The Things We Do for Love, page 18
“Okay, I see God has major work to do on you too.” Micah paused, then charged forward. “I pray you and Dionne raise that child well, Jesse, but it’s clear you’re not a real father yet. I perform to glorify God and earn a good living for my wife and babies. And I can’t do that when two of my members mock my attempt to honor God’s Word.”
“You don’t have the contractual say over who’s in or out of the group,” I said, bubbling with rage that I had to even call out a fact Micah had long forgotten. “We let you lead the way a lot, but you’re not judge and jury, brother.”
Micah’s tone was nearly venomous now. “You’re protecting a possibly murderous fag—do you realize that, Jesse? What’s that say about you?”
I held the phone away from me for a second, inhaling before replying, “Before I had Christ in my heart, Micah, any dude who came at me like that got his teeth busted.” I stood and walked to the nearest corner of the cafeteria, burning for privacy. “Why don’t you come on down to the hospital and repeat that slur about a brother in Christ one more time. You better pray the Spirit hasn’t fled me by then.”
I hung up before he could reply.
I dialed Coleman’s cell number this time, predictably getting his voice mail. “I’m not playing some game of calling all your numbers,” I said. “I know you keep this phone on you all the time, and I know you recognize my number. You can hide from the others, Coleman, but if you’re innocent of what they’re starting to accuse you of, I’ve earned a callback.” I punched the call to a close and stood against the wall, smoldering with righteous anger. If you and Suzette lied to me and Dionne about all this, I thought, God help your souls.
The phone rang, and seeing Coleman’s number, I answered on the third ring. “Yeah.”
“I’m on my way to the hospital,” he said, his voice weaker than usual, his tone confessional. “Just be patient with me, Jesse. Please.”
24
Jesse
He had me terrified, man,” Coleman said as we trudged down a hallway leading to the hospital chapel. “All I did was ask D-Boy to get me back on even ground by striking some fear into Adrian. Hurting him was never part of the deal.”
I looked my friend in the eye without breaking stride. “And how, preacher man, do you ask a gangbanger to just put a scare into someone?” I shook my head, using the motion as an outlet for my frustration with a brother I’d trusted. “I mean, where’s the fine line between letting the air out of his tires and leaving a horse head in his bed?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone,” Coleman said, stopping suddenly and staring me down. “Don’t judge me until you’ve been in these shoes. He was threatening my family’s safety, security, and peace of mind. I had to protect them!”
Reaching the doorway of the chapel, I swung a door back, peeked inside to verify we’d be alone, then held it open for Coleman. “After you.”
“I won’t ask the predictable questions,” I said, taking a seat in the pew in front of the one into which Coleman had collapsed. The past hours’ news had injected me with new doubts about my friend’s innocence, but either way I was hardly surprised he had suppressed his links to D-Boy. “Obviously, you were hoping Adrian would turn up okay, that you’d never have to reveal your attempt to quiet him down. Just tell me, though, as the friend who tried to help you squash this from the start—what’d you authorize D-Boy to do?”
Coleman gripped the pew bench and stared toward the chapel’s marble floor. “Adrian didn’t want that money you set aside for him, Jesse,” he said slowly. “He wanted me back in his life and when he couldn’t get that, he wanted revenge. Those gay activists—GET UP—their crusade against the Church just gave him the perfect way to make me pay.”
I nodded, acknowledging the tough fact that had always made this a nearly impossible situation.
“I’m not calling Adrian and those activists terrorists,” Coleman said, “but the similarity is that there’s no negotiating with them. They want it their way—the Church admits that homosexuals are born that way and are no worse sinners than straight folks—or the highway. I appreciated all that you and Dionne had done to try and find a way out for everybody, but it wasn’t working.
“So I approached D-Boy, seeing as how I’ve known him since we were both four years old. Told him the honest truth about what Adrian was holding over me—he could relate ’cause he’s got a gay uncle and a couple cousins too. I just asked him what types of things he could do to convince Adrian to find another target instead of me, you know? Things that wouldn’t hurt him.”
