For Rent or For Real

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Ted sat in a coffee shop waiting for Erik. He had been home for a week from The Golgotha Clinic for Reparative Therapy. Since their meeting with Mr. Jennings a month before leaving for the clinic, his stepfather had kept him a near prisoner. He was allowed out of his room for meals and to go to school, but there was no socialization with friends—certainly not Erik. Mr. Davis had also limited Ted’s contact with Jonah and Joshua, his twin brothers, lest he contaminate them. They were almost ten years younger than he. Ted wondered what their understanding of his situation was.

Ted had been given permission to go to his high school graduation but his stepfather hadn’t attended. Only his mom and brothers had been present. There had been no celebration of his achievement despite having passed all his classes with good grades, confirming his admittance to State. The summer was now over and he would be leaving for school shortly. He wanted to see his best friend before he left. So on the pretext of needing to shop for clothes and supplies for college, his stepfather grudgingly permitted him to leave the house. In that way Ted would be able to meet Erik in the coffee shop at the mall.

Ted sat idly stirring his coffee, thinking how in just a few days he’d be free from his virtual penitentiary. He had thought that having successfully completed the treatment program at Golgotha, Harold would have relented some, but he was wrong. The old man seemed to be convinced that until Ted was out of the house he had to guard against any satanic attack which Ted’s condition—or previous condition—might invite. He would miss his mom, and his brothers and most of all Dixie, his little mutt dog, but he would be glad to be free.

When Ted looked up he saw Erik coming through the door. Ted smiled as his friend made his way toward Ted’s booth. Ted rose and greeted him with a half hug and a fist bump.

“I’ll go get me a latté mocha spice,” Erik said.

“A latté mocha spice! Man, I thought I was the one sent to the looney bin to be cured of being gay!” Ted laughed.

Erik laughed, too. “Shut the f**k up.” He punched Ted on the shoulder. “Can I get you a refill?”

“Sure, but make mine a double espresso—that’s a real man’s drink! I learned that at the clinic,” Ted said with a wink.

“What?” Erik asked. “A f*****g big football player like you had to be taught how to be a man?”

“Never mind. I’ll tell you about it. Go get our coffee.”

In a few minutes Erik returned to Ted with their beverages. He slid into the booth. “So, tell me, what was this Golgotha place like? Was it as bad as the name sounds? Did they really teach you what kind of coffee to drink?”

“Yeah they did actually, and yes, in some ways, it was as bad as the name makes it sound. But mostly it was a joke. Lucky for me I didn’t really need to be there since I’m not gay. So I got out pretty quick.”

“Tell me about it?” Erik urged, taking a sip of his latté.

“Well,” Ted began thinking back on his time at the clinic. “You’re there for at least two, two week sessions and you repeat the session if you don’t pass the evaluation of whether or not you’re still gay. I was there for three sessions.”

“If you aren’t gay, why did you have to stay for an extra session?”

Ted hesitated. Did he want to tell Erik about Kenny Stintson? Instead, he said, “I figured staying an extra two weeks would convince the old man I was really cured, and besides, as bad as Golgotha was, staying there was a better deal than being home under house arrest. The real bonus was, staying cost my dad another thousand bucks!”

“What did they do to you to cure you?” Erik asked with a wink.

“Well, we had Bible study every day with the same old bullshit about how homos are going to hell just for being queer. Then you had a daily lame counseling session where they taught you how to walk and talk like a man. They went over what real men should be interested in and what things to avoid doing. That’s where they teach you which coffee to drink and how to dress. No, really,” Ted said in response to Erik’s incredulous look.

“That doesn’t sound all that bad—just dumb and boring as hell.”

“That part was, but they did some stuff that was really pretty awful, too.”

“Like?”

“Every day you had two therapy sessions: aversion and reinforcement. In aversion they show you videos of guys doing it with each other and play loud screeching sounds and pipe in rotten egg smells to make you think gay s*x is repulsive. If that didn’t work they attached electric clips to your nuts and shocked you.”

Ted thought of Kenny and how he would cry himself to sleep at night following his aversion sessions.

“Holy f**k! That’s criminal! How can they get away with that?” Erik exclaimed.

Ted shrugged. “I don’t know. I never got the shock treatment. When they asked how I felt about the videos I just said I thought they were disgusting.” Once more he thought of Kenny. “But some guys really want to be cured and they let them do it because they think it really will fix them.”

“Yeah, fix them all right. They might just as well cut your balls off. What about the other therapy? What did you call it, re…?” Erik asked, seeming very interested.

“Reinforcement. In that one you watch Victoria Secret type chicks, doing strips and playing with themselves. They encourage you to jack-off. They supply you with a box of Kleenex and a tube of lube. They check the room after and see if there are any used Kleenex full of c*m in the wastebasket.”

