Charles Kruger

When he was 15, his father invited the family to a church breakfast in Homestead where his father directed a health clinic for migrant workers. They made the 30 minute drive into the country and stood in line for pancakes among a couple hundred migrant workers. He stood stiffly, eyeing the young men, noticing their smells, clasping his hands at his sides, full of a confused fear and longing. He felt the unfamiliar arms of the young man behind him slide around his belly as the man pressed against him.

He froze, knowing he had to pretend that nothing was happening. The young man hugged him from behind and breathed hotly in his ear, whispering that he was "hot" and "beautiful". He knew that this teasing was different from what he got at school. At least, he thought, the young man wasn’t trying to torture him. He seemed to like him. It was confusing, wonderful to be loved and the same time terrifying. What if this was a come on to take him off somewhere and beat the crap out of him? At any moment, he knew, it would turn terrible if he showed the slightest acknowledgement or excitement. He’d be flung to the ground as the man yelled cried out "faggot!" and started kicking him, and nobody would interfere to help. Not even his father. So he pretended that nothing was happening which was easier then pushing the hands away.

Besides, he couldn’t do that -- it felt too good to do that. It was too warm and too sweet. He tired to focus his attention somewhere else, concentrated on the smell of pancakes and syrup. The room, he noticed, was full of shuffling people, exotic, foreign, dusky men, not at all like the fascist bastards he knew at school. This was safer. They shuffled forward in line, serpent like, the young man gently cradling the boy. The boy stared straight ahead, afraid to turn. They reached the food and as the boy held out his plate their hands touched. Later, they sat next to each other at a long table, knees barely touching, never looking at one another. The boy stared at his food.

Afterwards, he wandered outside for a cigarette (already a fiend at 15) and the young man did also, standing several feet away with his friends. The boy pressed his back against the wall of the church, frightened, terrified the man was telling his friends about the faggot. The boy averts his eyes, smokes desperately, cuddles the hard wall of the building and prays that the young men will go away. They do, and the boy returns to the cold comfort of his family’s indifferent company and the long lonely ride home.

*****

But in my fantasy, it doesn’t end like that. In my fantasy, he doesn’t lean terrified against the building in the hot afternoon with the sour embarrassed sweat running down his back and the nicotine staining his teeth and his fingers as he sucks sorrow from the cancer sticks.

In my fantasy, the young man does not chat with his friends but stands alone, easy, his shirt open, his body lithe and inviting, a free and gentle smile on his face. He doesn’t tease the boy but stands a few few feet away laughing and beckoning gently. The boy laughs back with delight and goes to him and they hug and cuddle in the shelter of the building, fearless and warm. The young man guides him to a remote section of field, perhaps under a tree, perhaps by a shanty. The smell of oranges is fresh and just a little bit sour and I can imagine the bright, bright green of the trees and the hot yellow sun. The fruits are new and tiny, the barest blush of orange twinkling in the afternoon.

And that is all. My fantasy includes no passionate sex, no pornographic images, just the smell of ornages and a sweet young man and an innocent embrace like I never had, not ever, in all the sorrowful years of adolescence. The experience, when it arrived, was ugly and stoned with a harsh man who used me and tossed me indifferently out of his dingy apartment.

But I choose to remember instead a fantasy of a boy and a young man in an orange grove in Homestead in a different and kinder world.