The Best Little Boy in the World (5 page)

But now that we are on the subject, Officer, I can tell you a thing or two. I happen to know that some of the kids at camp were doing more than just fantasizing. Please don't say I told you, but there was a lot of experimenting going on. And with some of the counselors, I think they weren't just experimenting even, if you know what I mean.

Yes, I was only vaguely aware of it as I became an older camper—like the time Tommy and that counselor kicked everyone out of their tent and closed the flaps on a sunny day— but I was aware enough not to let any of those counselors give
me
back rubs. I was particularly cold to that one who couldn't take his eyes off my body, who kept telling me I could make a lot of money modeling. I was so disgusted by the thought that this ugly man wanted to touch me, it made me shiver.

But, oh, what I would have given to be Tommy's real best friend. God, how I wanted to be
like
him, to do the same mischievous, self-assured things he did, to have muscles and blond hair and a smile like his. Nothing in our relationship would be disgusting, nothing unmentionable. Just to be like the Hardy Boys, two blood brothers, two cowboys... that's it: two cowboys.

In elementary school I had felt the same way about Chip Morgan. We would go up to his apartment after school and eat chocolate chip cookies and watch TV, or play knock hockey, or play that board game called Baseball, where hitting and fielding are determined by a spin of the plastic spinner. Or Chip would put on his swim trunks and bathrobe, like Joe Palooka, and we would mess around with his boxing gloves, or wrestle, like we used to watch on Channel 9. Then his mother saw him that way once, in his trunks and bathrobe—well, I guess it was underpants, not swim trunks—and got angry and said never to dress like that again. But I was eight, nine, ten those years and too young to know what was going on. I just liked it.

I was going through what they call a stage, right? I was
supposed to
hate little girls when I was a little boy. I was
supposed to
hate those dance lessons we were all forced to take, aged ten, those multiplication dances where my ego required that I be chosen at an early round in the progression, while at the same time I was praying madly that if the progression caught me at all, it would be for the last round only so I would have to go bumbling around the floor just once, and then only while everyone else was too busy dancing, and maybe trying to sneak a feel, to have time to watch me bumble. Everyone else, of course, had things well under control, like that pitcher in color war.

I was going through a stage. Sure enough, young boys all knew: One of these days a little hair would start to grow in odd places (it did); the clerk would stop calling you "Miss" when you phoned in a grocery order (he did); muscles would begin to bulge all over your body (they did); and those little girls you had been ignoring would begin to drive you wild. I was waiting for those girls to start driving me wild, but I was very skeptical.

I was all of eleven when I first "knew" what I was, in a tentative, semiconscious sort of way, hoping to be proved wrong, but knowing for certain, way down deep, that it was snake eyes for keeps. No fingers crossed.

My parents were having a party in Brewster: mostly businessmen, a few doctors and a few lawyers, some real estate types, their wives—the standard grown-up dinner party. Sports jackets and slacks; pipes, cigars, and cigarette smoke; the hubbub cresting, hushing momentarily, then rushing to crest with even greater force.

I was watching
Superman
in the den. My father passed through with one of his guests. He was saying something like: "I've read that, too; but ten percent just couldn't be right. There couldn't be that many people with homosexual tendencies...." Something like that. Frankly, I am surprised I do not remember the exact words, because the incident itself I will never forget. That is all there was to it. They passed by, I sat there with my head aimed at the TV, but my face on fire with recognition. I
knew,
I'm not sure how, but I
knew
I was in that 10 percent. So
that's
the word for hating dancing school, for not playing baseball, for admiring Chip's athletic prowess, for the phony feelings, and lonely feelings, I sometimes felt.

It was hazy and vague, aged eleven. But I had gone off to camp the previous summer, and I was about to enter junior high school: I was being jolted into thinking a little, into becoming aware of myself. I no longer just looked at the picture of the Golden Gloves boxer in the magazine and liked it—I started to wonder
why
I liked it. And whether I was supposed to like it. And if not, whether I would stop liking it.

