Lost Years (18 page)

These clashes took place when they were both drunk, but their drinking together didn't necessarily lead to violence. Much more
often, it made them lively and noisy or intimate and quiet. From Christopher's point of view, at any rate, drinking was a built-in dimension of their relationship; while sober, he felt, they never achieved intimacy. Christopher spent their first months together trying to get Caskey to make a real unequivocal declaration of love. But Caskey was cagey—perhaps because he instinctively realized that this was actually, underneath all Christopher's sweet-talking, a conflict of wills. Christopher felt himself becoming seriously involved and he didn't want to be, until he was certain that Caskey was involved, too. He was willing Caskey to give way. When Caskey had done so and become his declared lover—well, then Christopher would be able to relax, take his time and decide finally if he wanted Caskey or if he didn't. Probably he did. He merely wanted to be able to make his decision from a position of strength. He was saying, in effect, “Just because I don't trust you, that's no reason why you shouldn't trust
me
.”

(Looking back on the situation, it seems to me that Caskey never did
quite
commit himself Later on, he told Christopher that he loved him, but these declarations were nearly always followed by actions which seemed meant to contradict them; he would neck with someone at a party in Christopher's presence, or he would go out and stay away all night.)

The furthest Caskey would go, during these first months, was to say, “I like you
enough
.” But Christopher wasn't discouraged; he had reason to believe that Caskey cared for him a good deal more than he would admit. Hayden reported to Christopher that Caskey had said, speaking of their relationship, “It's so wonderful to be liked.” This doesn't sound wildly enthusiastic, but Christopher was well aware how embarrassing it must be for Caskey to confess to
any
feeling for Christopher in Hayden's presence; Christopher was certainly an improvement on Len Hanna but, still and all, he was seventeen years older than Caskey! Christopher thought he could read, in Hayden's manner toward him, a grudging admission that Caskey had fallen for him, and that Hayden, much as he deplored the fact, could do nothing about it.

Caskey was fond of telling Christopher teasingly, “You've got nothing left but your reputation and your figure”—to which Christopher retorted that this was more than a lot of people could claim, at his age. Once, after they had been to an all-male party, Caskey said, “You know, I looked around and it was amazing—I realized I'd rather go to bed with you than anyone else in the room!” At the end of some heavy sex making in the Beesleys' chauffeur's apartment, Caskey was gracious enough to declare, “That's the best
queer fuck I've had in ages!” His compliments nearly always contained such qualifications.

Caskey made a strict distinction between queer and straight fucks. If you were homosexual, you couldn't hope to be graded 1A; his greatest sexual pleasure was in going to bed with basically heterosexual men. He picked them up without difficulty and usually blew them. If he could get to fuck them, that was best of all. He used to say that straight bars were far better than queer bars for pickups. Caskey's preferences for heterosexual men irritated and frustrated Christopher throughout their relationship. Caskey went to bed with far more queers than straights, but he never let Christopher forget that this preference existed. Christopher sometimes suspected that it was Caskey's way of keeping him in line.

If you started to analyze Caskey's sexuality in psychological terms, you ran into paradoxes. On the surface, he was the most normal, most uninhibited of homosexuals; he seemed very tough yet very female. He loved getting into drag. He loved straight men. But, when you looked deeper, contradictions were revealed. Caskey despised queens and didn't think of himself as one. Never, never would he have dreamed of referring to himself as “Miss Caskey.” His attitude to heterosexual men wasn't at all passive, he wanted to fuck, not be fucked by them. He never approached them with the mannerisms of a homosexual. Indeed, he told Christopher that, when he was out to make someone, he always dressed “very tweedy, with a tie.” And yet he most certainly couldn't be described as a closet queen; he declared his homosexuality loudly and shamelessly and never cared whom he shocked. He was a pioneer gay militant in this respect—except that you couldn't imagine him joining any movement.

Since Caskey refused to regard himself as a queen, one might have expected him to prefer a somewhat effeminate homosexual sex-partner. But not at all. He was seldom attracted by feminine men. In a moment of enthusiasm, he once told Christopher that he was the most masculine person he had ever met—within grade 1B, of course. This pleased Christopher, although Caskey modified the statement later and then denied it altogether.

