The Best Little Boy in the World (10 page)

Now, I wasn't stupid. I knew more or less what was happening, that I was psyching myself out. HEY, ADAM'S APPLE! CHOKE! I knew all I had to do to piss was to relax and not think about how embarrassing it would be if I couldn't. But I could no more keep myself from thinking about that than I could fall asleep by
trying
to fall asleep.

College football games had always been the worst. Sitting for three cold November hours on a cement stadium seat fills anyone's bladder. Though I had learned not to eat or drink much at the pregame cookouts—"What! You don't want a brew? Come on, have a brew!"—I still would have to take a leak at half time. Me and the other 10,000 men of Harvard, or in this case Yale, all lined up along a hundred-yard partitionless urinal, all looking at me. The stadium had no stalls, just the urinal. What if my bladder actually burst one day? Surely that was a physical possibility. Balloons burst; bladders must burst. Or what if I doubled up in a cramp on the way back from the game, passing out from the pain, only to have the doctors diagnose it as a severe case of suppressed homosexuality? I learned to relieve myself at the crucial point in the game, when no one in his right mind would tear himself from his seat. Better to be thought soft on football than to explode in the stands.

Well, by now I know that I am simply "Pee Shy," that millions of people are, and that it is nothing to worry about. That knowledge has gone a long way toward helping me relax, and I'm not as Pee Shy as I used to be. But standing at the draft physical in front of a long trough with a paper cup in my hand, next to hundreds of naked kids with their things out, pissing merrily away, and others waiting to take my place at the trough, and all of them, no doubt, watching the freak show that was me tickling my thing to relax it, but knowing I didn't have a prayer—I just didn't have a prayer. I went to the nearest drill sergeant and said I couldn't piss in front of other people.

How was I to know, too embarrassed and guilty ever to have told anyone of my hangup, that they had no doubt instructed this guy: "Look, Joe, somathese little peckers won't be abladoit without goin' to the can. You stan' here and whennay ask you, tell 'em the can's over there. Got it?"

Before I had gotten my sentence half out, he pointed over there to the can. I went into one of the stalls, locked the door, filled the paper cup, and sneaked back into line.

By eleven they knew I could see well enough to shoot gooks and that I could hear well enough to duck when mortars were headed my way.

At noon we were allowed to get dressed again. They gave us a ticket we could exchange for food. I just walked around the block once and then sat down to wait.

At one we were given a mental examination. I passed. I had heard that it didn't do any good to flunk if you had gone to Yale; they wouldn't believe you. Then they gave us the list of Depravities and Gross Defects. Had I ever had a venereal disease? Hah! Was I an epileptic? A diabetic? Was I fatally allergic to Beegee buts? (I had a friend who got out on that.) Did I have any false limbs? Transplanted organs? Was I a hemophiliac? Had I ever been convicted of a felony? There must have been at least a hundred things on the list, all of which I checked "no," in the left-hand column. It made a long neat column, everything lined up just so. Except on number 93, I think it was, I had faintly checked "yes," which stood out of the column as though it were lit in neon. I erased it and checked "no." Then I thought of two years in the Army, where they have no doors on the latrine stalls and I wouldn't be able to piss for two years, and I checked "yes." But I thought I might be able to get out later in the day on my big left thing, and it would be the height of folly to check "yes" unnecessarily, so I erased it again and checked "no." I finished the last few items, then thought of everyone going on leave in Frankfurt or Saigon or Honolulu and running to the nearest cheap bar to buy a good lay, and them all wondering how come I wasn't horny enough to do that after two months of being around nothing but men—and I erased "no" and checked "yes." Ten-year perfect record, martyrdom, thrones, "no." My ethical aversion to the war: I would say it was better to have
pretended
to be homosexual than to have gone to jail or given up my citizenship....

I don't mean to bore you. Generally I finish true-false tests as fast as anyone else. This time I was the last to pass mine in. I had compromised. I had checked "yes," but crossed out over it and checked "no." I figured that if my left thing didn't get me out, I would appeal on new grounds. And when they saw that I had struggled over number 93, it might be easier to persuade them that I was for real.

But I could just see it, in front of three doddering, faggot-hating draft judges sitting in uniform at a small table with Old Glory off to one side, an Iwo Jima replica at one end of the table, and at the other end a screaming lavender telephone, their hot line to the Supreme Court of Brewster, New York. If I was a homosexual, it was their duty as red-blooded American fighting men to despise me. If I was not, I was a draft evader, and nearly as despicable.

No, that's not the way it would go. These men would be gruff but understanding, and my obvious embarrassment and good manners would disarm them:

"Well, son, you don't look like a homosexual."

"Thank you, sir. I am, though, sir."

"Well, then, we won't drag this out. Just give us the names of three or four gay bars in New York by way of a sort of proof."

"Ahhhh. I can't, sir."

"Really? But your file says you have lived here almost all your life. Surely if you were a homosexual, you would know these names?"

"Yes, sir, but I don't."

"Well, then, give us the name of your psychiatrist. You really should have brought a letter from him to your preinduction physical and saved us a lot of time. What's his name?"

"I—I, uh, I don't have a psychiatrist."

"Well, then, the psychiatrist you used to have or a doctor you may have told?"

"I have never told anyone, sir."

"Come now, young man, we are too busy to play games. You say you have been a homosexual since you were eleven and...."

Another impossible case for poor F. Lee Bailey. Is it possible that I would now be hiring him to prove that I
was
a homosexual, after all my elaborate ruses to conceal that fact?

The point is, I thought that if I ever had to try to convince the draft board that I was gay, the fact that I had checked number 93 and then crossed it out might somehow help. I didn't know what the hell to do, sitting there on Whitehall Street with that goddamned true-false test. I was fast becoming a psychological basket case.

