The Best Little Boy in the World (11 page)

How long could I go without dating—or
marrying—
before people decided I was queer? I had vague notions of two years in the Peace Corps: A series of letters home talking about this girl I had met in Nairobi, a picture or two sent; a sudden marriage which, for fear they would not approve of my marrying a Kenyan girl, we decided to hold in the jungle without family or friends (read: witnesses). A year of letters about how happy we were... and then tragedy. She was bitten by a snake or smitten by leukemia—whatever seemed most plausible. I would be so grief-stricken I would not be able to remarry, or even date, for years. Maybe ever. The perfect alibi.

I shared an apartment at Sixty-third and York with an old friend of mine from camp, Jimmy Iskowitz, a college pole vaulter who looked as though he were put together from five sticks of Ronzoni #9 spaghetti, with big meatball feet, hands, and head stuck at the ends. We had a view of Rockefeller University, the Cornell Animal Hospital, and the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. It was a nice walk to work.

I have known Jimmy from the time we were ten, our first year at camp. Now he is one of the 4,000 assistant vice-presidents at First National City Bank; in camp he was considerably less dignified. He was one of the most active experimenters and one of the least embarrassed about experimenting. He never came right out and
said
he was experimenting; but everyone else said he was, and he would just grin.

Once when I was still at Yale, my last year, Jimmy was in from the University of Wisconsin, where he was an economics major, and he came up to visit me. We went to Mory's for a few drinks. After I bought him his third, I came right out and asked him: On a scale from one to ten, I wanted to know, where ten is totally straight and one is totally gay, just where did he fall? It wasn't a belligerent question. We were good friends, and he as much as invited it by joking around so much all the time. I felt secure asking the question because Jimmy knew perfectly well that I was ten on that scale. Hell, I wouldn't even let anybody at camp give me back rubs, for crying out loud. So I could sound a little curious without raising any suspicions.

After rambling through a lengthy preface, Jimmy said he was "about five" on the scale. (How could he
admit
that?) He told me that he used to mess around a lot at camp. Messing around meant sleeping in the same bed with somebody, playing with somebody's, beating each other off, maybe a few other things. Just the same stuff that has been going on at camps and all-male prep schools and British boarding schools for centuries, he said.

He told me that Tommy and Tommy's counselor used to mess around a lot and that Tommy would sometimes wake up to find his counselor in the same bed. He told me that the counselors who came back year after year, some of them in their forties and fifties, were gay. The camp bus driver was gay. Dan the Dishwasher was gay. Hell, my own counselor, Jack Simmons, for all his fancy dribbling and dating, would not exactly require all my fingers to count where he was on the scale, Jimmy said, though he wasn't sure just how many fingers I would have left over.

Jimmy himself hadn't messed around since camp, which was a long time ago. And he wasn't going to either. He wanted to become comfortably wealthy, belong to all the right clubs, throw the right kind of cocktail party at the right kind of Westchester estate, and be a trustee of the University of Wisconsin and the Museum of Modern Art. Fiduciary was written all over the gold watch chain that ran from the vest of his charcoal gray 36-extra-long suit to the suit pocket. And he was not going to let the urgings and stirrings of anything down around that pocket get in the way of a solid career in banking. It just took willpower.

Thus, for all intents and purposes, Jimmy was just as ten as anyone else, and I saw no reason not to room with him. On the contrary, besides enjoying his remarkable intelligence and wit, which were really out of character for a banker, I was glad to live with someone who wouldn't always be asking me why I wasn't out screwing. (I assumed he would not throw the first stone, right?) Someone, frankly, over whom I knew I had a certain power. His confessed desire for my athletic young body, despite his straight-arrow life plan, and my staunch refusal to let him come anywhere near it, somehow made me feel all the straighter. I guess I enjoyed the irony. It made my martyrdom more cosmic, if you see what I mean: his wanting to be ten but admitting he was five and wishing that I, ten, were five also, when I really was as one as I could possibly be.

