“A Word of Thanks” is dedicated to two men. The first is Rod Trask, who was my brother’s friend. He lived from 1941 to 1957, when he hanged himself in the woods at the age of 16. The other man is John Lauber, whom you might remember from the news. As a student at Andover prep school, he was chased through the halls by Mitt Romney and a pack of his friends and given an unwanted haircut. He lived from 1941 until 2004.
A Word of Thanks
Dedicated to the memories of Rod Trask (1941-1957) and John Lauber (1941–2004)
My twelfth and almost final summer.
The crunch of madrona leaves underfoot,
The scent of oak baking in the sun.
Bees and grasshoppers sounding off
While ants scribble unreadable messages on stones.
Poison oak, like the boy myself,
Inflamed by its defining toxins.
All centered on that horizontal branch
That makes no sense in these vertical woods
Except as an anchor for a rope.
The lynch mob in my head
Prepares to decorate the tree
With me as its August ornament.
Strange fruit, indeed,
Although it had been done before
By a boy my brother’s age.
A long hanging moment. A pause in the summer buzz.
In my tiny Oregon town without blacks
Or even browns –
Native Americans reduced
To bones, river names and mascots –
No Jews, few Catholics,
The queers were the ones everyone could despise –
Ridiculed, reviled,
Exiled to some other dimension of time and space
Unspoken, unseen, unknown.
Except for me,
Who in the pregnant pause of that summer day
Chose a false life
Over a hanging death.
Going forward, a soul in wrappings
Twenty layers deep.
Encased in mask within mask, splendid, safe, entombed,
Perfectly disguised by the art of pretense,
Passing in defiance of God’s plan
As a bogus kinda man.
Closet is too wide a word.
Tailor-made for one, it’s
A coffin fit.
A stone body glove
Impervious to love.
And this is where I stayed,
Behind my masks of a thousand years,
A struggle for every breath of air
Through a veneer
Of fear as thick as porcelain.
I could almost hear
The noise of liberation when it came to others.
A vibration just out of reach, little more than sound,
Every scream and jeer and cheer
A reverb of my inner fear.
Yet they would not stop.
Jesus died to open my eyes,
Gandhi tried to open my ears,
Jefferson, Mark Twain, Rosa Parks,
James Baldwin, Malcolm,
The rioters at Stonewall Inn
Throwing curses, purses, shoes and chains
At the frontline cops and the priests behind them.
The survivors of the double virus
HIV and bigotry
All told me this was my time and place,
Decreed by God.
But I stayed in my space apart,
Until Dr. King prayed open my stonecold heart.
The masks peeled off, one by one.
Lifted by a dream more real than real,
Lifted like the stonegold lids pressing on King Tut.
But the boy king of 12
Was no longer there.
Instead, Lazarus lurched out into an older world,
Stunned by the crunch of leaves, the summer sun,
Free at last, O Lord, or almost free,
With scattered members of the lynch mob
Still patrolling in my head
And a seething hatred for those
Who taught me to hate myself.
Only natural, but still stewing in the same hot stink of poison,
Still locked away from others
In the same solitary self.
New cell. Same hell.
Driven to my knees by the need to be free, I pray
Forgiveness for the mistaken few
Who pushed me down the path of auto-hate.
I will be free when God has neutralized my toxins
And I’ve thanked the poisoners for pointing me
In the direction of mercy, mortality and grace.
As I pray away the hate,
What is revealed beneath is kindness,
Which is no more than finding
The eternal in our kind.
The aging boy king
Has found his freedom and forgiveness
Using borrowed powers.
I have royalty to thank for that:
The King of Atlanta,
The Queens of Stonewall.
Jon Bell 