annual surprise birthday party. I had turned twenty-four on Monday. It was now Saturday, so I figured I had a handle on entering my midtwenties. I was pulling out a book I had been saving as a special treat for myself. I had a habit of not enjoying things right away, but instead putting them aside for a rainy day. Except living in Utah meant rainy days didn’t happen on a regular basis. It was like an old I Love Lucy episode, where pulling out the novel bumped two more books out of place, which let three books sitting on the top of others slide down. They knocked over a paperweight I had gotten for my eleventh birthday, and as it dropped off the shelf, the eternally frozen blue flower in a glass ball took out an ancient photo album. It hit me on my left foot as it fell, spilling out Kodachrome shots of my family’s life. They were now off-color—about the only thing that was off-color when it came to my grandparents. My mother’s face stared back up at me. She looked so young. She was probably about the age I was now.

  I bent over and started picking up the fallen bits of our history. Another one showed my mom in between my grandparents. She was smiling. Granma was looking into the camera as if she had never seen one before, and Granpa was frowning. There weren’t a lot of the three of them together. How many other people can honestly say their mother had been a pot-smoking hippy in a commune? Up until that point, everyone else had been a God-fearing Mormon. Maybe she had some sort of mutant gene. She danced off with her wild hair and wilder ways. She and her best friend Paula sold pot to support the commune.

  I’m a bit cloudy on the rest of it, but then it was before my time, and the grandparents weren’t big on details. It was rural Utah, and communes started later and lasted longer than in more civilized (or more jaded) places. My mom must have found the copy of Life magazine on top of the pile stashed in the bookshelf and based her life around what things had reportedly been like when her own mother would have been old enough to run away to San Francisco to put flowers in her hair. As if my grandmother would have ever gone farther than the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. I could picture my mom looking at the pictures in the old magazine and imagining herself at Woodstock and other places where hippies would hang out. A generation later than the residents of Haight-Ashbury, she would seek her own Summer of Love. Or more precisely, the Summer of Unplanned Parenthood. Guess hippy communes weren’t stocked with condoms.

  I sat down and opened up the photo album with the intention of putting the pictures back where they belonged. The page was waxed, and a protective plastic cover that looked a lot like the plastic furniture covers in the living room was weakly sealing things shut. No wonder the photos had ended up in a mess on the floor. I thought again of condoms and being told not to keep one in my wallet for years because eventually it would wear out. Then you could end up with the next generation of me.

  I picked up another photo from the pile. This one was of my mother and Paula. They looked sleepy but immensely happy. By the time she learned she was knocked up with me, the guy involved had been killed in a motorcycle accident outside a little town not too many miles on the other side of Salt Lake City. She talked it over with Paula, and they both decided on an abortion. But she came home. I don’t know why. Maybe when your world is upside down you end up seeking something familiar. Maybe she missed the plastic covers. I understand when she told them there were a lot of tears shed. Then Granpa, whom I’ve never seen cry, said if she kept the baby, they’d raise him. Me.

  She said she’d think about it. Then the next day a deputy sheriff showed up at the door to arrest her for selling pot. There were more tears. Money was spent on a lawyer, and he somehow managed to get her off with just probation. Maybe the thought of sitting in jail scared her, and she spent the next several months hiding away in the house.

  Then spring came and I came, and before my first birthday she climbed on the back of another motorcycle and drove away into the sunset. Or maybe it was the dawn. My grandparents aren’t much on details. My life consisted of Bible study and Temple. I remember sometimes wanting to look at pictures of my mother. I’d have to pull the footstool over from my granpa’s overstuffed chair to be able to reach up far enough to get this album. I remember it always being heavy. Now it was just a photo album. I sealed Paula and my mother back behind the plastic sheet. The next photo that had strayed was of my aunt Lindsey, the lesbian. Parenting for my grandparents didn’t quite go as planned. George came as an unexpected bonus. Uncle George was eight years older than I was. I sighed. It was like the Mormon gene skipped a generation. When I was a kid, I remember being horrified when some drunk looked at Lindsey and muttered in a sneering way, “Bull Dyke. ”

  LINDSEY STOOD stone still and said in her theatrical voice, “That’s Miz Bull Dyke to you.” Then she decked him. Ever since, when someone would ask her about her sexual orientation, she would proudly declare herself a Bull Dyke. Then she’d laugh. If Granma was in hearing distance, she’d sneak over and say, “Oh, Honey, it’s been hard enough to learn to say lesbian in public.” Uncle George grew up to purchase a Russian mail-order bride who spoke no English, and Uncle George’s Russian seemed to consist of “Nyet.” My grandparents made sure we stayed busy in the Temple and doing charitable work to compensate for all the sins of their children.

