UNDER THE CHERRY TREE
By
Rev. Jesse Penfield Gibson, MDiv, DMin
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. The characters and situations are purely imaginary. Any resemblence to any living persion is coincidental. This story is primarily a romance but does contain some scenes of explicit sex, primarily homosexual but not exclusively.
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EIGHT
The experiential sections of FYS have a wilderness weekend, complete with a ropes course, in the fall. That, combined with a community service component, gets you one hour of college credit. We loaded onto a bus on campus on a Friday afternoon and headed out to the Flint River. I was looking forward to it. I had been a boy scout and campouts were nothing unusual, plus I had spent large chunks of time in the woods since I had basically grown up surrounded by woods. We drove through Macon and out past Thomaston to a bridge overlooking the Flint River. The Army ROTC had supplied a good portion of the equipment and their deuce and a half truck towed the trailer with the canoes on it.
My heart sank when I saw the canoes. I don't mind a boat but not a canoe. I am scared of canoes. Canoes and snakes. Any sane person would be.
I told this to Xander and he actually laughed at me. "I'm not joking," I practically screamed. "I don't want to get in a damn canoe."
"Then walk on water, Jesus. It's 10 miles," he said as he headed over to the trailer. Reed came up and joined us, obviously wanting to be the third person in our canoe. So, I told them the story. When I was about 3 or 4, I went with my grandmother in a canoe in a fish pond that one of my great uncles had dug. It wasn't very deep and we weren't very far from the bank but I was little and couldn't swim. I don't know why, and it may have been my fault, but the canoe rolled over, depositing me in the water. I don't remember panicking but I do remember sinking in the water and distinctly remember seeing a bottle cap from a coke bottle floating past me as I drown. An older cousin ripped off his shirt and shoes and dived in to save me as my Grandmother also fought her way through the water to me. After that, I refused to get in a canoe. I have been fishing many times, usually from the shore but sometimes in a boat, but never in a canoe.
"You can swim now, right?" Reed asked me. I thought that it wasn't that simple. I can swim but the fear is there.
Xander handed me a paddle. "I'll be in the back, that's where you steer. You go in the front and paddle. It'll give you something to do and you can see what's coming."
It may have helped some but Reed shaking the canoe didn't help. I was getting angry at him but then I heard Xander whacking his back and telling him to lay off. The area of the river under the bridge was rocky, shallow and swift but within a few hundred feet, the water deepened and slowed. It was actually peaceful and each canoe paddled lazily with the current. After a while, I was able to relax and enjoy the scenery. We passed by a few fields but it was mostly woods. This portion of the river is particularly scenic as it is right at the Fall line, the transition between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain of South Georgia. Every so often, we would pass by a high rocky bluff as the river temporarily twisted back into the Piedmont.
We pulled the canoes ashore at a flat place in the river and I was surprised to see the trailer there for us to put them in. They had driven down as we paddled. There was also a water buffalo for potable water. I collected up my shelter half from the Army guy in his BDU's and got my sleeping bag and other stuff to head up the bluff to the campsite. It was primitive but pretty, not just the pine forests of home but cedars, magnolias, elms. The ground was gently rolling. I got Xander to join his shelter half with mine and form a tent for the two of us. I think Reed was jealous but I was still a little angry at him for rocking the canoe.
The sun set quickly since it was fall and we had a fire roaring in one of the fire rings. There were probably 30 of us gathered around the fire, which felt good against the slight chill. We were roasting hot dogs and mocking the planners for not providing beer. Everybody was having a good time and there was plenty of good natured joking. I noticed that Xander, along with a couple of professors, had rigged up a grill and were roasting onions, peppers, tomatoes, squash. I was happily munching on a dog as they divvied up the veggies and dressed them with a little oil and vinegar.
"What gives?" I asked him.
"I don't eat meat" he answered.
Reed, who was sitting next to me, snickered. "Since when? I mean, really, you'll swallow any chemical in the world to get high but you don't eat meat? That's a joke."
"Let me see if I can explain it to you, Reed: Fuck off," Xander snapped back. "It's a personal decision, just like choosing what you get high on is instead of other people choosing for you, and I don't need your fucking approval."
Some other people joined in the conversation and soon we were debating the morality of meat. That led to debating hunting and the gun culture of the South. For the most part, Xander actually remained silent as the vegetarian professors defended their lifestyle. But then he said something that surprised me, stating that he had no problem with eating the meat of an animal you kill yourself or from animal killed by someone close to you and shared. His objection was to participating in the industrialization of death.
