When You Are Engulfed in Flames (5 page)

I ordered myself a Stadium Pal and realized that while it might make sense in a hospital, it really wasn’t very practical for day-to-day use. In an open-air sporting arena, a piping hot thirty-two-ounce bag of urine might go unnoticed, but not so in a stuffy airplane or small, crowded bookstore. An hour after christening it, I smelled like a nursing home. On top of that, I found that it was hard to pee and do other things at the same time. Reading out loud, discussing my beverage options with the flight attendant, checking into a fine hotel: each activity required its own separate form of concentration, and while no one knew exactly what I was up to, it was pretty clear that something was going on. I think it was my face that gave me away. That and my oddly swollen calf.

What ultimately did me in was the self-adhesive condom. Putting it on was no problem, but its removal qualified as what, in certain cultures, is known as a
bris.
Wear it once, and you’ll need a solid month to fully recover. It will likely be a month in which you’ll weigh the relative freedom of peeing in your pants against the unsightly discomfort of a scab-covered penis, ultimately realizing that, in terms of a convenient accessory, you’re better off with a new watchband.

Never Listen to My Father

It was the weekend of my brother’s wedding, and my father was trying to talk me into a bow tie. “Come on,” he said. “Live a little!” Outside the window, waves pounded against the shore. Seabirds soared overhead screeching what sounded like “Queer, queer, queer.”

When worn with a tuxedo, a bow tie makes a certain kind of sense, but with a suit I wasn’t sure I trusted it. The model my father chose was red-and-white-striped, the size of a luna moth, and as he advanced I backed toward the door.

“It’s just a strip of cloth,” he said. “No different than a regular tie. Who the hell cares if it falls straight or swags from side to side?”

My inner hobo begged me not to do it, but I foolishly caved in, thinking it couldn’t hurt to make an old man happy. Then again, maybe I was just tired and wanted to get through the evening saying as little as possible. The thing about a bow tie is that it does a lot of the talking for you. “Hey!” it shouts. “Look over here. I’m friendly, I’m interesting!” At least that’s what I thought it was saying. It was a great evening, and at the end of it I thanked my father for his recommendation. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “A guy like you was made for a bow tie.”

A short while after the wedding, while preparing for a monthlong cross-country trip, I bought one of my own and discovered that it said different things to different people. This bow tie was paisley, its dominant color a sort of midnight blue, and while a woman in Columbus thought it made me look scholarly, her neighbor in Cleveland suggested I might be happy selling popcorn.

“Like what’s his name,” she said. “The dead guy.”

“Paul Newman is dead?”

“No,” she said. “That other one. Orville Redenbacher.”

Name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the bow tie was characterized as “very Charlie McCarthy,” while in Chicago a young man defined it as “the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.” This sent the bow tie back into my suitcase, where it begged forgiveness, evoking the names of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Senator Paul Simon. “Oh come on,” it said. “
They
were Democrats. Please let me out.”

Political affiliation aside, I know what the young Chicagoan had meant. It’s a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being “out there.” I’m just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone’s wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he’s out there for wearing it.

I wore my bow tie to twenty-seven cities, and in each of them I found myself begging for affirmation. “Do you
really
think it looks OK?
Really?
” I simply could not tell whether it was right for me. Alone in an elevator I’d have moments of clarity, but just as I reached for the knot, I’d recall some compliment forced from a stranger.
“Oh, but it looks so adorable, so cute! I just want to take you home!”

I’m told by my father that when I was an infant, people would peek into my carriage and turn to my mother saying, “Goodness, what a . . . baby.” I’ve never been described as cute, so why now? What was the bow tie saying behind my back? And how could I put it in contact with twenty-year-old marines rather than seventy-year-old women?

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. “A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.”

And that is
exactly
what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless, but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home not because you’re sexy but because you’re sex
less,
a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle. This doesn’t mean that the bow tie is necessarily
wrong
for me, just that it’s a bit premature. When I explained this to my father, he rolled his eyes. Then he said that I had no personality. “You’re a lump.”

He sees the bow tie, at least in my case, as a bright string wrapped around a run-of-the-mill gift. On opening the package, the receiver is bound to be disappointed, so why set yourself up? It’s a question my father answers in the pained, repetitive voice of a parole officer. According to him, you set yourself up in order to
exceed
those expectations. “You dress to give a hundred percent, and then you give a hundred and twenty. Jesus,” he says. “You’re a grown man. Haven’t we been through this?”

Grown or not, I still feel best — more true to myself — when dressed like a hobo. The die was cast for me on Halloween, and though it has certainly not been proven, I think it’s this way for everyone. Look at my brother, who dressed as an ax murderer, and at my sister Amy, who went as a confused prostitute. As for the other kids in my neighborhood, the witches and ghosts, the vampires, robots, and, oh God, the mummies, I can only hope that, like me, they work at home.

Road Trips

The house I grew up in is located in a subdivision, and when my family first arrived the front yards were, if not completely bare, then at least close to it. It was my father who rallied the neighbors and initiated a campaign to plant maples along the side of the road. Holes were dug, saplings were delivered, and my sisters and I remarked that, with the exception of birds, trees were the only things on earth that weren’t cute when they were babies. They looked like branches stuck into the ground, and I remember thinking that by the time they were fully grown I would be old.