  Then I turned out to be gay. For a long time, I blamed it on the pot my mother lit up while she was knocked up. But using pot wouldn’t explain Aunt Lindsey. It wasn’t as if Granma had spent her pregnancy stoned out of her mind. The Farnsworth family tree stopped with me. My mother was missing in action. Aunt Lindsey ended up marrying a woman named Sarah, and they had three yappy
little dogs, or what they called their “fur children.” Uncle George ended up contentedly smoking, drinking, and attending sports events. No kids. Not even a yappy little dog.

  I tried not to be the ultimate disappointment to my grandparents my mother had been, and frankly the other two siblings weren’t exactly prizes. I was “the-best-little-boy-in-the-world,” hoping if I kept my head down and did all the right things in school, people might overlook the fact I was gay. I didn’t act on my desires. I became an athletic trainer in high school. I liked sports—just not nearly as much as Uncle George. I won a state award for being such a great athletic trainer. But as my senior year was coming to a close, I realized becoming a professional athletic trainer probably wasn’t the best option for a closeted gay boy who so enjoyed taping up players’ groins.

  I tried not to be too flamboyant, but overshot it and ended up just short of dull. I never picked out clothes that I’d really want to wear. I used Aunt Lindsey’s fashion sense, since she was the most masculine person I knew. She ended up in community theater. My grandparents dutifully took me to every one of her opening nights. Uncle George never went. He’d stay home with his beer and sports-per-view. I’d sit next to her then-girlfriend Sarah. After the opening nights that took place after I survived into my eighteenth year, I’d get invited back to a party at Aunt Lindsey and Sarah’s place. There would always be gay friends of hers who would tease me. Eddie had been my mom’s best friend when they were in Murray High School together. He was still close to the family. He was the only Mormon missionary I knew who had been formally excommunicated by the Church. He once told me when it was time for his hearing, all the other men who were there were terrified in their knife-sharp parted hair and new suits. The rest of them were there for adultery. He was there because he was a drag queen. His advice to me was always, “Benjie, you need to get laid.”

  They knew. I blushed. I’d deny. Aunt Lindsey would eventually chase Eddie and the others away, and I’d watch them at the edge of the group as they were watching me. But I was too scared to do anything. Whenever I would even think about it, I’d hear Bishop Pugmire’s angry voice in my head telling me I’d make Jesus weep if I ever—well, if I ever. With the continued lack of success of the siblings in the Mormon scheme of things, Granpa and Granma started distancing themselves from the Church and the pitying eyes and whispered comments of everyone else. By the time I turned eighteen, no one brought up the idea of my going on a Mission. I shuddered at the thought of having to constantly be around a straight teenage Mormon Elder, ringing the doorbells of strangers to bring them the word of God. I guess on some levels I didn’t feel worthy enough. Better a missionary whose mother hadn’t been busted for pot.

  I sealed another photo away. This one was of my grandparents standing in front of their old station wagon. They were obviously dressed for Temple. I sighed again. The back of the station wagon was where I was late one night with my friend Jimmy—we were driving back after attending a high school basketball game in the neighboring town. Granpa was silent, with his attention on driving. Jimmy had his hand down my pants, and he was licking my lips with his tongue. I was terrified Granma would look back at us and see what was going on. I had no pleasure in it. I was too scared. She was going on with her usual stream of consciousness. She was talking about me as if I weren’t in the backseat, getting felt up. “That Benjie,” she told my granpa. “He’s got a dangerous tongue.”

  If she only knew, the one with the dangerous tongue was Jimmy. He left for a Mission in Venezuela. Last I heard, he had married a Latino guy and they were living in Nevada. There were some nights when I’d sneak into Salt Lake City to see a movie. But I’d also go to a newspaper box next to one for the Salt Lake Tribune that had free copies of the gay newspaper. I’d end up walking past it a few times to make sure no one would see me. I’d take a copy and fold it up to hide it. I’d read it in secret and wonder what it was like to be as open and crazy as Aunt Lindsey and Sarah, but I feared I’d end up a fat old drunk like Uncle George, passed out in front of his big-screen TV. Later everything went digital, and I didn’t have to drive into Salt Lake City to pick up a copy of the gay newspaper anymore.

