Vignette - Mr. Elmo Lincoln

Mr. Elmo Lincoln.

Yes, I was then in junior high school when the name, Elmo Lincoln, surfaced. I was thirteen or fourteen years old. Steve Peterson was also thirteen or fourteen years old. And, Mr. Elmo Lincoln was … ancient. He drove an old, battered, green Ford station wagon that was loaded with most of the stuff that comprised his life. He was always there – a three or four day growth of beard on his face, a soiled T-shirt; thick, black-rimmed glasses – sitting there behind the wheel of his old Ford. And, he was always there outside the school at 3:30 when classes let out. He would park along the sidewalk upon which more than a few of us traversed on our way home. One day, Steve Patterson pointed him out to me.

“That’s Elmo Lincoln,” Steve said. “I catch a ride home with him sometimes. He’s an old queer. He likes to feel you up. He’s harmless, though. Just an old queer.”

I then looked at Mr. Elmo Lincoln. His eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were huge, as he watched Steve and me cross the street in front of him. And, as I turned my eyes away from him I wondered if Mr. Elmo Lincoln was living my fate. Was I, one day, condemned to living in my car and watching the boys as they emerged from the school and feel up the one or two brave boys who dared accept my offer of a ride? Would I shave every third day in the filthy bathroom of the Conoco station two blocks from the school? Would I wear soiled T-shirts and threadbare jeans? I assumed that I would. Mr. Elmo Lincoln was, afterall, the only queer that I knew … besides, possibly, myself. At thirteen or fourteen the possibility of my queerness was just beginning to become something to be considered … not the obsession it would become at fifteen.

One day – in the spring of my thirteenth or fourteenth year – my father, the cop, came home from work one day and showed me a photograph of Mr. Elmo Lincoln with a sign hanging around his neck that had some writing on it. There was a front view and a side view in the photograph. “Have you ever seen this guy?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s Elmo Lincoln. He hangs around the school.”

My father’s eyes bulged. “You know his fucking name?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“He ever talk to you?”

“No.”

“You ever get in his car?”

“No, but Steve Patterson has.”

He wrote down Steve’s name in his notebook. “And, that’s how you know his name?”

“Yes, Steve told me.”

My father studied me closely for a moment. Then he said in a dangerously quiet voice, “If I ever hear of you getting in his car I’ll beat the shit out of you. You understand me?”

“Yes,” I said.

My father knew, of course, that Mr. Elmo Lincoln’s days of lusting after the boys outside of Kunsmiller Junior High School were numbered. He knew that the next day I would be called into the principal’s office where a detective would question me and Steve Patterson about Mr. Elmo Lincoln. And, I suspected my father believed that a clear and ominous warning needed to be communicated to his son that it was not normal, it was not natural for one male to touch another male in a gentle or loving way. He, my father, certainly had never touched me in that way. He was prepared, as always, to beat the shit out of me for indiscretions far less serious than allowing an old queer to touch my thigh.

My father was telling me that he forbade me to be queer.

And, I never saw Elmo Lincoln again.