*Hello everyone. Just a quick reminder, they do not use condoms, but this is set in the early seventies, and the AIDs scare did not begin until late seventies/early eighties. I endorse condoms 100%, but in this case it wasn't realistic. Darryl wouldn't have put a condom on because Jared was a virgin, and Jared was too naive to ask.
This is the last chapter of Shy Jared, glad to be down to three threads! Takes a lot of stress away!
All characters are 18+*
*
Jared had always believed in God. God had always been more like a friend to him, someone to confide in, someone who had always understood him, someone who was closer to him then anyone else in the world, even Darryl.
Even when Jared knew for sure he was gay, nothing could have gotten between him and his belief. Church however, was a different story.
Never was there a building or a place that Jared despised more then the little brick church. Reverend Phillip Dean was the kind of pastor who knew how to get the congregation inspired, he was a young man with a lionlike mane of hair and a mobile mouth and thundery eyes. Several of the women who came to church hung on his every word, from the wide eyed teenagers to the stooped old women.
Phillip Dean preached of salvation in everyday life. He often preached about controversial issues, and this week, he was preaching about homosexuals.
Jared sat in the middle pew with his mother and father, and his twin brothers Robert and Frederick, more commonly referred to as Bobby and Freddy. Jared was stifled in a pale blue dress shirt and uncomfortably warm wool dress pants and his ill-fitting dress shoes. The dark blue tie was uncomfortably tight and the collar was sticky with sweat. His hair was combed down flat on one side and it felt sticky and uncomfortable with the pomade his father insisted on him putting in.
"You're hair is getting too long, you look like a gol darn hippy. we'll get it cut after church but for now just slick some pom' in it so it doesn't look like you just woke up!"
The Davis family had very strict ideas about swearing.
So Jared was uncomfortable and hot, while a handsome preacher with thunder-eyes stood on the cherrywood pulpit and told them that homosexuals were spurning God.
"Let me tell you folks something!" The Reverend rolled up the sleeves of the white robe he was sweating in, revealing tanned and hairy forearms, several women in the congregation gasped. "The worst part about this, this invasion of the good God-fearing people in America, is that these degenerates choose their lifestyle. Jim Foster of the so-called 'Alice B Tokias movement' is challenging the truth of the matter, and as are the Doctors and Psychologists of this nation!"
Jared had a guilty, yet pleasant fantasy of bringing the huge bible on the pulpit--it was a beautiful bible, the pages edged in real gold leaf and the outside bound in white leather--down on the Reverend's handsome head. Bringing it down again and again to silence that steady flow of poison that leaked from his chiseled jaw and silver tongue.
"For the past fifty years or so, we have considered these Godless people as suffering from a kind of disease. And this Foster, there is not a word I can use to describe this kind of treachery to God and all else. Foster says that it is not a disease, and that people are born this way, and that there is nothing wrong with it."
"Because I can tell you what it is! There have been countless studies that prove that Homosexuals can be CURED! Not of a disease of the flesh, but a malady of the SPIRIT! There are treatments that have been founded not by some upstart DOCTOR in a LAB, but by the good Ministers and people of the CHURCH!"
Jared felt his eyes sting. The congregation was nodding and agreeing (many of the women were agreeing fervently, or as the good Reverend might say, FERVENTLY) the pleasant and cheerful faces of many of the people who had known him since he was a child were grotesque with belief. If any of these people learned who he really was at this exact moment, they would tear him apart.
---
After church, the adults stayed in the cool shady outdoors to discuss the sermon, while the youth, ages twelve through eighteen, discussed inside, and those younger stayed in another room to color pictures of Noah's ark and Jonah getting swallowed by the big fish.
Jared could go to the adult discussion if he wanted to, but considering what had been said during the day's sermon, that would be a bad idea. So he was sourly disappointed when Owen Pedanski, the sweaty, balding youth leader, decided to bring it up for the youth meeting.
Jared pretended to be bored. "I thought we were supposed to discuss Exodus today?"
Owen shrugged. "Glad to see you showing some interest Jared, but Exodus is a big chapter and I think we can wait until next week to do a more in-depth analysis. For now I think we need to discuss homosexuality. Now I know that you are all uncomfortable with this, and I am too, but we honestly need to just learn what it is in order to know what God feels about it."
For once the other teens were dead silent. Normally there were jokes and discussion, but now they were listening with grotesque intensity.
