Seeking Whom To Devour -- A Story About Rumors

The Bible says the Devil roams the Earth like a lion, seeking whom to devour. Rumors can be like that too. Someone’s loose talk spirals out of control and take out people’s lives and happiness like a vicious tornado; and much like a twister, gossip doesn’t much care about the carnage left in its wake. This is a story of how rumors swept a family out of town, and left a friendship crushed under the weight of innuendo and salacious gossip.

Loose lips do more than sink ships; they can take the captain and all hands down with them to a watery grave. No one died in this story, but then again, no one really was the same afterward either. I’ve changed the names of people and places out of respect of my old friend’s privacy and what little shards of our friendship that might still exist, the precious few pieces I was able to sweep up after thirty years. I feel I owe it to my memory of the childhood friends we used to be, to the friendship that never got the chance to live past two semesters of grade school. Our friendship was devoured by a rumor; one that still lives on even to this very day.

It was the beginning of another semester at Bronson Elementary in Perryville, Kentucky. The school sits atop a tall slope facing Broadway Street like a large castle. Outside the school is a replica of the Liberty Bell, created by the Truman administration and given to all of the fifty states back in the 1950’s. Today the bell sits inside a glass-lined atrium, but when I went to school there, it sat outside in front of the school on a brick pillar with a bronze placard.

That was where I first met John. John was the new kid in school, and he stood out head and shoulders over the tallest of us. He was pushing 6 foot tall and only in the sixth grade. He had bright blonde hair; the kind most women pay big bucks for in a salon, he had naturally. He was gangly and uncoordinated however, as if puberty had just started pulling his marionette strings to maneuver him towards adulthood and he hadn’t packed for the journey. He was dressed in his Sunday best for our first day of sixth grade. In fact, his Sunday best carried over into the other five school days his entire time at Broadway. He was also the only sixth grader I’d ever seen who carried a briefcase. He looked like a businessman on his way to the office. Yet this kid was the epitome of scared new meat on the first day of school; looking like a tie wearing alien in a sea of blue denim and T-shirts. He had a look on his face that seemed to say, “I’m scared, but I’m not going to let them know,” which only telegraphed his fear. I knew that look all too well.

I remembered my first day experience at Bronson Elementary that morning, and I could tell this kid was headed for a rough patch, the same one I hit literally on my first day of school at Bronson four years prior. I had started school there in the second grade, since moving to Perryville from Indiana. I was smaller than most of the kids, and my mother and I were poor as the proverbial church mice. I had second hand clothing and cheap shoes from the Dollar Store in town on my first day. Combined with my small size and my lack of sartorial splendor, I was a prime target for being teased by bigger and richer kids.
The teasing and bullying was epic for me, almost from the start. I was taking John’s measure and comparing myself to him, and I knew I had to at least find out why the newbie would court disaster dressing like that. As I look back at the time with a man’s hindsight, I realize now I had a kindred spirit in the making with John. I was a pariah at school, and John wasn’t going to fare much better, even with his nice clothes and his polished shoes.

 So I walked right up to John there as he was reading the plaque on the Liberty Bell replica and I asked, “Hey, are you going to school, or to church dressed like that??” John was startled out of his reverie, not hearing me approach. “Oh, man you scared the crap outta me!” he stated, “I didn’t know you was there. I was checkin’ out this bell… this is pretty neat. I’m new here. My name is John Davis.” He put his briefcase down and put his hand out to shake mine. I was surprised by the deep reediness of his young man’s voice; it had fluctuations that I hadn’t heard before but I know now as the beginnings of the maturation of male vocal chords. His voice was very pleasant and he had an easy, practiced smile; as if he was used to smiling in a professional setting and not out of any real emotional place. As I found out more about him, John was used to greeting new people all the time because of his parents standing in the community, didn’t like it much, but he didn’t want you to know it. His eyes were his calling card, though. His eyes were the brightest of blue skies. They were crisp and sharp like the air on a winter’s day where no clouds lived at all, but his eyes also had the promise the Caribbean Sea hidden behind the cold, a promise of summer just behind his irises.

 I took his hand to shake it, and I noticed he had sweaty palms, maybe from carrying a briefcase from his house down the street, or maybe from the nervousness of first day jitters. I wasn’t sure then, but I would quickly learn his size belied a gentleness and kindness that I was glad to know, and still am, even after all that happened later. “I’m Sam Moreland. I’m in the sixth grade this year. What year are you in?” “I’m in the sixth grade too, Sam. I just moved here from Lexington with my parents. We moved here ‘cause my dad is the new pastor of First Avenue Baptist Church. We live just down the street.” He said all that so fast; I could tell he was nervous about volunteering information about himself and his family. I told him that my mom and I moved here four years ago, and she worked at JJ’s Café just at the bottom of the hill. She was a waitress and sometimes a short order cook there.