By the age of thirteen I was poignantly aware of what I was. I was powerfully attracted by young male bodies. I was a homosexual, a queer, a faggot, a flit, a homo, a pervert. But my inner shell of defense was impregnable. I had found out about myself, but no one else would ever find out as long as I lived. That stigma and keeping it a secret were the fundamental core of my mind, from which all other thoughts and actions flowed.

I would somehow cope. I would somehow enjoy hour after hour of cosmic depression, day after day, year after year. I knew what was happening now, and I spent most of my time writing programs for my defense department computer. You would never catch
me
spilling the beans in my sleep. You would never catch
me
electing art instead of science, playing Hamlet instead of playing tennis.

One ingenious defense was to remain as ignorant as possible on the subject of homosexuality. No one would ever catch
me
at the "Ho" drawer of the New York Public Library Card Catalog. The less I knew, I reasoned, the less chance that I would start looking like one or acting like one. I
wasn't
one, God damn it! Those people I saw on the streets with their pocketbooks and their swish and their pink hair—they disgusted me at least as much as they disgusted everyone else, probably more. I would sooner have slept with a girl, God forbid, than with one of those horrible people. Do you understand? I wasn't a homosexual; I just desperately wanted to be cowboys with Chip or with Tommy.

So I never read anything about homosexuality. The FBI would never trace the fingerprints on one of those books to me! Bachelor J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde Tolson would have to be a lot more clever than that to trip me up.

All I knew about it was that it was awful. You could pick this up from the one-liners that fellow campers and classmates threw around or from occasional references in books or even the newspapers. But the most coherent explanation I had was from my father. One of his favorite stories between my ages of twelve and fifteen or so, my formative years, he thought, though I think he was about ten or twelve years too late—one of his favorite stories was about how
his
father had heard a rumor that one of my father's teachers was a homosexual, so when my father came home from school, his father asked him whether that man was indeed one of his teachers, and my father said yes, and his father beat the living daylights out of my father, who at the time it happened was always about the same age I was when the story was being told. Have you got all that? The two morals were unmistakable: I should be eternally grateful that my father was not the unreasonable tyrant that his father was. And homosexuals are the scum of the earth.

That was the extent of the knowledge about homosexuality that I allowed to penetrate my defenses.

Another important line of defense, the most important on a practical day-to-day basis, was my prodigious list of activities. "Highly motivated; a self-starter," the teachers would write on my character reports. You're damn straight I was motivated! No one could expect me to be out dating on Saturday nights if the school paper was going to be on the stands on Tuesday. No one could expect me to be partying over Christmas vacation when I had a list of seventeen urgent projects to complete—I would be lucky to find time to open my presents, let alone go to parties or date, for crying out loud.

And who do I know who gives parties in Brewster? That, of course, is where we went each weekend and holiday, which was a line of defense all its own. For all my classmates knew, I spent Saturday nights whoring it up in Brewster.

Really, it was not awfully hard to fake my way through high school. High school was more talk than action. At least my kind of all-boys high school was. And I did my best to learn to talk, or at least listen, as though I were just like anybody else. The better-looking, more outgoing kids
were
dating and partying; but nobody's parents were paying all that tuition to have their sons turned down by the college of their choice, and I was far from being the only one chained to a desk on Saturday night. Who would know that my chains were self-imposed?

I went to just enough parties to remain credible, though not enough to learn all the new dances, notably the twist, for the rapid demise of which I prayed religiously. The relationship between dancing and sex was all but inescapable. Sex got me nervous; dancing made me self-conscious. And I have since learned that it takes only one thing to dance creditably: self-confidence. The twist lingered for years and was a continual source of embarrassment. You can't
do
it? Really?
Why not?
Well, Doctor, you see those thousands of people out there on the dance floor? They're all normal, Doctor. The guys are going nuts over the girls; the girls are going nuts over the guys. But me, well, I just can't tell you why I can't do the twist, Doctor, but it would make your hair stand on end if I did. Just let me suffer.

Of course, I tried to avoid doctors and would no more have considered talking to a psychiatrist than one of the ten most wanted criminals would consider stopping to get directions from a cop.