And that’s pretty much what happened.

Throughout my teens and early twenties, I’d wonder if my father hadn’t made a mistake and ordered pygmy maples, if such a thing exists. During my thirties, they grew maybe three feet, tops, but after that their development was astonishing. The last time I saw them, they were actual trees, so tall that the upper branches on the left side of the road mingled with those on the right, forming a solid canopy of shade. This was a few years ago. I was in Raleigh for the night, and my father took me to a party hosted by one of his neighbors. I used to know everyone on our street, but since I’d left there had been a lot of turnover. People die, or move into condominiums, and their homes are sold to young married couples who scrap the earth-toned carpets and build islands in the kitchens. The interiors of these houses used to look the same, and, eventually, as each is bought and remodeled, they’ll look the same again, but in a different way.

The party was held at what I thought of as “the Rosens’ place,” though that was two owners ago. The hostess was one of the new people, as were her guests, and it surprised me that my dad knew everyone’s name. Here were Phil and Becky, Ashley and Dave, and a high-spirited fifteen-year-old, who threw himself onto the sofa with great flourish and referred to my father as a she, as in “Lou Sedaris, who invited
her?
”

“My son is gay!” the boy’s mother announced, as if none of us had figured this out yet. He may have attended one of those magnet schools for the arts, but still it floored me that a ninth grader in Raleigh, North Carolina — on the street where I grew up — could comfortably identify himself as a homosexual. I felt like someone in a ten-pound leg brace meeting a beneficiary of the new polio vaccine. “
She
just happens to be my father, young man, and I’d appreciate it if you’d show her a little respect.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

When I was this kid’s age, you’d be burned alive for such talk. Being a homosexual was unthinkable, and so you denied it, and found a girlfriend who was willing to settle for the sensitive type. On dates, you’d remind her that sex before marriage was just that, sex: what dogs did in the front yard. This as opposed to making love, which was more what you were about. A true union of souls could take anywhere from eight to ten years to properly establish, but you were willing to wait, and for this the mothers loved you. You sometimes discussed it with them over an iced tea, preferably on the back porch when your girlfriend’s brother was mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

I kept my secret to myself until I was twenty years old, and I might have kept it even longer had a couple not picked me up when I was hitchhiking one night. It was 1:00 a.m., and the last thing I expected was a ride in a Cadillac. Stranger still was opening the back door and discovering that the people inside were old — my parents’ age, at least. The car smelled of hair tonic. A CB radio crackled from its berth beside the steering wheel, and I wondered who they could be talking to at this time of night. Then I noticed that the woman was wearing a negligee. She leaned forward to press the cigarette lighter, and I could see a tag the size of an index card showing through the sheer fabric at the back of her neck. We drove in silence for a mile or two before the man turned in his seat and asked, as if he were inquiring about my health, “How’d you like to eat my wife’s pussy?”

Then the woman turned as well, and it was to her that I made my confession: “I’m a homosexual.” I’d been waiting to unload this for as long as I could remember, and, amid the screeching of tires and the violent swerve to the side of the road, I felt all the relief I’d imagined I would.

A few months later I said the same thing to my best friend, Ronnie, who pretended to be surprised and then admitted that she’d known all along. “It’s the way you run,” she said. “You let your arms flop instead of holding them to your sides.”

“Work on your run,” I wrote in my diary the following morning.

At the age that many would consider their heyday, I had not had sex with anyone. My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company.

Next on my list of people to tell was my former college roommate, Todd. I hitched from Raleigh to Kent, Ohio, but once I got there, the time didn’t seem quite right. It was harder telling a guy than it was telling a girl, and harder still when you’d taken too much acid and were trying to keep the little people from sticking pins in your eyes.

After my failure in Ohio, I headed back south. It was early December, and I had forgotten how cold it could get in the Midwest.

Todd had suggested that I take his down jacket, but I thought it was unsightly, so here I was in a thrift-shop overcoat that didn’t even button all the way up. He’d also offered a sweater that belted at the waist. It was thick and patterned in bright colors, the sort of thing a peasant might wear while herding llamas, but I’d said, “No, it might ruin my silhouette.” That was the phrase I had used, and now I was paying for my vanity — because what difference would it have made? “Oh, goodness, I can’t give
him
a ride. He looks too lumpy.”

I’d left Kent at eight in the morning, and the next five hours had taken me less than fifty miles. Now it was lunchtime — not that there was anywhere to buy it, or anything much to buy it with. It began to rain, and, just as I thought of turning back, a tow truck pulled over and the driver motioned for me to get in. He told me that he wasn’t going far — just thirty miles up the road — but I was grateful for the warmth and climbed into the passenger seat determined to soak up as much of it as I possibly could.

“So,” the man said after I had settled in, “where you from?” I pegged him to be somewhere between old and ancient, midforties, maybe, with gray-tinged sideburns shaped like boots.

I told him I was from North Carolina, and he slapped his palm against the steering wheel. “North Carolina. Now, there’s a state for you. My brother and me went down on vacation — Topsail Beach, I think it was — and we just had the time of our lives.”

