Fiction: A Coming Out Attempt

By Albert Rodríguez

 

I took some drugs and went home to confront my father. My friends had convinced me that this was part, maybe even the very essence, of growing up—to go against fathers. I hitched my wagon to that cart, but the cart ended up overturned in a ditch.

I had always thought I was the smartest person in my family. But on this day, if I'm honest, my conservative, soft spoken father, gave me a run for my money. My mother I could easily handle. She was a fortress easily breached. Her love was a shimmering thing that could never sharpen itself into a blade against me. My father, however, was the pebble on the shoe of my psyche.

I went home and called a family meeting. 

“I’m attracted to boys,” I said.

My father got up, shut the blinds, and came back to the table. Something about that subtle move bothered me. I guess I expected a seismic shift that never came. 

“What is it about boys that you like?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say. “Their masculinity… I guess.”

It was the wrong answer. I should have reached for something more ephemeral, more ungraspable. I quickly found myself losing ground. 

“If you are into masculinity, that’s ok,” my father said. “There are plenty of females out there that are masculine.”

I hadn’t expected this line of argument. It took me by surprise. My father, sensing my unpreparedness, started to press on me like a bully. When my mother tried to intervene, he told her: “Honey, it’s time for me to put a stop to this” 

He started to lecture me: “You cannot elevate your petty sexual prerogative above the collective needs of the community. To do so is a moral failure. You cannot place your individual corrupt desires over the certainties of biology.”

I was pissed off that he was calling my choice “a petty sexual prerogative.” It wasn’t petty to me. When I defended myself, he called me “selfish,” and “self-centered.” He began to exert that suffocating pressure of his Christian ethos that I knew so well. It was a moral squeeze play that was weighty because it assumed righteousness. It insisted that self-denial was the only path to joy.

“You cannot do wrong and feel right,” my father said. It was a clever thing to say, but was it true?

I started to curse. I had mentally prepared for it. I went scorched-earth, calling him a “jerk,” and a “monster.” I deployed profanities like incendiary devices—linguistic carpet-bombing intended to level his moral high ground.

“Stop cursing,” he commanded me.

I continued. He was stoic. He cast me as the hysteric, flailing child. I was losing this battle.

“Stop cursing,” he said again. 

I doubled down not wanting to give ground to this fastidious tyrant. Yet all my salvos failed to destabilize him. They only seemed to dismantle my own inner scaffolding. My father’s face turned red. He became a singular point of terrifying, concentrated heat.

He told my mom that the university had ruined me. 

“He’s become one of those radical progressive types.”

He began to wield the phrase, “rebel without a cause,” throwing it about as if that explained something deeply corrupt about my nature.

That’s when I realized my tactical catastrophe. There was no real path to victory. I had come to the battlefield too early. My timing was ruinous. I should have remained undisclosed until my financial umbilical cord was severed. My father had a devastatingly material leverage over me that I had conveniently edited out of my thinking. He was the one that paid for my education. He saw it in my eyes—this weakness. So he began to brandish it like a thug, transforming my very future into a theater of war.

“Under my roof, you abide by my worldview,” he said. “Once you leave, you can transform yourself into whatever specimen of humanity you desire. But do not come crawling back to me when you get AIDS.”

It was a low blow.

I countered with a flurry of “jackass” and “jerk,” while my mother dissolved into tears. When I finally called him a “hateful monster,” the table before me suddenly took flight, flipped over as if Darth Vader had entered the room to an epic soundtrack. 

“You will respect me!” he roared, “or I will make you respect me!”

A ringing silence followed. Eventually I sat down and he did too, though the table was gone. 

“You support abortion I assume?”

“Of course,” I said proudly.

“Watch this.”

He pulled out his phone and made me watch an AI generated video of a digital baby being dismembered within a rendered womb.

“How does that make you feel?” he prodded.

“Whatever,” I replied.

I wasn’t expressing indifference toward the hypothetical baby, but I didn’t want to give my father any ground. We sat there for a while in silence. Then he got up abruptly, went to the backyard, and returned clutching one of Coco’s puppies—a small, warm bundle of fur. One of five.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“What if I kill this puppy? he said. “Would that be reprehensible to you?”

“Dad there are laws against that!”

“Well,” he said, his features contorting into a mask of righteous mania. “You think that protecting this puppy is more important than protecting an unborn child? Screw you!” 

He tightened his grip around the puppy’s neck until it went limp. 

“You are crazy!” I shrieked.

“Get the hell out of my house!” he screamed.

I ran out in a panic, hyperventilating. In my frantic departure I miscalculated the front stoop and fell face forward on the steps. I couldn’t get up. My father had already closed the front door. So, I was in front of the stoop for half an hour, moaning quietly. It turned out I shattered my knee. But I refused to ask my parents for help. But then it started to rain. And then pour. 

Eventually I cried out for my mother. 

My parents called an ambulance, but before they took me my father came to me and told me in a low, gavel-filled voice that he would be sending me the bill for the ambulance. 

After that we didn’t talk for years. He stopped paying my university bill. Last Christmas was the first time we talked since he disowned me. The old man is getting old. He’s losing his hair.

That same Christmas night, also, mother offered a startling correction to that trauma of that infamous day: “Your father never killed Coco’s puppy.”

 

 

 

 

 

Albert Rodríguez lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in many platforms, including: Litro Magazine USA, Five on the Fifth, White Wall Review, Platform Review, BULL, Turn & Work, Modern Literature, Discretionary Love, Across the Margin, Farewell Transmission, Blood + Honey, etc.