Caskey had a love—hate relationship with Catherine, his mother, and a hate—hate relationship with his two sisters. He regarded the American Woman as a man destroyer. Sometimes, only half-jokingly, he would say that he regarded himself as a substitute—no, “alternative” would be a better word—which he offered to the American Man. Years later, when Caskey was working on oil tankers and often crossed the Pacific, he found that he had no objection to
having sex with Asian girls. But this didn't make him any less homosexual.

To judge from a photograph taken in his early twenties, Caskey's father had been very attractive and very like Caskey. Now (according to Caskey) he was an alcoholic miser with an ugly disposition. He and Caskey quarrelled whenever they met, but Caskey didn't altogether hate him—since he was an American Man and Catherine's victim. I seem to remember that Caskey's father had made a lot of money by breeding horses. Caskey himself had ridden since he was a child. He loved horses, and perhaps this was the only interest that he and his father had in common. I think Caskey's father and mother were now living apart.

The question arises, had Caskey been subconsciously on the lookout for a substitute father and was he now casting Christopher in this role? Yes, I think he was, to some extent. In Caskey's case, however, the father figure wasn't to be merely a stand-in for Mr. Caskey Senior; it was also a father confessor. The Caskeys were Catholics with a streak of black Irish Catholicism, and Bill Caskey, just because he had “lapsed,” was the blackest of the lot. He betrayed this when he declared that he couldn't stand converts; the only Catholics he had any use for were born Catholics. Once, Caskey came near to asking Christopher right out to be his father confessor—when he muttered (drunk but nevertheless still embarrassed) that he wished Christopher would tell him whenever he did anything wrong.

Christopher was touched by this. And he was very happy indeed to find that Caskey was religious; it made him realize that he couldn't have lived with a boy who wasn't. He didn't at first mind at all that Caskey took no interest in Vedanta; it was enough that they both recognized the function of a shrine and could therefore kneel down together in any Catholic church.

The trouble was that both Caskey and Christopher were entering upon their relationship with powerful feelings of guilt. Caskey felt guilty not only as a lapsed Catholic but also as a dishonored navy man. (He had a tattoo on his arm which he had acquired during his days in the service, and he wore it as an emblem of nostalgia and a badge of shame. Later, he had another one added to it.) Christopher felt guilty as a failed monk. Neither of them would admit to their guilt, except by the violence with which they reacted against it. Their guilt feelings were self-regarding at first. But by degrees they began to involve each other in them. . . . There will be much more to say about this, further along in the story.

Nevertheless, despite growing tensions, they managed to have a
good time together. Christopher enjoyed being with Caskey as long as the two of them were alone. Even the entertaining he enjoyed sometimes, at any rate after the guests had left and the strain was relaxed. And his sex life with Caskey was certainly enjoyable, within its limits.

“Limits” seems a strange word to be using, for they did everything in bed which normal homosexuals do—cocksucking, rimming and fucking. Rimming was the most satisfactory, from Christopher's point of view, because of its grossness. Caskey had a coarse animal smell which Christopher found exciting, when he was dirty and full of liquor and his fuzzy body was rank with sweat. Licking his sweaty armpits and belly fuzz and dirty asshole brought back memories of the Berlin hustlers—but Christopher had been much more fastidious in his youth, nowadays he was able to enter into the spirit of the thing. (How lucky they both were not to get hepatitis!) Caskey insisted on fucking Christopher, if Christopher was to fuck him. Christopher was thoroughly in favor of this, in principle; he believed (had, in fact, just then decided) that the true beauty of homosexuality lies in a balanced active-passive relationship. In practice, Caskey didn't really like being fucked. So Christopher let himself be fucked more and more often, until the time came when he stopped fucking Caskey altogether. Christopher could enjoy being fucked only if he found it possible to reverse gear psychologically and feel that he was giving himself and being possessed. He couldn't ever quite feel this with Caskey, who was smaller than himself and anyhow, from Christopher's point of view, unalterably female. Caskey might be tougher than any bull dyke but Christopher still couldn't see him as a stud. So the two of them were forced to playact. (They both were aware of this—no longtime sex partners can deceive each other—though of course they never discussed it.) Caskey would strip and put on a pair of cowboy boots. “You want to get the shit fucked out of you?” he would ask. Christopher would press the sole of one boot against his erection as Caskey greased Christopher's asshole and his own cock. But, at this point, something was missing and had to be faked—for Christopher must now roll over onto his belly and relax to let Caskey's cock into him. What was missing was some sort of token (at least) of violence and resistance, some hint of rape. And this was unthinkable. To try it would have been ludicrous. They just had to ignore the gap and get on to the fuck scene as quickly as possible—like actors covering up a joint in a crudely cut script.

