Leave Myself Behind Read online

  Outstanding praise for Bart Yates and his debut novel LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND

  A Main Selection of the Insight Out Book Club A Finalist for the Insight Out Violet Quill Award

  “Ever since J. D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye, authors have been hoping to create the next Holden Caulfield and critics have hoped to crown a character with that distinction. The latest temptation for comparison is surely Leave Myself Behind, a debut by Bart Yates. Yates’s main character and narrator, Noah York, has Caulfield-style teenage authenticity. Noah’s voice is more than just honest or original; it’s real. The tone of his observations will ring true for anyone who has been around teenagers. This isn’t just a novel about a boy dealing with discrimination and fighting for acceptance. Nor is Noah a character for whom sexual orientation is the only developed personality trait. We don’t see Noah as simply a gay teen or fatherless child. We see him as a character dealing with life. That’s what makes Leave Myself Behind so great.”

  —The Plain Dealer

  “Noah York is seventeen, but don’t let his age fool you. Noah’s blunt, funny and dead-on narrative will lend this memorable tale of young-but-cynical love a fresh resonance with readers of all ages, gay or straight, male or female. A gripping tale of buried secrets and emerging attractions, but more than that, a story of the familial ties that bind as they grow stronger and pull apart.”

  —Brian Malloy, author of The Year of Ice

  “With Leave Myself Behind, Bart Yates gives us both the laugh-out-loud and refreshingly sincere coming-of-age story we’ve been missing all these years.”

  —Instinct

  “A dazzingly brilliant debut novel . . . Bart Yates, where have you been hiding? Leave Myself Behind is not only well written, it is at once hilariously comic, disturbingly sad, achingly profound, and just plain good reading! Some novels just get to you and this is one. Bart Yates, please write another and another. You have so much innate talent and gift for storytelling that it is simply mind boggling! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED reading for just about everyone who loves good books.”

  —The Gay Read

  “Tart-tongued and appealing, young Noah York is living through the worst and best three months of his life. In Bart Yates’s gripping debut novel, Noah spins a tale that is by turns refreshingly strange and poignantly familiar. What he discovers—about the haunted and haunting past, the always vexed relations between parents and children, the bittersweet mysteries of love—will shock and surprise and move you.”

  —Paul Russell, author of War Against the Animals

  Please turn the page for more extraordinary reviews for Bart Yates . . .

  More outstanding praise for Bart Yates and Leave Myself Behind

  “Yates effectively captures the honest, sometimes silly, often tender interactions between his fragile characters.”

  —Booklist

  “The coming-out novel is a staple of queer fiction debuts. Some would even say it’s an overworked cliche. But Leave Myself Behind is an effervescently effective addition to the genre—Yates, in his first novel, has injected juicy originality into the coming-of-age fable. At its smart and smart-ass center is impudently precocious Noah . . . Yates crams his richly nuanced plot with a lot of issues, but he bundles it all together with a sure touch for deciphering teen angst, exploring adolescent sex and detailing life on the confusing cusp of growing up.”

  —The Front Page (Raleigh, North Carolina)

  “It’s not an easy task these days to come up with a fresh and original gay coming-of-age and coming-out story (which are usually the same thing). Give Bart Yates credit; he takes the challenge and relies on other narrative pulls to launch his tale of how his narrator, seventeen-year-old Noah York, a smart and smart-alecky artist with Holden Caulfied-like skepticism about the world, comes to self-knowledge about his own sexuality, society’s (especially his high school’s) way of dealing with it when it becomes a public issue, and most importantly, how his love for the boy next door develops. Yates is an author to watch and earns an ‘A.’”

  —Frontiers

  “What a delightful surprise to see a new, very talented author appear on the literary scene! It has been ages since I have read something that has grabbed my full attention, as has Leave Myself Behind.”

  —Larry Bailey, The Open Book, Ltd.

  “The voice of Noah York is beguiling, impudent and wise. Noah’s honesty made me remember how it feels to be seventeen when only humor and friendship can save you.”

  —Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of Mermaids on the Moon

  “The writing is fresh and the stories intriguing.”

  —Echo Magazine

  “Bart Yates has written a compelling tale about the obsessions and mysteries of the heart. A risk-taking, impressive debut that will keep readers page-turning from start to finish.”

  —William J. Mann, author of Where the Boys Are

  LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND

  BART YATES

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Outstanding praise for Bart Yates and his debut novel LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Epitaph

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Bart Yates’s new novel

  Copyright Page

  For Newell Yates

  1931-1983.

  Wherever you are

  I hope they let you read books

  Acknowledgments

  This book would never have happened without Gordon Mennenga. Period. Thanks, Gordon, for everything.

  Thanks as well to Melanie Santos, Angela Strater, and LeAnn Keenan for invaluable help and support. You each get a wet, sloppy kiss the next time I see you—whether or not you want one.

  John Talbot is a gifted agent and a good man, and my editor at Kensington, John Scognamiglio, has been a joy to work with. Thanks to both for helping me chase down, painlessly, this particular dream.