"So do you eat eggs and cheese? Drink milk?" I asked him.
"Yeah" Xander admitted.
"Okay, except it's the same thing. Egg production is industrialized death, too. And how do you think they get cows to give milk. In nature, any mammal only gives milk after birth. The vast majority of male calves are killed. Industrialized death is essential for milk and cheese."
"Yeah, I know. It's inconsistent," Xander admitted.
"It's hypocritical" Reed shot back.
"No," I said. "It's being imperfect. It's like saying that if you can't be perfectly good, you shouldn't be generally good. To be hypocrisy there had to be pretense. If you acknowledge your shortcomings then it's something different. You're just imperfect, like we all are."
As the embers of the fire died, still generating meager warmth, we crawled into our sleeping bags. Laying there, I told Xander about the concert and the E, omitting the bit about sleeping with Reed. He didn't say anything for a while but then rolled over and looked at me.
"I don't want you to take this the wrong way but it was pretty bad idea. For your first time with a chemical, you need to treat it with respect. I mean, it's doing powerful stuff in your brain. Second, most ecstasy is shit. You have no idea what you are actually taking. It could be anything. It could be MDA, MDE, a tryptamine, meth, caffeine, any fucking thing. Trust me; it isn't like Reed's getting the highest quality drugs. And you should have taken a multivitamin with anti-oxidants before, during and after and taken some 5-HTP the day after so you avoid the Tuesday blues. But he didn't tell you any of that, did he? You're smart. When we get back, look up the drug, see how it works in the body, what it does. Never take something on a whim, okay? It's totally cool if you want to explore. I'm with you there. But be smart about it."
"I seem to remember you doing it at a concert just a couple of weeks ago. I wasn't doing anything you weren't," I protested.
"You're smarter than me. You're not fucked up."
"Everybody is. We all are. You're no different than anybody else. All anybody can see about anybody else is what they want us to see. You know what you know about me and assume that's all there is. I do the same thing to you. But we don't really know each other."
The fire ebbed away and the chill took over. Off in the distance, you could hear an owl. On the hard ground, I slept fitfully. Not for the first time, I dreamed about him. An erotic dream. As hard I tried in my wakening life, I couldn't control my thoughts in my unconscious life. In my sleep, my true passions were revealed which I had spent the last few years concealing as best I could. He was right about one thing, though. I had taken a powerful drug on a whim, mostly so that Reed wouldn't think I was uncool. I would have had sex with Reed under the influence of that drug, or was it just a whim too? The only thing that had kept me a virgin was the inability of either of us to perform.
When I woke up, it was just cold enough so that I didn't want to get out of my sleeping bag. Rolling over, I saw that Xander's bag was empty and that the fire had been stoked to a minor state of life. There were a few flames trickling in a mound of meager fuel but not enough to provide any real heat. In the stillness of sunrise, I heard the sound of footfalls in the leaves, too heavy to be a squirrel or rabbit and to rhythmic for a snake. Yawning and steeling myself for it, I struggled out of the bag and then unzipped it to drape over my like a blanket. In a minute, Xander came up from the gully bounding our campsite.
"Hey," he greeted me as he dumped a load of dead wood on the ground. Arranging them in the fire, he said to me, "I seem to piss you off a lot. I'm sorry."
"Do you have any water for coffee?" I asked.
When he said that he didn't, I volunteered to go get some from the potable supply. I shook off my bag and shuddered before heading over there. When I returned with it, everybody else was still asleep but he had fished out the coffee supply. We sat silent while the water came to boil and we brewed up the coffee. As I poured each of us a cup, I figured the smell alone would begin to stir everyone else so I suggested that we go sit by the river. There was a fog of condensation rising off the slow moving black water of the Flint as we sat on a rocky outcropping savoring hot, strong black coffee. Ahead and high up, a sortie of birds, probably geese, flew in formation southwards.
"I have something to tell you," I said. "I'm gay."
He stared at the coffee in his cup, the same color as the river, and didn't look at me. "I know," he said.
