Grace Notes, Part 3
Jason Locke
Grace Notes, Part 3
Thank you for bearing with me. As a reward, we’re leaving high school. We’ll only revisit it in my dreams from now on. I promise.
Okay, we’re going to fast-forward now. I won’t bother you with the interim. I think we should let it be said that I learned a lot that day. You’ve just seen my worst moment. Come on. Let’s go…here. It’s March, 2001, and we are in an apartment in Estonia. I know. It’s pretty random, but work with me here. Outside, there is snow falling. Inside, the apartment is decorated in mismatched shades of pink: pale coral walls, a bubblegum floor, a red-orange door. The colors clash with each other so intensely that, upon seeing it for the first time, I joked that clearly no gay person has ever been in this country before, because they would have at least fixed the color scheme. Outside, the snow is falling silently.
I’m a different person now. My battered passport is heavily stamped and stickered. I’m about to head back to Moscow in a few weeks. I am far more bitter and cynical, but I hold my humor in. But the questions. My God, they’re on point. I have had to choose something that will define me, and that is my curiosity. A classroom, a press conference, a private conversation: they’re all the same. They’re hard-hitting. And for all that I am, I should mention the one or two things that I am not. I am not an addict. By now, my younger brother, at thirteen, has started using my mother’s pills, but I don’t know that. My older brother has vanished, giving himself over to alcoholism. I don’t know that either. At this juncture, I don’t haven’t seen him for five years and assume he’s dead. But I am unique among my clan of dysfunctional people in that I have no chemical additions left.
I want to say that the people who were cruel to me in high school did not prosper, but they did. Of course they did. They are already transitioning into the careers and families that will define them. And me? Right now, it’s three days before my twenty-third birthday. My life has already derailed, and the train car that I am in is hurtling into the unknown. The mistakes that I have made over the years will soon catch up with me, exploding the life that I have created. But for now, I don’t realize that I have sealed that fate, and that within three years, I will be living in my grandmother’s basement with a résumé strewn with words that need to be transliterated from foreign alphabets and a list of references that require country codes.
I don’t know any of that yet. Don’t let’s tell me. It’ll be our little secret.
Instead, I am concentrated not on work, but on the words written on Microsoft Word. I have just written the words The End at the back of my first novel.
Oh, it’s a mess. I say this with love. The plot was done by a drunken raccoon who ate someone’s knitting and proceeded to vomit it haphazardly onto the page. It’s a dual-timeline gay romance set in the same small Massachusetts college town, in the same row house—one in the years leading up to World War I, in which we have a music professor falling in love with an immigrant German, and one today, between a lower-middle-class man from a huge Irish Catholic family and a rich guy. It is interspersed with the fairy tale the German weaves for his beloved back in Massachusetts when he goes home to Germany, is swept up into the Great War, and then dies. It’s 80,230 words, and I didn’t plan a bit of it. I don’t know much about POV, or plotting, or…anything. But every now and then there’s something beautiful there. Like this first line: Alone of all the O’Donnell children, Michael had never been afraid of lightning. For the first time since that awful day in Mrs. Williams’s class, when I put away those scraps of plot and stopped writing fiction, I wrote this for me. I have tried to give Michael O’Donnell, the main character, a family that is warm and kind, even if they don’t understand him. I have not yet graduated into taking my vengeance upon enemies on the sheets of the page. This is an amalgam of romantic tropes.
But, most importantly, it’s mine. And this is 2001. Gay content is rare, and it’s still controversial. I won’t have the right to marry in the US for another fourteen years. It’s hard to explain, because today there are more choices, but back then, there was such a gap, and I so hungered to see myself in a movie or a book that I would translate it into my mind. Samantha from Sixteen Candles became Sam, and her yearning for Jake Ryan became my own. Until the last scene, when they are finally together, and the translation breaks down as I have to confront the societal approval that they will always have, even though she’s just sixteen and he’s…not. But this book means that that tiny bit of mental gymnastics that I have been engaging in for years is gone. I wanted to show you this image because I promised you at the outset that this would not be a sad story, but one of grace. I will take long breaks in which I give up writing, but this one moment is when I slowly start healing. This is the moment—I realize that now—when my voice becomes important to me, even if to no one else. The book will never see the light of day, and the few people who’ve seen it are distant memories in my mind, but I wanted you to see this, because I wanted you to know that voices, even when they are suppressed, can return. And I wanted you to see this moment because it meant so much to me, and I had no one to share it with. The moment I realized I wrote a novel! So now, I am sharing it with you. Let’s linger a couple more seconds and give this earlier version of me, as imperfect and troubled as he is, the grace that he deserves.
It’s time to leave him now. Let him have his life. Let him learn from his mistakes.
Thank you.
Thank you for bearing with me. As a reward, we’re leaving high school. We’ll only revisit it in my dreams from now on. I promise. Okay, we’re going to fast-forward now. I won’t bother you with the interim. I think we should let it be said that I learned a lot that day. You’ve just…
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