He grinned with perfectly aligned teeth that would probably never need braces, a dentist’s dream. “Cool. Do you go there and eat sometimes for lunch?” “No,” I said, “we can’t leave school grounds without a parent or guardian until we go to high school. You’ll learn that and other things during your first week here. But what’s with the tie and dressy clothes? Are you going to a funeral or something today?” “Nope! I like to dress like this. I think guys look great all dressed up, ‘specially for their first day of school. You have to make a good first impression.” I thought to myself, “Oh you’ll make an impression alright. One of these clowns around here is going to have a field day picking on you.” But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I also felt like we could be friends, and I had none. Oh… there were a few guys, some comic book nerds with whom I traded comic books from time to time, but they would turn on me in a second if social survival dictated it, and I knew it. The survival of the fittest theory was never proven truer than in grade school, I believe.

Yet John was different. He was like me, a transplant into this foreign soil; houseplants whose roots would not find proper nourishment here in small town Perryville. In John’s case, he would get yanked out of this particular pot much sooner than I. Little did I know that I was going to be used as a tool to cause him much pain and humiliation and cause his family to leave their home and jobs behind. Such is small town life; a rumor gets bigger and more virulent whenever there’s even a hint of truth to it, to hell with who it hurts. If I had only known then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have approached John and struck up that first conversation, made that fateful connection. I should have known better. But sixth grade kids don’t know about things like collateral damage and rumor control. They only know what it means to grow up. Sometimes the process of growing up hurts. Losing a good friend to grist for the rumor mill is even worse.

As our time together began to develop, we realized we had much in common, but I felt he had a better situation than I did. He had both a mother and father at home. They loved John passionately like parents are supposed to do. He was their only child, while I was the youngest and only child left at home, with no siblings near my age. We were only a few months apart in age, but John was more childlike than I, less “street-smart”. Being a preacher’s kid he knew how to behave himself, but I could sense he wished he could relax and be just like everyone else. I found out the dress clothes regimen was from his father – his father thought that his son would follow his feet to the pulpit someday and expected him to dress up to prepare him for what he called “the straight and narrow path.” But he was still a kid.
He had the most impressive Star Wars toy collection I had ever seen, the beneficiary of two sets of grandparents with good incomes and a mother who doted on her only son. His house was huge compared to the small apartment I shared with my mom. I walked by his house a million times to and from school for years before he had moved to town. It was a two story parsonage that was built right on the other side of the parking lot of the church his dad gave his sermons. It was meant to house a larger family, with at maybe three kids roaming around; but John had two rooms of his own. His bedroom took up one room and another for all his toys and other memorabilia. It was an embarrassment of riches to me but John wasn’t one to lord it over me, in fact he was quite a generous person as befitted his standing as a preacher’s son. 

We started becoming good friends, I would come over to their house and play, and his mom would bake cookies and we’d watch TV or play Sorry or Aggravation. His dad was tall and very handsome and charismatic, rugged and very much a macho guy; he loved his sports and hunting. His mother was tall too, but very kind. She played piano at the church and taught John piano lessons every day, determined to make a pianist out of her son. He hated it, but would never tell his mother that, he confessed to me once as we were playing in his room of “once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away.”
This kind of life was a stark contrast of my personal experience, as I saw a fortunate kid with two parents and a moderately wealthy family. His father worked at the mines as well as preached, so his mom could stay home. My mom, however, worked all the time. There were times I went most of the day without seeing her until late in the evening. We were poor, and I knew it… but I wasn’t jealous of John. I admired his family and all they had, but I always coveted my space and my freedom much more than most kids my age. Most of that stemmed from being bullied mercilessly, but even now, I still love my times of solitude. But even I had to have a friend… and John was ready made for the job. It’s too bad people couldn’t respect what we were and what we were not to one another. But once you set some wheels in motion, no one can stop some lies from taking on a grotesque life of its own.

About halfway into the school semester, kids started to notice that John and I were friends. John became a target for the bullies, just as I feared. He was labeled the stuck up rich kid who dressed like a preacher and walked like a fag. He really caught hell over being my friend, but he didn’t back down from them in the beginning, not like I did. His dad taught him to stand up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves. But he had to have had second thoughts about our friendship. I know I did. It was around the time that I was beaten up so badly that I ended up having surgery that I realized these kids meant business.