It turned out, of course, that D-Boy had been too savvy to give Coleman any details about how he’d deliver the threat to Adrian. The less his naïve friend knew, the less he could be pressured to reveal to the authorities.
“He promised me no harm would come to him,” Coleman said, standing and eyeing the wooden cross at the front of the chapel. “I would have never gone through with it otherwise.”
I placed a hand to my forehead, slowly kneading the flesh there. “Adrian seems like a cocky little customer. Wouldn’t surprise me if he told D-Boy and company where to go stick it. How you think they’d respond to that?”
“Oh God.” Coleman’s voice crumpled in on itself and I started in alarm as he bolted toward the chapel’s altar, his sobs permeating the small room.
He was on his knees before the cross, his cries erupting jaggedly when I reached him. Staying on my feet, but placing a hand to his shoulder, I let him cry it out as I prayed for God’s provision on my brother in ministry. He’s a good man, Lord, and he loves you. The force of Coleman’s guilt frightened me—were these the cries of a man who’d been an accessory to manslaughter?—but I knew good and well the intensity of the emotions pummeling him.
In all the years I had known Coleman Hill, the most shameful acts in his life involved loving another man, and then, in recent days, possibly placing the same man’s life in danger. By comparison, my greatest hits collection was considerably lengthier—cocaine and heroin use and trafficking, funding two girlfriends’ abortions, committing adultery as a single and a married man, and direct and indirect participation in numerous beat-downs of rival singers, dancers, and druggies through the years. As Scripture says, though, Christ’s salvation had removed me far from that corrupt history, placing me as far from those sins as the east was from the west. Coleman had that same grace for whatever he had done, and I sensed that he needed to be reminded of that.
“I should just end this,” he said a minute later, the words coming out choked and hushed. “That’s the only reason I came to tell you this, personally, Jess. So I could stop myself.”
“What are you saying, man?” I got onto my knees so I could look him in the eye. “You’re not thinking about hurting yourself, are you?”
“Jesse,” he said, wiping furiously at the countless tears still sliding around his face. “I’ve worked so hard at this, for years. I’ve done what the Bible, what everyone in the Church, told me I should do. So why is my family being put through all this? Why does my sin get dragged out of the closet?”
I ran a hand over my mouth, searched the cross for an answer. “You know all the rationale, man.” Harsh truth tumbled from my lips. “You have the wrong sin in your past, Coleman. Seems like no matter how much society progresses on other fronts, people are still pretty touchy about the gay issue.”
“Yeah, my wife included.” Coleman bit his lower lip. “We’ve been keeping this from you guys the last few days, but so you hear it from us first, I’m putting Suzette out of the house.”
“What?”
“God has forgiven my past,” he said, his eyes flashing with defiance for the first time, “but my own wife can’t. She says she tries, but then she goes off and starts seeing another man—sleeping with him! Says she’s lookin’ back on all our years together, that she’s not convinced I have the passion for her that a wife should expect from her husband.”
“Coleman, man,” I said, inhaling with shock, “I’m sorry, brother.” I was hardly surprised; I loved Suzette like a sister, but that didn’t change the fact she was an impulsive hothead. “I don’t want to know who she’s seeing,” I said, holding up a hand, “but the important question is, can you guys get past this? Maybe she just needed to get this out of her system.”
“I don’t know where we’re headed,” Coleman said, shaking his head as new tears sprang from his eyes. “All I know is I can’t count on Zette, not when she questions my honesty. She’s as bad as Adrian, saying she’s not sure I can be healed of homosexuality!”
The question had haunted me for a while, so I asked it. “What do you think? Are you healed?”
Coleman trained his eyes on the cross again, his stare so intent it seemed he was willing Christ to materialize there in the flesh. “During the last conversation we had before I sent D-Boy to see him, I told Adrian about the process I went through to deny my urges for him and other men. I think I always had just enough sexual attraction to women to go that way, but the intensity was never like it was with other men.”
