JD (18 page)

August 31, 1966

I was looking for Ovid. I keep H through R in Mickey's room. I'm pretty sure I knocked but--if I had been busy like Mickey, at Mickey's age--I mightn't have heard a knock, either. We just stared at each other for a second or two. I didn't let go of the doorknob, he didn't let go of his dick. I decided: this has happened, I might as well get the goddamned
Metamorphoses
so I can look up Sisyphus. I murmured, “Excuse me,” grabbed the book, shut the door. I didn't go on writing about Sisyphus. I sat in the office wondering if Mickey had resumed. Wondering, more precisely, what he thought about when he did it.

Somebody told me once, maybe Edgar Villard, that working men don't think of anything at all. They just rub. I don't know if I believe this or not. Certainly I've encountered my share of “working men”--it had to have been Villard who said it, who else would use this phrase?--who don't seem to care where they stick it, so long as it's into something round and wet. But when they clench their eyes shut, as they so often do, are they just trying not to look at me? They must conjure up something.

How is it that anthropologists claim to penetrate the minds of tribesmen in Pogo-Pogo when I cannot so much as think my way into the head of some schmo I meet in the subway toilets? More urgently: I can't penetrate Mickey's mind, after fourteen years of field work. I don't even know if he likes girls or boys. Of course if anyone asked my opinion, I'd say it doesn't matter, or he'd be lucky to like both. That would be my
opinion
, not my feeling. My feeling is he'd be very lucky if he liked girls, just so his life would be simpler than mine. He'd be lucky if he didn't think of anything when he rubbed it. Because maybe the things guys think of, when they rub it, are the cause of half the misery and mayhem in the world.

September 3, 1966

A couple of days now, and neither of us has spoken about what happened. Of course not, what is there to speak of? I accidentally broke in on him as he performed a natural bodily function, I excused myself and departed. Door closed, incident closed. Yet I feel more than a door has closed.

What did I expect, that he would talk to me about his new hobby, the way he used to talk to me about his stamp collection? Yes, indeed: just as I used to pretend to be interested in the silly little slips of paper and the albums with the spots reserved for fabulous prizes he would never acquire, so now we could talk about jerking off. Do you like squeezing the base or rubbing the top more? Do you fiddle with your balls, do you ever change hands?

Even as I chuckle at this preposterous colloquy, a little nag: why is this preposterous? Why is it okay for my son to tell me he likes cheeseburgers or that Negro singer, Otis something, but he can't tell me he likes to start out slow, and then kind of …

I know how I am
expected
to feel. I should brush away a little manly tear, like a father giving away the bride, I should admit to myself that my wanting to share something so personal with Mickey is all about robbing him of his selfhood and keeping him from growing up. As if it were axiomatic that the only way you can grow up is to hide from your father and hope he doesn't burst through the door! I've just written a whole goddamn book about helping boys find their way into manhood, and here on 17th Street we're helplessly reenacting the capitalist script of repression and solitude.

I want to tell him he doesn't need to hide from me. But I can't think of any way to bring the subject up that isn't the equivalent of bursting through his door. Sorry I broke in on you the other day. Translation: I have been thinking of nothing else for three days. Say, we haven't played pinochle lately. Translation: Guess you've had your hands full …

So we hardly talk at all. I am reading every conversation so closely, looking for my opening. And, as if he knew, his conversation has become hermetic, no openings anywhere.

My house has turned into America. This is how people talk when they know they're bugged.

I suppose I shouldn't be gratified that Mickey was as impenetrable to Jonathan as he was to me. But I can't help what pleases me.

Mickey was open and luminous until he was eight or so; then he began to have secrets; then he was a secret. I know it wasn't just Mickey, somehow it happens between parents and children. Mickey began to have a private life, he kept things to himself. Perhaps you don't really have a self to call your own until you have things to keep
close to it. I understood, even as it was happening I understood that it wasn't just Mickey, that this was how people grew. A child is like a present that leaps back into the gift box and wraps itself up again; you don't get to open it a second time. Of course, understanding that some hurt is commonplace doesn't make it hurt less. On the contrary.