  Cheers to the Fall River Red Wine Consortium: Tim and Maria Ferreira-Bedard, Kevin St. Martin, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Paul Robbins, and Karen Lehrach. You were all there at the beginning of this book and taught me the true meaning of the word “hangover.” I miss you guys. Ditto to Paul and Irene Gross.

  Thanks to all my T’ai chi friends, in Iowa City and Madison and Boulder and Minneapolis, especially Pena Lubrica, Dave Dugan and Tonja Robinswood. Moving in slow motion with you is always a pleasure.

  Jeff Yates answered dozens of inane questions about law enforcement, and my mother, Lois Yates, has been good-natured and patient with me for forty years. Thanks also to Joel, Debbie, Cheryl, Halley, Chad, Stewart, and Marshall Yates.

  Rob and Libby Shannon regularly remind me (through personalized slippers, hot food, and mildly violent games of croquet) exactly what hospitality is all about, and Brad Causey, Karen Levin, Bianca Rigel, Joe Stansbery, Judy Gates, and Brian Pogue help keep life from sucking. And thanks to Marie Von Behren and Thomas Knapp for making me so welcome in their home.

  You’d think Michael Becker would wise up one day and stop picking up the phone when I call, but thank God for his relentless stupidity: I’d be lost without him.

  Deep appreciation to Sifu Moy Yat Tung and all my Kung Fu brothers at the Moy Yat Ving Tsun Kung Fu Association.

  And finally, huge thanks to my adopted family: Brad and Liz Schonhorst, Andrew Knapp, John Perona, Marian Mathews Clark, and Jack Manu. Thank you for your generosity, thank you for your kindness and good humor, and thank you most of all, for your love.

  CHAPTER ONE

  I’ve never wanted a different mother. I just want my mother to be different.

  Get in line, right?

  Anybody who tells you he doesn’t have mixed feelings about his mother is either stupid or a liar. Granted, Virginia York is a special case. Living with Virginia is like living with a myth. She’s only half-human; the rest is equal parts wolverine, hyena, goddess and rutting goat.

  In other words, she’s a poet.

  But she smells great.

  Know the way someone smells when they’ve been outside on a chilly fall day? That’s how Mom smells all the time. Like rain, and wind, and leaf mold, and a faint hint of wood smoke. Hardly the way a woman is supposed to smell, but trust me: if the Glade Air Fresheners people could bottle her scent, you’d have her hanging in your car and your bathroom and your kitchen.

  Sorry. I didn’t mean to get all Oedipal on you.

  Anyway.

  Mom and I just moved into this old Victorian house in Oakland, New Hampshire. I grew up in Chicago, but Mom was offered a job at Cassidy College and we decided to get the hell out of Dodge. My dad Frank died last year. The coroner said it was a heart attack but what really happened is a poem got caught in his throat like a chicken bone and he choked to death.

  I’m not making this shit up.

  He was in his library, listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes on the stereo and reading poetry for one of his classes. When Mom found him in his armchair there was a book splayed open upside down on his lap; he’d been reading Herman Melville by W.H. Auden. Dad hated Auden. He called him “an overrated, pretentious
queer with a penchant for sentimental excess.”

  Mom loves Auden. So do I.

  The night Dad died I was in my room, painting. Mom was in her study writing. I thought I heard some odd noises coming from the library but I didn’t think much about it. Dad seemed himself at dinner. A little tired, maybe, but cheerful and relaxed. He gently teased Mom for picking the olives from her pizza; he laughed at me for wolfing three slices in the time it took him to eat one. When Mom went to tell him she was going to bed, his body was already growing cold. She came to get me. The two of us stood on opposite sides of his chair waiting for the paramedics. I think I was trembling, but neither of us cried. Real life seldom makes us cry. The only thing that gets to Mom and me is the occasional Kodak commercial.

  I’m seventeen. My name is Noah. (Don’t blame me; Dad had a thing for biblical names. It could have been worse, I suppose—Enoch, or Amalek, for instance.) I’m going to be a senior this September. That’s still a month away. I want to get a job, but Mom won’t let me until she and I get the house remodeled. She’s probably right. The place is a mess. Plaster dust, nails, boards, spackle, paint cans, caulking guns, and a shitload of boxes. We’ll be lucky to have it finished by the time school starts. I keep telling her she should hire somebody to do the harder stuff, but she gets pissed and tells me she’s “not going to hire some goddamn carpenter and pay him my firstborn son (and that means you, mister, by the way) to do what any idiot with a hammer and the brains of a squirrel can do, so just suck it up and get back to work.”

  Like I said, Mom has some issues.

