What Binds Us (3 page)

“Thanks,” I said, not fully understanding. “I’ll cherish it.”

***

Dondi decided that on my birthday, I should get high. “I cannot believe you’ve never smoked a joint,” he cried incredulously.

On my birthday, he marched us over to Calvin and Eddie’s apartment. Calvin answered the door and waved us in with grand hawklike formality. Eddie wandered into the room, a small blue towel knotted at his waist.

“Don’t you ever wear clothes?” Dondi asked him.

Eddie ignored him and sat on a circa 1950s kitchen chair covered in bright pink linoleum. I was surprised by the question because by then the sight of Eddie’s penis within the coils of his towel had become as commonplace as the nose on his face and equally unworthy of comment.

I sat in the chair of honor, a great wingchair from a local thrift store that had been slip-covered in an old sheet so ratty, I wondered what the chair underneath could have looked like so that its current covered incarnation was an improvement. With a flourish Dondi whipped a gold Dunhill lighter from his pocket. A small plastic bag was produced and a great fuss made as seeds were removed and the virtues of various rolling papers discussed.

When they handed me the joint, I regarded it in my hand. “I don’t think I want to do this.”

Calvin gasped, leaning back, drawing his hawklike countenance away. “But darling, you must. It is
so
important that one learn how to party. It’s where one meets all the best people.”

I regarded them: glamorous Dondi, the predatory Calvin, silent Eddie.

“Don’t be afraid,” Eddie said, his soft voice startling us into silence. “We’re all friends. We’ll be right here.”

Because it seemed so important to them, I put the joint in my mouth and drew on it. To my embarrassment, a coughing fit resulted, ejecting the joint from my mouth in a cloud of smoke.

“No, no,” Dondi cried, retrieving the joint from the floor. “Like this.” He put it in his mouth and pulled at it. He removed it, passed it to Calvin without looking at him. “Then you have to hold it in,” he spoke without releasing the smoke, his voice strangled.

I tried again, this time managing not to cough. As soon as I opened my mouth, smoke sallied forth like a belch.

“Better,” Dondi commented. “Now, try again. This time, hold it in a little longer.”

The joint made its way around our little circle. Another was lit and passed around. I felt the knot in my stomach loosen and everyone’s voices floated over me.

Calvin stared at me, his small light-blue eyes like twin oases in the pockmarked desolation of his pale face. “Are you all right?” he asked from a great distance.

Eddie handed me a drink. I sipped. Rum and Coke. I felt myself slipping away.

Then Dondi was shaking me gently. “C’mon,” he said. “You fell asleep.”

When I opened my eyes the next morning, the first thing I saw was Dondi straddling his desk chair, his chin resting on its back. Exhaustion ringed his eyes.

“Morning,” I rasped. My throat was raw, my voice scarcely recognizable.

“Morning,” he repeated. “How do you feel?”

“Like the inside of a chimney.”

He chuckled.

“What are you doing up?”

“I haven’t been to bed yet.”

“Why not?”

“Ahhh…I dropped some speed after we came back.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to be up in case you needed anything.”

“You stayed up all night just to make sure I was all right?”

“Well, yeah. It was your first time getting high. I felt sort of responsible.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Know what?” he grinned.

“No. What?”

“You snore.”

“Do not.”

“Do too. And,” he sang gleefully, “You had a boner.
All night!
”

“You looked?”

“Uh-huh!”

I flung my pillow at him. He ducked and leaped into the upper bunk.

I lay down again. “Thanks,” I called up to him. A soft snore answered my gratitude. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

***

“Aren’t you ready yet?” Dondi called impatiently from the living room.

“No,” I answered, pulling on my boots. “In a minute. I just have to comb my hair.”

We were meeting Cal and Eddie and some other people to go to TLA and catch the midnight showing of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. “You’ll love it,” Cal had insisted. “It’s so
gay!
”

I stood in front of the mirror combing my hair; I didn’t notice Dondi in the hall watching me until he spoke.

“In our boarding school there was only one black kid. His name was Keith. I remember how fascinated I was by him. I would stare at him for
hours
. His skin was the color of chocolate milk and his eyes were black. It was his hair that fascinated me most. I always wanted to touch it. But I never did.” He reached out, fingers gently brushing the side of my head.

I froze. I remember looking at our reflection in the mirror—I with my pick held in the air, his hands wandering over my head.

“It’s so soft,” he murmured.

“Dondi,” I said, “We’re going to be late.”

He drew his hand back as if he’d been burned.

