The Best Little Boy in the World (21 page)

The next day I saw Golden Boy on the beach, surrounded, of course. I walked by his circle a couple of times; no one noticed. Again. No one noticed. Then I went for a long swim and timed it so that I came slushing healthily, glisteningly out of the water right down from where Golden Boy was lying in the sun. You know how you come out of salt water, having a hard time at first keeping your balance after the motion of the waves, eyes shut tight as you rub the salt water from your face—apparently just staggering uphill without really seeing where you're going. You aren't thinking about the impression you're making or where you're going, you're just trying to get the water out of your ears and the hair out of your eyes and you know damn well you look as appealing as you'll ever look, perhaps because you know it looks as though you're not trying to look appealing. Paying no attention to where I was going, the first people I "happened" to notice as my eyes finally were willing to stay open—were Golden Boy and his group. "Say, how's it goin'?" I asked casually, feigning moderate surprise, the way you are allowed to when you have stumbled out of the water and happen to recover your equilibrium next to someone you recognize. "It's Mike, isn't it?" I asked, as though trying to remember the name of someone I had met before who had made a mild impression on me.

Golden boys apparently have egos, too. He smiled at being recognized and being picked out of the group by someone the rest of the group would want to know. Before I could be shot down with an "I can't remember your name," I said, "John. I met you with Eric last night at Piggy's." Sure, I remember, lied the class president.

I had learned enough about the game in those three months of being out to know not to press it any further. If I looked more than casually interested, my chances, slim as they were, would be shot. However, if I looked as though I could live without Golden Boy, I would be set apart from the crowd. I might be noticed. I didn't look for an open space on their blanket. I just resumed my wet stumbling in the direction of my own blanket, heart pounding, to talk over this great new development with Eric.

If I sound like a sixteen-year-old high school girl—an analogy I find it hard to bring myself to offer because of the masculinity threat—well, that's probably what I was like. I had a crush on Golden Boy. It was all out of Murray the K and American Bandstand, even though I was eight or ten years late.

Eric was not enjoying the weekend. It was supposed to be
our
weekend, but I couldn't control myself. I was immature; he was grumpy. I thought of staying an extra day, but Eric said he had to get back to Boston, so we left. I knew I would be back the following weekend, the last weekend in August.

My Summer of '42, if you will allow me to be sentimental, was almost over. It had been a wonderful, exciting, full summer. Even the week when I was recovering from Freddie had been a good week, thinking back on it, because it was so human.

For the longest time, when I was growing up, I actually thought I had somehow been born without feelings. I mean I consciously thought about that in high school, wondering whether it was some sort of biological phenomenon, or somehow related to my Big Secret, or what. When my father's mother died of lung cancer, I was nine. She had always been good to me, she was a wonderful woman, but having to visit her at her sickbed was an imposition I resented. I tried to feel sympathetic, but I felt put upon. After she passed away, my parents were in tears, on and off, for days. I had never seen my father cry before. I knew I should feel bad, but I didn't really. At the funeral I felt itchy because of the wool suit I was made to wear.

That same year my elementary school teacher had to be out almost all spring because of what she claimed was an appendectomy, but was apparently something far more serious. From nine to two every day she had supported my position as the best little boy in the class. She was the kind of teacher who genuinely loved her children. But while we were drawing get-well cards for her, I was feeling sorry for myself: All that work to get the best grades in the class was now in jeopardy, with a new substitute teacher who might not count all my goodness from the months before she showed up.

I certainly didn't hate my mother or father, but I couldn't detect any great love for them, either. I was oddly neutral, feelingless. As for Goliath, he could go jump in the lake. And Sam? Sam had kinky hair, and when he was dognapped, I was the only one in the family who had to
pretend
to feel bad about it.

I didn't see anything so special about the Mona Lisa. Poetry left me totally blank, bored. I did not react to love songs that should have made me sad. I had feeling for one thing and for one thing only: me. I felt guilty about that, considering the fact that I was supposed to be so good. As I said in the first chapter, it made me feel phony. It also made me feel "different."

As I got older, I seemed to develop some feelings, if not my full share. Our new dog was much more lovable than Sam had been, in my view, and when he finally had to be put asleep, I was genuinely sad to hear about it. I was at Yale by then. But the Mona Lisa and the poems and the love songs still left me cold, coldly analytical, calculatingly self-centered, even at Yale. As I rose in my teens, I just gradually stopped worrying about my lack of feelings. I learned the word "hypocrisy" and wondered whether I was the only one who pretended to like the Mona Lisa for the sake of form. I saw a movie about a soldier whose buddy was killed in the foxhole next to him, and how that soldier felt
glad
when it happened. He hated himself so much for feeling glad that his legs became paralyzed, psychosomatically, until a doctor years later told him it was
natural
to feel glad—not glad that your buddy had been hit, but that it hadn't been
you
. When the soldier heard that, he regained use of his legs. It's
natural
to be selfish. All in all, I decided, I probably had fewer feelings than most people, but that was the least of my problems. It was a lot easier to pretend I liked the Mona Lisa than to pretend I liked Hilda Goldbaum, let me tell you.

Now I had had my Summer of'42. Now, crushed by Freddie, it was apparent that I was as feeling as anyone else. Sad as it had been, it was a relief to know I was human. The songs were written for me, too. I was no longer left out of the stream of common experience, no longer the superfluous man.

I had been dashing around like crazy that summer, spending virtually every night at the bar, or else at a Student Homophile meeting and the bar afterward, and having sex with loads of different people.

I wasn't getting better at sex as fast as I had been told I would. Perhaps my instructors were not taking into their calculations that in twenty-three years I had never before had sex with any person of either sex. Most gay kids come out earlier; many of them had sex with girls when they were younger, or still do.

