Daniel Corcoran Finney

Daniel Corcoran Finney was laughing and laughing, the early morning light bouncing off his ragged Sam Shepherd teeth.  She was a little offended.  After all, she had just met this guy and had no idea what set him off.  But their very strangeness to each other made it possible to be frank.  They would never see each other again.

"You really don't know ANYTHING about gay, do you?"  He had to stop, drag out a kerchief and wipe his laughter-wet eyes.  "Gay is like being Christian!  The hell it is."

Stiffly, she defended herself.  "Dan, Christian IS hell.  Anything that locks you in is hell."

"What makes you think that being "gay" locks me in?  What can you possibly know about the subject.  Do I remotely resemble anything the media presents as gay?  Am I built and blonde, wearing a Speedo?  Do I talk differently?  You're pretentious, uninformed, and insulting."  

Oddly this made her curious.  It wasn't about sex or this little pinprick in time that gave access to a whole different world than hers.  She felt defensive, but as though defensiveness was going to prevent any insight she might have.

"Let's make a rule," she said.  "You don't know anything about being Christian either -- I only know enough to be over it, which took a LOT of reading and arguing and thinking.  I do know that in the past it's been used as a weapon to assault gays and I don't like that.  I do know that there are many categories that people move in and out of, but I don't think either of us is trans-sexual.  We present pretty much as we are, maybe more than we intend.  We could use that to dialogue about life itself, before categories, outside institutions."

"What gay institutions did you have in mind? Know any?"

She didn't.

"See what I mean?"  He lit another cigarette.  "Don't say one single thing about my smoking."

"Okay."  She stood, brushed herself down, and went back to her room to close her suitcase, check for strayed objects, and leave the key on the bureau.  By the time she returned to her car and loaded, her new friend had finished his cigarette.

"Where do you go now?"

"Little town called Dynamite."

"I know it.  The name of it is ironic.  I've never been in a town more limp and inert."

"Fancy vocabulary for a road rat."

"I started out as a lit major, long ago."

She had a little leather travel kit with a zipper that included cards with her electronic contact data and the tiny studio apartment where she went to ground occasionally, usually in winter when she did workshops instead of pulpit supply and therefore could sleep and read for long uninterrupted days..  She gave him a card.  He took it gracefully and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

"Prob'ly won't use it.  Don't usually keep cards.  Don't usually get offered any."  When she pulled out of the motel driveway, he held up his arm and called, "Safe travel."  Sunlight gleamed off the chrome on his big powerful bike.

She never saw Daniel Corcoran Finney after that.  But in the fall she got an email from him and answered right away.  He was as vivid in her mind as he had been that early desert dawn.

"Dynamite" had turned out not to be ironically named after all, those "Fuse" would have been more accurate.  So many of these small town congregations were full of covert rage, tipped off in tiny ways that an unhip person might not notice.  They sat in the pews stone-faced, determined to destroy any sign of change, which meant of course that there were no progress.  There would be a few on the edges who were alert, at least aware of some changes that ought to be made.  

She thought about her own role as a change agent in a world that expects clergies to be people who keep things even, no trouble, dogmatic in a world that tumbles.  Pushing the edge meant she rarely returned, but that suited her.
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This story was prompted by a conversation with a transplanted LA hustler in a laundromat.  The town is a transportation hub -- lots of truck drivers.  He had brand new white sneakers, but his face was far from new.  I'll see how far I can develop a sequence.