When we got out of the theater, South Street was deserted. A heavy snow was falling. It had obviously been snowing for some time, quilting the street in a white blanket, patchworked here and there by manhole covers and occasional footsteps and blowing rubbish orphaned by overfull trashcans. Cal and Eddie and the rest of our ragtag party decided to go dancing. Dondi, to my surprise, declined to go.

Cal peered at him, his eyes narrow, inquisitive. He must have found his answer, for with a bemused glance at me, his prying eyes swooped away and he led his dancers away.

Unable to find a cab, we decided to walk back to campus.

“Your hair’s all white,” Dondi exclaimed. “You look like an old child.”

By the time we reached our dorm, I was soaked from head to foot. I peeled off my wet clothes gingerly and said, “I’ve got to take a shower. I’m freezing.”

There had been something between us all evening. The air around us seemed charged. On the way home he’d laid his arm across my shoulder. It was a gesture he’d made a dozen times before, but tonight there had been a weight to his arm, a
possessiveness
that hadn’t been there before. When I’d slipped and fallen in the snow, he’d bent down to help me to my feet. As I’d pushed myself up on my elbows, his face hovered over mine. I’d thought for a second he was going to kiss me and closed my eyes, but someone on the corner had cried out and he’d looked up. When I opened my eyes the moment had passed. He’d smiled and pulled me to my feet.

So I was not surprised when he pulled back the shower curtain and said, “Mind if I join you?”

I shrugged and stepped further under the jet of water.

He stepped in behind me. “You look sexy all wet,” he breathed huskily. He laid his hands on my shoulders and turned me toward him; my erection swung into the air between us and he laughed. I kissed his laughing mouth.

His hands travelled up my back and over my shoulders, found my nipples. His thumbs passed back and forth across my chest; my nipples hardened and he smiled. He kissed my neck, stroked my back. “Skin like chocolate milk,” he murmured, catching my erection in his hand and bringing it to meet his.

Sex with Dondi was different than any I’d experienced. What came before was child’s play—adolescent fumblings in the dark: awkward hands, cold feet. And after: sticky sheets and a vague feeling of dissatisfaction, a nagging doubt, a vague suspicion there should have been more. That night though, I discovered what that
more
was, what exactly it was I’d been longing for.

***

To celebrate our relationship, we went downtown and got our ears pierced. I had my right pierced, he his left. I argued with him. “Why not your right?” I demanded.

“I don’t need to advertise my gayness,” he said. “I can let it show in other ways.”

“But if you pierce your left, people might think you’re straight.”

“Sometimes one needs to be discreet.”

“Right! Like you’ll ever have to sit through a job interview.”

I thought him a coward and held him in contempt for the rest of the afternoon. He bought us T-shirts. Mine read “I’M 1 PERIOD.” His read “I’M 1 2.” I laughed. When he reached across the bed for me that night I forgot my anger and couldn’t tell the difference in the dark between left and right.

As soon as our ears healed, we went to Caldwell’s to shop for diamond stud earrings. When the rather forbidding saleswoman realized the earrings were for us, she became chilly. When Dondi held one up to my ear and shrieked, “Fabulous! You look totally butch,” she became positively frosty.

“Honey,” Dondi purred to her, “Tell me what’s wrong with this picture. You’re on that side of the counter. We’re buying. And you’re giving
us
attitude. No, no, Miss Thing. I don’t think so.”

She muttered something under her breath.

Dondi executed a neat pirouette and marched up to the store manager. “Excuse me,” he said, “but my friend and I just tried to buy a pair of earrings and that Teutonic bitch called me a faggot.”

We went to Bailey Banks and Biddle. He found the diamond studs he wanted and purchased them. “When’s your mother’s birthday?”

“October sixth,” I answered absently.

“Does she like crystal?”

“Yeah, I guess…”

He turned from me. “What do you have in Steuben?” I heard him ask. Then to me, “Does she have good silver?”

“I think all we have is stainless.”

“This pattern. Service for twelve, please.”

I tugged on his sleeve. “Dondi, what are you doing?”

“Getting even. Now, give the nice lady your mother’s address.”

Afterwards, we went back to Caldwell’s and he handed the manager his receipt from Bailey’s. “This,” Dondi said, “could have been Caldwell’s. Read it and weep.”

The manager looked at the receipt and paled then looked at Dondi, speechless. Dondi turned and walked out the door.

The manager handed me the receipt. Dondi had spent $21,000 in Bailey’s.

