My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey (4 page)

When I began junior high school I also entered puberty, which meant that I spent hours of my time masturbating, sometimes, if my memory is anywhere near correct, as often as ten times a day. I discovered this delightful occupation on my own, I was proud to acknowledge, especially when my friend Bob told me that he only learned when his uncle told him what to do. I had no close male relatives (my brother had gone east to college, not that I can imagine sufficient intimacy between the two of us to acknowledge the penis), but I had an insistent libido. Masturbation for young males is as much about mechanics as pleasure. In those early days of my new maturity I was confronted by another one of the crowd with whom I walked to school. He asked me if I could now ejaculate, admitting shyly at the same time that he could not, although in his jeans and T-shirt he seemed to me the quintessential boy. When I said yes, it was only minutes later that he had persuaded me to demonstrate my new skill, and as the jism squirted powerfully from my penis he gasped in awe. I was very proud indeed: maybe I could not play sports, but I had a handle, so to speak, on a very basic game that all men want to play well. When I tell women friends this anecdote they have a hard time understanding that for men orgasm is a function as much as an expression of desire. The commonplace practice of boys at camp or young soldiers standing in a row jerking off to compete in ejaculating is a response to the former; women only know the latter.

My first experience of sexual relations falls somewhere in both of these two categories, I imagine. At this distance in time I only dimly recall the moment. A youngster named Buddy and I were alone at his house. We must have been at some function because I picture Buddy in his gabardine pants, wing-tip shoes, dress shirt, and tie. If you can, try to recall Andy Hardy and you will get the idea. We were standing in the garage, where Buddy’s father carried out his hobbies of woodworking and car repair. Buddy had gone into a drawer of tools and fished out some magazines, which he evidently knew were there. The one he opened for our inspection showed a series of naked women facing the camera with their legs spread or being mounted by naked men, the typical porno shots of the time. I don’t remember being amazed, horrified, repulsed, or attracted by the photos. What I do remember was the bulge in Buddy’s pants. Somehow I stepped back from viewing the magazine, which gave me the perspective to notice the distinct articulation of Buddy’s member. Without thinking, I moved to unzip the fly of his pants, and gently maneuvered his erection through the opening of his underwear. Dropping to my knees, I took Buddy in my mouth and stayed there, moving my head until I felt him come. And then I stood again, bent my head slightly to the side, and spat the contents of my mouth onto the concrete floor of the garage. We both stared at the small pool shimmering in the light from the work lamps nearby. Buddy put his penis away, zipped up his fly, put the magazine back into the drawer, and we both left the place. Neither of us said a word. I guess I went home. I have no further recollection of the incident, nor do I remember in the rest of the years of my schooling speaking with Buddy. He was never part of my crowd; I think he went to parochial school and I do not know how I came to be with him that day. Something about those gabardine pants and wing-tip shoes makes me remember him as what we would now call a nerd.

By eighth grade we were pairing off into couples, “going steady.” Few of us had any real understanding of the boy-girl phenomenon. A girl named Rosie had taken upon herself the role of social arbiter of the class, and she was unofficially establishing couples. I was assigned Betty Lou, a very well developed girl with a loud voice, a habit of cracking gum, and an aggressive friendliness, a very good female equivalent of me, come to think of it; Rosie clearly had talent for what she was doing. Betty Lou, who lived near the school, used to sit with me on the school steps in the gloaming and we necked. I kissed her, she let me put my hands on her breasts through her blouse. I even invited Betty Lou to my house, and she appropriately enough appalled my mother, especially when she told her that her own mother was a scrub aide in surgery at the hospital and had “worshipped” my father.

In my second and last year at junior high school I guess Mother took it into her head to be more aggressive in giving me an all-masculine environment. At any rate, she suddenly announced that instead of freshman year at high school I would go away to Andover, Massachusetts, to attend Phillips Academy, the renowned prep school there. When I consider the present-day orientation and preparation leading up to the decision to send a child away to school, and then the actual journey to arrive on opening day, I am astounded at my robust cheer at what I went through. First off, her decision to send me to Andover did not include any discussion of the matter with me, either over going far away from home or the particular institution where I was to be enrolled. The sight of me sitting reading in a silent room perfectly ordered, smelling of fresh-cut flowers, which in fact I had somewhat earlier helped my mother arrange, might have put her in mind of the story of Ferdinand the Bull. Or maybe it was the tableau that presented itself to her eyes as she sought me out one day when I was up in the nursery. I was seated at one of my sisters’ four dollhouses rearranging the furniture while dreaming up domestic drama. As usual I was ignoring the elaborate electric train set with its many switches, main lines, off lines, mountains, valleys, lakes, and bridges. It was not that I did not like electric trains, but their potential was easily exhausted, whereas interior decoration and drawing room comedy offered endless variations. One sight of that, I fear, and it was Andover for me.

