The Lost Language of Cranes (11 page)

One afternoon Gerard, his once-fat, dogged best friend since kindergarten, his beloved Gerard with whom he had stolen candy and stared at dinosaurs in the Museum of Natural History—one afternoon Gerard had a girlfriend. He had been teasing Laura Dobler for weeks, had scoffed when other girls brought messages that she liked him. Then, to Philip's immense shock and betrayal (for Gerard had sworn he would never do it), he "asked her," and they were going steady. At recess they sat hand-in-hand on a bench in the playground, and the girls came up to them, to flirt and smile, or to ask their solemn advice. In the afternoons, in math class, Gerard wrote Laura love notes which he signed "Love Always," in imitation of his sixteen-year-old brother, Stuart. Philip, in a panic of confusion, asked Tracy Micelli to go with him. He was desperately fearful of losing Gerard, who had been his faithful friend since infancy, and he imagined he and Tracy Micelli might double-date with Laura and Gerard, thus providing a reason for the friendship to continue. He asked Tracy Micelli to go steady in a long letter, written in red magic marker and complete with illustrations, which he slipped inside the grate of her locker. A few hours later, he saw her. She was with Laura and some other girls, and as soon as In came into their view, they ran into the girl's room.

After that, in the course of four days, Philip asked seventeen other girls to go steady with him, and they all turned him down. It became a minor scandal; even the teacher was aware of it. Finally Donna Gruber, who at thirteen was five foot ten and flat-chested, and as a result had a no-nonsense air about her. decided something had to be done. "You're making a fool out of yourself," she told Philip sternly in the library, her two best friends nodding on either side of her in corroboration. "You're a nice boy, but you're being stupid asking all those girls to go with you. And while we're at it, you've got to stop scratching yourself. It's very unattractive."

Philip's mouth opened in shock. He had never thought anyone had noticed.

"It's my underwear," he said meekly. "My underwear is too tight."

The girls on either side of Donna Gruber turned red.

"Do you think that's why they wouldn't go with me?" Philip asked.

"Oh, Philip!" Donna said. "You asked seventeen girls.
Seventeen."

"Would you think about going with me?"

"Philip!" they all shouted, exasperated. "Boy, are you stupid," Donna said. "You really don't get it, do you? Well, I've put in my bit. The rest you have to figure out for yourself." And they left him.

It was after that that he threw himself against the wall. No one saw. He went to Central Park to do it, to an obscure wooded corner where he could have gotten mugged or beaten up. Again and again he threw himself, unsure which he wanted to crack more—the wall or his head—or if he just wanted to get to the other side, where he might take tea with hedgehogs and be king.

"Kid!" a voice said. "Kid! What are you doing?"

A hand grabbed him by the collar and pulled him away from the wall. Philip's eyes were red with tears, his fists red, little pieces of grass stuck in the creases.

"Nothing!" Philip said, and wondered if the man was going to Kill him. He was a tall man, in his thirties, with a black mustache and very short hair. Although he was dressed mostly in leather, he didn't look dangerous.

"What the hell are you doing here?" the man said. "Do you know where you are?"

"Where I am?" Philip said. "In the park. In Central Park."

"Kid, trust me, go somewhere else—go play with your friends on the grass, go to the zoo. Don't stay here."

He let Philip go. Philip brushed grass from his pants and jacket, and started to walk away. Nearby, two or three other men stood among the trees, staring past each other, stroking erections that bulged from their pants. Philip watched them. They didn't scare him; indeed, he was almost drawn to them, to their lonely circle, the way they didn't look at but over each other. He watched the sad ritual of his kind and was not surprised. Then one of the men saw him. "Hi," he said. He smiled, unzipped his fly. "You like what you see?" Philip ran away.

Sometimes Philip thought about what would happen if his mother were to walk in on him one day and find him surrounded by the shiny magazines, mounds of them spread all over the floor, colorful as the toys and blocks with which, as a child, he had often built play castles to house himself. He imagined the look on her face—her eyes wide, her mouth open in confusion. Beyond that, he couldn't imagine. His life, he presumed, would end in a flash, as it had begun. If he was lucky, he would be born again without this need.