***

Packing up to go home that summer was hard. We’d shared everything: pajamas (he got the tops, I, the bottoms), a bed, a toothbrush.

We sat in the lobby of our high-rise dorm. Our keys surrendered, we couldn’t go back upstairs; I couldn’t bring myself to leave him. On the floor beside him was a pile of matched, monogrammed Mark Cross luggage forming a mountain that would have daunted Mohammed.

Dondi reached out and patted my hand. He’d been comforting me in this distracted fashion for quite some time, an unlit cigarette in a black plastic holder hanging from his mouth, his eyes restless.

“Well, I’d better be going.”

He glanced at me as if surprised to see me sitting beside him or as if his favorite pet had suddenly begun speaking in tongues. “Oh, okay.”

As I walked away, he shouted, “Hey!” Lowering his voice, he added, “I’ll miss you.”

“I love you,” I mouthed, relieved.

“Ditto,” he mouthed back.

I went back to Willingboro and a job at the local paper. He spent the summer in Amsterdam. I received almost weekly transatlantic telephone calls, in which he sounded breathless and faraway, between bursts of static.

I would later look back on those as the halcyon days of our nascent romance. By fall, everything would have changed.

In the first few weeks after our return to school sophomore year there were a few desultory copulations. Then…nothing. I was too embarrassed to pursue him and instead waited until he fell asleep and masturbated watching his face. When I came, I felt as if I’d stolen something from him.

Slowly I came to realize that while his voice remained the same all summer, he himself had changed. He was distant, less affectionate. Without the connection of sex, we seemed out of step. Our conversations were short, often hostile. Dondi started going out again. I thought he was running away from something rather than toward something else. His absence was wrenching.

To make matters worse, Eddie and Calvin were having problems too. There was a certain tension between them. Their words often carried a hostile edge.

Finally Dondi asked them, “What’s wrong with you two?”

“He’s pissed,” Calvin said, pointing at Eddie, who sat glowering from the flowered depths of the wingchair. “Because I want to start dating.”

“Dating?”

“Women!” Eddie exploded before erupting into tears. His penis, shriveled with grief, hid in the folds of his towel.

Our heads swung from one to the other as we waited for the punch line.

“We graduate in June. I have to start thinking about a future. That future includes a wife,” Calvin reasoned.

“What about me?” Eddie asked plaintively.

“You’re turning into your parents,” Dondi accused. “Joining that Bal a Versailles, weekend-in-Aruba-set that you used to hold in such contempt.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that life,” Calvin defended weakly.

“That life
kills!
” Dondi said with unexpected vehemence.

“What about
me?
” Eddie repeated.

***

They clung to each other with the tenacity of divorcees, unable to let go completely. They continued to share the same tiny apartment. Eddie, his eyes often swollen and red-rimmed, exchanged his towel for Cacharel jeans so tight they concealed scarcely more than the towel had. Pants, I supposed, made him feel less vulnerable.

Calvin started dating, privileged, confident girls in peasant blouses with long straight hair parted in the center. Eddie moved back to his dorm. Calvin removed himself from our circle, neatly exchanging one set of friends for another. He shed his old life as easily as a favorite shirt grown too small, stretching his arms and tugging at the sleeves of his new life, admiring the fit.

It was 1978 and the whole world seemed to be going crazy. In November, in Guyana, more than 900 members of a cult led by Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.

***

Things between Dondi and me came to a head just before Fall midterms. We had been studying at our respective desks. I was aware of his quiet movement but didn’t pay much attention to what he was doing. When I finally raised my head, he was shrugging on his jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“But you have an exam tomorrow. You need to study.”

“I need to get laid.”

“But—”

“Not by you.”

I fought back tears. “Dondi, why are you doing this? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing, babe,” he said, softening, sitting down. “It’s not you. It’s me. I need…something…else. Not you.”

“What? Am I not good-looking enough? Not butch enough? Is my dick not big enough for you? What? Tell me! What?”

He sighed and stood up. Without saying a word he left. Silence was his retreat. He was safe without words. I was not. I threw a book at the wall. Then another and another until the shelves were bare.

Dawn was peeping around the edge of the curtains when I heard his key in the door. Light from the hall fell, tripping over strewn books. I turned to face the wall and pretended sleep. I could hear him undressing with the clumsy noise of the inebriated. He pulled back the covers and slipped into bed beside me. I could feel his nakedness and pulled violently away.

“I don’t want sex,” he whispered, sounding sober. “I just want to be close to you.”