The next thing I knew, a huge wardrobe trunk had been delivered to my bedroom, the kind that people in thirties films used to maneuver around in their stateroom on transatlantic voyages. Before the war I had more than once crossed half the continent on trains when my little sister and I traveled with the help from Iowa City to Montreal, where a car picked us up for the ride to join our family at the summer place in Vermont. This trip I would be alone, and somehow that grand trunk suggested a kind of ominous permanence. Suddenly it was the day of my departure; at four in the morning it was just turning light as I waved goodbye to Mother and boarded the
Zephyr
, an art deco masterpiece of stainless steel that took me to Chicago. From the LaSalle Street Station I found my way onto the Parmelee Transfer, a bus that brought me to Union Station and the
New England States
, a deluxe all-Pullman train on which I slept overnight. The following morning in Boston’s South Station I looked at my now quite tattered set of instructions and took a taxi to North Station, where I boarded a commuter train to the town of Andover. There I engaged another taxi to take me up to the school, where I found Rockwell House, my dorm, and someone to sign me in. Finally I was lying exhausted on the bed in my room listening to the voices of other boys and their parents coming through the window.

The account of this journey sometimes horrifies people. Contemporary helicopter parents, certainly, cannot imagine it. But in wartime things were different. The only distress I remember was the embarrassment of arriving not dressed in a jacket and tie, attire no one in Iowa would consider for a boy on a two-day train trip. At the same moment, when I realized that all the other boys seemed to be accompanied by parents, I froze with the sense of being an outsider. I have to think that Mother did not come with me because wartime travel was so much controlled and limited; and I can now see that most of the boys came from New York and Boston, from rich eastern families whose parents no doubt were cheating on the gas rationing in order to drive their boys to New England prep schools. Still, I was alone and I was betrayed. Perhaps I should imagine that this was yet another maneuver in my mother’s never-ending struggle to make a man of me. (My husband, Richard, thinks that I am being charitable.) It did succeed in reinforcing the idea that you can count on no one. That, I guess, is what being a man is all about, or was in the mind of an Edwardian woman. Years before, I had tripped at school, and, although I was unaware of it, broken my ankle. When I hobbled home for lunch, sobbing in pain, Mother seemed indifferent and sent me back to school. When I struggled home again at three, the pain and swelling were enough to induce her to take me to the hospital. Cruel and inhuman treatment? Monstrous indifference? Incapacity to deal with another’s suffering? Determination to make a little lad into a stoic? Whatever her motive, the experience was good training for the ordeal of my sixteenth year.

The year at Andover actually went well enough. The teachers were excellent, and I regretted later that I had not attacked my assignments with more passion. My housemaster complained that I was a dilettante. Testament to the truth of this proposition was my indifference to consulting a dictionary for the meaning of that word. Most of the time, like any other fourteen-year-old, I was just hanging out with the guys. My schoolmates were a congenial lot, but I was not part of their athletic program, which is the true glue of teenage male relationships. I was placed in the dorm for the maturer beginning students where we each had our own room. This was a lucky stroke, as it gave me the privacy to experiment sexually that year without shame or fear. I cannot believe how innocent I was, how readily I took to sex, and for how long I let the Andover experience form the pattern for it.

Uninteresting as descriptions of sexual intercourse can be, I shall describe my relations with my two partners that year because they changed me forever. A month after my arrival found me in the bathroom near my room waiting for the one available shower. It was afternoon, I was excused from athletics, of course, and had decided to profit from the absence of my dorm mates, since two of the three showers were broken in our wing. Unaccountably, another boy had arrived there first. Warren was his name. He was a short, wiry, muscular blond, with a hard, determined face. “Out in a minute,” he said, peering around the shower curtain. Seconds later he spoke again, this time without showing himself, to invite me in. Absolutely innocent of any preconception, Your Honor, I took the towel off my waist and entered. The space was small, scarcely big enough for one boy. When I adjusted to the steam of the shower I saw that Warren sported a major erection. Almost instantly I grew hard myself.