I still had to fantasize my masturbation fantasies to come at the hand of someone else, even now at the end of the summer. And I mean "at the hand" quite literally, because, for all the valiant Oscar-like attempts, no amount of slurping and sliding could make me relax. That, and my list of thirty-two other hangups, naturally made me self-conscious about sex, which, like any good self-fulfilling prophecy, kept me from relaxing.

But I kept looking, kept trying. It had been so good with Freddie, except for what he had said afterward about our not having done much, that I thought perhaps I would find the right guy, the guy who would share my cowboy fantasies and put me at ease.

Of all the people I had met that summer, Eric and Freddie and Golden Boy were the only three I would remember for long. Yet Eric never
did
anything and couldn't keep me interested, nice a guy as he was; Freddie loved Cap; and GB, well, GB would give me something to think about during the fall. I would shortly be back at work, running a feasibility study for some government work IBM might wind up doing. But I knew that I would not be working the kind of single-minded eighty-hour weeks I had right out of Yale, at least not for quite a while. Important as my career was to me, I was determined to make up for the living I had missed. And I had to come to terms with such questions as: Who would I come home to when I was fifty, or even thirty, and no longer riding near the top of the gay world? In fact, who would I come home to tomorrow? Did I want to come home to anyone, or to bring someone new home every night?

I was learning that I had some basic characteristics that would stand in the way of long-term relationships. The kind of kid who turns me on sexually is not the kind I could have for a lover. He is all the things I wanted to be when I was growing up: He is young, cool, and dumb. I never idolized older people; I just obeyed them. I idolized young people who were the things I was not, including dumb. Being dumb, like Brian at
Moby Dick,
meant not being a bookworm, not being a goody-goody, but being a regular guy. Being trashy was the same way. A young, dumb, trashy truck driver with a tight, smooth, rock-hard but not grotesquely muscled body, whose only pastimes were getting stoned, listening to rock, and letting people dig his body. Too dumb to have anything to say; too cool to get enthusiastic except for an occasional "Wow, man, are you ready for this shit?" as he smoked; and too trashy to be seen with. Great fantasy material in a masochistic sort of way. I suppose, though again I find it hard to write about, I suppose part of me wants someone like that to pin me to the wrestling mat, to dominate me, to hate me for being such a goody-goody and ridicule me for being so out of it—even to do the unmentionable to me.

Clearly, it would be difficult to form a good long-term relationship with a cool, trashy young kid whom I wanted to have humiliate me.

That all fits neatly into the "homosexual self-hate" chapter of psychoanalysis. Yet I don't believe it really does fit. I'm not sure that feelings like that are by any means exclusively gay. And I
know
I don't really hate myself. If I honestly believe, as I obviously do, that I'm about the neatest thing since integrated circuits, is it meaningful for someone else to come along and look at my file and say, "Well, no, I am sorry to inform you that, really, you are not happy with yourself as you seem to have convinced yourself you are. Actually, you do hate yourself—so much that you can't stand to admit it. For twenty-five dollars an hour for the rest of your life, I will gladly try to help you face up to the fact. Perhaps if we can get you that far, we can even get to the root of your unconscious unhappiness and build you all over again a true happiness." Obviously, I think that is ridiculous. But there are some shrinks and parents who take that point of view.

Then there is the other side of me, probably the larger half. I am aggressive, egotistical, competitive, and dominating, as I hold my trick down in a half nelson, one arm tightly around his waist so he can't struggle, and hoping, frankly, that he will struggle while I ram into him and feel my muscles flexing and tensing, in complete control of him, and then, finally, sweating, panting, shoot into his helpless body.

So you see, it works both ways with me, as I guess it does with many people, straight or gay.

So there is the problem that the kids who turn me on the most are not likely to be the kind I would want to share a home with or discuss politics with. And there is the problem that sadomasochism may be easier to come to grips with between a dominating man and a submissive woman than between two men, though perhaps this is changing with the women's liberation movement. (Uneasy as I admittedly am with women, in a primordial sort of way, I certainly am all for them on a rational level. Gloria Steinem is my hero. Maybe I can do for homosexuals what she is doing for women, I think, when I am looking for something to feel cosmic about.)

And there is yet another obstacle standing in the way of my forming a lover relationship. It is that I have been conditioned to fall for the kind of kid who wouldn't fall for me in return, at least, not in any romantic sort of way. I am turned on as long as someone is, for whatever reason, unattainable; but as soon as he shows affection for me or—God forbid!—needs me more than I need him, I know he isn't truly Brian or Tommy or Hank. I realize that part of this is simply the universal hard-to-get syndrome, part the anticipation-is-better-than-the-attainment syndrome. Yet it goes much further.

That has made truly satisfying, lose-yourself-in-it sex hard to come by, as you might imagine. It is tantamount to saying, "I don't
want
to have sex. Cowboys
don't
kiss, cowboys have fistfights." Yet my body wants to have sex; it wants to be touched and tickled and rubbed and hugged and kneaded and warmed. And I am not about to have fistfights, because pain hurts. Not in fantasies it doesn't; it's fine in fantasies. But it provides no pleasure whatever in fact. It hurts. I've checked.

This being the case, I simply grin at the idea of having truly superb sex night after night with the same guy. Sure, I would like it to happen, and I will welcome the gradual lowering of some of these obstacles, should they start to lower with time. But the last thing I am going to do is let myself take them too seriously, let them make me unhappy, dedicate my life to what may well be the impossible task of changing around some of my primordial feelings. I can remember having had some of these feelings, having seen some of the same images that appear in my fantasies today, as much as twenty years ago, when I was five! This is
me,
Great Scorekeeper, and I have learned to love it. If it changes, fine; when it does, I will love the changes, too.