Truth is a Hard Pill to Swallow

It’s never easy to admit that you’ve been lied to, that your life was built on faulty foundations. It’s easier to keep pretending that the ground beneath your feet is solid and keep going as you always have.

Because the alternative is to unmoor yourself from the safe, if fake, world you know, and to become a raft drifting along the ocean with no compass and no company. In short, it was the scariest thing Marcus had ever done.

It had taken a long time to gather the courage to leave. For most of his life, he’d done as he was told, believed what his leaders told him to believe, and never questioned anything. That had all changed when his brother was killed by the in a hit-and-run by a town bigwig. He knew the truth, had seen it happen in front of him. But everyone believed the killer when he said he didn’t do it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

After that, he started noticing a lot of inconsistencies in what he was being told.

But he also couldn’t just up and leave. His family, his friends, his work, they were all caught in the web of lies, earnestly believing what they were told to believe, hating who they were told to hate, and ignoring what they were told to ignore.

His own mother didn’t believe his story of his brother’s death. She just parroted the official report, same as everyone else in town.

So he stayed quiet, kept his head down, didn’t openly question, and kept pretending he was one of them. But things were never the same. He wasn’t one of them anymore and could never be again. So one day, he left.

As he stepped out of his old life for the last time, he felt wobbly on his legs, like a newborn foal. He tossed his belongings into his truck and drove out of town.

It didn’t matter where he was going, he just needed to get away. Once he was out of town, he sent a message in the family group chat explaining why he left and that he’d always love them. The only response was being kicked out of the chat and blocked by them all.

Mile after mile after mile, he drove down the highway, passing towns, fields, cities, and billboards, until the sun dipped behind the horizon, taking all light with it. Marcus shivered and suddenly felt very alone.

He pulled into a hotel and got himself a room for the night before wandering next door for a drink. There was a sticker of a pride flag on the window beside the door. Not long ago, he’d have popped a blood vessel in fury at the sight of it.

But now he was too tired. He just wanted a drink and a place to think things over.

He opened the door, expecting a room of man-hating blue-haired women, predators masquerading as women, and homos griding on each other. He kept his eyes firmly on the toes of his shoes as he made his way to the far corner of the bar where there was an empty seat.

The bartender was a young Hispanic man.

“What can I get for you?” he asked in unaccented English with a smile, putting down a napkin and handing Marcus a menu.

He ordered a whiskey, neat, his voice barely a whisper over the din of the crowd and the music.

A minute later, the whiskey was in front of him, its dark hue a rusty mirror into his soul. He gazed into it, hoping to find a new Marcus, a better Marcus hidden in its depth. But all he saw staring back at him was a muggy reflection of a lost and lonely Marcus.

He downed the drink in two gulps and ordered another.

When it arrived, he swirled his new drink, hoping that this one would show him a path forward, out of the stormy sea he was floating on.

Through the haze of liquor, he saw the reflected face morphing. The gruff, wrinkled face became clean-shaven and smooth, the grimace turned into a beaming smile. Beside the smiling man, a woman appeared, no one he’d seen before. She also looked happy and young as she gazed lovingly at this other Marcus. They kissed, her wavy blonde hair briefly covering their faces as she bent down to embrace this better Marcus.

While he was smiling down at this other, happy version of himself, a man sat down on the seat beside him. He didn’t notice at first until he saw, out of the corner of his eye, pastel pink and purple nails at the end of a muscular, hairy arm.

He stopped smiling and felt that old anger rise up inside him, gnawing at his innards, desperate to get out and start swinging. That old, familiar voice spitting, how dare that man do something so unmanly, so feminine around him. It was a threat and his brain reacted the same way it would to someone pointing a knife at him.

The man took a swig from his beer, keeping his eyes straight ahead, glued to the TV showing a basketball game.

Marcus tried to unclench his jaw.

“Can you put on the hockey game?” the man asked the bartender. Since several other screens were showing the basketball game, the bartender obliged.

“Hope you don’t mind,” the man said to Marcus. “It’s playoffs and I have to support my ‘Canes.”

“You from Carolina?” asked Marcus, remembering a family trip to his cousin out in Fayetteville when they’d been to a game.

The man nodded, still watching the screen. “Born and raised in Fayetteville.”

“No way!” Marcus’s whole body let out a sigh of relief. He knew people from there, had family there. This man couldn’t be that bad. “If you don’t mind me asking, what do the people back home think about your nails?”

The man let out a cackle. “They have no idea about them!” He turned, then, to Marcus. His kind, light brown eyes betrayed a sadness buried deep, recognizable only to those who experienced a similar haunting. “I left there the minute I could, but I still hold on to a few things from my youth, like a love for the Hurricanes. My dad and I used to watch the games together and once a year we’d make a trip up to Raleigh to see them for my birthday.”

In the silence that followed, a sadness filled the space between the men, the pain of loss that comes with losing your old self palpable in the air. But it also made Marcus feel just a little bit less alone.

“I know what you mean, I think,” Marcus drawled after a few minutes. “I’ve just left my old home, too. I don’t fit in there no more. In a different way,” he quickly added then immediately admonished himself for. “Not that there’s anything wrong with…well, I mean…”

The man laughed. “I know what you mean. So you just left, huh? Where are you going?”

Marcus gazed back into his whiskey, looking for that other Marcus again, wanting to be told where to go and what to do. But it remained just whiskey. So he just took a sip, letting the liquor burn a path down his throat, forging a path for the words to come out.

“Truth be told, I don’t know. All I do know is that I can’t stay in my old life.”

“Tell ya what,” said the other man, “my friends and I get together for a weekly game of kickball on Friday afternoons, why don’t you come join us tomorrow? It’s not a full life change or move or anything, but it’s a start toward a new life with new friends and new hobbies. What do you say?”

The old Marcus wouldn’t have set foot in this bar, let alone talk to this man. The old Marcus definitely wouldn’t have played a childish game with him and his likely equally queer friends. But that was the old Marcus.

“I’d love to,” he said, grinning.

For the first time, he looked around at the other patrons of the bar and saw not the man-haters, prowlers, and threats he’d been told to expect. It was, simply, a room full of people.