The Best Little Boy in the World (20 page)

The following Thursday Eric and I again went to the meeting, and Freddie was there. His lover had gone down to Washington to do some research in the National Archives and to spend the weekend with friends. Freddie wondered whether I wanted to drive out to the beach Saturday. Did I ever!

Saturday was wonderful and Freddie in the surf, with his red swim suit and brown glistening body—it really
was
Brook-from-Tulsa, and I was ecstatic. Unlike Eric, he was bursting with ideas and plans and stories of past accomplishments. Just the week before he had been on TV representing "The Youth of Today." And he was really interested in the things I had done at Yale and was doing for IBM. He wanted my advice on his future. It was a beautiful, complementary relationship. I was more experienced in the practical world; he was more experienced emotionally and sexually. He liked older, established people, and even at twenty-three I qualified. I liked younger kids who reminded me of those I had idolized at camp, in high school, in college. We really turned each other on.

We had fabulous sex that night. I thought so anyway. He said I hadn't seen anything yet—that he wasn't feeling all that well and so he didn't want to do much. Oh.

I didn't tell him I preferred it that way; I did feel self-conscious, though. I mean, I thought we
had
been having fabulous sex, and he thought we hadn't been doing much. Maybe next time wouldn't be so great, after all, when he found out about all the things I was too inhibited to do. Speaking of next time, how about tomorrow night?

Freddie wasn't sure about Sunday night, because his lover would probably be coming back. He said he would call to let me know. Freddie didn't usually make it with other people, he told me, but he knew his lover would understand. Freddie had just wanted to do it with me and was happy that I wanted to become best friends.

Sunday he must have been too busy to call.

Monday I began to feel just a little gloomy.

When I hadn't heard from Freddie by Tuesday, I called him. His lover answered. Freddie was sick, he said. He had a fever and something wrong with his mouth. When Freddie woke up, he would give him the message. (Would he, really? I wondered.)

Freddie didn't call me back Tuesday. He didn't call me back Wednesday. What was he, in a coma? How could he
do
this to me? I
knew
he liked me. He had to know how important he was to me. And now it was as if he had forgotten that I existed.

Thursday I decided to sit by the phone no longer. I got in my car and headed for Provincetown, punching the buttons of my car radio any time a happy song came on, cosmic as I ever had been, and none the worse at it for my lack of recent practice. Color this page cosmic black. Black on black, easy on the eyes.

By Thursday evening I was light-headed and my gums felt as though my wisdom teeth were parading around my mouth. But I was not too light-headed to stop by BU on my way home from the elusive gay beach to see whether Freddie had bothered—the very least he could do, even if accompanied by his lover—to come to the meeting. I ascribed my light head to the long day in the sun and the driving. As for my wisdom teeth, they do occasionally make trouble. Mainly, I was thinking what I should say to Freddie when I saw him at the meeting.

He wasn't there, he hadn't been there, and, according to someone who knew him, he and his lover had gone down to Washington for another long weekend. Without so much as calling me to say good-bye!

Friday I was in bed with a temperature and what was either a mouthful of wisdom teeth or the same virus Freddie had. I must have caught it from him. (Germs! See? I knew it all the time!) That was delicious, cosmic-wise. Not only was I despicably wronged, I was now felled by grief and some mysterious, unidentified virus which would no doubt kill me by the time Freddie bothered to return my call and tell me with what I was inflicted.

By Monday afternoon I knew Freddie had to be back, because he was not the type to miss classes, and yet he had not called. How was it possible? Telling my wounded pride that I was calling for medical reasons rather than emotional ones—Campbell's chicken noodle soup felt like barbed wire in my sore mouth—I called Freddie that evening to find out just what strange disease I had contracted and how to cure it. This time I got him. Oh,
hi!
He apologized for not having called me back on Sunday or after I had called Tuesday; but he was feeling really rotten, and then there was no answer at my place on Thursday, and then they went down to Washington. How had I been? Oh, no! He was terribly sorry to hear I had caught his virus. I should just drink fluids and take aspirin. It took about a week to wind itself down, he said. I should feel fine by Thursday, but he felt terrible that I was sick.

