So Long, Chester Wheeler(27)

“I have no idea what that means,” he said gruffly.

“No, you wouldn’t, would you?”

We drove in silence for a blissful couple of seconds. I kept scanning the mirrors, hoping there was no one right next to me. Because the damned vehicle was so wide. It made me edgy.

There was always someone right next to me.

“But back to my original question,” Chester said.

“No. Not back to your original question. I’m trying to drive this thing, Chester. I’ve never driven anything this big before and I find it stressful. So could you please be quiet for a minute and let me drive?”

He imitated a motion of zipping his lips.

In my peripheral vision I watched him stare out the huge passenger window. He almost seemed hurt that I had shushed him—which made my head feel like it wanted to explode, because I’d been more polite in the asking than Chester ever was to anybody.

I pulled onto the expressway, set up camp in the right lane, and just drove. A lot of my tension eased out of me. Marshall had been right. Once you get it out on the highway, it’s a different deal.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m obviously going to regret this. But what is your big question about LGBT people?”

Call it curiosity. Call it stupidity. Or maybe I just knew him well enough to know it was coming out sooner or later, and I wanted to get it over with.

“I would never ask that question,” he said. “I don’t even know what all those letters mean.”

“You know what I’m saying, though.”

“Right. I suppose. More or less. You know, you can’t just stay in the right lane all the way through to Arizona.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because it’s too slow. All that merging traffic. It’ll add too much time to the trip.”

“It’ll add minutes to the trip. Stop being so damned impatient. I’m not changing lanes in this boat any more often than I have to.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“Probably. Now kindly leave me alone until I do.”

He pitched right back in without missing a beat.

“Anyway, here’s what I always want to know about . . . you people. You could already see it was going to be a much harder life. You know . . . your way. So why do it?”

At first I just drove for a few hundred feet with my mouth open.

Then I asked, “You think it’s a choice?”

“Oh, I know it is.”

“You’re saying you chose to be straight.”

“No, you don’t choose that. That’s just normal. It just is.”

“How can one sexuality be a choice and another be ordained?”

“I don’t know how we got religion into this, but it’s just what is, my friend.”

“You’re absolutely impossible,” I said. “And I’m not your friend.”

He had no immediate argument to that, so we just drove for several minutes.

The Winnie didn’t have any kind of navigation, so I had my phone in the cupholder, open to the map app. I was glancing at it, trying to figure out how best to get to the 90 South toward Erie, Pennsylvania, without backtracking east.

“It sucks that I ask you a legitimate question,” Chester said, “and you won’t even bother to address it.”

“There isn’t much to address,” I said. “When you grow up, you have attractions. You can’t change them.”

“You can change what you act on.”

“Just live a loveless, celibate life? Is that your suggestion? Why would I do that?”

“Because it’s so hard. You know. Being queer. Or whatever I’m supposed to call it.”

“Here’s another solution, then, Chester. There’s nothing hard about being gay except homophobia. So how about you just stop being so damned homophobic and then my life is happy and easy and the problem is solved?”

“Jeez,” he said. “You don’t have to bite my head off.”

“I really think this trip is going to go a lot better with a minimum of chatting.”

Oddly, that worked.

We drove in blissful silence for hours.



Pleasant surprise number one—and possibly the only one—for the trip: the motion of the road put Chester to sleep.

We drove until after nine o’clock that night, Chester’s head drooped onto his shoulder. Also he was snoring lightly and drooling.

By the time I used my phone to find an RV park where we could stop, I felt as tired as I had ever been in my life. And it was beginning to dawn on me that it wasn’t really the driving that was the problem. Sure, the Winnie was a challenge, but I’d begun to adjust to it.

What I found exhausting was Chester. And not only on the road, either. He had been exhausting me for days, draining my energy, grating on my nerves, and wearing me down. I just hadn’t allowed myself to admit it. I had put up a wall to keep him away from my tender inside places, and I’d been spending days pretending he hadn’t breached it at will multiple times a day.

He sputtered awake when I stopped the Winnebago near the RV park office.

“What? Where are we?” he asked, wiping his drooly lower lip on the shoulder of his shirt.

“Barely past Indianapolis. As best I can figure, if I could’ve brought myself to drive another half hour or forty-five minutes, we’d have made it to Terre Haute.”