Though I had asked Jimmy, I secretly thought he was weak for having told me about himself. That, too, reinforced my BLBITW feelings: I was so strong, such a martyr, I could keep my problems to myself. Granted, if I had somehow known that Rick, my friend in the office, was the same place on the scale as I was, it might have been worth spoiling my perfect record to open up to him. But maybe not. Knowing that he was gay just might have ruined my image of him, and opening up just might have ruined my image of myself.

Despite my involvement in my work and my good relationship with Jimmy, I was lonely in New York. I realized that most of my friends, maybe even Jimmy, would be getting married. And that pretty soon I would run out of college friends or camp friends to room with and would have to live alone. And that, while ostensibly everything was going great, the future was as bleak as ever, and getting closer fast.

I tried to take refuge in the past. When I took weekends off, it would be to go up to Yale and stay with Brook, my friend from Tulsa, and his roommate, Fred, who sat stoned in the lotus position.

This was my first year working in New York and Brook's junior year at Yale. Brook was in love with a freshman at Conn College named Debbie who liked to wear Yale T-shirts and jeans. She wore a size X-L T-shirt. In fact, if Debbie had wanted to, I'm sure she could have carried one of the dining-room trays on her chest without spilling a thing. Brook liked that.

Debbie would hitch down from New London every weekend to sleep with Brook. The dress and sex rules had fallen apart even faster than the economy the year after I left Yale. Cohabitation was the order of the day. I had made it through just in time.

At least once each visit, I would ask Brook how all his friends were, including Jon Martin. The news about Jon usually included little stories about others and evoked conversations about homosexuality. I got the impression that Brook, a psych major, knew a good bit about the subject and that Jon was not the only one of Brook's friends in the college who liked other guys.

In terms of maintaining my cover, I should never have asked about Jon or engaged in these discussions. Sure, I always professed amazement and mild revulsion at the thought of one boy's liking another sexually. But I have no doubt that this ruse began to wear thin when time after time I would lead the discussion around to Jon and homosexuality.

It was a risk I had decided to take. I would never
admit
to Brook that I was every bit as gay as Jon. But if he wanted to suspect, I would just have to let him. Because if we kept discussing this stuff, I just might find out who else besides Jon was gay. And that someone else just might be straight-looking, straight-acting, and straight-talking, like me. Hell, Brook knew so much about all this,
he
might want to play cowboys, Debbie's tray table notwithstanding. He seemed to like wrestling around with me. I had read one of his psych papers where he talked about having been the shortest one in his elementary-school class and how it had made him feel inferior. For all I knew, though Brook was now of normal height and apparent self-confidence, his sexual inclinations might have been molded in early childhood, as mine were. Of course, he was obviously not one on the scale of one to ten, or he wouldn't have been hunting for rubbers all the time. But that was fine with me. I was just hoping—it really was too much to hope for—that he might have been far enough down the scale to want to go off to Wyoming with me. Figuratively, of course: All I really know about Wyoming is that you can draw it with a ruler.

I was forever bringing Brook little gifts—birthday gifts, Christmas gifts, or gifts just because he was putting me up at his place, which made gifts allowable—and one day, my twenty-second birthday, he gave me one. It was the rock opera
Tommy
, performed by the Who. Brook said he knew how much I liked pinball, so he thought I would like
Tommy.
Tommy is "The Pinball Wizard, the Bally Table King." He is also deaf, dumb, and blind. He has no contact with the outside world, except a sense of touch.
"Deaf, dumb, and blind boy, he's in a quiet vibration land."
The doctors find that there is no physical explanation for his lack of sight, speech, and hearing. It's a mental block.
"There is no chance, no untried operation,"
says the doctor;
"all hope lies with him and none with me. Imagine, though, the shock from isolation, when he suddenly can hear and speak and see!"
Tommy's refrain is
"see me, feel me, touch me, heal me!"
He is desperately trying to break out of his shell. Midway through the opera Tommy is sitting in front of the mirror, gazing at his own reflection, but unable to see or hear his mother, who, becoming increasingly frustrated, smashes the mirror. Tommy is cured! His shell is broken! He is no longer alone!

I'm free! I'm free! And freedom tastes of reality.

