Ricky, whenever I’d thought of him, had been stuck in the glaze of memory, never progressing beyond his teenage self, but here he was, evolved, of age-which meant we might finally be able to talk through what had happened. And, above everything, a charged expectation. Grief, to know his sexuality was still, or again, causing pain. A sober satisfaction, to hear his gayness confirmed. Watching Ricky, I flailed atop a rough surf of feelings. The victim is sure, a reporter says, that he was attacked because of his sexuality.
His lip and chin needed nearly twenty stitches. He tried again: Why are you hitting me? And there his memory ends. Why would you do that? he says he asked, and the stranger up and punched him. Ricky explains that he was at a club when a young man waved at him, a feminine flip of the wrist, meant to taunt. We zoom in: the clothes are spattered with stains. The camera pans down to the grass, where pants and a shirt are arranged like a Sunday-best ensemble set out on a schoolboy’s bed. (By now he’d be-I can scarcely believe it- thirty-five.) His hair’s buzzed tight, and you can see it’s thinning at the temples, even though, in the video, he was only twenty-five-almost as old as I was when I knew him as a fourteen-year-old. Then there’s Ricky, standing on the front lawn of a house, taller than he was when I knew him, and filled out but still remarkably skinny, his slimness magnified by the hang of his baggy jeans. Above her shoulder, a graphic hovers: a fist smashing apart the symbols for male and female, and a simple, stark, blue-lettered word.
LEGAL BOY GAY SEX STORIES TV
The video, a clip from a local TV newscast, starts with a solemn anchorwoman at a desk. The shade of his mixed-race skin, like something just this side of burned, was more vivid than I’d let myself remember. But when I added the name of the state where he grew up, I was rewarded promptly with a decade-old YouTube thumbnail that showed part of a face-only a nose and mouth-that I sensed right away must be his. His real name, when I searched, got half a million hits I braced myself for a long wild-Google chase. I’ll call him Ricky, which sounds almost right: boyish, a little innocent, a little insolent. Then one day, at my writing desk, inventing another teenage boy-my stories are overpopulated with them-I was hit by a truth I must have worked to keep at bay: by now he’d be findable on the web.
Over the next fifteen years, I liked to tell myself I’d made meaning out of his life: planted the scanty seed of him and grown a magic beanstalk of what if? But I could never stop wondering about the actual him.
Whenever someone asked me if the book was based on a boy I knew, I hedged: “Nah, I mostly made him up.” Gallantly protecting him, I wanted to believe, but more truly protecting myself from old, dismaying questions. Why did it take me so long to think of tracking him down? In 2002, I’d published a novel that starred a boy inspired by him, and once I’d forged my fictional kid, I tried hard to smother thoughts of the real one.