Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (47 page)

Instead, I found refuge in the church. Just as my father had found refuge in the church as a schoolboy in Poland in the 1930s, I found refuge in the church as a schoolboy in America in the 1970s.

I believed contritely in the faith of my father, as elucidated by the civil rights–era nuns. “There is good in everyone,” they practically sang, “because each person is made in the image of God.” Each person could behave badly as well, they warned, “because each person is a child of God infused with the freedom to choose between right and wrong.” The nuns concluded their training on personal morality with a simple but uplifting flourish: “Choose what is right, love one another as God loves you, and work for what is good for the world.” When the nuns were at their best, they were angels.

My role model at the time was Father Douglas Ferraro, the young and rare Italian priest who had charmed Mom. For the adolescent me, Father Ferraro was unique in ways far beyond youth and lineage. He oozed coolness. He was suave, outgoing, and wildly popular. He had been raised not in gloomy Ireland but in glitzy Hollywood, and he exuded its star quality. Even in his black collar, he showed a sense of style with his matching black sporty sunglasses. Best of all, he made time for us kids. He emerged faithfully from the rectory at recess, at lunch, and after school to shoot hoops with the boys or to just hang out with the adoring throngs of eighth-grade girls. He inaugurated a mellow guitar Mass on Sunday evenings at 5 p.m. so that young people could come sing folk music together after a day at the beach. His Mass was an overnight sensation.

Father Ferraro earned the nickname “Father Fonz” in honor of “The Fonz,” Arthur Fonzarelli, the motorcycle-riding, black-leather-jacket-wearing, greased-hair-slicking, and unquestionably coolest of the cool characters on the hit television show of the time,
Happy Days
. The show, set in a cheery 1950s, was an antidote to the misery of the 1970s, the loss of Vietnam, the disgrace of Watergate, the humiliation of the Arab oil embargo, and the whole godforsaken era of self-doubt and disaster films. From
The Towering Inferno
(a movie about people dying in a skyscraper) to
Earthquake
(a movie about people dying on the ground) to
The Poseidon Adventure
(a movie about people dying in a tidal wave), the film industry made sure we felt vulnerable on air, land, and sea. For an American schoolboy in the 1970s, the cool and composed “Fonz” of the 1950s was everything a kid could want to be. And “Father Fonz” was everything I wanted to be. When the world was falling apart, he seemed to hold it all together.

I thrived on the teachings of the nuns. I thrived on the role model of the young priest. I thrived on the expectation that all of this thriving would someday lead to doing something important for the world and for God. I felt aglow with a missionary zeal. I just knew I was a candidate for the priesthood.

Something was bound to go wrong, though, because another trait I shared with my father was a proclivity to judge rigorously between right and wrong. That’s what life, humanity, and history were all about, I felt: the eternal battle between right and wrong. Good and evil. Black and white. There was no shade of gray. There was no time for ambiguity. I was too busy battling absolutes. My role in the eternal battle was to make things as absolutely right and good as possible. No war. No poverty. No pollution. No abortion. No death penalty. No euthanasia. No guns. No nukes. No racism. No sexism. Too bad I didn’t quite make it, at least by the age of 14, to no homophobia.

At that time in America, lesbians might have been invisible, and I certainly had no inkling of the inchoate sexual orientation of my own lesbian sister. But gay men had become just notorious enough to be the object of almost universal loathing. From the 1969 Stonewall riots of drag queens in New York City to the mid-1970s antics of an openly gay male San Francisco politician with the milquetoast name of Harvey Milk, male homosexuality had burst onto the scene, causing many Americans to recoil in repugnance. On the playground, no form of ridicule was delivered with greater venom and tolerated with broader assent than the crude condemnation: “That’s so gay.” By the age of 14, I knew exactly what it meant to be a gay male, I knew that it was regarded by practically everyone as the lowest form of life, and I was doing my damnedest and praying my hardest to suppress my brewing physical attractions toward other males.

I firmly believed at the time that homosexuality was wrong. The church said so and in no uncertain terms. Sure, you could be gay, but you couldn’t act upon it, just like you could be an alcoholic or a homicidal maniac, but that didn’t give you license to get drunk or to commit ax murders. I believed myself to be the moral equivalent of a homicidal maniac lying in wait. Wholly unfit for civilized society.

As I entered high school in 1976, I knew where I stood in the eyes of the church: I was the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that might as well be thrown away. I considered the church to be an all-or-nothing proposition; therefore, I couldn’t cavalierly throw out one piece of the church. If I wanted to retain my faith in good over evil and right over wrong, then I had to throw out that piece of myself that didn’t fit into the church.

The religious diversity and social tolerance of Redondo Union High School came as a blessed balm. I bonded with an ecumenical bunch of idealistic beach boys and girls who wanted to make the world a better place for humans, whales, and other living things. My buddies and I in the late 1970s wore our hair down to our shoulders and bought used clothing in rejection of American consumerism. We joined marches against the killing of baby harp seals in Canada and the fueling of nuclear power plants in San Onofre.

But no matter how loudly we demonstrated against the apparent evils of the world, I found no escape from the prevailing social and religious judgment that I was the most despicable form of evil of them all. That I, by definition, was an instrument of the devil. And that no matter how much good I might ever do for the world, I would still be, at the core, innately depraved, because I was attracted to guys instead of girls.

Everything my teenage soul had come to believe in most fervently began to wage war against my inexorably homosexual self. Thus began a tumultuous journey into the realms of religion and society that few people dared discuss.