"Now the first chapter in the Bible that discusses this...issue...is in the book of Leviticus, where all of God's rules are being listed, and God states very clearly that 'If a man lies with another man as he would a woman, then they shall be stoned until dead'."
Jared interrupted, he couldn't help it.
"Isn't Leviticus a bad chapter to take advice from?"
Suddenly all eyes were on Jared. Several of the other youth were looking at him with shocked and prissy expressions, and one girl actually gasped.
Jared had to continue. "Well it also states that if a virgin gets raped then she has to marry whoever raped her and all he has to do is pay a fine and sacrifice two castrated goats by burning them to ashes at an alter!"
Owen flushed. "That has nothing to do wi--"
"Or, if any of the women here have their period, they are unclean, and everything they touch has to be washed and anyone who touches them will be unclean till sundown."
Shocked giggles were breaking out and Jared gained a little confidence. "Same thing if they give birth. Your wife gave birth to a beautiful baby girl a month ago Mr. Pedanski, but in Leviticus, you have to burn two goats, or if you cant afford a goat, two pigeons, and everything and everyone she touches will be unclean until sundown, and she is not allowed to enter a building of worship, and the child cant be named, for 66 days! It only would have been 33 if it was a boy..."
Jared had forgotten briefly that Mr. Pedanski could punish him.
"JARED DAVIS YOU SHUT YOUR GODDAMN TRAP AND KNEEL IN THE CORNER!!"
Uneasy laughter at that, none of the adults had ever sworn at them in church. The snickers intensified when Jared flushed and tried to walk with dignity to the corner where he would have to kneel on grains of uncooked rice until the discussion was over.
---
Of course his parents learned. Jared walked slowly to the family station wagon with his stippled sinner's knees and waited for what he dreaded most of all. His family wasn't violent, but they punished by taking away privileges. Privileges like the 'study group' that he stayed after school for.
Jared cringed, if he had to stay away from Darryl, he didn't know what he was going to do.
Bobby and Freddy were both very husky ten-year-olds, while Jared was a very small eighteen-year-old. He could probably still beat them if he really had to, but he really didn't like fighting, so he didn't argue when they jostled him for the window seats.
Alfred Davis wasn't that angry. He hated Owen for selling them a shitty car that had broken down after about a hundred miles, and despite trying to act stern, he was not-so-secretly happy that his son had managed to break Pedanski's temper. Helen Davis, on the other hand was so furious that her mouth was a tight white slit and she muttered the entire way home. Neither of them spoke to Jared on the way home, punishments were reserved for the parlor.
After the church, the parlor was probably Jared's second least favorite place to be. It was pretty, he supposed. The furniture and carpet and wall paper were in moss-green, dove-grey, and rose-pink. An antique german clock ticked away on one moss-green wall, and the other three were decorated by oil landscapes done by a distant ancestor. Helen Davis was an amateur genealogist. But the room was filled with bad associations.
The parlor was where the wake for Grampy Thomas had been held. Grampy had been Jared's favorite relative in the whole world, a wizened old man who swore like a sailor behind his stern wife's back and always had treats for his grandchildren, and who told fantastical stories about WWII, and storming the beach at Normandy.
The parlor is also where relatives had come to grieve for Helen when she had a miscarriage.
Whenever relatives visited, it was always in the parlor, wearing starched shirts and tight shoes and not allowed to talk but not allowed to fall asleep or even yawn or you would be in BIG TROUBLE.
As Jared sat on a rose-pink armchair, hearing that clock tick dryly on the moss-green wall and tapping his toes nervously on the dove-grey carpet, he realized that he would like nothing better then to destroy this room. Pour gasoline on the silk wallpaper and smash the clock and put his foot through the paintings and take an axe to the furniture and piss on the rug.
Helen and Alfred Davis came in. Alfred was trying to look stern, but failing to look that serious, while Helen looked as serious as a heart attack. Jared could feel light sweat becoming heavy sweat under the arms of his uncomfortable blue shirt.
The attack came as many had before. They took turns, and Jared was expected to sit there, sweating with his head down unless they barked at him to look at them, and with his mouth shut unless they barked at him to speak. They took turns, but he had no rest.
The parlor was the place where you were never following the rules, no matter how hard you tried.
He was near tears when the lecture was near its end. The German clock had ticked dryly and slowly, and nearly forty minutes had passed from when Jared's parents had entered the room. He hated how his parents could make him feel, worthless and stupid and inconsequential. Like he wasn't even their son.