"I think the first real sexual feeling I ever had was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I was at 4H camp at Rock Eagle and the counselor had all of us together in the common room of our cabin the first night. Somebody asked him if we had to sleep in pajamas or if we could sleep in our underwear. He said we could and then somebody asked if we could sleep in the nude. He said we couldn't do that but, you know, I felt something really powerful come over me at the thought of other boys sleeping naked right there around me. I didn't even know what that feeling was. I didn't have a name for it. You know, the next year, all my friends were obsessed with boobs and getting a girlfriend and I didn't feel any of that. I was kind of late bloomer, I guess. I was the smallest boy in my grade. So I figured that would happen to me when, you know, puberty kicked in, which I wanted to happen right then because I was tired of being the smallest one with the highest pitched voice. But I noticed the boys with hairy legs and veins in the arms, how their crotches bulged when they sat. I figured it was jealousy because they had hair and I didn't. But then I did but I still didn't like boobs. When I would ...jerk off, I had fantasies about specific boys having sex with a generic girl. Which is kind of weird, I guess. I tried to convince myself that I wasn't queer, because it was a sin to think that way. I didn't want to choose that path. I pretended to be like everybody else, trying to remember to make a lewd comment about a girl, ostentatiously look at a girl's butt when she walked past. I tried to convince myself that I wasn't gay, I was bisexual. That it was just a small part of me that I could just put over there and just leave alone. But that didn't work. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was gay but I told myself that those were feelings I didn't have to act on. I could maybe just be asexual because asexual is better than being homosexual."
As I had talked with my head down, Xander had turned himself so that he was facing me. Looking at me in the eye, he asked, "How's that working out for you?"
I smiled ruefully. "Not good."
"Yeah, I wouldn't think so," he said, putting a hand on my knee. Involuntarily, my heart sped up at his touch. "You do understand that it's not something you choose, right? It's who you are."
I dropped my gaze downward, "You don't choose the attraction but you do choose the behavior."
"Yeah, well fuck you, Dylan." I looked up at him startled. He had misinterpreted it as an attack on his behavior. "Nobody questions that straight people have the right to have a healthy, satisfying sex life. Nobody expects them to hide their feelings. But I don't have the same right just because it might piss off somebody else. Or because some book I don't even believe in says it's wrong? Fuck them."
"No, I didn't mean it that way," I said, fighting back tears. "Last night, you said that I was smart and you were fucked up. I'm telling you this is what's fucking me up. I know it's different for you. You're actually bi, I guess."
"Oh, yeah. I can pass for straight because I like pussy too? Dude, you and me have different issues but we're both just fucking treading water to keep from drowning. I don't know what I am. Maybe just sexual, I don't know. I didn't have the luxury of being able to figure it out before I did anything. I'm going to tell you something: the first time I came – the first time I actually shot – was when a guy was giving me a blowjob. I wish things had been maybe different. But I am what I am."
"I'm not sure if being a virgin is better."
Xander shrugged. "I think it's cool if that's what you want and it's working for you. But when it isn't, it's time to get rid of it. You know I'm attracted to you, right?"
"So Erica was right?" I smiled. Him saying that he was attracted to me was the happiest I probably have ever been. "You're just trying to get in my pants?
Xander looked up at the sky and thought for a second. Then he looked at me and said, "I want your first time to be with me. With somebody who cares about you and not just some random fuck.
"I'm not sure I'm ready yet."
"Okay," he said. Back towards the campsite, we could hear the activity and noise as it seemed that everyone had woken up and begun to stir. Our private moment was at an end. "We probably ought to head back."
The business of the day was the ropes course, which was fun. The highlight was learning to rappel. They had two lines set at the top of a bluff about 30 feet high. We all put on helmets, gloves and a crotch set of some kind with a D ring that definitely accentuated the guy's natural properties. A ROTC guy demonstrated it and he flew down the rope but the second demonstration showed how you would not fall with the ropes belayed. With our brief instruction done, we climbed up a path to the top to go down again. My turn came quick and I got into the position they showed with one hand on the rope behind my back. Holding my breath, I took a little jump outward and down and landed into a natural depression in the rock face. Stunned and unprepared, I panicked when my feet didn't hit solid rock immediately. I flailed around, got a little footing and started to try and climb up the rope. I had both hands in front of me trying to climb as the instructor yelled at me to stop. Then I realized I was going nowhere as the rope was pulled taunt. He told me what to do and I recovered my wits and, in a series of small jumps, made it down the rock face. Once back on solid ground, I had to admit that it actually was exhilarating and I climbed back up a second and third time to go again. After a while, the instructor and the belay guys demonstrated the Australian method, which is rappelling face first. Basically, you're supposed to run down the rock face. Then he asked for volunteers from those of us that had gone several times.
