In a Trick of the Light

I have never seen anyone die. But as I heard the day after it happened, a young girl saw and held the body of a man, full of holes, as he bled thick and black onto the pavement. This road ran alongside Freret Street, which opens at the mouth of Carrolton Avenue with thick, wooden trees and thick, wooden houses, trickling down into a thin stream of stacked clubs and shady bars, and people cold and harsh as gunmetal. Moving away from the walk, up the stairs and into the double doors was Friar Tuck’s bar and grill, inaptly named due to its lack of grill and Friar-dom. This road cuts through my backyard, where I used to take many drunken walks back to sleep or sober walks back to waking. It was the place to go; no one really liked being there, at least no one I know (myself included), and the majority of business came with plans to forget their evening in a clear plastic cup filled with alcohol that no other place would serve them. While I slept, the scene was set: the victim and the one who pulled the trigger; all in their places. If the days could realign, I would have been there, I could have seen.

I wasn’t sure what to make of all the stories being told the next day. Snippets of conversation told me that someone died last night outside of Tuck’s—he went to school with me and he was only 19. The news reports all said similar things: “Fatal shooting outside troubled Freret Street bar”; “Shooting forces Tuck’s closure”; “A Deadly Night”; never really the full story, though, just summaries of what I could read from Facebook statuses and hear from people’s excitement over something to mourn. As always, people blamed the demographics or the shooter’s drug addiction (allegedly, this was the case, as one news story explained) but this brought no avail. The kid was still dead and we all wanted to know why. One quote read, “He was a good kid, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” As if he had walked in front of the bullet’s path as it harmlessly headed for embedment into a light post. No, people were convinced something else was at work, something, someone had to be blamed because people can’t just die unless they have a damn good statement to make about it.

I wondered where you were that night. I wondered if you pulled that trigger and what you were trying to say.

I was not a Tuck’s frequent, but I spent time there. I made friends with my floor-mates there, met future roommates there; my drunken sexuality came into full bloom there while shitty rap music came in through the speakers. Still, as dingy and gross as every aspect of that bar was, it became a character in itself, almost a friend—the one you keep around to exploit but secretly like regardless of everything, the one all your friends love to hate but without whom they would be lost. I couldn’t shake myself from it.

This is where I ran into you.

One night, it was a Wednesday; I was at a table in the corner, next to the beer pong tables. I was offered drink after drink and before I knew it the cups were drained and only a pale blue stain remained at the bottom. Empty cups crowded the table like an avid audience. The familiar numbness descended into my joints, my legs became loose and so did my mouth, and faces blurred in front of me, Yeah, hi, nice to meet you and We go to school together, don’t we? and empty cups kept crowding, watching the show. People passed and hands pulled mine and before I knew it I was kissing one of these faces, an unfamiliar one, warm and wet with alcohol, and we stopped and giggled and someone must have shifted because then there was another mouth I met, and another, and another. One of these mouths was another man. He was talkative and skinny but I liked him, almost instantly, the vodka burning up all the unnecessary conversation between us and letting our hands do the talking. Simple, base attraction; both of us basking in the affection of someone we don’t have to worry about loving.

You made your entrance. I was buried in the crook of his neck when you walked up and told us to separate. I don’t know if you touched me, but I remember my chest burning as if you’d shoved me; as if my ribs anticipated violence by contracting. Like it was obvious, like it was a rule, you told us we should stop. “I just don’t like faggots” is the phrase you used. This is something I know I heard because I remember the sensation of my spine snapping me straight into sobriety. When I picture you turning away from me, I can hear you say it. The alcohol allowed me to keep that snippet of memory—a punishment, or a warning.

Three weeks later, that boy was killed. In a matter of days, they found his killer. I don’t think he was hiding. The media loaded their guns and took aim. They called it gang violence, they made references to drugs. They blamed the area, this “poor part of town,” all firing wildly at what might be the reason why.

One article spoke of two men who heard the gunfire. They ran to get blankets for the victim to help stop his bleeding, and were too late.

The articles are as worthless as those blankets. The dead remain dead and the living still question why. We don’t get answers.

My mother once warned me that people still hate, but I did not understand. As my sexuality flourished and matured I assumed everyone else’s did, too. In the sticky heat of that summer after my senior year I knew more boys than I care to remember because I was seventeen and immortal, and at this age, I have no reason to say no to anything. In the secluded world I made for myself, my parents had no idea my identity was quivering in the back seat of my car and the world didn’t give two shits who I was kissing because they had bigger matters to attend to. I was wrong. My parents could smell sex on my clothes and people cared more than I could understand. I didn’t understand this world’s ability to kill.

Well, I sure do understand now, and I thank you for clearing that up. That night, while some drunken frat star rubbed his hard-on into the tight-jeaned crotch of some random woman, I was told to stop kissing another man because as you told me, “I just don’t like faggots.” While people fornicated on pool tables and girls pushed their full breasts up against each other like some sort of lewd circus, I was wrenched away from a warm mouth and tongue and told that I didn’t belong. Yes, thank you, now I understand perfectly. I never realized my sexuality was not supposed to exist. Under dim bar bulbs reflecting off pools of spilled beer and piss there are no queers. With sports games and beer pong humming in the tabaccoed air there are no fags here, you can get drunk with no shame and do whatever you want because you are a real man, not my shameful sham of skin and bone that doesn’t act like you do.

In the maw of night, a man fell onto asphalt as gentle and as shaken as a crumpled leaf, and in this road someone watched him die. That could have been me. In retrospect, maybe it should have. “He was a good kid, just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The night I kissed that boy full on the lips was the night I unknowingly danced in gunfire. If the hard, shiny metals that make a gun would have assembled and solidified in your hands, you could have pulled the trigger. These two separate nights could have been one. Someone was killed on the cracked brick sidewalk in front of that bar, and it easily could have been me, shamelessly flaunting myself to people like you, people that burn with inherent hatred that I only try to understand. I do not know why that boy was killed, and perhaps he didn’t either. Both of us were in that bar, unaware of our power to die. The lines between our two stories blur so easily. In a trick of the light within my mind’s eye, I watch myself bleed onto black pavement.

That boy is still dead for reasons never clearly explained; no sudden revelation of the killer’s intention has surfaced and revived his victim. Tuck’s has closed down. People avoid that neighborhood. I don’t raise my voice when asked to speak of myself. We all carefully watch where we stand and who we are.

But not you. You don’t care because this will never happen to you. You are doing everything right. Not you, not you. But in my mind, you are a murderer. Not you, not you, not you, not you, never you.