“And that’s supposed to make you straight?” Erik shook his head in disbelief.

“I guess,” Ted said, taking another drink of his coffee.

“So, how do they decide if it worked?”

“At the end of every week you have an evaluation. There are two parts. One is a written test. The other is an interview with Reverend Hollis, the head of the clinic, to go over the test results.”

“Couldn’t you lie on the test and to this Hollis guy, just to get out of there?”

“Sure,” Ted said, thinking of how he had lied to skew the test in favor of making himself look more straight. “But, like I said, most of the guys at Golgotha sincerely wanted to be cured. So they’re honest even if that meant staying for another session.”

“So, what’s next now that you’re cured?” Erik asked with a chuckle.

Ted was glad to move on from talking about his experiences at the clinic. He’d thought he was ready to tell his friend the whole story but when it came right down to it, he wasn’t sure he was.

Ted had met Kenny, his roommate. He had befriended the handsome, slender, bespectacled redhead and stayed an extra two weeks to help the guy get free from the clinic. Kenny was a young gay man who had been desperate to be cured of his homosexuality. He was very religious. His father was a minister. Kenny was sure he was headed straight for Hell for being gay. Kenny had been at the clinic for several months, trying his best to apply their twisted thinking and methods to affect a cure. But to no avail. He remained gay and failed every test, responded with raging hard-ons to the same s*x videos and was totally turned off by the women shown in reinforcement videos.

Ted had devised a plan to help Kenny get out of Golgotha, end the tortures he endured from the nut clips, and get a certificate of straightness even though he was still as gay as the spring flowers in May. The plan had had several parts. First, Ted had to convince Kenny he wasn’t going to burn for eternity just because he was gay. This took several late night discussions in which Ted used his own extensive knowledge of what the Bible really had to say on the subject. Then he persuaded Kenny to stop repressing the urge to jack-off—outside of reinforcement—as was advised by the counselors. In the past, saving his c*m had always backfired. Kenny was so horny he gave in to his arousal during aversion sessions watching the man on man s*x, despite the noise and noxious smells. So by the time he got to the sexy female models he was spent. When Kenny had admitted this to his counselors it had led to the application of the shock treatment which he’d been enduring for several weeks.

In order to make it look like Kenny was getting off during reinforcement, Ted had come up with the idea of mixing shaving cream with water to make fake c*m. Kenny would smuggle it into reinforcement in a plastic bag, put it on a Kleenex and leave it as proof he’d c*m. In order to handle the arousal during aversion, Ted encouraged Kenny to masturbate often. That part of the plan almost boomeranged on Ted as the pair often jacked off together, causing Ted to question his conviction that he was straight. Ted couldn’t deny he was aroused by the sight of Kenny’s big c**k in its nest of red pubic hair. And there was that one night when the two had lain together, rubbing their hard d***s between them until they came, then finished the night in each other’s arms. Ted didn’t want to think of the implications of that.

The final portion of their plot was for Kenny to overcome his addiction to being honest to a fault and lie like hell on both the s****l orientation inventory and in the interview with Reverend Hollis. They rehearsed that part of the scheme over and over at the end of each week before the evaluation sessions. Finally, Kenny could convincingly state, with a modicum of conviction, that he no longer felt much attraction to men and couldn’t wait to copulate with a woman. This was really the big test as Reverend Hollis tried to trip up his interviewees by placing a hand on their thigh or shoulder, and giving them affectionate hugs.

The plan worked, however. Kenny was declared straight, as was Ted, and both left Golgotha the same weekend. Their parting was another moment of uneasiness for Ted as they hugged tightly in their room the morning of departure, Kenny declaring his eternal gratitude to Ted for freeing him from Hell. Ted had felt his c**k starting to harden as Kenny’s chest pressed against his. He could feel Kenny’s hard c**k alongside his through their pants. He’d thought Kenny was going to kiss him and for a split second Ted knew he would kiss back, if it had come to that. It never did.

“What’s next?” Ted asked, repeating Erik’s question and bringing himself back to the present, shifting to accommodate the slight plumping of his d**k in his whities. “Well, I leave for State a week from Saturday. I’m not sure how I’m going to afford it. The old man says he can’t pay a cent. He said it serves me right because if I hadn’t been a queer, I would have been a good enough football player to get a scholarship. But I think it’s just more payback for the gay thing and the money it cost him by my staying the extra two weeks at Golgotha. So, I’ll be getting student loans, if the old man will fill out the forms, and probably looking for a job. But it’s worth it to get away from him and his bullshit.”

The two friends talked for a while longer about Erik’s own plans for college, and then, wishing each other well, they parted company. Ted watched Erik walk away then turned toward the mall to finish shopping for his new life.