After careful consideration of many titles, a final
decision has been made for my new book
------ LOCKER ROOM TALK. The book has not been published because I am
seeking assistance from the right literary agent who will get behind this book
and promotion it. In the meantime, I am providing several paragraphs from
Chapter One for you to read. Please
offer opinions.
PART ONE
LOCKER ROOM TALK
NINTH GRADE
CHAPTER 1
Hawk Summerset sits up in his bed. It is
the middle of the night and he should be sound asleep preparing for the big day
ahead, but instead he is awake and he is hungry. Tomorrow will be his first day
as a freshman at Shady
Oaks High
School, but once again he was sent to bed early
by his father without the evening meal. He quietly tiptoes down stairs and into
the kitchen. He knows that Elizabeth, his mother, has left a covered plate of
food in the oven. He gets the food and hurries back up stairs, sits on the edge
of his bed and enjoys the meal.
It has happened so many times before that he
has forgotten what he didn’t do this time that caused the rage of anger to fare
up in his father. Did he forget to water the horses, fail to put the bales of
hay in the hay loft, trim the hedge that grows along the front driveway, sweep
the leaves from the back porch, mow the grass or pick up the pecans that had
fallen from the big pecan tree? No matter what Hawk does he cannot please his
father. Harlan always finds something to start an argument that allows him to
criticize his son that sometimes ends up with the use of the leather belt.
It is September 1, 2016 and Hawk is in the upstairs
bedroom of his families’ traditional, wood-frame, country home, where he lives
with his father and mother just outside the city limits of the town of Shady Oaks, Louisiana. With his hunger satisfied and his worries
pushed to the back of his mind, he is able to fall asleep and enter into the
beauty of a dream world that is only available for a teenage boy. Hawk
Summerset dreams that he is in the center of the universe and that the town of Shady Oaks has grown up
around him. Even though his dreams are
beautiful, they do not provide the reality of his current situation. Hawk fails
to realize that this fast growing, industrial community is still a mass of
Southern Bible belt beliefs. He has no idea of the rough road that is ahead of
him as gay, Louisiana
teenager.
Hawk knows that he loves the town of Shady
Oaks, but he is far too young to realize that the development of off-shore
drilling and the many gas wells that quickly sprang up has moved Shady Oaks
from a small, friendly community to a large industrial area centered in the
heartland of Cajun Louisiana. In this heartland Catholicism is the predominate
religion and religion provides the social path to success.
He is old enough to know that his town is
beautiful but he is too young to know the history. Many years before he was
born the founding fathers of Shady Oaks planted a series of oak trees that
outlined the northern boundary of the city. The oak trees grew into beautiful,
umbrella-shaped, shade trees, with lower branches decorated with long, grey,
moss-like, beards, which identifies Shady Oaks as a typical Louisiana town.
Even
before he was born his father managed to make a down payment on a plot of land
located a few miles outside the city. A few months before Elizabeth
was to give birth to a baby boy, Harlan Summerset, volunteered for service in
the USA
army. Soon thereafter he was involved in active combat duty in the war in Iraq. Harlan
had left a pregnant wife to struggle with hospital bills and mortgage payments.
He returned home only briefly to cradle his baby boy in his arms but became
restless and re-enlisted for another tour of duty in Iraq
which extended into Afghanistan.
Elementary school was nothing like Hawk had
imagined. A playground bully had called him a fag and that stigma followed him
through elementary and Junior High. Life had not been easy for him, but things
had gotten worse when his father returned from the war. What should have been a happy experience
resulted into a disappointing development of a man returning from war but
unable to leave the horrors of war behind. Hawk and his mother became victims
of a disciplined, military-like, environment controlled by a war-lord dictator.
Harlan Summerset developed a list of chores that were to be enacted with
military–like precision. A well-stocked survival cellar was added to the
Summerset household, by a man who was infatuated with futuristic survival.
Elizabeth had fallen in love with a man and hoped
to develop a stable marriage, a beautiful home, with loving children. But a
different man returned from the war and even with determination their marriage
was in jeopardy.
Hawk’s father was obsessed with homophobic
fears that his son might grow up to be something less than a man. Thus, these
restrictions made life miserable for his teenage son.
The most
exciting part of Hawk Summerset’s first day at Shady Oaks High School was at the 5th
period gym class. The dressing room of
the high school gymnasium became an exciting arena filled with a gaggle of
naked boys all running around popping each other with towels and quarreling
over locker room space. Even with the loud noise of locker doors slamming and
confused conversations, Hawk was amused. (MORE LATER)