Eight Years Out

By Chris Perman

I wanted to try to write a gay themed book without the benefit of gay bars, drugs, clubs, bath-houses, ghettoes and sex. WOW! In ‘Eight Years Out’ I’ve attempted to do this, whether successfully or not is in the hands of the reader. The book follows two boys living in ‘almost’ small town America for the first eight years of their gay lives and is in the form of a journal written by one of them, Jeff Riley, and tells of the people who pass through or stay in his life. If you’re looking for a ‘gay bars, drugs, clubs, bath-houses, ghettoes and sex’ book, sorry, this book isn’t for you. Thinking about it, it might be if you feel like reading something away from ‘the scene’ for a change.
Chris Perman

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Perman
• Release date: Oct 26, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311283658

Book preview

EIGHT YEARS OUT

Dramatized extracts from

Jeff Riley’s Journal

Chris Perman

Copyright:

Chris Perman (2014)

Smashwords Version

Stuck in the middle of nowhere Edlington looks like small town America. It could be, but it’s only seventeen miles south of Chicago off a main highway and should have become a Chicago suburb. Edlington stands on its own surrounded by 40,000 acres of land used for cattle transported from the south and east to spend a month or so grazing before being taken off on their last journey. The cattle land is still owned and used by the Edlington family who moved from Illinois to Arizona - the town’s built on a big chunk of land given by them.

The land is used in rotation so when a new load of cattle come in they’ve got fresh grass to go to and plenty of trees for them to shelter under. Everybody in town knows they’re welcome to go on the land any time they feel like a walk. Same as everybody knows to keep away from the pieces of land the cattle are using, Dad reckoned there would have been about 5,000 cows there. I don’t think he ever asked for certain, he just guessed and, because he came from Texas, was supposed to know about cows.

The town’s population must be about nine or ten thousand. Over the years the town’s formed into, I suppose you could call it a settlement, with a main street running through the middle of it and houses built on streets left and right off of Main, the street used to be called ‘Edlington Main’ but somehow the ‘Edlington’ got dropped. There’s every kind of store you can think of as well as a market, there used to be a movie theater but it closed before I was born, it’s now a boxing club and gym, the Church is about three quarters of the way down Main on the left hand side. The Church didn’t used to have a Church Hall until the Baptist Church on the other side of the street shut down so that became the Church Hall.

People in town use the stores on Main, except for buying big stuff like furniture which they go out of town to buy, though over the last year or so some of the older people have been taught in the Church Hall how to use laptops and have been ordering big stuff online but only with the computer instructor watching them. Things like TV’s and washing machines everybody gets from Mr Langdon’s, he’s cheaper than Chicago and if anything goes wrong he’ll come and fix it for free. His son, Eddie, does aerials.

Houses in Edlington come in all shapes, some single storey with a veranda to some with six bedrooms, every house in town is different. Anytime anybody wants to sell and move out can sell with no problem to people from Chicago who are aching to buy a house here but, now the town’s complete, nobody can build any new property through there being no land left to build on.

At the bottom of Main is the highway lined on both sides with businesses probably finding rents cheaper than in Chicago, the workers from the businesses come up to the stores.

At the top turning left off of Main is the High School, smaller than most with only three or four hundred of us, but it comes with just about everything a bigger school would have. The baseball team’s well up the league; the football team was crap and broke up because everybody preferred soccer.

At the top of Main on the right is my Mom and Dad’s business – Riley’s Rentals - they’ve been renting out cars for twenty years past and set up the business themselves, their customers come from just about everywhere, people from the businesses along the highway come up when they need a car, from spring to fall a load of people come in from Chicago and roundabouts because hire charges are cheaper and the cars are good. Seems strange some Chicago people get driven to Edlington to rent a car, some people have been coming to Mom and Dad’s for years and get treated like friends, they’re always given a few dollars off and come back next time, people tell people where they can rent a car cheap and up they come. Mom and Dad also get a fleet of company cars come in on Friday late for cleaning ready to go back out on Monday early.

When they bought the place there was a shop on the site selling cigarettes and candy but now the shop is used as an office for the business, we still call it ‘the shop.’ Next to the shop is the yard where the cars are kept and behind that a car repair business called ‘Mikey’s’ which has been run at the same place since before Mom and Dad got here, Mikey and his sons check over the cars when they come back in and clean them up ready to go out next time.

The land around here’s all flat and during the winter, if there’s snow or ice around, Main is bulldozed and heavy gritted so cars coming into Edlington from the highway have no problem getting to the stores, to the school or to Mom and Dad’s.

