Big Diehl understood his nature, early-on. Raised as a cowkid on a ranch in northeastern Colorado, Diehl yearned for something more, something encompassing the truth of himself. He became a soldier. Served honorably in Iraq. Found precious love along the way. Yearned to return to Wyoming where his future awaited, where an unfinished reckoning beckoned.

This short story also contains a short teaser for the full length novel of the same name at the end.

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Chapter One

Diehl leaned against the wall inside the vintage World War Two wooden barracks, now a gym with free weights, a pull-up bar, an incline bench and two mats at either end of the room. Watched two boys wrestle, a circle of others sitting on the floor or on their knees at the edge of the mat, hollering at the duo to do this or that to the other, flung admonitions framed around the words pussy, wimp. Boys wrestling wore shiny nylon shorts, tennis shoes, flash of jockstraps.

Diehl had wrestled in high school, knew the moves, the holds, the essentials of tactics; knew the necessity of quickly learning your opponent’s weak points…a war of sorts. Knew the boys here were just working out the kinks of the Army, nothing serious. The screeve of testosterone wafted to the rafters. Neither of the boys appeared to know a damn thing about the fine points of the sport. Diehl smiled, wondered if they’d want to know. He could teach them. Didn’t have any shiny nylon to pull on, though, just his old sweats, cut off at the thighs. But, hell, would they let him into the circle? He was a three-stripe sergeant, with three years of the Army behind him. These boys were all privates, PFCs, all just out of high school or scooting by on a GED…good enough for the Army. Diehl was only a few years older. But he was part of what some of these boys called the management, the chain of command to which they, the privates and PFCs owed fealty. Not that fealty was necessarily deserved. Just demanded.

Mock battle over, the loser now sat with his back against the wall, breathed hard, watched the others leave the gym with the winner. Grabbed his T-shirt, dabbed sweat from his face, shoulders, chest. Saw Diehl, smiled, raised his hand in greeting.

They all knew Diehl. Diehl was the junior NCO who assisted drill sergeants and staff sergeants with small arms training. Diehl’d always show up for one company or another’s morning formation. Participated in PT, ran the two, three miles with the privates, corporals and their drill sergeants. Sang the songs, chanted the chants against the unison double-time clop of combat boots on tar top, cement streets or dirt trails. Diehl gave smiles and small talk to what were technically his subordinates, but who he’d come to think of as just kids — so much like himself, not so long ago — trying to figure out the particular nuances of the Army as well as the mysteries of themselves. Most of them had also seen Diehl in the gym, his body hard, defined, somebody whose wrong side you wouldn’t want to test, even though he was only five-eight. When Diehl worked out, he took on the look of caged anger, a bantam whose gray eyes projected a cold hardness, something the primordial part of yourself, there at the top of your spine, told you, without thinking about it, to avoid.

Diehl walked over to the PFC. Denman was his name, remembered from the tag on his fatigues.

“You did okay, Denman.” Diehl stood over him, watched him pull his T-shirt over his head.

“Guess I lost though, sarge.” Denman looked up, smiled from his blue eyes, a dark blue that Diehl thought he could get lost in if he looked long enough. The kid’s black hair was wet with sweat, his face carved fine; strong cheekbones, dimpled chin.

“Prob’ly did lose, but I think you could do better. I could give you some pointers. Wrestled a bit in high school. Could show you some moves, if you’re interested.”

Denman nodded. “Sure, why not. Maybe a rematch, huh?”

“Sure, couldn’t hurt.” Diehl thought about the prospect of touching the kid, feeling his skin, smelling his sweat, running his hand over nylon. “Tomorrow. Sunday would be a good day for it. Meet you here at, oh, say oh-eight-hundred. Work for you?”

“Yeah. That’d be great.”

“Good. Don’t eat much breakfast, though. Full stomach don’t mix with exercise.”

Denman smiled. “Okay, sarge, oh-eight-hundred.”

“You could call me Diehl, if you want. Kinda try to get away from the Army when we can. Drop the sarge stuff.”

“If you say so, sar…uh, Diehl.” Denman stood up, walked to the door.

Diehl watched Denman leave, saw an ease of movement, stepping more from the balls of his feet than his heels, ass flexing with each step. The kid had worked his body. Probably knew what it was to be prideful in seeing what he saw reflected in a mirror. “See you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here.” Denman turned and, once again, raised his hand in a wave.

