The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (9 page)

If Ewald experienced any sadness or misgivings in regard to our passionate teaming, it never showed. Whatever part of him was homosexual had been meticulously compartmentalized, while I was about to discover my sexual queerness. My Freddys—if not on the street where I lived—were just around the corner.

While I’d already amassed a number of anonymous sexual trysts, a platonic love affair with one of my high school teachers, and several major crushes, I had not yet managed to blend crush and sex and love together in one package.

I met him at the Muny Opera.

CHAPTER 16
               

In addition to twelve thousand seats that accommodated audience members, the Muny had several rows of free seats, located about a half mile away from the stage. Being able to see what was transpiring on the stage meant nothing to the large contingency of gay men who were scattered throughout the free seats. They only had eyes for each other. For this notorious cruising area, the musical theater ambience provided the perfect—almost too perfect—backdrop for queer love in bloom.

“Now you’re here and now I know just where I’m going,” Betty White sang (to real-life husband Allen Ludden). “No more doubt or fear, I found my way.”

I came to see Betty White several nights during the weeklong run of
Bells Are Ringing
. So, along with the other boys and men who were hoping that love would find them “just in time,” I cruised the free seats on occasion.

He had on white pants, blindingly white, starched like a sailor’s. And he had a big, bushy, pitch-black mustache—not something you’d ordinarily see in St. Louis. That’s what I remember, the black-and-white aspect of it. He looked, smiled; I looked, smiled. Repeat. Maybe one more time. Then he did that walk-dance, slowly making his way toward the public john, looking over his shoulder every third or fourth step. You could have put it to music. I followed.

There may have been a slight smile of acknowledgment, encouraging me to keep on his track. I was following those white pants—a beacon if there ever was one.

I entered the john and sauntered to a stall that had a chest-high partition so that everyone could see everyone else. It was not crowded, but there were a few others, probably gay men, meandering about. He stood near the entrance, posed sexily, leaning up against a wall. He was touching his dick as I tried to piss but couldn’t because I was too fucking hard. He smiled, licked his lips and his tongue grazed that beautiful mustache.

I tried to smile. It was clear to me that nothing was going to happen here; thank God he wasn’t like those misguided men I’d met downtown who immediately fell to their knees with their mouths gaping.

He was basically flirting. Teasing. Making my heart pound.

After several minutes of this intense staring across a crowded room—I mean, T-room—he made a slinky exit. I followed. There he was, right by the door, waiting.

“I’m Richard,” he said.

“Mike,” I said.

“Michael?” he asked.

“Well, that’s my name, but everyone calls me Mike.”

“I’ll call you Michael,” he said.

The entire relationship could be defined by that exchange.

He told me where to meet him after the show. He was with a friend who had a car.

“I have to get home on the bus,” I told him.

“Well, we’ll drive you to the bus stop.”

After Betty’s final curtain call, I met him at the appointed place. His friend was far more typically gay than Richard was. A bit overweight and overblown, leering at me like I was hanging from a rack in the meat section of the market.

What happened in the few-minutes ride from the Muny parking lot to the bus stop would forever alter the course of my life. His friend drove so Richard and I could sit in the backseat.

He kissed me. My first man kiss. I tasted his tongue, darting inside my mouth and I felt that mustache against my chin and upper lip as it slid across my cheek on his way to lick the inside of my ear. I was gone. Lost. Drunk.

I kissed back; my mouth was on fire. As I kissed him—right then, right there—I thought, “This is it. This is me. No turning back. I’m gay. I’m sixteen years old and I’m kissing a man and I am ecstatic and I now know that I’m gay.”

Still kissing me, he was attempting to find a piece of paper. He asked our “chauffeur,” who had pulled up near the bus stop. I could not miss that bus. He kept kissing me, short and fast smooches, as he wrote out his name and phone number. “Call me tomorrow,” he said.

I kept kissing him. My face was burning. There was pre-cum seeping through my underpants and onto my slacks. I felt his dick through those white starched pants, pressing up against some part of my body.

“I’ll call.”

Big smile. Shiny wetness on his mustache—part of me, my saliva. Fuck.