Before I was born Mom and Dad bought a house on Mellison with four bedrooms, as there’s only three of us, Mom, Dad and me, I guess they were expecting more kids after I arrived, but it didn’t happen. The house is what they call ‘double fronted’ with a house door in the middle, a double garage on the left hand side and painted all over cream. There’s some land for growing things in front of the house but it’s left alone and gets tidied usually when Mom screams at Dad. At the back of the house is a small yard, Mom says it’s ‘big enough for a line of washing’ but as she doesn’t put out washing anymore it’s been concreted over.

Downstairs we’ve got three big rooms and a kitchen, we use the kitchen, dining room and the living room, the fourth room has got furniture in it but we don’t often go in there. Upstairs are four big bedrooms with bathrooms, Mom says the two spare bedrooms are guest rooms, but we don’t often have guests.

Dad’s thin and tall - about six foot three. Mom’s small and is what she calls ‘comfortable as a Mother should be’. At 17 I’m just over six feet, but I think I must have inherited some of Mom’s ‘comfortable’ because I’m thicker set than Dad but have inherited Dad’s black hair and brown eyes.

Mom and Dad came up to Edlington from Texas. I get told at school I’ve got a Texas drawl like John Wayne. I say, as Mom and Dad told me years back to say, that John Wayne didn’t come from Texas, he came from Iowa and that his name wasn’t John Wayne but was Marion Morrison.

I know it might seem strange to some but I don’t often go out of Edlington, if I do it’s usually to play ball with the school team but I’m always glad to get back.

Part One

It must have started about two maybe three years back. If we had a team coming to play at school or we were visiting another team I noticed I wasn’t looking at the cheerleaders like the other guys, I was looking at the guys. I must have thought about it for some time and tried not to look at other teams but tried to look kind of sideways. At first it didn’t bother me but when I started looking at guys from other teams without knowing I was doing it I was worried, it’d gone through my mind that I’d have to be careful of myself in the changing room so I joined in the noise the others made – same as usual.

Cory and I had gone through school together, we were about the same height and weight but Cory had light brown hair and blue eyes. When we were sitting out during a game I saw he was doing the same as me, watching the guys from the visiting team, I didn’t want to say anything about it but he caught me first:

‘Jeff, we’re doing the same thing’

I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said to forget it then, at another game, we caught each other looking at the same things. Cory was first:

‘Do you want to talk about it? I feel I want to talk to somebody’

So we decided we’d walk home together after the game.

We knew what ‘gay’ meant but didn’t think it meant us. We decided we’d go on the net to see what we could find and thought the best way to start us off was to go on Google and put in ‘Gay’.

We met during the lunch break at school and spoke quietly to each other:

‘Jeff, do you think ‘gay’ means us?’

‘I don’t know, maybe it does, I think over the next couple of months we should give up talking about it then see how we feel’

We didn’t talk about it for about three weeks before Cory said he’d been noticing guys round town, I said I’d been doing the same thing then we both said we’d been thinking about guys in bed. It got to where we had to take a walk round one of the fields to talk about things. We did a lot of walks. We thought if we talked for about thirty minutes after ball practice nobody at home would ask things like where we’d been because we were late in.

I think I was about sixteen when I first kissed Cory and he kissed me underneath a cow tree. We liked it. We liked it a lot and decided we’d both go back on Google and email each other on what we thought instead of talking about it around school.

As we went through the year with us coming up to our seventeenth birthdays Cory and I realised there was no doubt about it, we were gay, but we didn’t think we could go creeping about for another year before we finished school. Somebody somewhere was going to guess something wasn’t right with us.

The next thing we read up on Google was called ‘Coming Out’. Neither of us liked the idea, I’d never hidden anything from Mom and Dad but this felt like something different.

We’d known Maddie and Nat since we were in sixth grade, they were twins and liked to go about everywhere screaming and tormenting people but Cory and I knew we could trust them. They didn’t scream when we told them but went quiet and seemed to be thinking about it:

‘Do you want to come out?’

‘We’ve got to do it sometime – before Mom and Dad get told about it in town’

They agreed with us and said we’d better start thinking about when. We knew our timing had to be right and that one or both of us was likely to get kicked out the house. Must have been for about a month we’d been trying to pick a day, we’d pick one, then chicken out and pick another.