That's all. No big deal. He had tried to call when he felt better, but I was away. Sure, he liked me. Sure, he wanted to get together. But I began to understand that he did love his lover and that I was just another friend he was glad he had met. Maybe even very glad—but for crying out loud, keep things in perspective.

I still felt bad that I wasn't the biggest deal in Freddie's life, but I felt better. At least we would be good friends. At least the virus had only a couple more days to run.

Right on schedule, the virus vanished. Freddie called to see if I was better and invited me over to their place for a solid meal. That evening I got to know Freddie's lover, Cap, and I realized that he was a bright guy who knew exactly what was going on. Cap said he knew enough about relationships to know there was no point trying to keep Freddie locked up, and it was fine with him if we wanted to pal around. I thought he was remarkably considerate, and we became friends. I stopped pretending I liked him, and liked him.

Freddie was my first gay "love," and I went into the brief episode defenseless. I had developed defenses for lots of things, but I was new to trying to develop love relationships. I had loved straight people before, but I had not expected them to love me back and had not been hurt when they didn't. I was pure Ricky Nelson, aged sixteen, in love for the first time on
Ozzie and Harriet.

Eric and I went down to Provincetown, and this time I was steered to the left as we walked onto the beach.

I had gotten used to heads turning when I passed in the bar. Well, to be honest, I enjoyed the ego boost. Even if there happened to be no one of great interest in the bar, it was still worth driving down there just to reaffirm my own "power." Having for so many years lived in the shadow of truly charismatic campers and collegians, the looks I got as I walked around the bar were like electric impulses charging my ego battery. I could even afford to attach my cables to some other ego I was not sure operated on the same current, to see if I could get something started, because if I failed, my battery would still have enough juice left over to start my own engine going around the bar again while I recharged.

Discovering the gay beach was rather like discovering high-voltage wires. The wiring at Sporters is a fine power source, but the Herring Cove cables were more powerful in direct proportion to the degree by which my body is more attractive than my face. (Such poetic metaphors, right?) I've got one of those faces that is on the border line. If I am happy and smiling, sort of radiating, and if I am tanned and well rested and candy-bar-bump-free, and my hair happens to be at the high point in its cycle between washings, not too wispy and not too greasy, then I am pleased with my face. As long as I don't think about it. If I start thinking about it and looking at it in the mirror, then I get self-conscious, and the radiance and the smile go, and I get more self-conscious and may as well call it a night.

My body, on the other hand, is much more reliable. I suppose I owe it to all those sports in high school and to general good fortune in my bone structure. I don't work out with weights or anything. We have an understanding: I don't try to change it or elongate it or tax it greatly; it looks good when I take my clothes off. A little on the short side next to some of my friends, but well proportioned and well defined. It's a tennis-player-in-alligator-shirt kind of body. And, while I don't like hairy chests myself, opposites seem to attract each other. (I've heard that even extends to opposite sexes.)

Eric just lay on his Budweiser beach towel and soaked in the August sun. I walked around the beach, swam a lot, discovered friends I had met in Sporters, and met their friends. When we first arrived, the beach was perhaps forty yards wide, between the lapping ocean and the ridge of sand that hid the hot dry dunes beyond. People were scattered widely. But as the tide came in, everyone got friendlier, some more stoned, some more drunk, and the ocean snipped away at our ribbon of beach, leaving us finally with about five yards between water and ridge. Perhaps that's what pushed some pairs into the dunes; but Eric told me it was more likely they wanted some privacy while they fucked. Oh.

My feet were sanded nearly to the bone by the time we left the beach. Eric said it served me right for being so dizzy. We drove back to where we were staying—a sort of Portuguese YMCA without the gym facilities, where no one even pretended to be straight—via a Buster Bar and fried clams swimming in ketchup at the Dairy Queen. Back at the Y we fell asleep on the kind of high metal beds whose springs play "The Star-Spangled Banner" if you so much as roll over. There was not a stanza to be heard from my bed, however. I was rendered motionless by the sun that was pressing at every point of my charred body.

