The Best Little Boy in the World (9 page)

Though I managed my way through these evenings with Hillary, I didn't enjoy them at all. I didn't enjoy pretending. It went very much against my superhonest instincts. But I didn't enjoy always getting home before Hank, either. Why did I have to be the social cripple? What were he and my other roommate going to think if I always got home before they did?

One evening I decided it was time for me not to be the first one home. I was walking back from Hillary's hotel. Instead of going back to the dorm, looking first to see that no one was watching me and feeling tremendously guilty—I ducked into another hotel and asked for a room. No luggage, sir? No luggage, I gulped, feeling exposed, guiltier still, but determined. Then you will have to pay in advance.

I went up to the room and tried to sleep, with only moderate success. There was no clock or radio in the room, and no phone. When the sun in the window woke me, I had no idea what time it was. I waited in bed as long as I could, and then went out into the street—again stealthily to be sure no one saw me. It is unlikely any of my friends would have been up that early on a Sunday morning. It was seven fifteen.

That's what the clock above the newsstand said. So I walked around feeling guilty for two hours and then went to make my grand unshaven entrance in last night's wrinkled clothes, hoping my roommates might possibly have woken by this time and noticed that my bed was made, and no me anywhere in sight.

Of course, they were asleep, so after turning on the lights in my room for extra effect, I went stealthily back out and walked around for another hour.

At quarter past ten they were still asleep. I hadn't slept much myself and was exhausted by my ridiculous fraud. But I had invested $12 and lots of energy in it and had to have it go as planned. Finally, on my fourth attempt, just before noon, I walked in and saw my roommates were up and reading the Sunday
Times.
I walked past them into my room as nonchalantly as I could, with a simple, "Morning." I waited a minute for the applause, or at least for a question or two. After all, we had been living together for nearly two years, and this was the first time I had ever stayed out all night with a girl. My best friend Hank should have had something to say.

Hank kept reading the paper. I took off my tie and jacket and sat down with them to read the paper. Nothing.

A couple of days later I broke down and asked Hank, "Hey, didn't you notice that I didn't come home Saturday night?"

"Oh, yeah?" he asked. "How was it?"

"Good."

"Good."

It wasn't a bad life, surrounded by Yale's most attractive, preppie young men. A little frustrating, maybe.

If only I had had someone to talk with. The single most important thing in my life that I thought about for hours each day, that determined what kinds of activities I would participate in, how I would spend my time, who I would sit with at lunch—the most important thing in my life had been kept a total secret for
ten years
now that I was turning twenty-one, about to graduate. (Applause, please.)

Ten years, and I had never once been able to speak honestly, to open up.

That's not a healthy situation.

I was so inhibited and uptight and defensive I couldn't even get stoned. Marijuana had come into its own by my last year at Yale, and two of my best friends, sophomores named Brook and Fred, used to smoke all the time. Not wanting to be left out, I would sometimes smoke with them. I would smoke my head off down in their room, but I would not get stoned.

Not even a buzz. Grass did not turn me on. What did were the occasional playful scraps Brook and I would have, the way college pals do. Brook had wrestled in high school back in Tulsa, I had wrestled in high school, we were both high (he on the dope, I on him)—and we would flex our competitive egos to see who could pin whom. I usually won when Brook was stoned because the grass dulled his competitive spirit. I could never pin Fred, because I could never goad him into action. He would sit in a lotus position on the floor, his back against the wall, too stoned to move, nothing on but his shorts, for hours on end.

Wrestling around with Brook was a risky thing to do, I knew—not least because I couldn't keep something besides my competitive ego from flexing when we did. (Jesus! What if he notices? But he never did.) And it left me feeling guilty, it was such a sneaky, depraved thing to do. I felt worse about it when I would see the older bachelor faculty residents of the college trying to pick the same kind of friendly fights. They never fooled me. I knew exactly what they had in mind, or I thought I did. And when I saw myself acting like that, a dirty old perverted man aged, say, thirty-one—the future looked bleak.

Although I knew what these resident perverts had in mind, and what the counselors in my boys' camp had in mind, and what the teachers in my high school had in mind, I would never have gone to them to talk about it. They would have vigorously, if not violently, denied it, just as I would have. These were the last people I wanted to confide in, let alone have a relationship with. I wanted to ride around Wyoming with Tommy or Brian or Chip or Hank—not sip sherry with some pudgy, hairy old faggot. I was terribly intolerant, but they were terribly threatening to me. They were everything I was afraid of becoming.

Among all my fellow Yalies, surely there were others like me. There had to be. To find one!

I even thought of sending "sexual preference questionnaires," marked "highly confidential, entirely anonymous," to my 1,000 classmates, or perhaps to just a few. We frequently received questionnaires of one sort or another. I would send mine out on forged Psychology Department letterhead and have the business reply cards return to a post office box registered, naturally, under a phony name. The "anonymous" questionnaires would have been preprinted with a code that showed up under ultraviolet light. Brilliant, no? The scheme was sufficiently foolproof for me to consider it every so often, and sufficiently preposterous for me never to summon the nerve to try it out.

In our college we did have one "avowed homosexual," Jon Martin, a student in Brook's class and one of his good friends. Brook could afford to like this lisping, shrieking long-haired kid, because Brook was at peace with his masculinity. Jon was particularly threatening to me because along with exposing himself as a homosexual, he had taken it upon himself to expose everyone else. He talked constantly of "closet cases" and "closet queens." He believed in liberating the world. He thought it was sick and hypocritical to hide one's true sexual preferences—so anyone who got involved with Jon could not be assured of having his confidences kept.