I nodded as if I understood, focused on being respectful. “So you chose to focus on your attraction to women and ignore men?”
“Something like that. Again, I never had a choice about being attracted to men, but I had a choice about whether to act on it. And except for Adrian, I never did. So with Suzette, the challenge was to convert the emotions I felt for him and place them on her.
“Praise God, it worked! And the attraction grew through the years, to the point where I don’t even have to think of men anymore when she and I make love.”
“Hmm” was the best reply I could give as my eyes focused hard on the worn carpet below. Between you and me, my friend was treading on “too much information” territory now. I’d had many openly gay friends in my worldly days—not to mention quite a few we all knew in the gospel industry—but to hear what I’d always viewed as a “straight” friend talking this way left me feeling a little dizzy. “So, uh, what did Adrian think of your process?”
“You know good and well what he thought,” Coleman said, his chin turning rigid. “If Adrian’s lying in a ditch somewhere, it’s only my fault if D-Boy played a role in it. May God forgive me if that’s true, but if so, I’ll pay the penalty.” He took another long look at the cross, then surprisingly punched me in the shoulder. “Help me up.”
I knew he was emotionally drained to put that on me; the brother had two inches and fifty pounds on me. I pulled him to his feet, though, and steadied him. “I don’t want you talking crazy anymore,” I said. “Are you sure I can trust you to drive home safely?” When he waved me off with a shrug, I kept an arm around his shoulder. “So we’re clear, Coleman, whether you’re gay, straight, or asexual, you have too much to live for, man. Your children, your ministry, your friends—”
“Yeah, friends like Men with a Message?” He gave a wry grin. “You don’t have to worry about me taking care of myself, man, because I’m doing two things before this night’s through. First I’m calling the police before they call me, so a detective can come interview me in full about D-Boy, Adrian, everything, and I’m not bothering with a lawyer. Then I’m calling Joe so he can deliver the news to the rest of the group. I’m out.”
I had begun to smile with assurance at his first promise, but his second just enraged me. “Coleman, don’t let them scare you off. As men of God, we need to fully hash this thing out.”
“No,” he said, patting my shoulder and turning toward the chapel door. “There’s enough drama in everyone’s lives as it is—my marriage possibly ending, you and Dionne welcoming baby Sammy into the family, and me doing what I can to help Earl and the rest of Adrian’s family find him. The last thing any of us needs is a knock-down-drag-out over who’s in and who’s out of the group.”
“How will you support your family?” I asked. When we first formed the group, we’d all had day jobs as ministers and counselors, but with our most recent contract, we’d come to rely on our music money, first and foremost. “Your music minister gig is only a part-time salary, right?”
Coleman shrugged. “I’m in this situation—more important, Adrian is in whatever situation he’s in—because I put my trust in man, not in God. I’m not making that mistake again. If I have to take out a second mortgage to get through a patch, I’ll do it. God will provide.”
“You recruited me into Men with a Message, Coleman,” I said, embarrassed at the pleading nature of my tone. “Now especially, I’m not sure I can picture being in it without you.”
“The group is changing lives, man.” Coleman smiled for the first time of our entire exchange, and he waved me to match his stride toward the chapel door. “I may not be able to take part anymore, but don’t stop letting God use you just because I’ve messed up my part in all this. The group needs you, Jesse,” he said. “Frankly, you’re the member I most admire—not only were you the least judgmental of me, you’re the one out of all of us facing the most temptation to backslide. You’re my role model, man.”
As I followed Coleman into the hallway, the anvils of guilt my friend’s praise created burrowed into my shoulder blades. “I’m no role model.” As the door swung shut behind me, I ran a hand through my hair in shame. “God, if my sin was exposed in the way yours was, you can’t imagine how sickened you’d be.”
“That was the old you,” Coleman said, turning away from me and toward the hospital’s main lobby.