It was only many years later that Philip was finally able to face this possibility, to enact the scene that never took place, the scene where his mother walked in and caught him with his pornography. He imagined what it would have felt like to be forced to talk about it, to acknowledge the protruding erections and the "toys" in the ads and the sergeants in the stories, "planting liplocks" on willing recruits. His mother would probably have handled it relatively well, he decided. She would have left the room, let him clean up. Later, calmly, she would have brought it up with him, said something wise and never mentioned it again, imagining, he supposed, that this was a childish phase, something he'd get over. And he—what would he have said? His sexual life had been bred in secret; he had never spoken of it with anyone, not even himself. Could something so private be real, he wondered? Wouldn't he someday soon meet a girl, fall in love with her? Wouldn't there be some shifting in the hormones he was just learning about in science class, so that he could make love to a woman like any other man, marry her like any other man? He would be free of it, then, that other life, the secret life; it would fall away, unknown to anyone but him, and he would look back on it as a distant dream. Only if his mother found out, if she caught him—then he could never go back.

It wasn't until college that Philip finally made love with another human being, and it was a man. He was not altogether happy about this, but he felt compelled: Loneliness, horniness. the need to touch real flesh—these things conspired against him. He and a skinny medical student named Dean rolled on an ancient sofa in a dorm room, and Philip's hands grabbed for flesh, touched where they had never touched before, investigated the hardness of some things, the softness of others.

What disappointment he felt when, in the midst of sex, Dean took his own penis in hand and began, without compunction, to jerk himself off. He looked right at Philip as he did it, too, a look fall of lusty encouragement, prodding Philip to join in, to pose, to become, for a moment, a photograph in a magazine. And Philip—disappointed, but more than that, dazzled by how much easier it was this way, and how exciting—went along with him, watching him, watching him watching him.

When Philip came, it was with such power that the semen flew across the bed and hit the radiator, where it sizzled and disintegrated on impact. Dean smiled appreciatively. "That was some distance," he said. "It must have been a long time since you had sex."

"My whole life," Philip said.

"Your whole life!" Dean said enthusiastically. "Really? Does that mean I'm your first?"

"I suppose so," he said. "Yes."

Dean put an arm around him, wrapped his long body around Philip's and kissed him on the cheek. "That's great," he said. "I've never been with someone their first time. You know, I wish you'd told me, because it would have been a big turn-on for me. Then maybe I could have shot as far as you."

"Sorry," Philip said.

And now Philip is seventeen, and walking in circles. He is used to this. When he goes to parties given by his friends from school, he tends to overestimate how long it will take him to get to the apartment or house where the party is taking place, and he arrives sometimes a full half hour early. So he walks in circles—wider and wider circles, first a five-block radius, then a ten-block radius. He walks until ten minutes after the party is supposed to start, and still he is the first guest.

Tonight there is no party. The place he is going has no beginning or end. It runs on an endless loop. He actually called the theatre week earlier to see when the feature started and the woman on the other end of the line laughed at him. The circle he is walking includes the crucial block of St. Mark's Place, with its haircutting salons and clothes shops; the Indian ghetto on Sixth Street; Third, Second, and First Avenues. He knows every inch of this territory by now. He has been walking for an hour.

He passes the theatre. The brick wall is painted red. Behind twin glass doors and a glass partition, a woman with peroxide blond hair sits and files her nails. She is the fulcrum of his circling. The first time he passed he almost went in, but then an old woman hobbled by, and he couldn't.

The feature film is called
Strap.

Enough. He walks directly up to the theatre. No one is passing in front; no reprieve awaits him. He has his money counted out in his front pocket, no wallet in his back pocket. Nothing for pickpockets, no identity. He is no one. To the woman behind the pane of glass, he hardly exists. She has a large, artificial-looking mole on her cheek and is certainly real enough to him as she takes the money from his shaking hand through a slot in the glass. Then she reaches under herself—a gesture that in itself seems obscene, prophetic—and pulls at something. The turnstile loosens, and he passes through it, counted, a click, then through a curtain, into darkness.