I dumped on Jon Martin at every opportunity. I was an Uncle Tom, a peroxide-blond Jew with a nose job and blue-tinted contacts who persecuted other Jews to keep the Nazis off his back—a schmuck of the worst order—but I had to dump on Jon Martin all the same. What would people have thought if I had befriended him? If I had even laughed when he "camped it up"? If I had looked interested when he talked about the gay bars he had been to—or asked him for the address of one? Tommy would have been disgusted by Jon's antics, so I was disgusted by them. Hank had no use for an oddity like Jon, so I had no use for him.

In fact, I realize that my near hatred of Jon Martin was genuine. Here I was centering my being on the cosmic feelings I had and the burdens I bore, here I was carefully cultivating all traces of normality and masculinity—and here was Jon Martin spitting on the temple, laughing at closet queens, ridiculing my entire value system. He was saying that the Great Scorekeeper gave points for being yourself, for being honest—not for being a consummate, cosmic phony. He was saying that all my effort and pain of the last several years had been laughable. I could not accept that, so I was repulsed by Jon Martin, and dumped on him and his mixed up value system, his lisp, his swish, at every opportunity.

There was no way I was going to go to someone like Jon to tell my secrets and unravel all my knots. These were knots I had managed to live with for ten years and would manage to live with for the next forty. Whatever pain they gave me was unavoidable, and there was always the cosmic depression that they afforded.

But if only—if only I could somehow find someone like Hank or Tommy who had my same inclinations, my same fantasies. There had to be people like that. It was just a logical impossibility to find them. There was no way each of us could be sure about the other before talking honestly.

I felt a little like the character in one of those totalitarian stories—
1984
or
Animal Farm
or
The Grand Inquisitor
or
We—
the character they have somehow forgotten to brainwash, the one for whom ignorance is somehow
not
bliss. There must be at least a few others out there like you whom they have also missed, who have the same odd ideas. But spies and informers are everywhere, so in order to keep from having your brain amputated, you act and talk exactly as though you were like everyone else. But you desperately want to find your fellow oddballs. How do you find them? How do you communicate in a way only they will understand? If you tell the wrong man, you are zapped.

And who hasn't heard stories of plainclothesmen inviting eye contact with homosexuals, making friendly conversation with them, agreeing to go back to their places for drinks—and then busting them on morals charges that ruin their lives?

Even if stories like that weren't true, my self-respect would have been destroyed if I admitted the truth to a sympathetic, but straight, friend. And my perfect record, ten years of absolute loneliness and silence, would have been broken. And then what would the best little boy in the world have had? Neither normality nor martyrdom.

If only....

I graduated from Yale. With honors, of course. I had been a moderate big shot on campus. The future was golden. Everyone told me I could write my own ticket. But where?

A few things were automatically ruled out. I would not do anything even vaguely related to art or hairdressing, because you know what kind of people do that. I would not try politics, because you need a pretty wife and adorable kids for that—or at least you have to like cocktail parties and $100-a-plate dinners and dances and socializing, always with a date, and I was not up to that. I couldn't expect Hank to keep me in blind dates forever. Of course, to a lesser extent, that would be a problem in any field. To get ahead, you have to socialize; to socialize, you have to have a date; to have a date, you have to know a girl who will go out with you; and to have a girl go out with you, more than once, anyway, you have to have sex with her.

I was very sorry to leave Yale.

Hank was going to Paris to take a postgraduate year in political science prior to becoming a United States Senator. (That was my goal for him, not his; I was sure he could make it. I would be his campaign manager.) I couldn't think of anything to do in Paris. My proficiency in French was about on a par with my proficiency in bed.

I would have loved to move in and smoke Acapulco Gold with Brook, who still had two years to go at Yale, and with Fred, who still had nothing on but his shorts. But what kind of career could I build in New Haven? Career, after all, was a key word. I had no intention of falling behind, "handicaps" notwithstanding. I had become too accustomed to sitting on wicker weave to settle for anything less.

I received a number of job offers, including one tentative one from the government known as a preinduction physical notice.

From the time the notice arrived until the morning of the physical a month later—that's six o'clock in the morning in case you didn't know—I could think of nothing else. For a combination of selfish and ethical reasons, I was determined that I would leave the country sooner than be drafted. Would the enlarged left side of my thing be enough to keep me out? Would I "check the box" on the long list of defects and depravities they handed you—the box next to "overt homosexual tendencies"? And then what?

I stumbled into the giant Whitehall Street draft center at five forty-five feeling much as I had in that Tossa hotel room. Everything was coming together this day. All my knots, tightened to the point of strangulation, were to be exposed to a bunch of unsympathetic crew-cut drill sergeants.

From six to seven we stripped to our shorts and stood in line waiting to be weighed. Standing in line with 1,000 naked black, white, and Puerto Rican strangers, all disgustingly normal-looking, who did not get embarrassed in situations like this, not a virgin in the crowd but me.

At seven they discovered that I weighed 151 pounds. By eight they knew I was five nine. (In elementary school I had been third tallest in the class—remember how important that was?—but my Nader-like pace in high school robbed me of sleep and stunted my growth.) By nine o'clock they had a vial of my blood and my chest X ray. Next they wanted a flask of my urine. I can't piss when anyone else is around.

I had always been able to piss like everyone else until shortly after that experience in the American Museum of Natural History. Some weeks later I was in the men's room of a New York movie theater. There were men pissing on either side of me, and I thought I saw one of them noticing me. That made me think of the man in the museum, and all of a sudden I could not relax. If you cannot relax your muscles, you cannot piss. It is as simple as that. I thought of my Big Secret, of my big left side—this had never happened to me before!—and I got very embarrassed about the people waiting behind me to use the urinal. What was the Great Phonifier
doing
to me? I zipped up, having to piss more badly than ever, tried to look relieved, and left, feeling sorry for myself. From that day on, I could not piss whenever anyone else was around, or even if I thought someone might come in while I was trying.