I borrowed my mom’s car, saying I was only going a few blocks from home and drove to his apartment the next night. About twenty miles away, on the outskirts of Forest Park, in a very chic section of St. Louis (not far from where Karen and Ed Ewald lived).

He had something else in common with Mr. Ewald. “My wife is out of town,” he said at some point. Probably before I had a chance to come to that conclusion, since it was clearly an apartment that belonged to a couple. Because we couldn’t sully the bedroom, we made love on the living room floor on huge, glamorous, overstuffed red pillows.

We kissed and kissed and kissed, for hours on end, before our clothes came off. And when they did, the fireworks began. This was it, wife or no wife; I was in fucking love. Madly. Absurdly. Like only a teenager fresh out of the closet could be. He was twice my age: thirty-two years old.

The wife returned within days and Richard and I began our furtive love affair, consisting mostly of lunches near his downtown office (he was a fashion designer) and Saturday morning sexual trysts (often at the “chauffeur’s” apartment). The sex got wilder as he became more—what’s the word?—fatherly.

“Don’t bite your nails,” he instructed me. A few days later, he’d check them to see if I’d been a good boy. “Stand up, you’re slouching,” he said. I tried desperately to please him, to be the perfect boy and sex toy.

Fortunately, I was immersed in a Children’s Theater production of
The Pied Piper
that I was also directing for a local theater company, which gave me a sense of self that I surely didn’t find in these doomed relationships. Thanks to my achievements in the theater, I was not entirely demoralized by his constant picking at me. I could phone him at work only during limited periods of time; I didn’t know his last name; we saw each other when it was convenient for him. He talked on and on about The Wife.

One day when I was on a break at rehearsal, which coincided with one of the windows of time I was allowed to call, I phoned his office. The secretary, who knew my voice, said, “Oh, Richard is not here. He’s out of town. New York.”

“Oh,” I said, shocked. I’d seen him a couple of days prior and he never mentioned a trip to New York. “Okay.”

I waited a day or two and called back. “Richard?” she asked, as if she’d never heard me ask for him. “Still in New York.” Back to rehearsal, where I knew what I was doing, where I was safe, where emotions were make-believe.

Now approaching two weeks after the first time I called, I called again. Now the secretary was getting firm, but I swore she was making it up. “Richard is still in New York, I’m afraid.”

You’re
afraid? Later that day, I employed my acting abilities, faking a voice and took a chance at asking for his last name (hoping it wasn’t Smith or Burns). I told her I had to mail him something and needed to verify the spelling. She fell for it. His name was Derwostyp and I would, whether he fucking liked it or not, call his apartment.

I got the number from Information and called. It either rang off the hook or was busy. Then, finally, after several days, the wife answered. Since all I was really trying to figure out was whether he was in St. Louis, I just hung up.

I waited for him to answer. I borrowed my mom’s car (“only going a few blocks away”) and began driving down there. I parked in front of his apartment, waiting to see him come or go. He didn’t. Neither did she. A stalker was born.

I could not make sense of it, knowing that he loved me, certain of it. He’d made love to me, hadn’t he? He’d had sex with me. He’d held me, kissed me. Wasn’t that love?

More than a month separated my first phone call to his office from the one that would finally explain, at least ostensibly, what had happened.

“Richard?” she said, seeming to delight in delivering this news to me, knowing how desperate and distraught I sounded. “He’s moved to New York and is no longer with us,” she trilled. “Thanks,” I said as I hung up and looked at several kids dressed in their
Pied Piper
costumes, waiting for me to begin the afternoon dress rehearsal.

CHAPTER 17
               

“No longer with us. No longer with us. No longer with us.” The words just kept repeating in my ear. No longer with me. No longer mine. No longer in love. No longer loved.

Heartbroken doesn’t begin to describe it. Heartbroken, betrayed, angry, jealous, enraged; filled with self-hatred, sadness and confusion; a typical teenager’s angst.

The theater saved me. My Pied Piper was lovable—even the rats could perceive my charisma. And I was lauded as a director. But few knew what I was really going through.