I only wish, I thought as I nodded a good-bye to my friend. As Coleman faded into the distance, merging into the stream of blue scrubs, white coats, wheelchairs, and rolling beds, I realized that I had left Vanessa and Dionne alone for nearly an hour. That thought, fresh from Vanessa’s earlier emotional striptease, first filled me with fear, but instead of rushing upstairs impulsively, I followed a still, small voice and turned back into the chapel.
Coleman had stopped running from the tough issues in his past and present. I found myself longing for the freedom and peace that had permeated his parting smile tonight. My fists balled, but my heart opening, I moved intently toward the cross, determined to emerge with the strength to finally tell Dionne the truth about Samuel.
25
Jesse
When I returned to Vanessa’s hospital room, newly prayed up and determined to confess everything, my spirit was warmed by the sound of my mother’s voice. From four doors away, I heard the boom of her raspy belly laugh and smiled wide. I had been too consumed by the competing dramas of the moment to remember her promise to come over as soon as she could to see Samuel. My son was no blood relation to Mama, and was in fact her twenty-fifth grandchild, but apparently the thrill was new with each birth. Arriving at the room, I flung the door open, eyes roving for the three most important people in my world—Dionne, Samuel, and Mama.
Mama was there, but she had brought company.
“Hey, baby brother!” My sister Carol’s back was to me as I strode in, but she eyed me over her shoulder. She held Samuel while Mama leaned over the both of them protectively and Dionne and Vanessa carried on with small talk. Rising from the bed and holding Samuel out toward me, Carol flashed an oddly friendly smile. “He is beautiful, ain’t he? Congratulations, new Pa-pa!”
Accepting my son from Carol and cradling him with my right arm, I felt the earth shift beneath my feet, but resisted panic. “Thank you,” I replied, kissing her cheek and then Mama’s. “I’m glad to have family here to share this moment.” Because of the complexities involving Vanessa and our need to respect her final chance to commit to the adoption, Dionne had asked her family to wait and see the baby once we brought him home. I had asked the same of most family and friends, but knew with Mama that it was a futile request. What I hadn’t counted on, by any stretch of the imagination, was Carol’s presence.
Holding Samuel close, I leaned down and planted a quick kiss to Carol’s forehead. “What you been doing?” I asked. “Hanging out at Glamour Shots or something?”
“Doesn’t she look beautiful?” Mama said as she came alongside me and hugged me around the shoulders. “Amazing what having a little talk with Jesus does for the soul.”
I kissed my mother on the cheek before turning back to Carol. “You really do look great. How long have you two been here?” Did I still have time to keep Carol from asking the obvious, devastating question?
“I gotta say, Jesse,” Carol said, her eyes growing wider, “I about had a heart attack when I saw who the birth mom was! What are the odds, huh?”
From her perch in the bed, Vanessa cleared her throat and aimed a pained smile toward us. “Carol, I guess I should be grateful that you didn’t pick up where we left off. I might have your hands wrapped around my throat about now!”
“Naw,” my sister replied, waving blithely toward Vanessa. “That was ages ago for me, Vanessa. I’ve moved on. Now, that doesn’t change the fact you was a lousy landlord, but it ain’t my place to harp on it or hold it against you.”
Standing there between the hospital bed and the door, my son in my arms as my eyes anxiously searched Dionne’s face for even a hint of betrayal, rage, or suspicion, I knew deep down I was toast. Years of following Christ had left me without the necessary skills of deception to clear the hurdles before me.
Dionne was on her feet now, and her expression—arched eyebrows, tight mouth, penetrating stare—said it all. She didn’t raise her voice, didn’t show out, just asked a single question as our eyes locked. “Jesse, what are they talking about?”
My time was up.
26
Dionne
I was literally dizzy as I climbed into the passenger seat of our BMW. Against all odds, my tone was even, my words carefully chosen as I looked over at my husband. “You really want to lie right now, don’t you?”