I rolled onto my back. Staring at the ceiling, I asked, “What’s wrong between us?”

“I know what you want,” he said. “You want forever-and-always. You-for-me and me-for-you-only. Only, that kind of love doesn’t exist. And if it did, I wouldn’t be the one to give it to you. Look, I like you. I like you a lot. We can fuck. We can be friends, but you’ll never be the only one for me. I’m just not built that way.”

“Are you saying you don’t love me?”

“If I believed in love,” he paused and I thought I caught an unaccustomed catch in his voice. He drew a breath, started over. “If I believed in love, I would probably believe I was in love with you.”

He laid his head on my chest. Almost instantly, he was asleep.

In the breaking light I could see that his mouth was bruised and raw-looking. He smelled of sex and someone else’s cologne. I held him and watched the new day dawn.

It was to become a pattern that would repeat itself throughout most of our college years. Dondi would stagger in the early morning hours to find me asleep at my desk with an open book beneath my folded arms, or sprawled across our bed with my study notes scattered on the floor. He would lift me into bed, or gather up my spilled pages before slipping in beside me. He’d soon fall asleep and I’d wake to the sound of his soft snores in my ears, limbs thrown across mine, the scent of some other man’s semen still on his breath.

I remember Dondi that year as a blur of drugged movement: dancing, dancing, dancing. He danced until last call; he danced until first light. Waking in another stranger’s bed, he would call me, ask me what day it was, what time his first class was.

***

I stepped into our room and a rank odor. “Ugh! Dondi,” I shouted, “what the hell is that smell?”

“Quell. I got crabs,” he shouted back through the closed bathroom door.

“I
hope
you didn’t eat anything that smelled that bad.”

“Not that kind, dummy,” he said, opening the door. A small-toothed purple comb was tangled in his dense pubic hair. “The venereal kind.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid.

I was lying on our bed when he came out of the bathroom. “Um, I think I’d better sleep on the couch for the next few nights.” He went into the living room and closed the door.

I found it hard to be in his presence after that. So I spent a great deal of time in the library, wandering around campus, riding the El back and forth across the city. I scheduled early classes so I wouldn’t have to see him in the morning. He would come into the bathroom to pee while I was in the shower. I would turn to the wall to hide my erection.

“You know, you don’t have to avoid me,” he said one morning as I was leaving.

“I’m not.”

“Aren’t you?”

I left him in the silence in which he trusted so greatly.

As the distance grew between us, so too did the extravagance of his gifts. He took me to Victor Saks on Walnut Street in a horse-drawn carriage. After two weeks of almost daily fittings, we’d emerged into a snowy Saturday morning in matching Canadian Lynx fur coats. He gave me a Cartier tank watch and replaced it two weeks later with a $13,000 Piaget Polo.

Dondi, because he could give me everything except what I wanted, went shopping. To Dondi love
was
shopping. He bought me things because I was in his heart and mind. That he bought me so much so often meant I was always on his mind, would forever have a place in his heart, if not his bed.

One day we got into an argument when I refused to accept something he bought me—I don’t even remember what he’d given me that day. “I don’t want anything. Why are you always buying me stuff?”

“It’s what I do,” he shouted. “I don’t know how to do anything else.”

His sudden anger defused my own. “You have to stop. I’m a poor boy,” I said, half-joking. “I can’t afford to buy you anything in return.”

“You’re wrong.
I’m
the poor boy. It’s me who can’t give you anything, not compared to what you give me.” I started to interrupt him. He held up his hand. “You’ve given me your heart, your friendship—”

“You have other friends—”

“I have tricks and acquaintances but no one who matters.” He sounded bitter, defeated. “Except you.
You matter
. I know that when I’m old and sick and dying and everyone else is long gone,
you’ll
still be here.”

I found his words chilling.

In the end I gave up trying to refuse his gifts; he’d told enough that I knew every present was a token of a feeling deeper than generosity. And he gave me each gift with such sincerity, with such offhand joy, that to have refused him would have seemed petty, mean.

***

One morning while he was peeing, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I pulled back the shower curtain. His face was corrugated by pain.

“Dondi, what is it?” I asked alarmed.

“Gonorrhea, probably.”

“Excuse me?”

“It feels like I have the clap,” he repeated.

“How would you know what the clap feels like?” I asked, ready to dismiss his diagnosis as drama queen histrionics.

“Oh, please! I ought to know what it feels like by now.”

“You’ve had it before?” I asked, scandalized.

