The Stars Don’t Judge

by Charlie Rogers

I squint into the afternoon sun, imagining my stubby legs are pistons, built for no other purpose than to drive the pedals of my old bicycle up the steepest hill in the entire county. Two months ago, at the start of the summer, I couldn’t make it anywhere near halfway—I had to find a longer, alternate route to the mall rather than suffer the indignity of getting off the bike and walking up the hill—but I’ve been training all summer and the peak is finally within my grasp.

I’m running a couple minutes late, which only motivates me more. I’ll never hear the end of it if I miss Dad’s big moment, even if he wasn’t ever around for mine.

My calf muscles are starting to show. Raymond commented on them last week, and he’s getting really into bodybuilding, so he should know. He keeps offering to take me to his dad’s gym and show me how to bulk up like him. He’s asked me so many times its become a joke between us—he asks and I hunch up my shoulders and say I’m scared in a goofy kid’s voice and we both laugh.

But first I need to make it up this hill. I’ve had this bike more than half my life—my parents surprised me with it when I was in second grade and now I’m nearing the end of high school. It was too big for me then and is too small for me now, but I can’t imagine ever riding anything else. Its banana yellow paint is chipped and new rust spots keep popping up like a bad rash, but for years it was the closest thing I had to a friend.

I pull in as much breath as my lungs can take and stand for better leverage. Nothing can stop me. My legs are fire. I am fire. I—

I’m there. At the top of the hill, finally. There’s no real vista here—houses and woods block my view on either either side, and in front of me, at the bottom of the hill, is the edge of the mall parking lot. But I made it.

I really want to visit Raymond at work and tell him about my accomplishment, but it has to wait.

I try to sneak down the stairs as quietly as possible since the meeting’s already started, but the bottom three steps groan with comical weariness. Half the room turns in judgement. Plus Dad, who waves like a middle-schooler. The old Dad wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to berate me for my lateness—as if he wasn’t also chronically missing appointments—or to make a humiliating scene, but there’s none of that with this new version of Dad, not even a hint of annoyance in his eyes. I still don’t know what to make of this.

I grab a seat in the back, by the window, careful not to scrape the metal chair across the floor and create even more disturbance.

Kenneth, at the front of the room, ignores my arrival, and continues with his spiel—depending how long we’ve been coming to these meetings, we’ve all heard it a dozen or a thousand times.

“...and I think we’ve got someone collecting his one-month chip today?” Kenneth sounds robotic, bored, though he’s actually quite funny outside the rooms, always with a cigarette and a perpetually arched eyebrow. “Is Mitchell here?”

Dad raises a hand and stands, clumsily knocking his chair back so it hits Wen’s knees.

I try not to watch as Dad makes his way up to Kenneth, listening instead to the sputtering drone of the ancient air-conditioner struggling in the high window above us. Dad moves like he owns the place, puffing out his chest as he steps onto the makeshift dais. We all know overconfidence is a killer here—I’ve heard people gossiping how Dad won’t last—but I’m trying to let him have his moment.

I was sixteen when I got my first one-month chip. Still sixteen when I got my second, and so far last one.

“Hi, everyone,” Dad says. “I’m Mitch, and I’m an alcoholic.”

It doesn’t even sound like the same person who I’d find passed out on the bathroom floor, his cock still poking out because he was too drunk to work it back through the fly of his briefs. That version of Dad always sounded like he was chewing on gravel, but this one—this is the Dad I prefer to remember. The one who fixed my bicycle after Mom accidentally ran over it. The one who offered to build me a treehouse but ended up installing a tire-swing instead and tried to convince me it was just as fun. That Dad’s been missing a while. It’s nice to hear him again even if every word out of his mouth makes me cringe.

“Hi, Mitch,” the room replies in unison, everyone except for me and Big Luke who is snoring softly in the opposite corner.

The chapel at the community center is closed because someone left some nasty graffiti, so the meeting I usually bring Dad to got canceled. For the past week, we’ve been meeting in the storage basement of Donnie’s pizzeria, underneath the mall. A few cardboard boxes tower precariously near the stairwell but aside from them, the room is empty. I wonder what Donnie uses it for when we’re not here.

“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my son, Joe,” Dad says, just as I begged him not to. When he points to me, I look around too, as if I’m searching for who his son might be, even though most people here already know about Dad and me.

Dad tells his story, up to the part where Mom first kicked him out. As much as I think he’s trying to be honest, he can’t help but make himself the hero. Everyone else is transfixed. Dad has somehow not figured out why yet.

He’s probably the only straight guy here. That includes me, which Dad also doesn’t know. We usually go to ones that are a lot more mixed—we leave every meeting with him begging me not to tell Mom about all the women he harmlessly flirted with, and me stifling a laugh because those women were all lesbians—and I keep this predominantly gay meeting for myself. But with the graffiti cleanup at the chapel, I’ve had to let him into my sanctuary meeting. It’s a bit terrifying.

