Way back, back when I was just a little guy, a little guy with a severe depression and a desire to see myself die over and over, over and over in different ways, I mean, I was walking to the Dairy Queen just down the road from where I lived and was stopped by a homeless man who requested literally anything. He said it just like that, too. He said it in italics. He said to me, “Hey, kid, can you spare literally anything?”
So I rooted around in my pockets, darting fingers past the lint that forms fleshy ponds at the bottom cup of the pocket, and found, deep in there, folded up into the architecture of the fabric, a quarter. I pulled out the quarter, carefully polishing it free of lint with my tongue, and presented it to the homeless man.
He gingerly took it from my hand with a little index-thumb bird-finger and gazed at it with glazed eyes and a creeping smile. His tongue lashed out, stretching far from his mouth, and coiled around the quarter. He sucked it into his mouth and began to suck on the quarter and agigtate it in his mouth. He sucked on the quarter super hard, like he was trying to extract something from it.
He stuck his hand out. I shook it. “My name’s Jerry. And, kid… this is kinda like we’re makin’ out.”
“What?” I asked. Making out? Isn’t that what to grown-ups do when their tongues twist into each other and they lock and make the suckin’ noises with their heads stuck together?
I wasn’t kissing him. I couldn’t kiss him if I wanted to, and I didn’t even want to, so it would have taken a lot of external compulsion to get me to do it.
“I said it’s kinda like we’re makin’ out. You cleaned this quarter off with your tongue and now I’m the one done been suckin’ on it, so your spit’s in my mouth.”
“That’s not what making out is,” I said. I was getting nervous.
“Yeah-huh. When you spit into someone else’s mouth, they get a little piece of yah, and that’s what makin’ out is. It’s the transference of DNA in a non-penetrative capacity, and, boy, I’ve got yer fuckin’ number.”
He started making weird noises. Smacking his lips. Relishing the quarter in his mouth. Euummm. The pitch would rise and fall. YUUMMM.
Is that all it took? Was my innocence in tatters. Had I made out with an old homeless man who was now rubbing the zipper-part of his torn up dungarees?
I was.
He was right.
I couldn’t believe it. I was gay now, all because a homeless guy had to go and get me on a technicality. I was gay and there was nothing I could do about it, because this guy decided that my heterosexuality was his to take — to mold into a perversion of what it was to be me. I didn’t like girls, but I can tell you that I weren’t no gay kid. I would never have made out with this ugly homeless guy and his bleeding mouth.
Now I wander the streets in search of penitence, asking all women — ugly and uglier — who tread on my path to suck a tongue-quarter and vacuum the gay outta me.