There are hours when Mickey was a baby that I can remember more clearly than whole years in his teens. I mean this: hours when Jonathan was out and Mickey and I were alone, playing, or I telling a story in a tongue he didn't understand, but to which he listened with astounded gravity. Or just lying together on the bed, looking wonderingly into each other's eyes. Maybe there are lovers who know times like those, maybe Tristan and Isolde had one hour of communion as deep as passes between a mother and a baby on an ordinary rainy afternoon.

Mickey stopped being a baby. What I remember of his teens is one long absence. Mickey at school, or out with friends, or sequestered in his room or, even at the dinner table: absent. Jonathan could make him talk, goad him until he spoke, but the moment he closed his mouth again he was gone, a million miles from us. Sometimes, still, Mickey and I were together. Doing the dishes maybe, I washing, Mickey drying, a rhythm, while Jonathan was busy intellecting in the next room. Then I might feel together with Mickey again. Except I would look up from the sink and see him holding a plate and staring into space, not there at all.

He wasn't furtive or sneaky, he didn't tell lies. He was merely silent about whole stretches of his life, about everything outside the apartment, at last about everything inside. He didn't fib even if I directly accused him of something—stealing a cookie, not finishing his homework. He wouldn't protest his innocence, he'd just stick out his lower lip and look at me with amused curiosity. As if to say: how interesting, that you should care so much about a cookie. By the time he hit puberty he was as bland and ingenuous as a boy in a comic strip or a commercial.

I was the furtive, sneaky one. Listening through a cracked door when he spoke on the phone. Digging through his dresser drawers while he was at school, spelunking into the forbidden cavern of his closet. Finding nothing much, one time a couple of
Playboys
, which
made me so sad that I almost learned the elementary lesson: digging through other people's things will always, always make you sorry.

Perhaps I should have been relieved to find some evidence that Jonathan's proclivities were not necessarily hereditary. Yet I don't think I had even wondered, until I saw those magazines, whether Mickey was “normal” or not. It's hard to imagine now, but I don't recall ever worrying about his sexuality. The thought that he had a sexuality probably made me queasy enough without adding a prefix to it.

I wasn't relieved; I was disappointed that my Mickey might have been aroused by those haunted women, soft and defenseless as cattle. But they were what the world offered him, there was no magazine featuring naked female physicists. There was no magazine featuring me; I suppose the real disappointment was that he had moved on from me.

I did not learn the elementary lesson. There was still something I longed to know, when I plunged my arm under the bed, trawling for truth amid the dust bunnies. Something that made me desperate enough to pick the lock on his little leatherette diary—discovering that the single scrawled entry, dated April 8, 1960, reported that it was his eighth birthday and that he had got books, a baseball mitt, a diary. So another of Jonathan's proclivities, journalizing, was not passed on.

I always imagined that Jonathan knew more, shared more with him. Whatever it was fathers shared with sons. They had never done much in the way of male bonding, if anyone had even thought of the term back then. Jonathan didn't take Mickey fishing, though Mickey might occasionally tag along when Jonathan went to Second Avenue for whitefish. They didn't play catch together—I was the one who insisted on the baseball mitt to go along with the too-hard books and the diary Jonathan thought were splendid eighth birthday gifts. They didn't ever talk about sports, not even during that weird period when Jonathan followed ERAs and RBIs so assiduously.

But I had always assumed they shared
something
. Yes, it is a sort of ugly relief to know that Mickey was as closed to Jonathan as he was to me. Except for this: he must never have shared his hopes with Jonathan, any more than with me. So when he died, there was no one who even knew what dreams had been exploded.

September 7, 1966

Last night after dinner I went to the Poplar. I don't think I'd been since just before I started
JD
--two years ago, about. That summer when I was so lonesome I hung around with the likes of Edgar Villard and Dennis O'Grady. I don't miss seeing Villard, of course, but I do miss O'Grady in a funny way. Maybe because I never did quite figure out what sore spot in me O'Grady poked his way into.