Maddie and Nat came over to us at a lunch break and said their Mom and Dad would be away for a week and if we came out and got kicked out we could stay with them for a few days. We thought on it and, if we agreed on a day, neither of us could chicken out. We agreed on a day.

Three sides of our square dining table were taken up by my Mom, my Dad and me, Mom and I sat facing each other, Mom and Dad talking about the business, who they’d met in town and the rest, Mom looked across at me:

‘You’re quiet honey’

‘Just thinking’

Have you ever noticed the bubbles that form around a frying egg? At this moment that was my stomach, my ass told me it needed the bathroom, my chest told me it’d like me to breathe in every now and then, my heart told me it was working at the moment but couldn’t guarantee how much longer it’d last. Dad had finished eating, Mom had finished eating. I hadn’t. Pretty soon I was going to be asked why, Mom and Dad picked up their water glasses, drank and put them back on the table:

‘Jeff, you’ve hardly eaten anything. Are you OK?’

Mom and Dad’s eyes were watching me waiting for a reply, I tried to clear my throat it wouldn’t clear so I had a couple more tries. I looked down at my plate, it flashed across my mind in a second ‘How’s Cory doing?’ I closed my eyes, opened them and lifted my head:

‘Jeff, are you alright?’

I looked up at Dad:

‘Yes and no’

‘How’d you mean yes and no?’

I think I spoke slowly, I can’t remember:

‘Mom………… Dad’

My voice was a wobble:

‘I’ve got to tell you something’

Deep breath through nose:

‘What honey?’

Their eyes were fixed on me:

‘I wanted you to know’

I felt Mom and Dad’s faces were pushing into mine:

‘I wanted to tell you’

I tried to look both of them in the eye at the same time, the words were coming out and I was coming out - whether I liked it or not:

‘I wanted to tell you that I’m gay’.

There was a five year silence squeezed into five seconds. Dad spoke:

‘You sure son?’

‘Yes dad I’m sure’

Mom had picked up a napkin ready for use on tears:

‘How long have you known?’

‘Two or three years for sure’

Dad put a hand on the table:

‘You’ve lived with that stuck in your head for two or three years?’

‘Yes dad’

He was quiet for a few seconds:

‘It took a lot of courage to get those words out didn’t it?’

I looked at him, looked down at the table and lifted my head back up to eye level with him:

‘Yes’

Dad stood up:

‘Stand up son’

I stood:

‘You’re our son, Mom and me we both love you, any problems you’ve got we’ll sort out between us’

He stood and hugged me, he’d never done that before, we weren’t a ‘huggy’ kind of family, Mom was using her napkin, she took it down from her eyes and waved it at me:

‘The three of us together Jeff’

I picked up my napkin and sat. The doorbell rang, Mom stood and went to the door, a banner headline went from right to left across my brain ‘Cory didn’t make it’. Then:

‘Cory come in, you going somewhere?’

Christ, he’s got his bag with him, Cory and Mom came into the dining room, I turned in my chair:

‘Bad?’

Cory nodded:

‘Bad’

Mom was smiling at him:

‘Cory sit down’

Cory sat, Dad leant back in his chair and seemed to be studying him:

‘How bad was it son?’

Cory answered slowly:

‘The worst Mr Riley’

Mom came back to the table, Dad slowly nodded his head a couple of times:

‘You just told your family – same as Jeff?’

‘Yes’

‘…..and what happened?’

‘Dad told me he didn’t have a son anymore and kicked me out the house’

Mom glared at Cory:

‘The bastard’

Dad leant forward and put his arms on the table:

‘You stay here boy’

Dad stood:

‘You stay for as long as it takes’

He walked round the table in the direction of the kitchen:

‘….and if it don’t take, you live here – clear’

Cory smiled at Dad:

‘Thanks Mr Riley’

The kitchen light went on, Mom looked at Cory with her head poked forward:

‘Cory have you eaten?’

‘Yes Mrs Riley, I told him after I’d had dinner’

Dad’s laugh came from the kitchen:

‘Good planning’

He came out of the kitchen and back to the table holding four glasses between his fingers on one hand and carrying a bottle of Bourbon by the neck in the other, he put everything on the table, poured four glasses and handed them round, - he’d never given me a glass of Bourbon before, just a splash on six cubes - he kind of smiled at Cory and me and then at Mom.

‘We’re going to drink to the both of you’

He lifted his glass:

‘You’ve got guts’

I thought Mom would complain about the toast, she didn’t and followed Dad with:

‘You’ve both got guts’

Until that moment I’d managed without tears, after the