In One Person (52 page)

“It’s just not very
satisfying,
” Atkins complained.

“How about a blow job, Tom?” I asked him. “I’ll show you
satisfying
.”

“I was being serious, Bill,” Atkins told me peevishly.

“So was I, Tom—so was I,” I said.

After that summer, it wasn’t a surprise to either of us that we went our separate ways. It was easier, for a while, to maintain a limited but cordial correspondence than to see each other. I wouldn’t hear from Atkins for a couple of our college years; I guessed that he might have tried having a girlfriend, but someone told me Tom was lost on drugs, and that there’d been an ugly and very public exposure of a homosexual kind. (In Amherst, Massachusetts!) This was early enough in the sixties that the
homosexual
word had a forbiddingly clinical sound to it; at that time, of course, homosexuals had no “rights”—we weren’t even a “group.” I was still living in New York in ’68, and even in New York there wasn’t what I would have called a gay “community,” not a
true
community. (Just all the cruising.)

I suppose the frequency with which gay men encountered one another in doctors’ offices might have constituted a different kind of community; I’m kidding, but it was my impression that we had more than our fair share of gonorrhea. In fact, a gay doctor (who was treating me for the clap) told me that bisexual men should wear condoms.

I don’t remember if the clap doctor said
why,
or if I asked him; I probably took his unfriendly advice as further evidence of prejudice against bisexuals, or maybe this doctor reminded me of a gay Dr. Harlow. (In ’68, I knew a lot of gay guys;
their
doctors weren’t telling
them
to wear condoms.)

The only reason I remember this incident at all is that I was about to publish my first novel, and I had just met a woman I was interested in, in that way; at the same time, of course, I was constantly meeting gay guys. And it wasn’t only because of this clap doctor (with the apparent prejudice against bisexuals) that I started wearing a condom; I credit Esmeralda for making condoms appealing to me, and I missed Esmeralda—I definitely did.

In any case, the next time I heard from Tom Atkins, I had become a condom-wearer and poor Tom had a wife and children. As if that weren’t shocking enough, our correspondence had degenerated to Christmas cards! Thus I learned, from a Christmas photo, that Tom Atkins had a family—an older boy, a younger girl. (Needless to say, I hadn’t been invited to the wedding.)

In the winter of 1969, I became a published novelist. The woman I’d met in New York around the time I was persuaded to wear a condom had lured me to Los Angeles; her name was Alice, and she was a screenwriter. It was somehow reassuring that Alice had told me she wasn’t interested in “adapting” my first novel.

“I’m not going down that road,” Alice said. “Our relationship means more to me than a job.”

I’d told Larry what Alice had said, thinking this might reassure him about her. (Larry had met Alice only once; he hadn’t liked her.)

“Maybe you should consider, Bill, what Alice means,” Larry said. “What if she already pitched your novel to all the studios, and no one was interested?”

Well, my old pal Larry was the first to tell me that no one would ever make a film from my first novel; he also told me I would hate living in L.A., although I think what Larry meant (or hoped) was that I would hate living with Alice. “She’s not your soprano understudy, Bill,” Larry said.

But I
liked
living with Alice—Alice was the first woman I’d lived with who knew I was bisexual. She said it didn’t matter. (
Alice
was bisexual.)

Alice was also the first woman I’d talked to about having a child together—but, like me, she was no fan of monogamy. We’d gone to Los Angeles with a bohemian belief in the enduring superiority of friendship; Alice and I were friends, and we both believed that the concept of “the couple” was a dinosaur idea. We’d given each other permission to have other lovers, though there were limitations—namely, it was okay with Alice if I saw men, just not other women, and I told her it was okay with me if she saw women, just not other men.

“Uh-oh,” Elaine had said. “I don’t think those kinds of arrangements work.”

At the time, I wouldn’t have considered Elaine to be an authority on “arrangements”; I also knew that, even in ’69, Elaine had expressed an
on-again, off-again interest in
our
living together. But Elaine was steadfast in her resolution never to have any children; she hadn’t changed her mind about the size of babies’ heads.

Alice and I additionally believed, most naïvely, in the enduring superiority of writers. Naturally, we didn’t see each other as rivals; she was a screenwriter, I was a novelist. What could possibly go wrong? (“Uh-oh,” as Elaine would say.)

I’d forgotten that my first conversation with Alice had been about the draft. When I got summoned for a physical—I can’t remember exactly when this was, or many other details, because I had a terrible hangover that day—I checked the box that said something along the lines of “homosexual tendencies,” which I vaguely recall whispering to myself in an Austrian accent, as if Herr Doktor Grau were still alive and speaking to me.

The army psychiatrist was a tight-assed lieutenant; I remember
him
. He kept his office door open while he interrogated me—so that the recruits who were waiting their turn could overhear us—but I’d lived through earlier and vastly smarter intimidation tactics. (Think of Kittredge.)

“And
then
what?” Alice had asked, when I was telling her the story. She was a great person to tell a story to; Alice always gave me the impression that she couldn’t wait to hear what happened next. But Alice was impatient with the vagueness of my draft story.

“You don’t like girls?” the lieutenant had asked me.

“Yes, I do—I
do
like girls,” I told him.

“Then what are your ‘homosexual tendencies,’ exactly?” the army psychiatrist asked.

“I like guys, too,” I told him.

“You do?” he asked. “Do you like guys
better
than you like girls?” the psychiatrist continued loudly.

“Oh, it’s just so hard to
choose,
” I said, a little breathlessly. “I really, really like them
both
!”

“Uh-huh,” the lieutenant said. “And do you see this tendency
continuing
?”

“Well, I certainly
hope
so!” I said—as enthusiastically as I could manage. (Alice loved this story; at least she said she did. She thought it would make a funny scene in a movie.)

