Dean

And who should come out but Dean? Past the west transept of Sacred Heart is the whole section that leads into the sacristy and the porches, north and south, leading outside. I am on the northern porch, scribbling in my journal and looking at the large tree outside of the church, the one that seems to be the only relevant thing. That’s the tree I come to look at when the Mass is just too much, when it seems to have nothing to do with reality.

Dean has come out of his hidey hole n the sacristy. I didn’t even know he was here. I wave, and he comes over. We begin what is the longest conversation Dean and I have ever had. Yes, Eric is fine. It’s important that he even brings up Eric, or that I ask. “It was his birthday yesterday, we didn’t too much in the way of celebration…” And honest little paragraph that says several things about his relationship to his roommate and my relationship to him. That is, he has let me in on the roommate, the boyfriend.

I have done some thinking about this. It is not that I like Dean a lot, but that I like him at all. That means a lot. As you get older and more aware of the people you sincerely dislike, you realize how important it is just to like someone at all. Dean is honest with me. Let’s think of this: if, for some reason I had to know the most personal hidden aspects of his life, well then, I know them” just like that. I have seen him stand in church, running things and talking impressively, legs spread apart arms folded over his chest, looming. And I have seen him in a gay night club sitting on another man’s lap, having his shoulder stroked. And he had seen me writing in my precious journal. And that’s important to me. If I had one thing to tell people, one thing that defined me to myself as myself, it would be myself as a writer. And there, he has seen me as a writer. Right there. He knows it.

I’ve been lied to my whole life: by friends, by parents, by priests, by the television, by professors. The whole world is busy lying to you, and some how you have got to be wary with out being bitter. Dean is not a liar. Not to me at least. He is beginning graduate school the same time I am, going to school at night, like me, with prospects of almost gainful employment during the day, like me. Unlike me, he is not a storyteller, has never been an actor, and isn’t dramatic about any of this. He’s understated. Dean is always very Indiana, very Midwestern, thin, sort of pale, understated about the things he says. There is ambition and excitement behind him. But, like a good young white man from the heartland, he is appropriately embarrassed about both.