Seven mornings a week, following coffee and the Billings Gazette, Dad would lumber his big, soft body up a steep stairway to our second-floor bathroom for his daily shower. During my second-grade year, in 1973, he had had our splintery attic finished into what we now called “the up-upstairs,” covering over everything but some of my carefully hidden memories with burnt orange carpet and a half-acre of wood laminate paneling. Paneling hiding enough closets—twelve doors in all—to satisfy his Depression-era childhood compulsion to hold onto anything that might slip away. I showered in the same bathroom. Mom kept it stocked with a stack of terry cloth towels.

I did not read the book for days after Billy let me take it. I knew the book was dangerous. That was half the attraction. I spent days thinking of it, but not so much as touching it. Wondering what it would mean to read it. To read a story like that. What it said about me, to want to let strange scenes of men touching men in dirty, far-off cities be painted behind my eyelids, where no one sees but me. And God. Wondering what God would say, period. But, God had already scratched me off long ago, after Brad taught me to touch him when I was four, then touch myself when I was seven. At thirteen, now, I had been touching myself for years.

I knew it was wrong. Brad had told me to hide, lie, and never, ever say anything about him touching me to anyone. Even at four, I knew there was an “or else” to his warning. I had known from first grade that boys who touch other boys are “faggots” and that faggots need to be hunted and killed. That’s why The Pauls would lead games of “Smear the Queer” at recess, calling a circle around someone whose job it was to be hit with a big red ball, preferably in the face. I knew the balls. I felt their threat in every after-school alleyway contact with The Pauls, and their friends Keith, Jim, and Randy.

In 1980, I also knew more than enough from our Catholic church to feel guilty, guilty, guilty for imagining myself touching Christopher Atkins and Sean Cassidy the same way Brad had touched me, all while touching myself again. Guilty enough to stop touching myself and count the days, and hold off for weeks, until I had to stop and start over again. Over and over. This had gone on for years. Brad had taught me how years before. Pressure, pleasure, guilt, and pressure. Stopping just got harder. I was trapped.

This book Billy loaned me was not a Playgirl or Blueboy. It was not just some handsome guy laying there exposing himself like Burt Reynolds. I had skimmed the book enough to know there was something more than just some guy laying there, wanting my attention. I could see all the untouchable men I could want on any Saturday afternoon at the mall. I had already spent endless Sunday mornings watching robed men and boys performing ceremonies at the feet of a pale, fourteen-foot tall, nicely muscled man in a loincloth, hanging on a cross. I had been one of those boys. I knew all the words by heart. In this book, though, there were far more men than just one, and they all touched each other back. They didn’t just hang there, or lie there, or stroll on by. They touched each other. But, how? When? What would you say to make this happen? Where would faggots find each other outside of Billy’s basement?

And, why did I stick this book, of all books, in a stack of towels my dad sat next to every morning, as he dried his feet and medicated his toes? Why, indeed. Of course he found it.

How did that finding feel to him? How did the sleeveless, black cloth-bound copy of Rushes I had tucked deeply into that towel stack feel in Dad’s famously big, soft hands, as he discovered it there one June morning? It would have been a mystery. His son was bookish. Books were everywhere in our home. Had he seen this book literally anywhere else it would have slid past his eyes unnoticed. But, why tuck a book inside a towel stack? This question would no doubt have been sufficient for him to open it and find words like “cock” and “lube” and “leather” and “cum.” To find a story of men touching each other. There were no pictures, only words. He would have had to read some of it, who knows how much. How did reading these words feel, sitting in the bathroom he shared with his thirteen-year-old son? Would it matter that John Rechy’s first novel had been a New York Times bestseller? That Bowie, Morrison, Dylan, and Waits would all later claim him as inspiration?

Dad was born in 1921, and was a Veteran of World War 2. His wife was born in 1926, and built a career in medicine, until five years past their wedding, when Catholic family culture forced her into motherhood as a by-product of her third pregnancy, mine. Words like these were not a part of their world. Until now.

The book was missing for nearly a week before he asked me of it.