“Darling, I’ve had the clap so many times, it’s now applause!”

He skipped his morning classes and went to Student Health. When I came home he was leaning over the toilet. “Erythromycin,” he explained between dry heaves. “If morning sickness is anything like this, I’m having my tubes tied!”

***

There were good times—times when the air wasn’t pregnant with recriminations and bitter anxiety, when silence wasn’t a raised offensive. With the first snow we sailed paper airplanes out of our high-rise window until one-thirty in the morning while the campus, besieged by winter’s cold fury, blanched below us.

We went to St. Croix for four days in the middle of February. We stayed in a small hotel in Fredericksted that had neither telephones nor televisions. We were content with the sea and the sand and each other. One morning Dondi chartered a Cessna to fly us to St. Thomas because he wanted to see Bluebeard’s castle. I sat in the co-pilot’s seat.

“Don’ touch anyt’ing,” the pilot, a grizzled native, warned me as we climbed above the clouds. Rain fell around us like pieces of ice.

When we got back I told my parents that we’d seen a werewolf.

“In Fredericksted? Oh,” they said, laughing together without apparent alarm. “That was Mr. Kreiger.”

***

In the same week in March, Horses burned down and The Crypt was raided and padlocked. Dondi wore black for an entire week.

Unable to dance, Dondi fell in love. The object of his affection was a strapping lad with a shock of sun-bleached hair. Unable to get the guy’s attention, Dondi stole his clothes out of the wash. Once he dragged me into the common bathroom at the end of the hall.

“What are we doing in here, Dondi?” I asked.

“He just used the toilet,” he explained. “I want to see.” He led me into the toilet stall and bolted the door behind us. “Look,” he whispered in a tone normally associated with gravesides and church sanctuaries.

I glanced into the bowl and groaned before turning away. Dondi, however, stared at the turd floating in that bowl as if it would reveal the route to his beloved’s heart.

***

We only had one class together that year—Latin, conducted by a demented German with a heavy accent and a wooden leg. As this was our second year of Latin, we were expected to have mastered the rudiments of the language that was dead in more ways than one. Dr. Krause appointed us watchdogs of the language of Cicero; he assigned us each dogs’ names. Whenever someone made a mistake we were expected to bark. He would pound his cane or sometimes, more alarmingly, his wooden leg, which he often detached casually and shouted, “Vere are my dawgs? Vere are my dawgs? Rover! Fido! Prince!”

Both Dondi and I were in danger of failing until Dondi found us a tutor—Reinhardt, a blue-eyed, towheaded man-child who was the personification of the Aryan ideal and who, later, turned out to be Professor Krause’s son. Predictably, Dondi seduced him. Also predictably, Dondi dumped him. He would come over to tutor us and give Dondi hangdog looks. Dondi would ignore him.

“But why?” Reinhardt asked me sadly, repeatedly, while I tried to decline verbs.

“
Omnia mutantur. Omnia fluunt.
What we are today we will not be tomorrow,” I answered him.

He corrected my Latin listlessly.

***

While languishing from a particularly virulent strain of gonorrhea, Dondi asked me, “Do you suppose we could be happy together?”

“Oh, sure. So what if your dick is practically in a sling?”

He laughed, then leaned over the bed and vomited on the carpet. “Fucking penicillin,” he said, falling back on the bed in a pool of sweat.

***

Shortly before the spring semester’s end, Eddie arrived at our room. His jeans were still too tight, but his eyes were dry and free of hurt. “Calvin came over last night. He was drunk. He said he came over to apologize.”

“What happened?”

“I beat the shit out of him,” he said tonelessly. “Then I fucked the bastard silly.” He lifted his head and sought my eyes. His own were wounded. “Let him go back and explain his black eye and his sore asshole to her. It’s over,” he said. “It’s finally over.”

“Eddie, I’m sorry.”

“Do you know he was the only man I ever slept with? He was the only man I ever
wanted
to sleep with.”

“Yeah, I can believe that.”

“I’m not saying I’m not gay, because God knows I am, but… Anyway, like I said, it’s over. I can’t even hate him anymore. At least these last few months there was that.”

I knelt in front of him and wrapped my arms around him as he cried. He pulled away, sniffled, wiped his nose with his sleeve. “I didn’t mean to dump all this on you. I only came over to tell you goodbye. I’m leaving this afternoon.”

“What about graduation?”

“I’m not going. I can’t. We were supposed to graduate together.” He sniffled again. “I called my parents last night. They understand.”