No Place Like Home

Photgraphy by Zetong Li

Morning sunshine flooded the taxi, exposing Patrick like an x-ray. He flinched and turned his face away—all the late-night drinking had left him with a hangover that had sunk thin, bony fingers deep into his brain. On the taxi’s crackly speakers, Carly Simon accused him of vanity, as she had all summer long, though he’d never felt less vain.

Thank God he was leaving San Francisco. Had it really been just a week since he arrived here for the first time? Sitting in the back of a different taxi, he’d marveled over the steep streets plunging towards the financial district’s towers, and the snatches of blue bay beyond. He’d almost whooped with excitement over glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge, which he’d seen hovering grandly in the background of so many movies.

How thrillingly different it all was from the landlocked Kansas he’d known his whole life. Even the light felt different here. At home, the sun spilled across vast flat expanses with a starkness nobody could escape. In San Francisco, the sunlight felt hazier, the hills and towers creating a patchwork of shadows where surprises might be found.

Patrick’s father had warned him about California. He said it wasn’t just a different state, it might as well be a whole other country, and should have its own border police to keep its crazies from messing with the rest of the country. But Patrick had been intoxicated by it as soon as he saw it from the sky, the plane’s shadow gliding through mountain ranges and vineyards, with one brief glimpse of gleaming blue that he thought might be Tahoe. His first sight of San Francisco itself—skyscrapers jutting up like the crystal formations he’d once made in science class—had nearly set his heart on fire.

But that was before he’d got to really know this place and its people. Now, that same beauty repelled him. It was a lie, a coat of varnish on rotting wood.

A scrap of scripture bubbled up from his memory. Corinthians: Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.

Carly Simon’s husky voice faded out on the speakers and Marvin Gaye’s sugary croon faded in, imploring Patrick to get it on. He closed his eyes and unwanted memories unspooled in the shadows behind his eyelids. A wide, toothy smile aimed in his direction across a strobe-lit dance floor. Two boys crushed against each other in a dark doorway, kissing hungrily. A man unbuttoning Patrick’s shirt in a murky alleyway, rough hands on soft skin.

He tried to turn his thoughts towards Rebecca, the girl at home everyone assumed he would marry, but her face felt far away and fuzzy, as if out of focus. It frightened him that an idea that had seemed solid for three years could fade so fast, as though his reality wasn’t a sturdy tree rooted in earth but a tumbleweed tossed around by winds.

He opened his eyes. He had to forget San Francisco, find a way to make sure his employer never sent him here again. When he’d been promoted to senior salesman he’d practically pleaded to come. He’d looked forward for months to his first long-distance trip and his first sight of the sea. But he knew now that he didn’t belong here and didn’t want to.

“Okay there, buddy?” Patrick looked up to find the taxi driver regarding him through the rearview mirror. He was a stocky older guy who looked a little like Patrick’s father, though with softer eyes. He was smoking with the window only just ajar, and sour fumes drifted back towards Patrick, making him nauseous.

“Just car sick,” Patrick replied, a not-quite lie that he hoped would fend off further questions.

The taxi took a left and Patrick’s stomach clenched when he realized what neighborhood they were crossing through on their way to the airport.

The Castro.

Just one week ago, Patrick couldn’t have conceived of this place existing, this tic-tac-toe grid of streets where men roamed in their hundreds pursuing other men. It was the receptionist at the Crown View, the cheap dockside hotel his employer had booked for him, who’d warned Patrick about the area when he asked for sightseeing tips.

“You want to stay clear of that place, it’s been invaded by fags,” the receptionist said, pointing to it on a folded-out map. The receptionist flashed Patrick a quick look, perhaps checking the neat young man in front of him wasn’t one of them. Patrick apparently passed his test. “The hippies were bad enough, but these guys are even worse. Soon normal folks won’t want to come here no more. Christ, maybe I won’t want to live here and I was born here.”

Patrick made the right disapproving noises, and made sure to ask about the day trips to Alcatraz and the best route to Fisherman’s Wharf—but he didn’t forget the name of the neighborhood. He’d wandered through the Castro later that night, almost as soon as the sun began to set and dim the world.