It was September, my junior year of high school, when I received a pale blue envelope in the mail, containing a New York postmark. My entire body shook as I carefully opened the elegant envelope with my name scrawled in dramatic, artistic handwriting.

He said he was rushed into another job and attempted to apologize for leaving so abruptly. There were some details about where “they” were living and some news about his fabulous new job. He signed the letter, “Fondly.”

I studied the word “fondly” for days, weeks, on end and decided that it was just an excuse for not being able to say “love.” I would hold onto that belief my entire life. It’s a word of avoidance and it further served to break my heart. My first “fondly” letter should have been a love letter, shouldn’t it have been? To this day, a letter signed “fondly” makes me shudder.

Ewald continued to teach me about the theater, making our intimacy even more profound intellectually but making the lack of sex, post-Richard, more disorienting. Still, I accepted it and was grateful that I had someone to love. Sex was everywhere.

I figured the “chauffeur” would let Richard know what a slut I was being (like he was dying to hear about my conquests) so I started doing him (even though I was not really attracted to him). But it was compartmentalized. I loved Ewald. I had sex with these other guys. The “chauffeur” introduced me to all of his friends, who passed me around like a cheap novel.

My world at school revolved around the plays and Ewald was not making any pedestrian choices. While most high schools were doing the umpteenth production of
Our Town
or
Arsenic and Old Lace
, that year we did
Apollo de Belac
by Giradeaux and
The Cave Dwellers
by Saroyan. I played the leads in both—very heady stuff for a teenager. But Ewald was grooming me and his teaching included not only acting but also an appreciation of what good plays were like. The language, the metaphors, the imagery, the themes, the humanness—where else would I have learned this at seventeen years old? He instilled an appreciation of the theater that no one else could have because he was so smart and because I loved him so much.

To this day, I acknowledge that he is the person who taught me to act. I often say that when I’m stuck and without a good director, it’s Ewald’s voice I hear, opening a door to dig deeper and find the character or the right gesture or movement. Perhaps the greatest lesson any actor can be given is belief in self, so that the actor approaches the work with a physical, vocal and emotional freedom based on who he or she is. Ewald loved me in spite of my being a queer and a bit effeminate and decidedly not “normal” by some people’s standards.

He validated me by giving me those complex roles, demanding that I bring them to vivid life with every ounce of energy I could muster. And I did. I made him proud.

Less artistically challenging but a hell of a lot of fun was the yearly operetta,
Carousel
, in which I played the role of the snaky Jigger. This provided me with an opportunity to butch it up onstage, proving that I could tap into my macho energy in spite of my gentle demeanor.

I dressed entirely in black except for a bright red kerchief around my neck and one gigantic gold hoop earring. The final touch was a piece of art: on my hairless face, I painted a big black mustache.

Only as I composed these words did it dawn on me that my look as the bad-boy pirate was clearly a version of Richard’s distinctive Bohemian artist look.

I wrote my ex-lover a few letters, raving about my theatrical conquests. As long as I had a part in a play, I felt like I was okay. Every ounce of my self-worth depended on being in the theater. Otherwise, I felt unlovable and undeserving of being loved. In my mind, even Ewald’s love was predicated on me being a good actor and student.

Studying a photo of me as Jigger, I remember the intense relief I felt when I took off Michael and put on Jigger. Not only was Jigger a ladies’ man; he was sexy and dangerous and in control.

In the photo with me is Martha Murphy, wearing a cheap platinum wig and enough green eye shadow to paint a small room. She played the licentious owner of the carousel, a wicked floozy if there ever was one, especially in a musical comedy. Martha was dealing with her own adolescent angst; we bonded on and off the stage.

Of our first meeting, Martha remembers: “Arms loosely folded across his chest, hands tucked in the armpits of his maroon windbreaker, he threw back his head in hysterical laughter. The gaggle of teenage thespians encircling him were transfixed. He’s their BMOC—towering over all by a good six inches—dark hair flying wildly as he gestures to make his point.

“In this Little Theater at the Corner of the Lesser Known World of Normandy High School—it is Michael Kearns at age sixteen—launching the personal appearance tour that will last a lifetime.”