Ahead of him is a screen, and on the screen a penis six feet long lunges at a back, over and over, seeming to miss the opening deliberately. It slaps the back. It bounces. There is jazz music. He can see nothing except the huge screen—no seats, no faces—and he gropes behind himself for a wall, for something to lean on until his eyes adjust. The wall is tattered velvet. He feels the soft, diamond-shaped mounds, as well as the bald patches worn down by years of leaning. He is blind and helpless. The wall is sticky. His shoes stick to the floor. He feels as if he has walked into a spider's web.

Slowly he begins to see. People are sitting in the rows of seats—most singly, some in pairs or trios. A number of young men lean against the side wall, themselves on display, as if in rivalry with the film. Most of the people in the theatre are pacing up and down the aisles, occasionally turning into the men's room, the door marked "Lounge."

He gropes for a seat at the end of the aisle. He thinks that this will make it easier for him to escape if need be. On the screen ahead of him, three of them go at it, wildly, violently. They are vocal, and that is the best part. They grunt out what they want and how good it feels; they scream words and phrases Philip must whisper even in his imagination. Ahead of him a pair of shadows grope, meld, separate again. Which is the film and which is real? One slides below the other. A third comes to watch, to join in, if possible. They push him away. Philip turns his head up, determined to watch only the screen.

The film has a plot. According to the plot, a young man about to be married sneaks into his brother's room, discovers a gay pornographic magazine, and begins to masturbate. The brother finds him. "Hey, I'm straight," says the groom. "Then if you don't want your bride to find out, you better do what I say and suck my cock," the brother says. The groom is hesitant, but complies.

Philip is fascinated by the film. He hardly notices, after a few minutes, that a man in his fifties—one of the pacers—has taken a seat in front of Philip, just to his right. Philip immediately feels his back tense up. Up until this point, he has assumed that the people pacing the aisles were employees of the theatre, there to make sure nobody did anything they weren't supposed to. He was grateful for this imagined protection, for he really only wants to watch. But now the man who has embodied security—who might hoist other men off their knees by the scruff of the neck and put them out the door—is sitting in front of him, and his hand is cradling the empty seat in front of Philip's seat, as if there is a person there, a date, a girl, and the man is a nervous teenager, making his first, tentative move. Once the man turns around, looks at Philip, then turns back. He looks him straight in the eye and doesn't smile. His face is chunky, stubbled with gray; he has some sort of cap on. He sits in front of Philip and his arm squeezes the shoulder of the seat, the imaginary date. Philip almost laughs, and then the arm dips down over the back of the seat and brushes his leg.

He gasps, and closes his eyes—not because he is surprised, but because it seems so inevitable, this first touch. The hand strokes Philip's thigh, back and forth, gently, and the capped head does not turn around. The hand goes in circles, larger and larger, over his lap, landing on his groin, but not resting there. Instead—to Philip's surprise—the hand reaches for his own hand, and coils around his thumb. He can see the forearm—watchless, thick. He can feel the tiny hairs brushing against his hand.

The man removes his hand from Philip's lap, gets up and walks to the aisle, where he stands right next to Philip. He gestures for Philip to move in one seat so he can sit next to him, and Philip does. He had not planned to; he had told himself, I'll just nod my head no; but now he is doing it, he is moving in one more seat. On the screen, the giant genitals are back, going about their business, and the strange man's hand unzips Philip's fly and burrows into him. How strange it looks there—rustling in his pants like an animal making a home in a tree. By the time the hand has found what it is looking for, Philip's mind is blank, his body is soaked in sweat, and his penis is soft.

The man gives a few tugs, and turns to look at Philip. "What's wrong?" he asks. "What do you want me to do?" Philip closes his eyes, and shakes his head. There are tears in his eyes. He feels as if he can't breathe.

The man removes his hand and zips Philip's fly, as his father zipped his fly after helping him to pee out of it when he was five. They were in Europe, then, on a mountaintop. All around was air and snow and green, green hills.