We stood outside the hotel in the pre-dawn, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Our Uber pulled up, a gray sedan, and we tumbled in. Before we’d even clicked our seatbelts, the driver started talking, telling us how he’d been driving all night. We were his last trip, he said, though he didn’t seem tired, all talkative and jumpy. Money was tight, the driver told us, especially since he’d gotten out of jail, in Atlanta. But now he was back in Houston, his hometown, and he wanted to know why we were here.
“Just a layover between Boston and New Orleans,” I said. I told him how the airline had waited until midnight to cancel our afternoon flight, then they’d shuttled us to a hotel where we’d only had a few hours of sleep. Now we were heading back for the replacement flight at daybreak. I left out the fact that we were on our honeymoon.
The driver groaned on our behalf. My husband of four months, Peter, shook his head at our misfortune and sighed. He didn’t like talking to strangers, especially in the American South, for fear his Caribbean accent would attract the wrong kind of attention. Being a white guy from Central Florida, I could only try to empathize. Now I wanted to reach over and squeeze his hand, but I knew he wouldn’t like it, not here, not like this.
“Boston, huh?” the driver said as we pulled onto the interstate. “Celtics fan?”
“Magic,” I told him, because although I lived in Boston—not we, but I—I was from Orlando. I mentioned a certain basketball player, an all-star who’d played in both Orlando and Houston.
“Yeah, we had him for a while,” the driver said. Billboards shone and headlights blazed in the darkness. As he took the exit for the airport, the driver said, “You know what I heard? I heard he was gay.”
“Oh?” I said, not surprised that one of the hundreds of active NBA players might not be straight. I met the driver’s eyes in the rearview. “I could see that.”
“I’m like, ‘What do you want to be gay for, man?’”
With a look, Peter urged me to change the subject, but the driver kept on.
“You could have any woman you want. What do you want to be gay for?”
If we had told the driver we were a married couple detoured on our way to our honeymoon, would he have gone quiet? Would he have blinked and smiled and said congratulations? Or would have done something else? It wasn’t worth finding out, but I couldn’t just let it go.
“Well,” I said with a shrug, “you can’t help who you’re attracted to.”
Peter turned his head to look out the window. I could feel his anxiety. I hoped he could feel mine.
After a pause, the driver said, “That’s true. Yeah, that’s true.”
What happened in that pause? Did the driver consider his own attractions? The features he desires in a woman, or even a man? Did he consider how little control he had over those desires? Or did he run through a pre-programmed list of reactions — derision, condemnation, the compulsion toward violence — before setting them aside? Did he wonder about us, about our relationship to each other? I hadn’t outed us, not exactly, but I’d risked doing so by challenging the premise of his question. Only after he let us out safely at the terminal was I glad that I did.
“What do you want to be gay for?” Peter and I prodded and giggled on the flight to New Orleans. Snuggled against me in our two-person row, he’d already forgiven me for gambling with our safety. We were just happy to have Houston behind us, the Gulf Coast unfurling as we soared into the sunrise.
Paul Haney's work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Potomac Review, Quarter After Eight, Rumpus, Slate, and elsewhere. While developing a queer Bob Dylan memoir, he serves as Co-Editor of the Dylan Review. Follow him @paulhaney.
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