It was a Saturday afternoon. Nobody else was home but Dad and I. Mom and the girls were all off, each somewhere different, as they rarely did anything together. Without Mom barking her ongoing orders at everyone the house was quiet but for the ticking of the living-room cuckoo clock. I must have been walking from my bedroom through the dining room to the kitchen, because I remember seeing Dad framed by the left edge of the white ripple-plaster archway separating the living and dining rooms of our family home. He said my name, so I stopped. Of course I stopped. I never disobeyed him, openly. There was an odd note in his tone, like he was making himself ask a question he did not want answered. He was sitting in his soft fuzzy golden recliner, not reclining, but almost hunched over a black rectangle clutched in his huge palms. After saying my name he looked at me and back again at what he was holding, several times. The sky in the window to his left was blue, the same blue as through the French doors across the dining room table behind me. Doors leading to our backyard, the alley, anywhere. The doors through which I could turn and run. Of course I recognized the black rectangle, the book. It had been missing for a week. He held it like some odd specimen. I wanted to run but the freezing water pouring down my back had frozen my feet to the carpet where I stood, looking at him, away at the sky, following the archway down to the carpet, back at him, back to the carpet.

I honestly cannot recall exactly what all was said. I remember imagining walking alone in some dark snowy field. I remember feeling fear and freezing water. Not a fear that I would be beaten. Dad was almost never angry or violent. I could count the number of times I ever saw him truly angry on a single hand. Anger belonged to Mom. But, I felt a nauseous dread of being discarded. Of being tossed out of my family, school, church, life, everything, like garbage.

His tone remained pained and questioning, avoiding accusation for seeming fear of what his accusations might imply about his son. His own son. His only son. He kept questioning me. Asking me. Pushing me to tell him why this book? Why this story? Why? So I told a story. A story to keep me away from some dark snowy field. A story to banish someone else, for even I knew well enough, at a fast-aging thirteen, that no small price would be paid for this story. Someone was going to pay, and pay dearly, for bringing this story into the world, and into his home. There would be blame and guilt and confession and penance, all the tools and patterns burned into us by the church, someday to be rewarded by absolution and forgiveness if you groveled properly to God. We both knew this formula. We had both been altar boys. You confess and pay the price, then you are free. Until next time.

My friend Billy was the price. It still feels odd to call him a friend. Friends do not stab each other the way I drove a blade into his back that afternoon. Dad had met Billy. Billy was “funny” in the same way I imagined Dad found my cousin Larry funny. The eldest cousin I had heard of but never met. The kind of funny you laugh at, not with. The kind of funny you keep away from your kids. The kind of funny that jumps rope with the girls. The kind of funny that might read this book. So I told Dad that this was not my book. That I got this book from Billy, which was true enough to avoid lying to him any more than safe or necessary. The true lie was that, oh no, I certainly did not want to read this book, oh no, nor had I. I had barely looked at this book. Only just enough to know that no good boy would ever want to read such a thing. But, my friend Billy wanted this book for some reason, I did not know why, I could not imagine why, but he needed to keep it safely away from his parents, so I had offered to hide it for him, because he is my friend, and I just wanted to help a friend, by helping keep him safe from his own dad, to keep his own dad from finding a book like this, inside his house, and throwing his own son out like garbage.

My dad was not one to throw things out. He had been born onto a starving dustbowl farm in the early 1920s. He grew to build a house full of closets, enough so as to never let anything slip away. Everything was to have a place, no matter how far back it might need to be tucked in some dark corner.

Dad bought it, or enough of it. He heard a story he desperately wanted to hear. A story he could patch over to sound like whatever it would take to keep him from seeing his own son as funny. A story that threw someone else’s funny son in the garbage, not his. Something in my pleading allowed him to close the closet door he had cracked open using the handle I had tucked in our towels.

I lost a friend. A friend I had really, really wanted. A friend who had not only wanted me to visit, but expected me, several times each week. Someone who maybe even wanted me as a friend as badly as I wanted him back. A friend who showed me things and taught me things and who had access to secret stories, and books, and interviews. And, I banished him. I used him. I offered our friendship up as penance for the sin of having brought a story of myself into our home. An evil book of men touching men, written by an award-winning author who wrote stories later compared with Isherwood, Kerouac, and Genet.

Dad ordered me to never to see Billy again. To never visit that house again. To never so much as speak to Billy, or to anyone like him, ever again, for his having entrapped me with so unspeakable a task as to give shelter to a book which should not be allowed to exist.

Indeed, Dad, how stupid I was to allow such a thing. To let you see me for who I am then slam the door.

I promised fervently to comply. I did as I was ordered. It was now my turn to walk past Billy at school without seeing his eyes. To step quickly away if he called my name in the alleyway while walking home. To avoid alleys he might be strolling on his garbage-picking route. When Billy finally tried calling me at home, my dad took the call from me, and told him to never dial our number again. My afternoons returned to reading on my bed, or taking long, long lonely bike rides up and around anywhere far from home.