“I feel like I have my life back,” Dad says.

I see Kenneth moving towards him, ready to hustle him back to his seat so we can move on to the next speaker. Dad doesn’t notice him coming but pauses his rambling to pick me out of his audience again, grinning and flashing me a thumbs up. I can’t help but smile, like I’m the proud dad.

Then I remember the time he punched me in the face because I was too slow handing him the remote control and I told all the kids at school that I’d gotten into a scrap with a bigger kid who was trying to steal my lunchbox. In that version of the story, I won the fight.

What I want to do after the meeting is bike over to the other side of the mall and visit Raymond. What Dad wants to do is go upstairs to Donnie’s with me and have some disappointing slices of pizza. To… celebrate?

“Everyone was saying how jacked I’m getting,” Dad says through a mouthful of rubbery pizza. He briefly flexes one of his biceps as if he expects me to be impressed, as if I don’t see him drinking coffee in his underwear every morning. Yes, he’s in much better shape lately. No, I don’t care.

I nod and mutter, “Yeah.” I’m not going to burst his bubble but I’m not going to encourage him, either.

Dad rests a hand on the table and leans forward a bit. “Seems like there were a lot of gay dudes at this meeting.”

Oh. So he did notice.

I shrug. Best not to say anything. Raymond thinks I should just tell Dad the truth, that everything will be easier once it’s all out in the open. Some of the guys in the program say the same, but… they don’t know Dad like I do. And Mom, who knows him better than anyone, is pretty firm on the subject: Don’t ever tell him. She’s shared a bunch of stories about how homophobic he is, including a particularly disturbing one about what he and some friends did to a classmate they suspected of being gay in high school.

“I’m not crazy, right?” Dad grins, diffusing tension he may not have known existed. “That Kenneth is pretty fussy.”

I pluck greasy pepperoni off my last slice. “I dunno.”

“It’s cool, I guess.” He leans back again and rubs his stomach. “I would’ve freaked out when I was your age. But getting sober… I guess you never really know what people are going through. That’s what I learned.”

If he’s trying to lull me into admitting something, it’s not going to work.

“So, Joe… still no girlfriend?” he asks. Drunk Dad was a walking cliche but Sober Dad is not much better, just easier to be around.

I shake my head and pretend to focus on my pizza.

“You’re seventeen, right? When I was your age, I’d already gotten a girl pregnant.” He laughs, like it’s something to be proud of. I don’t know this story but I do know the pregnancy he’s talking about wasn’t me. “Your mother wasn’t exactly a late bloomer either. It’s good you’re not rushing into anything. I’m proud of you.”

He forgets that a little over a year ago, I couldn’t make it through a school day without at least a pint of stolen whiskey. He forgets that when he found out I’d been stealing from him—both the whiskey and later, money—he choked me until I passed out. I haven’t forgotten. Not any of it.

“Joe! That’s amazing!” Raymond offers me his vape pen but thinks better of it, grabbing me into a rough embrace instead. I’m still not used to that—Drunk Dad would sometimes get physically affectionate for a couple minutes, but neither Mom nor Sober Dad really ever do. I feel Raymond’s muscular chest against mine and an involuntary stiffness starts to develop in my shorts. I pull away before I embarrass myself.

Raymond settles back onto the metal steps to the loading dock of the electronics store where he works. My eye darts to the fly of his khaki uniform pants to see if he got as excited by that hug as I did. There’s no visible evidence but I assure myself that doesn’t mean anything.

“We should celebrate,” Raymond says, glancing at the clock app on his phone.

I’m proud of myself but I don’t think biking up a hill is something worth throwing a party over. “Celebrate… how?”

Raymond doesn’t smile much—I don’t know why but he maintains a stony face even when joking around, usually—but when he does, the whole world drops away like nothing else has ever mattered.

“I dunno; I could suck your dick?” Raymond flashes a quick smile—that impossible smile, full of mischief this time—and returns to his serious expression so quick I’m left wondering if I imagined the grin. I’m so distracted it takes me a second to process what he actually said.

We’ve never done anything like that, or even really joked about it before. Sometimes I go over to his house—his parents are friendly but disinterested, and they truly don’t seem to care what we do behind his locked bedroom door. But the funny thing is, we don’t really do much. Sometimes we kiss but we never use our tongues—I tried once but Raymond thought it was too much. Raymond likes when I rub his big pecs, but weirdly, he prefers to rub mine even though I’m a flap of cardboard compared to him.

My favorite is when we cuddle in our underwear. Mom won’t let me sleep over, though.

“Now?” I ask. Blood rushes to my cheeks and… everywhere… but panic paralyzes me.