“Always get a hard-on around now. Every afternoon,” Warren announced. “What about you? Why are you hard?”

Could I ever have been so simpleminded? “Because you are, Warren.”

I agreed when he asked if he could fuck me in the ass, but the pain of entry was far too much. “Let me suck you,” I suggested, sinking to my knees before getting his assent. I think that this startled him; I sensed uncertainty. But blow him I did, then and at least once a week thereafter throughout the course of the first year.

Two weeks later another boy, Butler, and I found ourselves at loose ends in the dorm when our English class had been canceled. We gravitated into my room, sex being perhaps already in our subconscious even if we did not recognize the desire. Thinking of Warren, I proposed fucking Butler, who cheerfully lowered his pants, bent over, and submitted to my greasing him up. But the pain of entry instantly made him straighten up and reject me. Butler asked to fuck me, and I agreed, forgetting in my excitement the pain Warren had caused. Somehow now the pain seemed easier to take; maybe it was the grease and my extreme arousal, or perhaps Butler was not so well endowed as Warren. As Butler had his way with me I discovered that extraordinarily pleasant sensation of the thrust, moreover the bliss of sensing the spent prick up one’s bum. English class was canceled again the following day. Butler and I fairly ran back to my dorm room for another session. This time, needless to say, it was far easier and far more agreeable.

Butler and I had a real relationship that year. We seemed to gravitate on Saturday afternoon into my room and go to bed together naked. This meant that there was much more contact between us than I had with Warren. Butler would hug me, sometimes kiss me, rub his body against mine, but he would not bring me to orgasm, although he tolerated me jerking off. We would lie about, talking, until we were aroused enough to go at it again. Sometimes I played games with him, refusing his advances until he was beside himself with sexual excitement. Butler was a tall, gangly boy, not too bright, but affectionate like a golden retriever. He was constantly horny. Some evenings just before lights-out he would get permission from the hall monitor to come down to my room, ostensibly for consultation about our English assignments. He arrived in his pajamas clutching the textbook to his crotch behind which he had hidden the tube of Vaseline and his erection. Because the doors would not lock and there were boys in the hall getting ready for bed, our drill was quick and efficient: down with my pajama bottoms, bend over the bed, off with the Vaseline cap, a swift swipe of grease with his finger, penetration, thrust, thrust, spasm, sigh of contentment, withdrawal. “Thanks. See ya,” and he was out the door, leaving me to lie in bed, glowing in my lower torso and ready to finger the instrument of my joy, as the porn romances would have it. Butler and I made plans to room together in our sophomore year. It would have been a disaster. He would have enjoyed the available sex and homework assistance, but anyone as sexy as Butler would soon have discovered girls. I would have fallen in love with him, but by then he would have considered our sex as somewhere between desperate measures and outright perversion.

Blowing Warren never got beyond minimal physical contact. Butler and I were friends, we wandered around the grounds together, we studied together, we went with other friends to the ice-cream parlor. Warren was friendly enough when we met for an encounter, but there was none of the extension of personality that marks friendship. But one evening he came to my room and threw himself on my bed. This was uncharacteristically demonstrative for Warren, almost a provocation. By now I was fully adept at anal intercourse and so I unzipped his fly, brought him out, got on top of him, and sat down. He went wild with excitement. “Why haven’t we done this before?” he asked hoarsely, thrusting up and down energetically. He was off a second later. The next day after my shower I walked into his room clutching my towel around my waist, threw it aside, and lay down on his bed. Without a word he stripped, lay down, and entered me. For the next four or five days he was either in my room or I in his. One day we got it on in the morning and again in the evening. This made him very angry, as he growled at me when we were doing calisthenics together in the exercise room. By now he was furious with himself and with me. At the time I could not understand why, but now I think that he sensed he was growing too excited by what we were doing. The next time he walked into my room, he moved toward me, then stopped, and an ugly look crossed his face. He yelled at me, saying I stank, that I was too dirty to get near, and with that he walked out of the door and out of my life.