April Rains

“Happy Passover,” Scott giggles, rolling over-top of Sherman and waking him up. The night before had gone rather pleasantly. Sherman’s uncle, visiting from Israel had made a few opening cracks about Scott’s inability to wear functional clothing and his failures in the areas of dignity and decorum, but after Scott settled into a conversation about plans to go to Turkey, Gerald just started mouthing the words “Midnight Express,” in reference to the delicious film noir.

“Start saving up,” Scott had replied. “I’ll need bail money and I have your phone number.” From that moment on they had crafted a night the sorts of which sprout life-long friendships.

“You did well last night,” Sherman responds, rubbing his eyes and trying to wake up. “It can’t be easy being the odd-one-out.”

“What, you mean because I’m Jain?” Scott asks surprised, to which Sherman nods. “Nah,” Scott continues, shrugging his right fist across the air in front of his chest. “I don’t see there being that much difference between any of us Sherry Bear. I think the kinship of religion is less in the religion you follow and more in the type of allegiance you have to it.”

“Interesting,” Sherman responds, albeit through a yawn.

“I think those who are rigid in reading the words of any religion are more similar to each other than they are to anyone who shares the title of their particular religion. Those who refuse to accept difference in others or contextualize the words they see as gospel. They are kind of the same—to me—regardless of whom their god(s) is or are. We can spin the words and choose the phrases that we follow with any belief. Some people will use any religion to justify hate and create fear where there never was reason. Others won’t.”

Sherman just lies there, taking it in.

“Anyway, I think that most people get a lot of things wrong,” Scott confides. “I know I certainly do.”

Sherman says very little in these revelatory moments of Scott’s. He doesn’t need to verify or deny the process; letting Scott come to his own solutions. He has a bewildering comfort with silence too. Something a lot of people seem afraid of. Instead, he sits up and rubs Scott’s back. For such a big polar bear, Sherman knows how to do this very well. His paws are surprisingly soft as well. That something big needs to be coarse, hard or scary seems an aberration of nature. That Scott was lucky enough to have never learned to be ignorant to that one thing led him to this man that might be the love of his life.

“I think, for the most part, people have a horrible misperception of each other,” Scott decides, as the man that has become his security and comfort continues to massage his back. “We act like things that we can define as differences—whether we call them illnesses or diseases and whether they are mental, physical or psychological in nature—we act like they make some of less whole than others. I know that’s not true. All people have their own struggles. If there is a label to pin to that struggle, or part of it, that may, or may not be helpful given on the situation, which is fine; but, for others to act like they are complete in some way that the rest of us aren’t is a delusion. It bothers me.”

Scott thinks about how Passover represents the need for Jews to once leave a land to escape slavery because of their religion. He knows that forty years ago he would have been thought of as having a mental illness because of his sexual orientation. That every individual dimension of any person can, and is, so easily extracted and magnified with judgment and ridicule by those around them. How every truth of one generation is proven ridiculous in the next.

“Nobody’s perfect. No one ever has been. It surprises me that we can convince ourselves that we—whatever we define as we—are without the flaws that others possess.”

Sherman just continues to rub Scott’s back. He knows Scott struggles with most things: a lot of easy things. He can’t cook or clean, he is not a great art instructor and he dresses incorrigibly; but, somehow he seems to have a unique insight into a lot of deep things that nobody else in Sherman’s world bothers to think about. He doesn’t get defensive about it, or have an ego that needs stroking. He just gives a shit and Sherman likes that.

“I love you,” Sherman breathes more than says, as the oxygen seems to have evaporated from his lips, making it difficult to speak. “I love your troubles and your faults and your fears. I love the package that is you and I love that I have gotten to see it stripped of all the dressings of urban life. You in this tundra has really been you, with nothing else to hide behind.”

It wasn’t the answer Scott was fishing for; but, not being a fisherman, maybe it was the answer he had cast out for. If not, given his tie-dye evening wear, it has certainly become the catch he will forever believe is out of his league.