Family Monsters and Kindness
A Gay Woman, and the Boy-Man Who Loved Her
“It’s supposed to squeak!”
He roared it at me. The first and last time ever. I had said it twice in my child voice, “Joe, it’s squeaking.”
I flinched from the shock wave of it hitting me, so loud his yell. It was too naked, that reveal of anger for himself that exploded at me for his botched saxophone practice.
Handsome, athletic, so much older it seemed beyond my measly six years or so then, that was my big cousin Joe. I could brag that he was on the football team at Pulaski High School not far off Eight Mile Road on the East side of Detroit. Everyone knew him. He was a star. Out of my two cousins and one brother, he was the oldest. Me, I was the youngest and the only girl. My constantly curled-lip brother would sneer “pampered” at me when no one could hear him. I think he hated me until the day he died, fifty years after Joe’s squeaky saxophone practice that only I heard. Joe had yelled at me that once but made up for the hurt. My brother never did for his sneaky attacks, never admitted.
But they’re all gone and I’m not the youngest anymore. And I know that because I’m preoccupied with my own dying. I rush to deny it, to keep living, and so I take exotic journeys with the rationale, “who knows when…?” But I still hate my…