One of my buddies in high school played the drums in my jazz quartet. He was a varsity football player who was fed up with doing everything just to please his family.

“
I feel like my whole life is just a big charade,” he told me while driving to a gig. “I don’t want to have to live up to anyone else’s stupid expectations anymore,” he ranted. “I just . . . want . . . to be free!”

“
You don’t need to please anyone else,” I suggested. “You’re fine just the way you are.”

“
But that’s the problem,” his jaw stiffened. “Nobody sees me for who I really am. It’s like nobody cares about that. They see only what they want to see. They see only what they want me to be.”

“
That’s
their
problem,” I said. “The best part of you is the part that nobody sees.”

“
I don’t know why,” he shook his head while thumping the steering wheel, “but you’re the only person who gets it. You’re the only one who understands me.”

I loved that he confided in me. But I hated that I was falling in love with him.

We were the inseparable duo of the rhythm section. During our performances at wedding receptions, we looked into each other’s eyes as we played the romantic tunes for the brides and grooms. We knew every word to those tunes. As he brushed the snare drum and as I laid down the chords on the keyboard for “Colour My World” by Chicago, he and I sang to each other through our smiles:

He and I had great fun with the music. We swayed to the 1940s swing tunes of Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington late into the night for weddings and private parties at the Redondo Beach halls of the American Legion, the Eagles Club, the Elks Club, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars. If we felt like getting really wild, we played some offbeat Dave Brubeck or cosmic Jean-Luc Ponty just to see how the older people would react.

We were different in many respects. He was the drummer with the fierce kicks and swings; I was the piano man with the soft touch. He was Mexican; I was white. He was the clean-cut athlete; I was the long-haired scholar. He was straight; I was gay. But musically, we completed each other. We followed each other’s cues. We backed up each other’s solos. We looked out for each other’s downbeats and crescendos. We weren’t the hottest jazz musicians in town, but we were in sync musically and emotionally. We could never overcome our sexual differences. But in jazz, we were one. It wasn’t the most meaningful relationship for me in high school. But it taught me the most about jazz.

We talked on the phone for hours. “You’re the only person I can be myself with,” he reiterated. He then said maybe the nicest thing he could’ve said and the worst thing he could’ve said. “If you were a girl, John, I’d probably ask you to marry me.”

That statement confirmed everything that my adolescent mind had feared was misplaced and wrong about myself. I was a boy who apparently was not supposed to be a boy. I was just a big mistake. I was some kind of demonically possessed freak.

The closer I became to the drummer, the clearer it became to me that I had no place in this world. The stronger the physical attraction, the harsher the eventual damnation. The more deeply I loved, the less worthy I felt of being loved. I was worse than a missing puzzle piece. I didn’t even belong in the picture.

He came over to the house to study for an algebra test. We went to my bedroom.

As soon as we finished studying, I changed the subject. “You’re the only person I can be myself with,” I echoed his words. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

We sat on the bed. I held his hands in mine. I looked into his endearing eyes.

“
I have a huge confession to make,” I sighed. “I’ve never told this to anyone before. Please don’t think any worse of me because of this,” I begged.

“
It’s okay,” he laughed a little, anxious. “I won’t. I promise. Tell me,” he squeezed my hands.

I took a deep breath. “I’m gay.”

He lurched backward, his eyes bulging. He caught his breath, but he kept holding my hands. He then shook both hands vigorously and asked, “Is
this
gay?”

“
No.” Our friendship was not about being gay or straight.

“
You’re fine just the way you are,” he echoed my words.

But he soon realized that I couldn’t stop yearning for him in a romantic way. Outside of rehearsals, he kept his distance. He had no clue what else to do. He was 17.

I was 16. I’d never felt so lonely.

The gloom deepened, even as I went on a ski trip with a couple other friends. We were eating lunch, with our skis off, at a helicopter pad atop a cliff at Kratka Ridge in the San Bernardino Mountains. The scenery must have been stupendous, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the drummer. The utter hopelessness. The unspeakable loneliness. The unalterable unfitness.

“
The world would be better off,” I imagined, “if I didn’t exist.”

I peered over the snow-covered gradient, which sloped downward about 30 feet to a precipice. I thought about how easy it would be to end the hurt. To let it all go. “It could happen so quickly,” I thought. “Everyone would think it was just an accident.”

Flirting with the idea, I hopped toward the gradient. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” I asked my friends who were chomping on their sandwiches, “if I slipped?”

And then, entirely by accident, I slipped. I landed on my stomach and careened down the slick face of the gradient, unable to halt the slide.

“
Reach for the tree!” my friends yelled. “Reach for the tree!”

There was a lone, spindly tree trunk at the edge of the cliff. I reached for the trunk, missed it by a few inches, slid over the edge, and released a chilling howl.

“
Ski patrol!” my friends screamed their heads off. “Ski patrol!”

As I fell through the air, only one thought crossed my mind: “I want to live!” It came as a complete surprise. I tumbled about 25 feet. By sheer luck, I slammed into a patch of snow between jagged boulders. My body then slid some more, bounced over a berm at the bottom of the hill, and plopped onto an asphalt road below.

Before any cars came by, I hoisted myself up onto my feet and wobbled to the far side of the road. Still shaking, I waved to the handful of ski patrol officers looking down from the edge of the cliff. With a swollen left wrist as my only injury, I staggered back to the ski lodge, where the ski patrol put my arm in a sling.

I removed the sling before arriving home and held my left arm in the same raised position for a week, my left hand resting upon my right shoulder. The arm healed.

Nobody at home knew about the injury.