The "in" bar that summer was Piggy's, on Shank Painter Road. It was particularly nice because the locals went there, some straight, some gay, and there was a warm Portuguese atmosphere. Well, I'm guessing Portuguese; the closest I've been to Portugal is Tossa. But whatever it was seemed genuine and comfortable rather than consciously designed for effect. Piggy's seemed to have been discovered rather than promoted. You didn't recognize much of the music they played (a pleasant change), but it made you want to dance and get into the rhythm of the place.

The summer was nearly over, and I had been out for almost three months. I was looking forward to starting back to work soon. For most of the summer I had refused to dance when I was at a bar or a party, or even at a gay lib dance. Cowboys don't dance. How could guys dance with other guys? (Massachusetts does not allow people of the same sex to touch each other when they dance—tolerance has its limits, after all.)

As the summer went on, I realized it was a little foolish to stand on the edge of a dance floor bouncing up and down in time to the music, wanting to dance, but fearing that it would somehow make me less of a man. Just dance in a manly way, and you will have the best of both worlds. There is a limit to the degree to which you have to feel superior to everyone else, you know. I mean, you
are
gay, after all. I mean, we understand that it will take you awhile to get used to everything, to lower your inhibitions, to accept your new life. But you are not going to be "just come out last month" all your life, friend. So have a drink, relax, and enjoy it. It's a good way to meet people, too, and it's fun. People wouldn't have been dancing throughout recorded history if there weren't something to it. By August of my twenty-third year I finally began to enjoy dancing.

Piggy's was jammed with attractive people that night. There were weekenders from Boston and New York and summer residents, many of them waiters and busboys, who came over to Piggy's when they got off their jobs around eleven o'clock.

Who
is that tall blond boy, Golden Boy, over by the bar? He was surrounded by others. Usually, when I walk closer to a potential fantasy, reality comes into focus. But not this time. Is it possible that someone that good-looking could be gay? Could be
real,
even? What I wouldn't give to be six five and blond with a perfect Ryan O'Neal face like that and the same self-assurance.
There
is a kid who has the world around his finger. Eric told me he was Mike York, going into his last year of college, and president of his class, if he remembered right. Undoubtedly! Oh, how I envy the kids who have it made before they start. I take for granted my good fortune and envy those who are born even more fortunate. Here was John Tunney-John Lindsay-John Kennedy, aged twenty-one.

I felt rotten. Seeing people I know I can never meet, never have, always makes me feel rotten. What was even more frustrating was that he was gay. I had learned to accept my inability to have straight people.
This
was tantalizing.

Eric managed to introduce us later in the evening, but Golden Boy wasn't paying much attention and was on his way out with someone else. Hello, how are
you?
he asked like a politician, looking at the top of my brown-haired head and then moving on to other well-wishers. Wow.

I spent the rest of the evening thinking about Golden Boy, wishing I were able, as he was, to point at anyone I wanted, flash my perfect smile, and go off with my instant conquest to Wyoming or the Portuguese Y.

I badgered Eric to tell me who everyone else was too—particularly the people I had seen talking with Golden Boy. If I could make friends with his friends, maybe I could elbow my way into his circle. The best looking of Golden Boy's friends, in an objective sort of way—handsome, very handsome, but not sexy-looking, not blond—was a kid Eric introduced as Chris. Another Southern accent—Montgomery, Alabama—and affable. He didn't stay long either. Someone asked him to dance, and Eric and I resumed our conversation. Eric thought Chris was better looking than Golden Boy, he said. Eric had done a thing with Chris when Chris was first coming out, the summer before me. Chris is a nice guy, Eric said, a little wistfully, I thought. He's down here for the summer working as a waiter in Wellfleet at some spiffy lobster place. He starts Harvard Business School in a few weeks.

Yeah, okay, but tell me about Golden Boy, for crying out loud. Who wants Harvard Business School? Golden Boy is going to be a senior in
college.
Do you know what the word "college" does to me?