“The
funny
word should have warned you, Bill,” Larry would tell me much later, when I was back in New York. “Or the
movie
word, maybe.”

What might have warned me about Alice was that she took notes when we were talking. “Who takes
notes
on conversations?” Larry had asked me; not waiting for an answer, he’d also asked, “And which of you
likes
it that she doesn’t shave her armpits?”

About two weeks after I’d checked the box for “homosexual tendencies,” or whatever the stupid form said, I received my classification notice—or maybe it was my
re
classification notice. I think it was a 4-F; I was found “not qualified”; there was something about the “established physical, mental, or moral standards.”

“But exactly what did the notification say—what was your actual classification?” Alice had asked me. “You can’t just
think
it was a Four-F.”

“I don’t remember—I don’t care,” I told her.

“But that’s just so
vague
!” Alice said.

Of course the
vague
word should have warned me, too.

There’d been a follow-up letter, perhaps from the Selective Service, but maybe not, telling me to see a shrink—not just any shrink, but a particular one.

I’d sent the letter to Grandpa Harry; he and Nils knew a lawyer, for their logging and lumber business. The lawyer said that I couldn’t be forced to see a shrink; I didn’t, and I never heard from the draft again. The problem was that I’d written about this—albeit in passing—in my first novel. I didn’t realize it was my
novel
Alice was interested in; I thought she was interested in every little thing about
me
.

“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy,” I wrote in that novel. (Alice had told me how much she loved that line.) The first-person narrator is an out-of-the-closet gay man who’s in love with the protagonist, who refuses to check the “homosexual tendencies” box; the protagonist, who is an in-the-closet gay man, will die in Vietnam. You might say it is a story about how
not
coming out can kill you.

One day, I could tell that Alice was really agitated. She seemed to be working on so many projects at the same time—I never knew which screenplay she was writing, at any given moment. I just assumed that one of these scripts-in-progress was causing her agitation, but she confessed to me that one of the studio execs she knew had been “bugging” her about me and my first novel.

He was a guy she regularly made a point of putting down. “Mr. Sharpie,” she sometimes called him—or “Mr. Pastel,” more recently. I had the impression of an immaculate dresser, but a guy who wore golfing
clothes—light-colored clothes, anyway. (You know: lime-green pants, pink polo shirts—
pastel
colors.)

Alice told me that Mr. Pastel had asked her if I would try to “interfere” with a film based on my novel—
if
there ever were a movie made. Mr. Sharpie must have known she lived with me; he’d asked her if I would be “compliant” to changes in my story.

“Just the usual novel-to-screenplay sort of changes, I guess,” Alice said vaguely. “The guy just has a lot of
questions
.”

“Like what?” I asked her.

“Where does the service-to-my-country part come into the story?” the studio exec in the light-colored clothing had asked Alice. I was a little confused by the question; I thought I’d written an anti-Vietnam novel.

But in the exec’s opinion, the reason the closeted gay protagonist doesn’t check the “homosexual tendencies” box is that he feels an obligation to serve his country—
not
that he’s so afraid to come out, he would rather risk dying in an unjust war!

In this studio exec’s opinion, “our voice-over character” (he meant my first-person narrator) admits to homosexual tendencies because he’s a coward; the exec even said, “We should get the idea that he’s faking it.” The
faking-it
idea was Mr. Sharpie’s substitute for
my
idea, in the novel—namely, that my first-person narrator is being brave to come out!

“Who
is
this guy?” I asked Alice. No one had made me an offer for the film rights to my novel; I still owned those rights. “It sounds like someone is writing a script,” I said.

Alice’s back was to me. “There’s no script,” she mumbled. “This guy just has a lot of questions about what you’re like to
deal
with,” Alice said.

“I don’t know the guy,” I told her. “What’s
he
like to ‘deal with,’ Alice?”

“I was trying to spare you meeting this guy, Bill,” was all Alice said. We were living in Santa Monica; she was always the driver, so she was sparing me the driving, too. I just stayed in the apartment and wrote. I could walk to Ocean Avenue and see the homeless people—I could run on the beach.

What was it Herm Hoyt had said to me about the duck-under? “You hit it and run—you know how to run, don’tcha?” the old coach had said.

I started to run in Santa Monica, in ’69. I would soon be twenty-seven; I was already writing my second novel. It had been eight years
since Miss Frost and Herm Hoyt had showed me how to hit a duck-under; I was probably a little rusty. The running suddenly seemed like a good idea.

Alice drove me to the meeting. There were four or five studio execs gathered around an egg-shaped table in a glassy building in Beverly Hills, with near-blinding sunlight pouring through the windows, but only Mr. Sharpie spoke.

“This is William Abbott, the novelist,” Mr. Sharpie said, introducing me; it was probably my extreme self-consciousness, but I thought the
novelist
word made all the execs uneasy. To my surprise, Mr. Sharpie was a slob. The
Sharpie
word wasn’t a compliment to how the guy dressed; it referred to the brand of waterproof pen he twirled in his hand. I hate those permanent markers. You can’t really
write
with them—they bleed through the page; they make a mess. They’re only good for making short remarks in the wide margins of screenplays—you know, manageable words like “This is shit!” or “Fuck this!”

As for where the “Mr. Pastel” nickname came from—well, I couldn’t see it. The guy was an unshaven slob dressed all in black. He was one of those execs who was trying to look like an artist of some indeterminate kind; he wore a sweat-stained black jogging suit over a black T-shirt, with black running shoes. Mr. Pastel looked very fit; since I’d just started running, I could see at a glance he ran harder than I did. Golf wasn’t his game—it would have been insufficient exercise for him.