Appetite

Prodigal

49 Prodigal This morning I yelled at a student for texting in class. Put that away, I don’t want to see it. I wanted to scream: Get fucked. I wanted to humiliate her, make her feel how I feel: There’s the faggot professor. They don’t say it like that, but I feel the looks, the not-quite-whispered whispers, the disgust of what I do with men cracked across their faces. I want to say: It’s all true. There’s nowhere I won’t put a cock, and I see a lot of me in you. Am I really back in West Virginia? Did I really leave New York City? It’s hard to remember, here where everything is green. I was afraid I’d get AIDS from the toilet seat, I heard a girl say on the street my first day in town. And in the store with the confederate flags I interrupted a joke: How many fags, big laugh, Oh, can I help you? A person who lives in the same state as his parents, one of three gay men in a tiny college town, someone who thinks he’s always dying: so many things I never wanted to be again. It doesn’t work like that, I tell the students. It’s not A to B to C. It’s over and over and all at once. But it’s hard to see that past all these trees, fucking trees. ...