Perhaps it was just the feeling that a fairy with a Semper Fi tattoo was hacking his own path to a new way of living. Not one I approve of, necessarily. But I find, in the couple of years that have passed, that I am less elementally offended by fairies than I used to be. More and more I think--as I thought this summer, during the riots, when the Negroes were burning down their own neighborhoods: at least they're burning something. At least the fairies are burning something.

In the Poplar was the usual mix of painters and far-off-Broadway actors and a handful of poets, none of them Dennis O'Grady. About 8O percent queer, I'd guess, and not one guy that I'd sleep with on a bet. Now I recalled why I'd stopped coming to the Poplar, and I was on my way out when I saw that Willis was at the bar, sitting stock upright and looking straight ahead, as if reading the names on all the bottles. I crept up on him and squeezed his thigh. He turned around crossly, ready to rebuke whatever ancient roué had taken this liberty. When he saw it was me he said, “Jesus.”

“No, just old Jonathan.”

“Well, I'm about as likely to run into Jesus, now that you're famous and all.”

This was pretty pointed for Willis. I thought of many crushing responses, but settled for, “Yeah, it's pretty time-consuming, being famous.”

“I'll bet.”

“But not as time-consuming as wishing you were. That took a clean half-century. Where's your friend?”

“What friend?”

“You know, the dancer, what was his name?”

“Eddie? We're not, uh, we're not an item anymore.”

“No?” This meant that Eddie and I could be an item, if I could find some way of getting in touch with Eddie. One that would not involve standing with a bouquet outside the stage door while he did the dance of the sugar plum fairy. “What happened?”

“He left me for some rich guy.”

“Huh. What a bastard.”

“No, he … he probably won't be able to dance much longer. And this guy is getting him into design.”

“Oh, so it was just practical. Designing what?”

Willis snorted. “Store windows.”

“I'm surprised he can even fit in store windows. Seeing anybody else?”

“Nah. You know, I'm trying to finish my dissertation while I'm still funded. So I'm not a lot of fun to be with just now. How about you, you still screwing around?”

“Much as I can get.”

“Even with your wife back in town?”

“We sort of have an understanding.”

“Ah,” Willis said. “Eddie and I tried to have an understanding. You know, we could do this but we couldn't do that, and … well, if we'd written it down, the ink wouldn't have dried on it before he broke it.”

“That's not an understanding, that's a treaty. What we have is: Martha understands I'm catting around and wishes I'd started years ago.” Even as I said it, I knew I had no idea what Martha wishes. She must sometimes wish she had married a man who could love her unfalteringly for a lifetime. As I sometimes wish I could have been such a man.

“So why are you together, just the kid?”

Just the kid! Just inertia is more like it. But I really haven't ever thought about what would happen to the kid if Martha and I split up. God knows, she wouldn't have any trouble proving adultery; she could fill a courtroom with
corespondents. So she'd get Mickey and, probably, drag him off to Baltimore. Rename him Axelrod, stick him in some country day school where he'd wear a blazer … Yes, absolutely I will stay with her for Mickey's sake. If I had to go down on her twice a day, I'd do it to save my Mickey.

I said, “He's started jerking off.”

“Mickey? Quelle horreur! How do you know, checking his laundry?”

“I just happened to walk into his room and caught him at it.”

“What did you do?”

“Walked right out again. What was I going to do, scold him for something I practiced every night of the Coolidge administration and halfway through Hoover?”

“Better you catching him than Martha. My mother figured out when I started doing it, I'm not sure how, and she
asked
me about it. ‘Willis, are you--?' So of course I said no. Starting a whole lifetime where I tell lies and she pretends to believe me.”

“I don't want to start a lifetime like that with Mickey. I'd like it if he never had to lie to me.”

“Ah.” He looked around the room for a second. “Kind of a one-way street, though, huh?”

“How do you mean?”