When the man turned to address me, I noticed that his ears stuck out and that his forehead was divided almost in two by a vertical dent that started at the intersection of his eyebrows and ran to within an inch of his hairline. It was the type of thing associated with heavy thought, but this was so deep and painful-looking that it might have been left by a hatchet.

“Yessiree, good old North Carolina,” the man continued. “N.C., I guess you call it down there.”

He went on about the state’s climate and the friendliness of its people, and then he looked into his side mirror to monitor the progress of an advancing eighteen-wheeler. “All I know is that if anyone wanted to give me a blow job, or have me give him one, I’d do it.”

This came out of nowhere, and what threw me was the way he’d attached it to his previous observation. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.

“Well,” I said, “they’re not
all
friendly. I remember one time I was walking down the street and a group of men grabbed me by the arms and spit in my face.” The story was true, and, at its mention, I recalled the stench of their sour, phlegm-clotted saliva. I expected, and reasonably so, that the tow truck driver might ask for details: “Who were these men? Why did they spit in your face?”

But instead he picked up where he’d left off. “I mean to tell you that I would actually crouch down on this seat and perform fellatio,” he said. “Either that or I’d sit up while someone performed it on me. I really would.”

“Then, another time,” I told him, “another time this guy threatened to knock my teeth down my throat. I was just standing there minding my own business, and all of a sudden there he was.” This was a lie, or at least the last part was. The man had threatened to knock my teeth down my throat, but only because my friend and I had given him the finger and called him a crusty old redneck. “I was twelve years old at the time,” I said. “In Ohio you’d never threaten a kid like that, but down in North Carolina it’s par for the course.”

Par for the course.
I was sounding more idiotic by the minute — not that it mattered.

“I mean, why
not
give someone a blow job?” the driver said. “It’s just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”

Outside the moving truck were flat, barren fields, some bordered by stands of trees and others stretching without interruption out to the horizon. One second they’d appear as a blur, and then the windshield wiper would make its shuddering pass and everything would leap back into focus. A station wagon pulled in front of us, and the children in the backseat signaled for my driver to blow his horn. He seemed not to notice them, and just as I thought to bring it to his attention I realized that the request included the word “blow.” And so I let it drop and turned my attention back to the landscape.

Had I been able to address the real subject, I’d have told this man that I was saving myself for the right person. I wanted my first time to be special, meaning that I would know the other guy’s name and, I hoped, his telephone number. After sex, we would lie in each other’s arms and review the events that had brought us to this point. I could not predict exactly what this conversation would sound like, but I had not imagined it to include such lines as “I knew this would happen five minutes ago, the moment you climbed into my tow truck.” Not that I minded this man’s profession. It was the other stuff that bothered me: his dent, his forwardness, and his persistent refusal to turn the goddamn page. He sounded like me when I sensed that drugs were around: “All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I’ll do it. I really will.”

I cringed to think of myself, skeeving pot off my friends and believing all the while that I was sounding casual. After dropping in uninvited and basically forcing someone to share his drugs, I’d pocket the roach and take my leave, saying, “That’s the last time I let you fuck me up like this, I mean it.”

“Yes, indeedy,” the tow truck driver said. “A little oral give-and-take would feel
pretty
good right about now.”

I could have ended it so simply. “I don’t think my girlfriend would like that too much,” I might have said, but I wanted to put that particular lie behind me. There was my life
before
I told a strange woman in a negligee that I was a homosexual, and now there would be my life
after,
two chapters so dissimilar in style and content that they might have been written by different people. That’s what I’d hoped, but of course it wouldn’t work out that way. I needed a story that I could live with, and so I compromised and told the tow truck driver that I had an
ex
-girlfriend. “We just broke up a week ago, and now I’m going home to win her back.”

“So?” he said. “I got an ex-
wife.
I got a current one, too, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t feel good to give someone a blow job, or to have somebody give you one while you laid back and enjoyed it a little.”

Mine was the lie that got you nowhere, and, as I berated myself for wasting it, the driver took his right hand off the steering wheel and laid it on the seat between us. For a moment it was idle, and then it began to lumber in my direction, its movement as hesitant and blocky as a turtle’s. “Yessiree,” its owner said.

There would come times in later years when I would have sex against my wishes. No one forced me, exactly — it wasn’t that. I just wasn’t sure how to say “Go. Get out. I don’t want this.” Often, I’d feel sorry for the guy: he was deformed through no fault of his own, he bought all his clothes at Sears, he said he loved me on the first date. Once or twice I’d be too scared to say no, but this particular man didn’t frighten me. I looked at him in much the same way that the fifteen-year-old, my father’s neighbor, must have looked at me: as a relic of an earlier era, when trees were stubs, women could be deceived, and everything inside your home was the color of rust or dirt.

When the shambling hand at last reached my coat, I thought of how I’d assert myself and tell the driver that this was an excellent place for me to get out.

“What?” he’d say? “Here? Are you sure?”

The man would pull over, and I would take my place by the side of the road, a virgin with three dollars in his pocket, and his whole life ahead of him.