My body’s inner upheavals were compounded by outer ones. I had a tremendous growth spurt the summer before eighth grade, six inches and twenty pounds in just three months. This explosion coincided with daily weight-lifting sessions overseen by Coach Johannsen at our local YMCA, and by the end of the summer my body’s soft meadows and gentle valleys had transformed into hardpan plains and sheer cliffs. My voice started changing, too, deepening in fits and starts like a 747 making its final descent through a nasty storm. My metamorphosis caused a dramatic reversal in my social prospects, making me someone boys wanted to befriend and girls wanted to date; and yet I knew that caution was paramount in a town where “faggot” and “fairy” were the epithets of choice. So rather than turn into some big man on campus, I became an amiable cipher: I was friendly with male classmates but didn’t trust myself enough to develop any real friendships, and I went on enough dates with girls to avoid suspicion but used the Catholicism I bought less every mass as an excuse to squirm out of anything sexual.
Realizing I was gay placed me in better stead than many pre-teens like me, kids who also lived in little conservative towns in the heart of the heart of this country, but my self-knowledge only led me to face the next, even bigger quandary. I was indisputably gay and indisputably a football player, and yet all I had to do was look at the swimsuit editions of those same Sports Illustrateds, or listen to my teammates argue over which of our cheerleaders had the best tits, to know that “gay” and “football player” did not equate. It was like the transitive law I was learning about in math class, in which A=B, A=C, and so B=C—except that everywhere I looked, everything I heard, everything I was taught was telling me B could never, ever, equal C.
I hoped, prayed, that this irreconcilability would change—but for now I funneled all my passions into the game, and at thirteen I was rewarded with the glorious experience of seeing my talent for football catch up to my enthusiasm for it. I was the only freshman at Sillitoe High to make varsity that year, and by the fourth game of the season I earned a starting spot, the first freshman in a decade to do so. As the weak-side outside linebacker, aka Will linebacker, I led our team in tackles, sacks, and interceptions.
I capped that season with my favorite performance of my entire career. It was a Friday night in early November, blustery and biting cold, the sky low with thick clouds that glowed purple in the way they do when snow is imminent. We were down three points with eight seconds left in the fourth quarter, and our opponent had the ball. The offense and defense broke their huddles and trotted up to the line of scrimmage. The opposing quarterback grinned as he approached center, clearly preparing to take a knee and run out the clock. My teammates were resigned and halfheartedly got into their stances. But not me—as soon as the ball was snapped, I knocked the center ass-over-teakettle, and he in turn tripped the quarterback, causing him to fumble. I caught the ball on the bounce and ran away with the game, sprinting eighty yards down the field. I wasn’t usually a demonstrative player, but I felt so exuberant, so invincible on that run that I flipped over the goal line, hugging the ball to my chest as I landed on my back in the end zone, feeling my body sink into the brittle, delightfully cold grass. I panted, staring up at the clouds—which at that exact moment started to pour down snow, like ticker tape.
Coach Johannsen and my parents waited in the school parking lot after the game.
—There he is!
Coach Johannsen ran up to me, draping his arm around my shoulders and telling my parents:
—You guys won’t have to worry about college tuition. Not with this one.
On the way home, Mom and Dad wondered if he was right, if I could earn a full football scholarship. They had made this suggestion before, but in the past had mentioned it in the same offhand, head-pat way they would when, say, I brought home a miniature cabin made of Popsicle sticks and they said maybe I could be an architect. But there was nothing offhand in their voices now, only a plain, heavy need. Three months earlier, they had both been pink-slipped by the mining company after twenty years of loyal service. Since then Dad had hustled temporary gigs while he looked for a permanent job—stints at the nuclear waste project up in Rocky Flats, at the Coors Beer HQ in Golden—while Mom got hired as a phone wrangler at the Jefferson County Courthouse, forced to fend off the advances of a handsy district attorney so we could be on the state’s health plan. I wanted to help my family but hadn’t known how—it’s not like my paper route was going to dig us out of our ever-deepening financial hole.
But that changed with Coach Johannsen’s pronouncement about my prospects for a scholarship, and
