The Best Little Boy in the World (25 page)

Before we drop this subject, I do think it is interesting to consider the question of Goliath's latent homosexuality. Rather, his apparent lack of any. How come? Not only did he come from the same family, he was the firstborn and as a result, one would assume, the more gingerly handled. By the time I came along my parents were probably less afraid of dropping me, less afraid that I would stick my tongue in the electric socket—and hell, if I did, at least they would still have Goliath. What's more, there
was
Goliath to terrorize me and to rough me up a little. Wouldn't this tend to have made my childhood
less
sheltered than his? Or was it that my parents tended to overprotect me from Goliath? And then there is the curious fact that in Goliath's crucial years, my father was off bombing Dresden, and Goliath was brought up with very little knowledge of his daddy. By the time I came along Daddy was back. Isn't it the kid
without
the daddy who is supposed to turn out gay?

Goliath and I went to the same schools, had many of the same teachers, went to the same camp—so what was the difference? Is homosexuality doled out at random? Was I just lucky? Or was it the fact that I was less hardy as a child—I did have a rough time with earaches when I was three or four—that led me to be more carefully protected? Or was it that my parents had decided to try out a different school of child psychology on me from the one they had used with Goliath, a psychology that somehow intensified my need for their love and attention, which thereby intensified my own desire to do only "good" things—and which made me feel guilty at the drop of a paint splotch? Or was I simply competing with Goliath for their attention in my most formative years, where as Goliath had not had to compete in his own formative years—and was it this competition that made me determined to be the best little boy in the world?

Perhaps that last was it. More likely it was the sum of hundreds of different factors, all interrelated. I doubt that there is anything random about it. Well, of course, I doubt there is anything random about
anything
in nature. I know quite a few gay kids who have gay brothers. I know one family of three gay brothers. That suggests that people do not become gay at random. Homosexuality is an effect of causes, just like everything else in the world, even though the causes may be too legion or abstruse for us to fathom. And like all good effects, homosexuality is also a cause. I submit that a boy might develop homosexually
because
he was a meek child, while another person might develop a meek personality once he realizes that he is a homosexual and therefore, according to society, inferior. Are schizophrenic homosexuals schizophrenic before their homosexuality is formed, or do some become schizophrenics because society forces them to lead two lives?

To me the case of Goliath and me suggests: First, if one or two of the sons turn out gay, that's neither good nor bad. It's the way it is. I am as happy as Goliath and as productive to society—and what else matters? Second, parents may as well give up on trying to keep their kids from growing up gay. You may say my parents should have forced me to fend for myself more. But while that might have "made me straight," it might have made another boy gay. Surely an effeminate father shouldn't take hormones and a dominant mother shouldn't quit her job and take up knitting and subscribe to
Cosmopolitan.

Goliath and I went back into the house to check out the strings of Christmas tree lights we have been using for the past twenty-odd years. Tradition runs strong in our family. Every year we go to the same nursery to buy a tree a few days before Christmas. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Goliath and I try in vain to mount the tree on its stand, until finally our father is prevailed upon to level the tree's bottom through some miraculous gift he has (he is also one of those fathers who can put together Heathkit radios and get them to work) and set it up properly on the stand. We then bring the tree into the house, to the same spot in the living room each year, and our mother comes in to help us decide which side of the tree should be facing the wall and which facing out. Trees are deceptive that way. You keep turning them little by little, but the part that shows always seems to be less full of branches than it was a few seconds ago when it was facing the wall. Then we check the lights, just in time to run into town before the store closes if we need to replace some bulbs, and then, if the TV networks are willing, we settle down to
The Christmas Carol,
which is over just in time to rush out to the traditional Christmas Eve restaurant. When Goliath and I were young, that was often the only totally peaceful, harmonious meal of the year. Then we drive back home, always by nine thirty, no fighting in the car, and my mother always says that we have never gotten home so late before and that she doesn't see how we can possibly get everything done before midnight. I needn't explain the importance of getting everything done before midnight, need I? So she starts decorating the dining-room table with little men in sleighs while Goliath and I start wiring up the tree. Dad fiddles with the FM tuner he constructed long ago, trying to find the perfect station for an evening like this. Eventually, he sits down in his chair, feet stretched comfortably over the ottoman that was once the scene of my paint-splotches-on-the-lawn spanking, and like Walter Cronkite in the command post, he oversees the preparation of Apollo 14 or, in this case, the tree. When the electrical work is done, Mom appears to express her amazement at the way we have managed to arrange the lights so beautifully and to help with the hundreds of snowballs and glittering pine cones and delicate tinsel balls that we have come to know so well. Inevitably, Goliath drops an ornament whose delicate spire breaks off—but the feeling is too good on this night for any recrimination. Dad moves from his command post to take the ornament down to the basement for some glue and hidden supports, and half an hour later, back on the tree it goes. My mother is sure this is the best-looking tree we have ever done. It is now nearly eleven, for crying out loud, and we still have to wrap the presents and write the poems! The poems, with the exception of the occasional statistical fluke, are terrible. The meter is off, the puns are awful, but they will be received with delight in the morning when it is finally time to come downstairs and open the presents.