Back in Berlin, in 1929, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft had classified Christopher as “infantile,” sexually speaking. This was perceptive. For Christopher then was and has since
remained very much under the spell of his prepub[escent] sexual experiences at St. Edmund's School.
³
If he wasn't quite infantile he was definitely inclined to be small-boyish. At St. Edmund's, all of his orgasms with other boys had been while wrestling. (The other boys were probably having orgasms too, but he couldn't be sure because
they always had some clothes on.) Auden and Christopher must have wrestled, during their sex acts. (Detailed memories of sex with Auden—which went on intermittently from 1926 to 1938—are strangely dim, perhaps because Christopher had to make a mental blackout, switching himself back from a grown-up man to a twelve year old, before getting into bed with him.) When Christopher entered the world of the Berlin hustlers in 1929 and found himself able to act out any sex fantasy which appealed to him, he always wanted to wrestle naked; nothing else excited him as much. Boxing excited him, too; he had a fetishistic attitude to boxing gloves. Many of his obliging young sex partners found all this perfectly natural. (This sort of sub-sadistic sexual violence—which also includes mild nonbrutal beatings with a leather strap—seems to suit the German temperament.) A boy who was basically heterosexual would sometimes suggest wrestling of his own accord, get violently aroused during the fight and have more than one orgasm. Later, he would excuse his pleasure by saying that it was something you couldn't do with a girl, something for men only—and therefore, he implied, the only nonperverse homosexual act. When Christopher was taken to Matty's Cell House
^[
4
]
in New York in 1938, he asked to be introduced to a German-American boy—meaning that he hoped for a reasonable facsimile of a Berlin hustler. Thus he met [one boy who,] oddly enough, despite his hangups and considerable sexual selfishness, [. . .] did prove to be “German” in his tastes. He was always eager to wrestle and box. But Christopher now wanted to be fucked or fuck after wrestling, and [the boy] refused to do this. He only liked fucking teenagers. With Christopher, he wanted to lie on top, belly to belly, and come with his cock between Christopher's greased thighs. This wasn't ideal for Christopher, but he
enjoyed it because [the boy] excited him terrifically. He was, in Christopher's eyes, a genuine teenage stud. (Looking back, I get the impression that [this boy] jumped from adolescence to middle age without ever pausing to be a young man.)

Wrestling and other forms of erotic violence are a feature of what I call a Whitmanesque relationship (
see here
). But Caskey was most definitely not a Whitman character. The love duels of naked camerados had no place in his fantasies. When Christopher suggested wrestling, Caskey was amused, in a grown-up way; he referred to it as “prep school stuff” and Christopher was so embarrassed that he never mentioned it again—though he sometimes pretended to himself that Caskey and he were wrestling, in the middle of a sex act. (The violence between Christopher and Caskey (
see here
) was grown-up violence, full of love—hate—quite unlike affectionate immature Whitmanesque violence. It resembled the fighting of married heterosexual couples.)

When Caskey and Christopher were getting along well—which was most of the time, during 1945–1946—their domestic life was placid and curiously polite. They entertained each other with stories and jokes.
⁵
They were very much on their best behavior. They were considerate. They contrived to flatter each other subtly. (I'm trying to describe the impression they would have made on someone who
watched them while they were alone together and sober.) Their relationship when sober seems to me now to have been a surface relationship; they make me think of children playing at being grown-ups.