Free Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir by Jamie Brickhouse

friend Henny, he was gay. Even though Jeffrey and Ronny were full-blood brothers and only seventeen months apart, Jeffrey and I were closest. Thin as the wing of a plane and tall as a skyscraper, he had sharp features inherited from his father and almost-black hair inherited from Mama Jean. We didn’t look alike, but when we were younger, Mama Jean liked to dress us in matching outfits. Beige-and-red-plaid bell-bottoms with beige velour tops are the twin outfits that stick in my mind.
    Jeffrey was my third parent, mentor, and best friend, and was forever inspiring me to fantasy and make-believe. After he told a six-year-old me about Ann-Margret’s face-crushing fall on a Las Vegas stage, I reenacted the fall dressed in a blanket as my strapless gown. I fell off the bed I used for the stage and rushed myself to the bathroom for plastic surgery. Ronny, on the other hand, was a loner redneck who liked to race dirt bikes and go to Neil Diamond concerts. Mama Jean described him as marching to a different drummer. Maybe Ronny seemed to march to a different drummer because he wasn’t gay .
    Jeffrey’s announcement was a double feature. Not only was he gay, but he was leaving the nest to move to Houston. And he was leaving with his boyfriend. I was eleven or twelve. I remember Mama Jean sitting in a burnt-orange wingback chair and crying. She explained to me that Jeffrey was gay and it was breaking her heart. When she asked, “Do you know what gay means?” I had a flashback to Mrs. Chambers asking me if I knew what a sissy was. “Yes.” I didn’t say anything else. I just listened with a poker face to mask my fear. Then she stopped talking. Her sobs were the only sounds in the room. I wanted to leave but was frozen in place on the floor at her feet. After she stopped crying and wiped the mascara running from her eyes like spilled ink, she looked down at me with a stare that could freeze lava and asked, “Do you have feelings like that? Because if you do, tell me now. I’ll take you to see a psychiatrist.”
    I wanted to say, If you have to ask…, but instead I answered with a clipped, high-pitched “Nope” and scurried to my room, where the original-Broadway-cast album of Mame was still playing. I’d known the answer to that question for a long time, ever since she’d asked me the first $64,000 question: if I had passed semen. I had.
    I was already interactively reading the issues of Penthouse Forum that Jeffrey had left behind. They had bi and gay stories, so I knew what to do, knew what went on out there. I remember watching a report on television about what was then described as a gay cancer. Shots of shirtless men dancing at a disco were overlaid with a voice talking about how the promiscuous lifestyle of gay men might be spreading the new disease.
    “Makes me sick,” Mama Jean said in disgust. I thought to myself, Don’t stop the fun before I get there!
    By the time I hit that deck chair at the Get ’Em Grotto, I was ready. I hadn’t confided in Jeffrey that I looked up to him in more ways than he imagined, and if he was bothered that Mama Jean hadn’t extended an invitation to his boyfriend to join us, he didn’t say. Instead we ordered a couple of pi ñ a coladas and simply basked in the sunshine of our Acapulco Princess good fortune. Jeffrey fell asleep on the deck chair. The pi ñ a colada that I quickly downed left me restless and ready for adventure. “Jeffrey, are you asleep?” He was. I left him there and meandered down the stone path that led to the other pools.
    The first one was all water wings, inflatable sea horses, and shrieks of “Marco!” “Polo!” The kiddie pool. Ew. I kept moving. I found the adult pool. The scene there was a party, the pool an aquatic lounge.
    I sat on the edge of the cement pond to soak in the scene. I wasn’t afraid of the water anymore, just wisely cautious. The pool was enormous and curved in and out and ended—or began—with a swim-up bar under a thatched