He told himself he was just there to look. He’d long been aware of unwelcome thoughts in his head, how in high school classes his eyes would slide to beautiful boys like a compass point dragged north. He knew sin lived coiled up inside him, waiting to unfurl and sink its fangs into him, but thought that if he looked the serpent in its face—saw its true malice and ugliness—it would lose its seductive power.

He’d tried to stay in the shadows on that first night, crossing the road from the brightest neon signs. He couldn’t see inside the bars because the windows were blacked out or boarded up, but occasionally doors opened like sinful mouths, belching out bright lights, cigarette smoke, cheap fizzy music, and laughing men.

Patrick’s heart thumped the whole time and he was about to leave when he noticed a different kind of bar ahead. Twin Peaks, its brash sign declared, and these windows weren’t covered. Not one little bit. Inside, the lights were shamelessly bright, so Patrick could see al the strange and colourful creatures through the glass, as if he was looking into a goldfish bowl. He could see boys and men and women who looked like men and women who looked like boys pretending to be women—all crushed into the same tight space. Didn’t they know they could be seen by anyone? Didn’t they care?

A smiling man with a buzzcut suddenly appeared out of the shadows behind Patrick, taking his arm and pulling him towards the doors. “Come on, honey, don’t be a spectator,” he laughed when Patrick tried to shake him off. And Patrick’s resistance crumbled quite suddenly, as if the walls he’d built were those of a sandcastle.

He’d been back to The Castro every night since, though never again to transparent, terrifying Twin Peaks. He’d gone to the more shadowy bars, arriving alone but never staying that way for long. If California was a different country, The Castro was a whole new world with laws all of its own. Patrick never lost his fear as he entered, but then dived into its alien customs with a recklessness that horrified him when he woke into the shaming sunlight of each new morning. He’d vow not to go back, tell himself he’d seen enough of the serpent now, but during his last meetings of each day his mind would itch in The Castro’s direction.

How different these streets seemed in daylight, from the safety of a taxi. What had seemed seductively sleazy in the darkness of night looked humdrum under the sun. Just perfectly ordinary people ambling about their lives—getting groceries, chatting in the street with neighbours, taking dogs out for a walk. Ordinary until you noticed almost all were men.

The taxi braked sharply for two young guys ambling over a crosswalk, hand-in-hand. One must have said something funny because the other threw back a big head of curls and laughed. The sight of them somehow shocked Patrick more even than the fleshy contortions he’d witnessed through bath-house steam two nights before.

“Still not used to that,” the driver said, gently accelerating.

“One way ticket to hell,” Patrick said. The same judgment his father had pronounced last year, when Kansas’ neighbor, Colorado, had become one of the first states to legalize homosexuality. He could still hear the certainty of his father’s words, spoken in that gruff voice Patrick had imitated since high school. A real man’s voice.

“You think they’re going to hell?” the driver said, mildly. He took a right and gravity shifted inside the car as they descended a hill, triggering a fresh wave of nausea. “I used to, but now I’m not so sure.” He took a left, driving towards a sign that read airport. “I pick these guys up from the bus station sometimes. They come from every state you can name and some you probably can’t. Young guys, mostly, younger than you. Some are shy but the ones who aren’t have some bad stories about how they lived before. Real bad. I’d say they got a one-way ticket out of hell, if anything.”

Patrick glanced at the mirror, but the driver’s eyes were on the road, not him. He tried to think of something to say that would lock the lid on the conversation, but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a fat, flat out lie. Instead, he retreated inside himself, but there was no safety there, just the usual churn of doubts and jagged, half-formed ideas. He’d lived with this broken feeling for so long that he could ignore it most of the time, even forget it was there. He told himself that everyone probably felt like this inside. But today there were new colors in his turmoil—bright neon lights—and they frightened him. The boundaries inside himself trembled, couldn’t contain all he was learning. Constellations were rearranging in his own private universe.

On the radio, Marvin Gaye had given way to Neil Young, who frailly wailed about his search for a better way to live. Had Patrick ever listened to these words before? Really listened? He was horrified to feel prickling tears and blinked them back.