“You look up for it.” Raymond points at the bulge in my shorts. It’s unmistakable but not particularly impressive, at least not from this angle, and I’m certain this is the most humiliated I will ever be in my entire life. But Raymond pats the metal stair next to him, gesturing for me to join him. “I’m kidding, Joe. I mean…  not now, though seeing you all riled up has me tempted. I thought maybe you could come over later.”

“Oh,” I say, and manage to pitch my voice up and squeak out my usual, “I’m scared.” I cover my bulge with my hands and sit next to Raymond. He puts his hand on my knee, which excites me more but also calms me so deeply and so instantly it’s hard to remember I was freaking out a second ago.

Now my nervousness has infected Raymond. “I mean… I was joking but… if you want to… I’ve been kind of wanting to try some stuff… I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid. Maybe you don’t want to—”

“I’d love to come over later,” I say.

Another smile from Raymond—this one lasts a few seconds longer. This one blots out the sun.

I don’t feel like going home. Mom will be watching television, or trying to, but Sober Dad will talk the entire time—oddly, Mom doesn’t seem to mind this, but it makes me crazy. And then, when it’s time for me to go over to Raymond’s, I’ll have to tell them where I’m going. Mom will tell me to have fun with a creepy wink but remind me to be home by ten, and Dad won’t pay any attention since the conversation isn’t about him.

So I’ll just stay out until Raymond gets off work in an hour or so. I could go into the mall and… I don’t know what I would do there. I don’t have any money and there’s nothing I want to buy anyway. No, I’m happy riding my bike around the parking lot to kill time. I bike up the big hill—it’s much less steep on this side—and race back down, seeing how long I can keep my arms in the air like I’m riding a rollercoaster before I need to grab the handlebars again. I could do this all night.

At the far end of the mall, there’s a small, standalone building that’s been abandoned for years. Dad used to bring me there to teach me to ride because we don’t have a sidewalk. Later I realized he picked this location because the small white building was a liquor store before it closed, but still, those are probably my best memories of him. He was already a drunk before I was born—I’m not the first teenaged alcoholic in the family, but hopefully I’ll be the last—but he thought he had it well-controlled, like he was fooling everyone else. His sloppiness and rages came later.

I remember his hand on my back, the other hand on my wrist. You’ve got this, he would say. You can do anything, Joe. In retrospect, I can see how close he was to losing patience with how scared I was, how scared of everything I always was, but I didn’t see it at the time.

My phone buzzes.

“Is he with you?” Mom skips right past hello.

We’ve had a version of this conversation a hundred times. Joey, can you go find your dad? she’d ask and I’d bike around town, hitting every seedy bar downtown so often the bartenders knew my name. No one knew that I’d always be drunk too, not until I crashed my bike into a parked car and gave myself a concussion. Best accident I ever had.

“No,” I say. “We went to our meeting and he got his chip and he wanted pizza and… he never came home?”

“Joey.” The way she says my name it sounds like she’s blaming me somehow. “Can you find him?”

It’s not hard to track him down. There’s a bus stop across the street from the mall—also near a popular sports bar—where he’d often end up, and tonight it’s the first place I check.

“I’m sorry,” he says when he sees me, or tries to, though what actually comes out is a soup of undercooked syllables. “I fucked up.”

He looks terrible. Half his face is bloody and bruised, his eye swollen so bad I can barely see it, and the polo shirt he was wearing earlier is missing a sleeve.

I steer my bike behind the same bush I’ve hidden it behind a hundred times, with the same prayer that it won’t get stolen while I’m walking Dad home. I tug at his remaining sleeve. “Come on. Mom’s worried.”

I don’t ask him what happened. He’ll tell me anyway.

“Some guys,” he says as I struggle to get him to his feet. “Talking shit. Fuckers.”

“C’mon, Dad.” He isn’t volunteering to, so I wedge my arm beneath him, hooking my hand around his armpit, and tug him upward. A hundred times, we’ve done this. “You can tell me what happened on the way home.”

For once he doesn’t resist me and we both stagger to our feet.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. This part, at least, is new. “But… I did it… for… you.”

I glance up at the sky. He’s not going to make any sense so the stars are going to be my only real companion for the forty-five minutes it takes to get home. A map of places I’ll never go. “Oh, did you?”

He coughs up some blood into his free hand. Once that’s over, he speaks with a little more clarity. “Buncha homophobic dicks. I told them I have a gay son and they can’t say shit like that.”

I don’t say anything.

“I love you, Joe,” he says. “Only good thing I ever did.”

I still don’t say anything.

We walk a little further. Eventually he gathers enough balance to support his own weight and eases off my shoulder. My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s probably Raymond, wondering why I’m not answering.

“I’m sorry,” Dad says again.

I look up again. The stars have watched me chart this same path, over and over, and tonight’s no different. They don’t judge me.

“Okay,” I say.