I'm free! I'm free! And I'm waiting for you to follow me.

There is much more to it than that, of course. This is the part of the plot I choose to remember. See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. I have to think Brook had more in mind than pinball when he gave me
Tommy.

In New York I was, as ever, thinking cosmic thoughts. One of the best times to do this was as I walked back home from work in the late evenings. I was certainly aware that there were hundreds of thousands of gay men in the city. Anyone knows that. But the men I could identify as being gay
looked
gay, and I wanted no part of them. I stared icily ahead and ignored every one of them.

Each time I passed Fifty-fourth Street and Third Avenue (and I made a point of passing that block every time I walked home), there were young boys standing in doorways or leaning against cars. I wasn't sure about them. What were they doing standing there like that? They didn't look gay, but they didn't look gainfully employed, either. Were they waiting to be picked up by women who would pay them? By men who would pay them? By each other? Or was this just the custom in the neighborhood to stand around like that? Were they waiting for the bus? I suspected that they were waiting to be picked up by men, but I never went up to any of them. What would I have said? Why would a guy in a suit carrying a briefcase walking up Third Avenue turn into a doorway and start talking to a rather unfortunate-looking Puerto Rican kid? "Scuse me, friend; got a match?" He either gave me a match or he didn't, and what then? "Thanks for the match. I haven't told anyone this before, but I'm a homosexual. What do I do?" Then maybe the kid would run away, or hit me, or laugh, or look confused and say, "No speak Ingles."

I must have passed that block a hundred times or more, but it got me no farther than Fifty-fifth Street.

And then another time on Third Avenue I was walking to a restaurant to meet my date and another couple. On the rare occasions when I had to date, I dated a lovely girl from my office who seemed to like me and apparently could live with my rule of never getting sexually involved with anyone from the office. (How was that for an excuse?) I was about three blocks away. I stopped at a corner to wait for the light to change, and I saw a remarkable thing that made me flush. There were two guys standing at the corner, waiting also, talking to each other, unmistakably together. One was an absolute screaming faggot. He really was. He was wearing patent leather boots laced up to the knee, he had a pocketbook slung over his arm, his wrist was limp, he lisped, he stared at me—there was no question about it. He was almost a caricature.

But the
other
guy was so beautiful, young, handsome, I could have cried. He was wearing a blue ski parka and slacks, and looked as straight as Tommy or Hank. But he was talking with a homosexual, and when I got to the corner, he stopped talking and looked at me.

I looked back. Usually I would catch myself and not stare at guys. But he was
so
handsome, and he was looking deep into my eyes. I just stared, my jaw loosening and ready on an instant's notice to form any word I could think to say.

"Hello" would have been good enough. A smiled "How's it goin'?" could have changed my life. I really would not have had to be awfully creative. He had probably made loads of friends on street corners that way. It was nothing to get all choked up about. Just say hello, ask a question or two as you walk together across the street, discover that you are going the same place, and take it from there. Or even be honest: "Uh, I don't know how to say this—I've never said anything like this before, please don't take offense—but you wouldn't happen to be gay, would you?" Admittedly, nothing could be less sophisticated, more awkward. But even that approach, for all it lacks in manly self-confidence, has enough sincerity to pull you through.

And so what if it doesn't, for Christ's sake? So what if they both ignore you, or even run away from you, or just say, "No, buddy, we're not gay," or, "It's none of your fucking business!" So what? Is the Great Scorekeeper, the Great Policeman in the Sky, or the Supreme Court going to be any the wiser? And if they are, don't you think they already know your deepest thoughts? Get serious, for Christ's sake!
Relax,
for Christ's sake! Break out of the shell! Do it!
DO IT!

The light changed and they started to walk across the street. I walked after them. Along with everything else running through my mind was the knowledge that three of my friends were waiting for me just a few blocks away—unless they were late and would be walking past me on the same street and see me talking to a guy with a pocketbook and boots laced up to his knee... rather, talking to the friend of someone like that. How could I go off to Wyoming when three people were expecting me for dinner? What would I tell them when I got back?