* * * * *

Diehl stepped onto the mat, felt old memories surge. Sat down, placed his hands on the leather. He’d learned to keep the demon behind him since he last wrestled in high school. Demon wasn’t the sex, or just the feel of another man’s body against his. No, the demon still stumbled around in a tin house in Laramie. Someday he’d… No, he didn’t even want to give voice to it. Still, he let the thought simmer.

02. How does your hair look currently?
What hair? Short, as to hide the lack thereof.

03. What’s new in your life right now?

My horse, tentatively named “Shy.” He’s a four-year-old, not gelded, not broken. He’s a black-faced bay who, at this time of the year has only one thing on his mind. Guess what that is!
04. How many colours are you wearing now?
Gray sweatpants, white shirt, blue and white New York Giants ball cap.

05. Are you an introvert or extrovert?
Um, depends on the surroundings.

06. What was the last book you read?

“The Secret Knowledge of Water,” by Craig Childs.

08. Who is your favorite super hero?
Right now, today, it is Matthew Shepard.

09. Is there anything that has made you happy these days?
My horse, of course.

10. What’s your current obsession?
Writing.

11. How long does it take you to get ready in the morning?
To get ready for what? Writing? No time at all. Half a cup of coffee and I’m off to the computer.

12. What websites do you visit daily?
Facebook. MLR. NY Times.

13. What was the last story you wrote?
“Tucker Beene.”  A short story about a cowkid in East Texas who doesn’t give a shit about what others think.

14. What’s the last thing you laughed about?
My next door neighbor refusing to let me shovel snow off her sidewalk because, “Weed seeds are in the snow. If you throw the snow on my grass, I’m assured of weeds!”

15. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head?
“Closing Time” Leonard Cohen 

16. What’s the last movie you saw?
Gawd! So many are so awful. Not awful, is HBO’s “Gray Gardens.” Wonderful movie

17. Do you buy or download the movies you watch?

Buy.

An introduction of sorts is required. Or so I see it that way.

My path to this place, this bevy of practiced and prolific authors, began when I was eight or nine. Perhaps typically for those whose passion is words, the urge to get to the guts, to the core of the meaning and application of words, and to use those words to give substance to the roil of my developing personhood, I began to write. Risking cliché, the onerous weight of my youth besieged by a most Catholic mother-equal parts Italian and Irish (not a good combination under any circumstances)-and a father whose religion was the job, a cop who stomped the way of the grizzly through my childhood, I delved early into an understanding and expression of myself through words on paper. By fourteen or fifteen, my words hidden from the scrutiny of, firstly, my parents, secondly, the rest of the world, I scribbled often, feigning homework if asked. This passion for words so secret, so guarded, that I came early to an understanding that exposure of my passion would surely be seen as blasphemy; a sin against God, surely a sin against the perception of what my father believed a boy should be. You see, at fourteen or fifteen, black words on white paper exposed me for what I was: indubitably queer, (yes, that moniker, queer, acknowledged early on); I was essentially different, undeniably alone in an unkind world.

The tortured artist? Not really. Just the luck of the draw, I suppose

Words. Words. Words. Words bloomed from seeds planted, nurtured, scrutinized for their worth, savored for their… Well, savored as gems, diamonds, a currency that purchased the course my writing would take; coveted coin that served only to exacerbate an arousal of wonder and desire as I slip-slid into adolescence.

***
I recall sitting on the passenger side of my father’s huge Chevy as we went somewhere, through the center of Denver, up Colfax Avenue, crossing Broadway. Camelot destroyed by then; the promise of JFK lost in Dallas a year or two before, the world had become a harder, less fantastical place, a place less filled with wonder and possibility, a place, like Denver, suffering the inevitability of that singular loss of wonder that occurred on cold day in November, 1963.

“There,” he said, pointing to a marquee that rose above a doorway amongst many doorways on that stretch of Colfax Avenue, east from Broadway where, across the street, the Colorado State Capitol squatted, gold-domed and imposing, “is a queer place. Better you be found dead in that place than alive.”

The message, the warning from my father was not lost to me. I understood. A warning from a father to a son-Better dead than queer!-that conjured a planting of a significant seed that begged words, secretly written, hidden away. Words that served only to exacerbate my interest, my blooming lust, the carousal of hormonal imperatives that fed on the extraordinary notion that a queer place was there-with a marquee for Christ’s sake-just across the street from the Capitol of Colorado.