  I don’t really mind working on the house. It’s dirty, sweaty work but fun in a sick puritanical kind of way. By the end of each day I’m filthy—my hair is clotted with dust, my clothes stick to me and when I clean my ears the Q-tip comes out black with crud. But I like doing something where you can see your progress. We’ve finished a lot of the downstairs and it’s nearly livable. The hardest part is stripping the woodwork. Some moron painted over every square inch of wood in the house (except for the mahogany banisters), and most of it is oak and maple. Sometimes I feel like Michelangelo, chiseling away at all the crap until nothing is left but the exquisite thing in the middle that no one else sees until it’s uncovered for them. Or was it da Vinci who said that was the way he worked? Whatever.

  The house is great. When you walk in the front door it’s like stepping into another century. There’s an ancient chandelier hanging overhead as soon as you’re inside, and even though it looks like it’s been dipped in dirt it’s still something to see, with hundreds of pieces of glass shaped like diamonds and rectangles. There’s an old steam radiator next to the door that Moses himself probably installed, and over that is a window facing west, made with some of that thick, leaded glass that has little waves in it. To the left of the entryway is the living room (with a fireplace big enough to roast a goat), to the right is the staircase leading upstairs, and straight ahead and down a short hall is a massive kitchen with a giant ceiling fan. There’s a dining room on the other side of the kitchen, with windows facing east and south, and if Mom owned enough china to host a dinner party for twenty people she’d still have no problem storing all the dishes in the colossal wall cabinet in there. Upstairs are four bedrooms and a bathroom, and as if that isn’t enough house for the two of us, we’ve also got a basement and a full-sized attic.

  The best part of the house, though, is the wraparound porch. I love sitting out there at night in front of the house, watching the cars go by. (We live right on Main Street, but Main Street in Oakland is just a two-lane brick road.) There’s a porch swing, but I prefer sitting on the steps. I like the solid feel of concrete under my ass.

  You can separate people into types by what part of a house they like the most. Mom is a kitchen person. Kitchen people like late nights and early mornings, and they spend a lot of time at the sink, staring out the window at nothing while they wash the dishes. They like cooking for people and don’t mind a friendly conversation about the weather, but if you ask them a serious question they hop up to take care of the boiling water on the stove or to get a loaf of bread out of the oven, and by the time they sit back down they’ve forgotten what you asked them. It’s like they’re always waiting for someone to come home, so they can’t pay much attention to anybody already in the house with them because they’re too busy listening for footsteps on the front walk.

  I’m a porch person. Porch people also love late nights and early mornings, but we’re more likely to answer your questions than a kitchen person is, and we don’t mind if someone wants to sit on the steps with us as long as he never mentions the weather. We sit with our chins in our hands and our elbows on our knees until we get uncomfortable, then we lay back and put our fingers behind our heads and let the breeze blow over us, tickling the hairs on our legs. I suppose we’re also waiting for someone to show up, but we want to know who it is before he gets as far as the door.

  I’m not sure what kind of person Dad was. Maybe a study person. Study people are off in their own world even more than kitchen people and seem to be genuinely shocked when they look up and see another human being in the room with them. Not displeased, really. Just shocked. Like they’ve read about other people but never expected to actually see a live specimen.

  Jesus. I am so full of shit. Where was I?

  We got the house dirt cheap. A place like this would have cost three or four times as much in Chicago, but Oakland only has two thousand people in it, and thirteen hundred of those are college students. Mom was worried about moving here right before my senior year, but I like it. I hated Chicago. Chicago is dirty and loud, and full of people with really shitty taste in music. Mom thinks I’m a snob, but Mom has a tin ear for everything except language—she even likes rap. I don’t mind the lyrics so much (how can you dislike something where every other word is “fuck”?) but the music is mind-numbingly repetitive—it’s like a little kid pulling on your sleeve, screaming “notice me, notice me, notice me.” It drives me apeshit.

  Anyway, Oakland is quieter, and cleaner, and you can walk anywhere you want without worrying about getting beaten up or shot. When Mom is writing I like to go out late at night and walk around town. She never would have let me do that in Chicago even though we lived in a nice neighborhood. Here she doesn’t even ask me where I’m going or when I’ll get back. Since we moved here a week ago she’s been writing every night—she shuts herself in her room (the only room in the house that we haven’t torn apart) and scribbles away until two or three in the morning. She’s always up before me, too. I think sleep is against her religion, or something.

  My current project is my bedroom. It’s going to be great when I get it finished. It’s the first room on the left at the top of the stairs and it has the most character of any of the bedrooms, with a recessed window seat and a view of the entire backyard. There’s a walk-in closet that’s almost half the size of the room, and I’m thinking I may eventually put my bed in there so I’ll have the bedroom itself to use as a painting studio. Until I get it done, though, I have to sleep downstairs on the couch in the living room. I figure another day or two and I can move upstairs and have a door to shut again. I could have started sleeping up here last week but the wallpaper would have given me nightmares—bulbous purple flowers on a pink background. Godawful. It was so old, the paper had been sucked into the wall. When I tried to get it off, big chunks of plaster came with it, so we decided to tear the walls down and start over.

  “Don’t be so dainty.”

  I turn around and Mom is standing in the doorway watching me work. I’m tearing down plasterboard with a hammer. She walks over and takes the hammer.