"I will if you will," I told Xander. He seemed eager to go anyway and would have, I think, even if I hadn't. It actually was scary as all get out but a definite rush. Of course, I didn't exactly run down the rock face as much as I waddled down like a zombie, trying to look up instead of at the ground. Xander came after me and I got to laugh at him for doing pretty much the same thing I did, shuffling along very slowly and hesitantly. The funniest bit was how big his eyes were. You could look at his face and see nothing but eyes, he was that scared. Naturally, having done it once, we had to do it again. It was easier a second time but I decided that was enough. You can cheat fate one too many times. Xander went a third time, trying to go faster each time.
After we got back on Sunday, we collected up Cass and went to eat pizza for dinner. I know I was a little bit exhausted, and I'm sure Xander was too since he didn't seem to sleep very much but pumped and excited like always. Of course, Cass had done the course last year and he knew what we were feeling. He even contributed a story or two about some funny things from his outing. I am pretty sure we were getting kind of loud but there weren't very many people in the restaurant.
"Hey, I got some tickets to the Georgia game next weekend, if you guys want to go," Cass said. "It's fall break so we can party it up good."
"No, I got plans all ready. Going to Tampa," Xander said.
"Oh, yeah, right. How about you?"
"Can't, sorry. Going home for the break."
Cass leaned toward me and said, "You don't like football, you fairy?"
"I like football just fine. But I'm an FSU fan."
Cass snorted and shook his head. "Give me a break. Chance to see an honest to God SEC game and you pass because you're an FSU fan. Really sad. I mean, the ACC is so gay."
"I wish you'd stop that. It's kind of offensive, you know. I mean, your own brother is gay," I said.
"Dexter's gay?" Cass said laughing. "My big brother might take it up the ass, but he isn't gay. I mean, he's gay but he's not gay, if you know what I mean."
"Keep digging that hole deeper there, bro" Xander laughed.
"Look, I'm sorry. We kid around. It's nothing. You're right, though. Dex is gay and I'm not homophobic, seriously. Besides, how long have you been a public member of the great pink legion anyway?"
"About 36 hours, more or less," I laughed. "I'm just yanking your chain."
"Okay, fair enough. Can I start a pool for how long it takes for X to, you know, do the deed?" Cass said, punching a fist into his other hand.
"It's going to be a while," I said.
It was after dark by the time we paid and headed out to Xander's jeep. Hanging outside the door were two guys dressed in baggy pants with tribal tattoos, some of them homemade, on their arms. They had short hair and were wearing wife beater shirts. "Hey, faggots" one of them called out and stepped off the curb toward us. Instantly, I was scared.
Xander turned around and took three short steps toward them. "Surely you're not talking to us?"
"Yeah, you three faggots" the bigger of the two, the meaner looking too said.
Suddenly, Xander smiled and walked toward him, not saying anything. Standing right in front of him, the guy pushed Xander in the chest. I was scared at that point, fearing a fight and not knowing why Xander didn't just walk away or really do anything except smile and laugh a little. Then he rammed the heel of his right hand into the nose of the guy in front and then sunk his left hand into his gut under the heart. The kid's face exploded with blood and snot. As that guy doubled over onto his knees, gasping for air, Xander stepped over him calmly and grabbed the other guy by the throat, kicking his legs out from underneath as he did. That kid landed hard on the ground. Then he cried out in agony after Xander kicked him in the nuts. Cass had been moving too and by now was standing over the first guy.
"You dumb, redneck piece of shit. It only took 10 seconds for one faggot to beat the shit out of both of you," he said, kicking him in the balls too. "And the term is gay. Don't forget it."
We all ran to Xander's jeep and tore out of the parking lot, leaving the two would be gay bashers writhing in agony. We flew down several blocks of Riverside drive before turning onto College Street, headed back to Cass's place. He was sitting in the front seat passenger side and he turned to Xander, who was driving.
"Shit dude, take it easy next time. You don't have to kill the motherfuckers. I thought Buddhists were into non-violence and shit."
"Their bad karma just caught up to them a little early. They deserve it. Besides, they're not dead but the one with the broke nose probably ought to go to the hospital."
"How do you know it's broken?" I asked, still stunned by how quickly it had went down.
"I felt it," Xander said, turning into the lane next to Cass's house.
"What if they do go to the hospital or call the cops?"
"Those fuckheads?" Cass snorted. "He'll just have a crooked nose and a bullshit story about some cool bar fight. Guarantee you he doesn't have insurance. And they won't call the cops for the same reason I wouldn't: too much else to hide. Besides, they don't want their friends to know the real story. They're just lucky it wasn't Dex. Fuckers would be dead. "
He must have been right because we never heard anything more about it.