As the driver steered onto the highway, they passed under a cheerful yellow sign with a cartoon sun and a speech bubble: “Leaving San Francisco—come back soon.” The sign pushed Patrick’s mind back to all he was leaving behind.

He thought of Ben from the night before, the only man he’d ever woken up with. He’d told himself he’d never cross that line, but Ben had found just the right words to make that line seem silly: “If you can share your body with me, you can share a bed with me.”

He remembered the warmth of Ben’s skin, and the feel of his hand curled round Patrick’s belly as he slept. And then he remembered all the hands that had touched him this week: pawing him in dark bars, slipping under his shirt in blackout rooms, grabbing, squeezing, caressing. His own hands, longing for touch all these years.

But the brightest memory was the newest—those two hands held in daylight. The shock hadn’t been in their sin. It had been in their innocence. As if what they were doing was the most natural thing in the world.

Another scrap of scripture floated to him then. Luke: Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.

Patrick had loved Church when he was younger. It had seemed so full of noise and life, compared to his bleak home in the fields, with a mother long dead and a father curdled by disappointment. But that was when he was a boy, when the minister’s sermons were meaningless to him, a tangle of words and ideas too knotty to unpick. When he was old enough to understand what the minister was saying, those same words felt like tiny darts, all aimed at him.

He wondered if everything he had believed true and immutable about life came from books that were old and fading, if all the walls he had been taught were eternal lived only in hardened minds. He tried to imagine his father saying anything kind about those two men holding hands, but the effort defeated him. His father was granite, standing stubborn and unyielding as time whistled around him. He had none of the driver’s softness.

The taxi rounded a hill and San Francisco’s sprawling airport came into view. Through the grubby taxi windshield, Patrick watched a plane descending from a cloud-ribboned sky, perhaps the same plane that would carry him home.

Absurdly, he thought of The Wizard of Oz and Dorothy, eyes squeezed tight and red heels clicking, wishing to return to Kansas after her adventures. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.

All Patrick’s thoughts bubbled over at once, like a pan reaching boiling point.

“Pull over,” he said, voice jittering. The driver swerved the taxi towards a rest area and slammed to a halt.

“Are you gonna be sick?” the driver said, sounding more concerned for Patrick than his car.

“No, just need to breathe,” Patrick gasped as he stumbled outside. He hugged his stomach and gulped the air, felt the tang of sea salt in his throat. As he watched the plane reach the runway, one clear thought punched through his whirling confusion: he didn’t want to get on that flight. He didn’t want to go back to his old world.

He looked back to the city, sunlight shimmering on the peaks of its distant skyscrapers, like a beacon calling.

He thought of Rebecca, who would probably try to meet him at Kansas City airport. She’d been waiting for him to propose for months now, the expectation crackling in the air between them like static electricity. He’d told her he loved her—and he did, in his way. But he hadn’t told her how he hated himself after he said goodbye at the end of their dates, how his chest fluttered with panic as he drove home alone in the dark. He was such a cowardly lion—and it hadn’t even saved him from his pain, only dragged Rebecca into it.

And then he thought of Ben, whose number he’d meant to throw away but which he could feel now, a scrunched paper ball in his back pocket. Ben the journalist, with his quick laugh, sleepy brown eyes, and those frank words which had thrilled Patrick as much as they’d alarmed him. Patrick wasn’t stupid. He knew Ben had probably only given him his number because he knew Patrick lived safely far away. He probably wasn’t expecting a call let alone anything more. But he wanted to hear his voice again. He wanted to hear those words.

“Are you okay?” the driver yelled over the traffic roar, leaning out from his rolled-down window.

“I don’t know,” Patrick shouted back, surprised to hear something like laughter in his voice, something light and giddy. He wanted to tell the driver that he sure wouldn’t find out in Kansas but he didn’t dare, not yet. He looked up to the sky as if there might be an answer there, but there was only the sun, dazzling. He had to stop blinding himself. He climbed back inside the taxi. “Sorry, but can we turn around? I think I left something behind.”

By Jaime Gill