John would never know about what happened exactly, but then again… he had a support system. I had a secret and a shame no level of friendship could begin to bridge the gap between what I could share and what I kept to my own thoughts. It didn’t matter much to my adversaries, however. I was a fag in their estimation and I was going to burn, and they were happy to supply the kindling. I didn’t know how badly John would end up burned right along with me, with the conflagration consuming our friendship. How could he? We had no idea how much a rumor could become its own entity and crowd out the truth with its vile little voice.

It started out that John and I were spotted kissing in the hall. Then the rumor mill got even more productive and reduced us to some sordid love affair. Girls started singing to us in the halls, “John and Sam, sitting in a tree, K-i-s-s-i-n-g!” Boys on the basketball team would shove us up against the walls in the hall and call us faggot and queer. It was all of the previous hazing I had experienced but multiplied by two. John was bigger than I, but not big enough to shield himself from the blitzkrieg of humiliation and harassment I had been experiencing for so long, and his portion if it was so undeserved. John was straight as an arrow. He and I were friends, and that was all there was to it.

I hadn’t kissed him, or he me… but that bit of truth didn’t have a shot in hell of being listened to. This lie did become the truth in most people’s eyes back then. It was awful. I felt so terrible about it.
The ultimate humiliation for John came one day when kids started calling his home at all hours telling them what a fag he was, with other parents calling and asking them to keep their kid away from that “Moreland boy if they cared about their reputation in this town.” I apparently had a rep that got its start from some stupid kids and now this damned kissing rumor. It ended up becoming such a nightmare my mother was called by John’s parents and asked if she would keep me away from John.
It was beyond heartbreaking to have to listen to my mother’s conversation on the phone with his parents and knowing I was the fulcrum of the whole damned mess. The pivot that would end up with John and our friendship ended, and within a few months, their family moving out of town; eventually his dad left the church and the parsonage behind. I walked by that house for years afterwards, never daring a backwards glance for fear of the rumors and the stories to start up again. The loss of John’s friendship taught me a terrible lesson about rumors and how quickly they can burn through a community, though people’s lives. The embers from that blaze still smolder, even now after three decades.
I never heard from John again. When our parents decided we wouldn’t see each other, we knew there was no going back, no way to keep our camaraderie alive. We avoided each other in the lunchroom; in the halls… it became a dance of avoidance in the rooms of our lives in a small town we both knew we both had to escape. He got lucky. He got away relatively unscathed compared to me. I envision he went on to become the preacher his dad wanted him to be. He had that image of how his life would be, while I would take a much longer, harder road to develop my own self-image; free of the distortion and haze of the rumor that decimated our friendship and shook up our families lives. 

I grew up gay in this hellish town, and I swore to myself I wouldn’t take another down with me for as long as I lived there. I never had another friend like John as a kid. I learned that lesson well, and any others that were around learned it too. Social pariahs like me were as radioactive as weapons grade plutonium. I never gave anyone else that opportunity to become irradiated by the fallout those nasty rumors created; I learned to live in my own hazmat suit of armor to keep everyone at bay. It was in everyone’s best interest, I told myself. I didn’t need another victim to mourn. My own burden I could carry. But I was unwilling to foist that yoke onto anyone else. 
Do you know what the worst part about all of this for me? Even to this day, I never got a chance to apologize to John or to thank him for our brief but very wonderful friendship. After that fateful phone conversation we broke off all contact out of fear of reprisals and of breaking our promise to our parents to stay clear of each other. Now I wish I could tell him and his family how grateful I was of their kindness and generosity, short-lived though it was. Maybe someday they will come across this story and realize there were and are no hard feelings on my part. I don’t blame John in the least for what happened, and after all this time, I no longer blame myself either.
It was a terribly unfortunate series of events that all started with a vicious rumor and had gotten so far out of hand. Even though I was gay, nothing funny ever happened or would have happened between us, unless you’d call his secret stash of Superman and Star Wars comics that I gave to him which he kept hidden under his mattress queer. I take comfort in the fact that we hopefully still share our love of heroism and all things Jedi. Those small simple things I hope is something we still can cling to; a fond memory impervious to all the rumor mills of the world. 


It is ironic as I type this last paragraph that I remember how fond he was of the original Star Wars movie, before all those retched cash grabs were created after the fact. We grew our friendship out of our mutual love of Star Wars: A New Hope. I hope he remembers our friendship in the same way. May the Force be with you, John, like it was when we shared the sixth grade experience as friends.