  I’d look at the pictures of drag queens and Mr. Leather events, and everything was as unreal for me as the novels I would read. I was so deep in the closet I had a zip code in Narnia. My aunt Lindsey insisted—translation: she threatened me—I attend her fortieth birthday party, being held in one of the gay bars near the theater where she worked. By this time in her career, she was respected as a director. She always liked to order people around. Part of me was excited about finally being in a gay bar. The majority of me was scared out of my mind. It was also the first time I had a cocktail. Aunt Lindsey insisted everyone would toast her. I didn’t know what to order. I would have gone with a Dr Pepper. I had what she was having, and after the first taste of scotch, I figured my drinking days were finished before they began.

  By the fourth sip, it didn’t taste that bad. The second drink started to taste good. A guy who was around my age with bleached blond hair twirled up beside me and started flirting. At least I think he was flirting. He ordered us more drinks and pulled me out onto the patio. I threw up. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I woke up with two of the three yappy dogs asleep on top of me on Aunt Lindsey’s couch. I had disappointed her. I’m sure I had disappointed my grandparents more.

  Chapter Two

  I WAS actually good with people I didn’t know. They didn’t make me feel nervous or as if I were being judged. I ended up working for Intermountain Healthcare. I had the responsibility of responding to patients who had not been approved by the HMO for a particular medical procedure. If the patient fought the decision, their file was handed to me. It was the easiest job in the world. For the system to justify its original denial, it would have involved a chain of command of their primary care provider, at least three supervisors, and another layer of administration. At that point, when you added up how much time (equals money) was involved with so many Intermountain upper-level medical staff, it was usually just simpler and cheaper to approve the procedure for the patient. It was the perfect example of the squeaky wheel getting as much grease as it wanted. The patient’s family would hail me as a hero, when all I did was shuffle some paperwork. After a lifetime of feeling I was always being told no, it felt good to always say yes to someone else.

  The years seemed to speed by. I was sealed into my workspace as tightly as if the door came with a protective plastic sheet. No one seemed to leave, except when Iris or someone else took off time to pop out another blonde baby. All the staff I worked with on a daily basis were women older than I was and, in several cases, old enough to be my mother. The younger ones always seemed to be pregnant. My social life consisted of an occasional baby shower, sitting at home watching sports in different seasons, and helping my grandparents more and more as they got older. My one stab at selfishness was when I got the nerve to change my name.

  I had been named after my grandfather. I was even a “Junior,” which I hated. It made me sound like I was five years old. But worse was always being called “Benjie,” rather than Benjamin. That would make me think of the stupid movies about that little yappy dog. One of the local stations seemed to constantly be playing a Benji movie whenever I was switching channels. In elementary school a music teacher taught us the song “B-I-N-G-O.” That scarred me for life after all the other kids would start singing it whenever I walked into the room—they’d laugh at me as they changed the lyric to “Benjie was his name-o!”

  After my internship in a smaller company before I got hired at Intermountain, I saved up enough money to get my name legally changed. I never told my grandparents. I figured it would break Granpa’s heart that I didn’t want his name. He took me in when my mother was ready to flush me away, so I figured I owed him. But I so hated my name. It seemed to represent all the things I hated about myself. It was a big deal for me when I walked into my first day at Intermoun
tain and introduced myself as Brett. I felt suave. I felt sophisticated. I got busy making strangers happy by calling them to let them know I had approved their previously denied procedure.

  Like the Barry Manilow song, it was all very nice—just not very good. I had tried dating girls a few times. I gradually accepted I’d end up with a beer gut and a TV remote attached to my hand like my uncle George. After my contribution to her birthday party, Aunt Lindsey gave up trying to advance my social life. My grandparents and I kept going to her opening nights. I’d watch Eddie and the rest of her gay friends in the audience as if they were on stage. They were all around her age, and I had been taught daddies don’t stay around. I was polite but distant. And the years trickled by.

  At a Thanksgiving Day dinner when Uncle George blew off his pants button before dessert, I realized Granpa was also getting rounder as he got older, and I saw my future. I joined a gym. I’ve never been anything other than disciplined. The gym gave me something to do. It also provided forbidden eye candy. The gym assigned me a female trainer, and somehow I wasn’t surprised. She was good. I started looking pretty decent. Even Aunt Lindsey mentioned one day I should consider doing some modeling and that she’d love to cast me in one of her upcoming plays.

  One day would bleed into another. I had to buy larger shirts because my shoulders had widened. I kept approving medical procedures. I kept getting promoted. Granpa had his first stroke. They did something they had talked about doing for years: they bought an RV and spent time driving around and seeing things they had put off seeing. I’d get postcards and photos from them. One had Granpa underneath a statue of a giant cow in Wisconsin, where he was reaching up to touch her enormous udder. Granma was standing away from him, looking embarrassed. Another postcard showed the world’s largest ball of string. I wondered if maybe on some level they were looking for my mother.