The closest thing to a shrink we had in school was a math teacher named Sir who doubled as the guidance counselor. Sir took psychology courses at Princeton every summer and liked to play heavy little mind games with his students. He was married and had kids, so he couldn't be accused of anything.

Sir had developed one of his heavy relationships with me—twisting my words, insisting I must be hiding things when I wasn't (well, I was, of course, but those were other things and surely none of his business), talking about love-hate relationships, for crying out loud, when all he was supposed to be was adviser to the student newspaper. That was our official connection, through the newspaper, and he was telling me I hated him. I didn't, though I began to when he kept insisting I did—you see! you
do
hate me! Now
why?
What's really on your mind? What was really on my mind was that he only did this kind of thing with the best-looking boys in the school, the same ones I liked—so if it takes one to know one,
maybe he was on to me.
Perhaps I hadn't hidden everything as well as I had wanted. That suspicion caused me to be all the less communicative. Why aren't you
communicating
with me, young man?

One day I had to deliver something to him just before his math class started. Usually, this would have been routine: Weave your way through twenty noisy kids; excuse me, Sir; a handed note; exit. I handed him the note and turned to leave. DID I TELL YOU YOU COULD GO? Sir had been in the Air Force and was a stickler for manners.

"I'm sorry, Sir," I said, standing about a yard from him.

"Come here," he said. I inched a little closer, hoping not too many of the students were watching all this.

"Come
here!"
he demanded, so I inched some more—what the hell, did he want me sitting in his lap, for crying out loud? As I was inching, he started to reach out to grab my wrist, as he would occasionally do—no big thing; teachers grab students' wrists sometimes when they are talking to them—but I... instinctively... jumped back. WHY DID YOU BACK AWAY?

I didn't know why I had backed away. And if I had known, I am sure I could never have articulated it there in front of the class. I muttered something about its just having been a reaction—nothing intended, and I was sorry. A REACTION! You see! You see how much worse that is? That proves that subconsciously you are afraid of me, that shows that subconsciously....

Subconscious, hey? Well, we were indeed nearing Secret City. But he could delay the start of class no longer, and our stage-whispered exchange was tabled. He was on to me. I avoided him for the rest of the year.

Close as Sir came, neither he nor anyone else ever penetrated my defenses. The guns of Navarone were like water pistols in a shoe box compared to the fortress that guarded my secret.

Short of doing myself in, which, like every adolescent, I enjoyed contemplating from time to time, my last line of defense was to turn and run. I only had to resort to it once. I was sixteen, researching one of my extra-credit reports at the Museum of Natural History. On satellites, I think it was. I was examining the Explorer capsule that was on display, watching the continuous film strip that simulated its flight through space, looking at the plastic astronauts cramped in the cockpit, when a man next to me asked some question about the capsule. I hadn't noticed him before. He was unassuming: average height, maybe twenty-five, slim, wearing a gray windbreaker zipped up halfway. Your nondescript man. I answered his questions; he asked a few more. We speculated for a while on what it would be like to be an astronaut—drinking Tang, floating weightless.... Then he said: "Now let me show you what interests me."

What interested him was the tropical bird exhibit, dimly lit, birdcalls echoing around the halls—a nice enough exhibit, but evidently of little interest to others. It was deserted. We looked around for a little while, he told me that some of his friends had painted the backgrounds of the exhibits, and I began to wonder how I was going to get away. Mainly I was bored, but I was also beginning to feel uncomfortable with this man. Then I felt his hand DOWN THERE! JESUS CHRIST! No one but the doctor had ever touched me down there. As I pushed his hand away, he was saying, "Would you like a blow job?" I was terrified. Half because I was being molested by some perverted old man (twenty-five), and half because
I didn't know what a blow job was.
The world was caving in again, my inadequacy on display right there in the American Museum of Natural History. I choked out a tortured "No!" as I ran out of the exhibit, out of the museum, and most of the way home. He shouted after m
e—shouted
in the hush of the tropical bird exhibit—"How can you be so NAÏVE? —AÏVE? Ïve? ïve?—ve?"