Did I realize then that my father’s admonition revealed only that I was not alone? Did I understand that only time was my nemesis? Did I recognize my determination that, upon majority, I would pass through that doorway, with the telling marquee above-The Court Jester-and see for myself what this queer thing was all about?

And, yes, I eventually passed through that doorway. But, by that time, the dimly lit interior exposed only a dearth of good men who had seen Stonewall as a thing of disquietude, encompassing the discomfort of an enforced intimation that no longer would their queer comfort be hidden from the light of day.
***
I was left then, at fourteen or fifteen, with only the smell of the boys after the track was rounded for the tenth time and, with the blow of a whistle, the herd, the white cotton gym-shorted herd of red-faced, quick-breathed boys turned toward the building, toward the steel door through which a flight of concrete stairs was bounded down to the subterranean, steamy, cavernous, steel-lockered and stone-walled, nakedly utilitarian phantasmagoria of water and soap, skin and catcalls, damp towels-the sound of the snap of towels against smooth, muscular asscheeks-and the bang of locker doors upon their steel casings and the hiss of the showers and the smell, the aroma of the boys when I myself was a boy. I remember it. I remember the boy who would always display a hard-on, proud, smiling, there, at those times when I was imploring the Sweet Virgin and all the Saints in Heaven to control my dick and my eyes so that no one would suspect, so that no one would catch me staring at that hard-on or an ass so lovely, so smooth, so tightly-muscled that even, yes, Sweet Jesus and all the Saints in Heaven would have envied my glance…me, a human male child so alive with the hot blood and the heady stuff of youth carousing through myself; and they, all the Saints in Heaven, only wisps of… What?

Yes, those seeds, those images begged words, encased in adamantine shells, as photographs that never pale with time, that never cease to have the intensity of the significance of the moment. How else to do that but with words, secretly written, hoarded against the scrutiny of those who would not have understood?
***
I read John Updike, “The Centaur,” at fifteen. A curious endeavor for one ensconced in the essentially parochial existence that Denver offered. Updike’s words opened chasms of possibilities. A reading of Whitman followed. Oh, with Whitman, the chasm evolved, erupted as an affirmation of what, by that time, colored inarticulate hunches to certainties. Struggles of self-awareness through black words on white paper were nothing new, nothing unusual, even for a young man hemmed in by the purple jut of the Rockies to the west, the vast spread of open prairie to the east.
Through matriculation at the University of Colorado, through a two-year intimacy with Uncle Sam, I sought not the offerings of writers of sultry detail encompassing the perambulations of man on man. No, I sought Edmund White, Andrew Hollinghurst, Felice Picano, Isherwood, Andrew Holleran and so many others. I suppose it is important to admit it was not the friction of the fuck that fascinated then, it was the stories behind the fuck, the words and images that led to the inevitability of the fuck that captured my interest, my passion.

I must admit also to a foray into the delightful grunge of Hollywood in the mid to late 70s that resulted in my first short story being published by a slick-backed magazine, “In Touch,” edited by another icon, Roger Margason, aka Dorian Gray.
Writers are, of course, an amalgam of seeds planted early in their lives; some nurtured, some eventually discarded. I have discarded a great deal. I’ve also nurtured some fabulous, some painful but nevertheless precious plantings that still, after all these years, serve the writer in me much as a potter’s fingers give form and substance to an otherwise useless lump of clay. How could it be otherwise?

And yes, I still lovingly grasp the seeds planted, those revelations from a time and place where such things, such images, such nutriment for the insatiable appetite of a boy’s imagination, provided the black words upon white paper that-so much more worthy than the truths gleaned from a therapist’s couch-gifted me with an insight into myself, lavished me with a caring muse who still, thankfully, sits upon my shoulder, licking his finger, pointing at a word or phrase brightly lit upon the screen and says, “Yes,” or “No, that simply will not do.”
So, I sit at the MLR table, expecting nothing other than the honor of sharing space with those whose lives perhaps somewhat mirrored mine. I revel in the company of such men, women; of those who will be served that meal, while I salivate with the specter of actually becoming worthy of joining their feast; a celebration of their words that, if nothing else, give voice to the urge upon urge to reveal the truth of ourselves, the essential truth of what it is we have all become: chroniclers of the joy, the singular fascination of man for man.