The afternoon wore on, and I was passing everything but water with flying colors. I asked to see the psychiatrist. They put me at the end of a long line. Before my turn came up, they told me it was time to go to the final desk for what I gathered was kind of the wrap-up, do-you-have-any-objections-or-forever-hold-your-peace desk. This is where I had been told that I would be allowed to display my large left thing. Nowhere else on the assembly line were they programmed to notice it. At four o'clock—a very long day—my turn came with young Dr. Heathcliffe, his name was, on the wrap-up desk. He told me he had all my test results in the file, there, and I looked okay. Did I have any last words? I said I had a varicocele (the technical name my doctor had used). He told me to go sit down in a room off to his right. He would be in in a minute to look at it. Privacy! Well, almost. There was another kid in there; evidently a troublemaker. He had refused to cooperate somewhere along the line.

Half an hour later Dr. Heathcliffe came in. How much longer could all this drag out? The other kid, a Puerto Rican, offered Dr. Heathcliffe some physician's letters, but a sergeant came in and said he had been a wise-ass. The kid said something to the sergeant and to Dr. Heathcliffe having to do with their collective mother. The doctor ignored the physician's letters, whatever they said, and stamped the kid's file OKAY. He was in.

Then Dr. Heathcliffe looked at me, the soul of a respectful, well-mannered white young man—not unlike Dr. Heathcliffe himself a few years back, one suspects—he looked at my thing and asked whether it hurt. I was working up the energy to lie and say it did:

"Well, uh—"

"Yes, I imagine it does. It's quite large. Okay." And I was out, never to hear from the Army again.

I had applied to Harvard Business School and was planning to spend the next two years there, not so much because I wanted to be a businessman as because law school sounded like too much work and medical school was out of the question. I knew a lot of my friends from Yale would be up around Boston, so there would be an ample supply of people to idolize. And a Harvard MBA was the kind of thing you would expect the BLBITW to have. What could be straighter than a Harvard MBA, right? Or more dull, maybe, but we all have to make compromises.

I was accepted by Harvard but then got an offer from IBM. I had gotten some help from them while I was working on my thesis—"Application of Computer Simulation Model Technology to the Determination of Optimal Airline Insurance Coverage"—and they had apparently taken an interest in a business type (my publishing exploits) who had some familiarity with computers (my major). They made me a tempting offer. An office with a view of Manhattan, half a secretary, and lots of money. It sounded like a shortcut in my rat race to remain the best little boy in the world, a jump ahead of my classmates who would be going on to graduate schools while I was climbing the corporate ladder. It also sounded reasonably safe. I couldn't picture IBM having company softball games in Central Park or chummy weekend orgies out at the company place on Long Island, so I might not have to do much "social work" to get ahead. IBM's reputation for prudishness was most attractive to me. I took the job.

I did very well. The BLBITW was indeed the youngest to rise the fastest to the mostest ever, and all that. How did I do it? It was a simple combination of two strategies: the corporate politics and ploys of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
plus really trying. I really tried, sublimating my sexual energy into my work, as usual. My boss would ask for a memorandum on such-and-such a topic as he was leaving to catch the 5:21 out of Grand Central on Wednesday afternoon. He expected to see the memo on his desk by Monday or, at latest, Tuesday of the following week. Hah! You don't make points that way. And what did
I
have to do Wednesday night? Go watch a swim meet at the Y? Not me. I would stay at the office most of the night writing the memo, typing it, Xeroxing it, binding it—and there it would be on his desk when he got in Thursday morning. That was as close as I could come to a sexual experience.

I enjoyed my work, my blue-carpeted office, my IBM dictating machine, and my paycheck. But I was getting lonelier by the month. Almost every month, it seemed, especially that first summer after graduation, one of my college friends was getting married. It's not easy to fantasize riding the range with a married cowboy. Cowboys don't marry; they just pal around on the range and whore it up when they come into town. And the best little cowboys in the world don't even whore it up: Look at the Lone Ranger and his faithful Indian companion. Did you ever see them eyeing pussy on the street?

There was only one attractive guy my age at work, a Chicagoan come East named Rick Swidler. We would go out for lunch to the local Italian restaurant and talk about the sexual characteristics of the Italian women we had known. He did most of the talking. Rick was passable fantasy material—but what was one attractive guy after having been surrounded by hundreds? Remember, I had always had to substitute quantity of relationships for intensity, in the vain hope that hundreds of handshakes an orgasm might someday make. One was not much quantity. If only I had known about Rick then what I know about him now.

IBM was a good place to work, but boy, did I miss Yale. I missed sweat shirts and jeans and track shoes walking past my library nook. I missed maneuvering for a seat next to that sandy-haired boy from Tucson I was determined to meet and "happening" to sit next to him in 100 SSS, striking up a conversation, meeting for a couple of beers at Mory's Thursday night, shaking hands when paths crossed at the Co-op.... And now I was getting an invitation to that sandy-haired boy's wedding.

Goliath, too, had long since gotten married, and it was getting to be my turn. My grandmother, subtlety personified, told me she would give me $1,000 when I got married, but I was holding out for more. My parents wanted to know when I would start bringing girlfriends up to Brewster for weekends the way Goliath had.

I would respond by changing the subject. My parents never pressed the point, but their anxiety over my finding happiness (and happiness is a family) was all too apparent, anyway.

I should have brought girls home, for my parents' sake. And I should certainly have dated in New York, to keep up appearances and to keep my hand in. I knew that the longer I went without a date, the more uncomfortable I would feel when I finally had to get one. The longer you put off your visit to the dentist, the more cavities he finds to drill. Yet without football games to require dates, and without Hank to supply them, I could no more take the initiative and inflict a date on myself than a little kid would take the initiative to visit the dentist.