To the Nasty Tortoise

To the Nasty Tortoise:

You called my attackers homophobic bums, resting a limp, semi-paralyzed hand on my shaking shoulder. And my blood pulsed with rage when I told you I wanted to kill them, all of them. I wanted to scrub them all away like dirty footprints.

Vivid recollections: the taunting, the fighting, the screaming of my father, the crying of my mother. I always felt guilty, ashamed, contaminated. We knew I was strong enough to hold my own, to fight back with fang-wielding ferocity, but I didn't. Our two-man pacifist club wouldn't allow violence, but we underwent much of it. Do you remember your wisdom? Your clairvoyant reassurances that steered me into a new world of love and confidence?

Maybe you were an advice magician of sorts. Sometimes you had no advice, and we rested on our own code of dignity, of morality: Hold true to kindness, spread love and appreciation, and all the other untos and salient platitudes that buoyed me in times of despondency.

You must remember how difficult I found it to ask another boy to the prom. Gays were not accepted then. So I shut myself in, and closed myself out from the world for awhile, despite your advice:

Don't confine yourself to the bigotry of these people. Don't let them trample you with their homophobic nonsense.

If I had a nickle for everytime you used the word nonsense, I would be a rich man. There seemed to be a mountain of nonsense back then, impossible to descend.

So you inspired some courage in me, sat there in your bulky wheelchair, hunched, round, affable, your condition irreversible. It didn't seem to haunt you like my own affliction, as I thought of it back then. You poked fun at your infirmity, calling yourself a nasty tortoise, slow moving and hunkered, and the band you conducted played lubricated jazz. It was headlined in the paper announcements posted all over the school:

January 18th at 7:00 p.m. Lubricated Jazz and the Nasty Tortoise performing the works of John Coltrane.

You told me: I had dreams leading up to it. They were almost too real, and now I consider it clairvoyance. I could feel the weight of the water all around me as I thrashed, a metal cage trapping me, submerged just below the surface where the sunlight flickered and reflected. I would grab for it, screaming and suffocating a few inches below the water.

When the boating accident happened, your world was ripped out from under you. Your legs were taken away. Your hands that once beat drums and slid fluidly along the necks of guitars could now barely grip a fork. But you pumped your baton in front of our miniature orchestra with such unyielding energy and passion! In your crippled state, you refused pessimism as if it were a poisoned draught, and in doing so, you stifled my fear, my guilt, my destructive moments of insecurity.

Who was I to be afriad? With my working legs, my quick fingers, my alert and fully responsive body. It angered you to see me demoralized when I could pop up and sprint full speed into a glaring sunset in the distance, not stopping until it faded away and left me breathless on the grass.

After they assulted me, a jeering gang of jocks and punks, using the business end of a golf club to prod my privates, weilding wet towles that bit into my bare skin like buggy whips, I came straight to your band room, pale and shaking.

The story spread like a disease through our high school, and after three days of abscence, which I spent in mute despondency, mortified by my Father's ashamed face at the dinner table every night, I came to you and we resumed our casual chats.

I laughed myself into tears when you told me you canceled after school band practice to attend Coach Miller's exercise program that you both designed for the boys who hurt me. You even brought your own whistle and megaphone to keep the panting group motivated as they sprinted from sideline to sideline, limping across the football field long after the sun had gone down.

You told me to run. You taught me to run. When fear crept into me, when I doubted myself, whenever I felt demoralized, rejected, I ran. I pounded pavement until my heart was about to burst, and all the blood in my body was hot and tingling. My head pounded as I drew large breaths into my lungs, and the fear seemed to dissolve, vanish into a realm of other trivial worries.

I write you this letter as a fully grown man, confident, more wise than I have ever been. You have passed away recently, and I apologize for not reaching out to you sooner. Know that I still think of you almost everyday, and when I begin to sulk and pout over distressing adult matters, I run. I run hard and far until my brain throbs and my working legs turn to rubber. I play guitar and relish the dexterity of my fingers as they slide effortlessley over the fretboard. I blast John Coltrane from my record player as I dance with my boyfriend in our living room. I am in love with the life you have inspired me to live.

Thank you. Thank you.

Your friend always,

Max