FILM / Superstar / Reece Gritzmacher
Image © Broadway Pictures | SNL Studios
Call me Molly Shannon as Mary Catherine Gallagher. You may as well, Father. I'm that high school student with thick-framed glasses and an insatiable need for love and stardom. Every day, I wrap my arms around a tree and make out, moving my hands up and down bark. Except, no tongue from me. Except, I do not kiss the tree wishing it was Will Ferrell as Sky-Corrigan-the-most-popular-kid-in-school. No, I love on the tree for the tree. But then, alone in bed, I am the nerd longing and hungry for lips. And I've imagined for weeks.
Distracted in Zion, how many minutes gone to hours did I collect red dust on my legs and hop scotch across the creek while feeling his lips on mine, then mine against his neck and nape? How many times was the channel set to him on top, already inside? Sister, I'm just as surprised as you are. Father Ritley, I'd rather not confess how many times I've sat on his lap and rocked into him as we kissed. What mindreader would know I once believed in a hard boundary to my sexuality, an instant “no” to reassure me that I did not like boys? No, not that way, no, not boys born with penises. And oops, I'm thinking of my tongue light and flicking, dancing. Mouth filling with saliva to help me take him. Then, no, before, to tease elsewhere. I am not supposed to think these thoughts. To want this. I don't need your stares, Father. I swear I don't. I have my own questions. Where are the old guardrails—the boundaries of desire confirming I am this and not that, I do not do that or this?
And here I wonder how to refer to a penis. How awkward. Do I say cock? Do I say dick? All these words that have long felt dirty and crass—do I want them inside me? Do I even know which spots they'd hit? Does he moan or grunt? Is he silent? How does his sweat smell, dripping down his back? Are his abs defined, is there hair between his legs?
I was my normal queer self, my normal pays-no-mind-to-boys-as-anything-other-than-fellow-humans-and-friends self, my only-engages-in-emotional-and-physical-intimacy-with-women-and-trans-folks self—not that you want to hear that, Sister—until I noticed the sunlight illuminate him in his bedroom during a Zoom class. Golden boy, I thought, then I kept listening to my professor. Even then, I continued existing as my normal self. Then class ended, and golden boy, boy only a thumbnail over Zoom, a small blip in my week, ran past my apartment just as I stepped outside, both of us newly freed from our screens. In that moment, Sister, something in me began to crack. Inched me closer toward the armpit-sniffer falling over chairs trying to make it to the stage.
I can make peace with wanting men. I can be brave. But still I call golden boy a boy, because if I think of men as boys, it’s easier to believe I’ll survive.
Still, I wonder if there's any point to this stepdance. Can any cisgender man be truly into a person with a vagina who will never fit into “girlfriend” or “woman” or “wife”?
And come, my dear, into this cold shower, I say to myself: nothing indicates he is into me and wrestling with similar desire.
Reece Rowan Gritzmacher lives in a mountain town surrounded by ponderosa pines, but grew up hugging mossy trees in the Pacific Northwest. Their poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming on Barrelhouse, Rejection Letters, Eunoia Review, Sundog Lit, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. They work at a public library and serve on the board of the Northern Arizona Book Festival.
