LOCKER ROOM TALK

 

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 5^th 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)