I find myself tempted to describe our Christmas Eve ritual in the past tense, because it is filed in my childhood memories. Yet there is really no reason for that, because next Christmas Eve will be exactly as I have described past ones. If anyone should appreciate the joys of a nearly perfect family, it is me. I know only a handful of friends whose parents have had such storybook marriages and whose families have been so close. Well, I suppose we are the best little family in the world. Yet I doubt that I will envy Hank's beautiful family, when he has one, any more than he will envy my independent and fulfilling life-style.

I left Brewster to go back to work. Chris had said he would be coming back in time for New Year's.

For Christmas I had sent Chris two of my favorite albums: Peter, Paul and Mary's
Album 1700,
which I had first heard with Hank at Yale, and Tom Rush's
Circle Game,
with Brook. Back in Boston I found that Chris had sent me
The Guinness Book of World Records—
perhaps so the best little boy in the world would know what his competition was. Did you know, for example, that "The duration record for lying on a bed of nails (needle-sharp 6-inch 2 inches apart) is 25 hours 9 minutes?"

One of my project workers at the office, with whom I had become quite close, gave me a Playboy Club Key for Christmas. I couldn't resist taking him there for dinner to tell him about his boss' sexual preferences. I had passed the stage of "Sit down, Sam, there's something I want to tell you." That was too melodramatic and serious and self-important. I would simply answer questions honestly if they happened to come up. So, when my Playboy friend asked me who I was sleeping with these days, I said, "Christopher." Then I answered the questions that followed. I liked this approach because it put being gay in the proper light: not something dreadful to be ashamed of and whispered about; just something to be casually and good-naturedly discussed.

I had developed ugly, but uncontrollable, reflexes to inconsequential things Chris did. He had a way of clearing his throat that was like the toast-scraping cliché. It annoyed me. Of course, the annoyance was only a manifestation of some greater annoyance with our relationship. Perhaps what annoyed me most was that the BLBITW had the capacity to be so selfish, so impatient, so ugly.

I went to the airport to pick up Chris, hoping our two-week Christmas separation would somehow have given me the breather I needed. I wanted to be able to enjoy his needing me, not resent it. I wanted to want to be with him.

Though two weeks had passed, I found myself feeling even more hyper than usual as I sat waiting for his delayed flight. I just don't have time for this! I have important work at the office, two proposals that will knock their eyes out if I ever get time to finish writing them. I haven't even had time to fill out my expense voucher for last month, and here I am on a plastic chair in the Eastern Airlines terminal accomplishing zilch and waiting for goddamned Christopher and the goddamned way he has of clearing his goddamned throat. What am I
doing
here? You're slowing me down, Chris. You're holding me back.

Was it Chris, or would any mortal affect me the same way? Did this experience mean that I would never be able to have more than a few weeks' fling with anyone? That question was the crux of it, and it was not fun to think about.

The next four months went well enough, more or less on my terms. We talked on the phone every day but only got together a couple of times a week and went out on our own a lot. As far as I was concerned, Chris was a good friend. As far as he was concerned, I was his lover. We blamed the infrequency with which we got together on our respective work loads: his three business school cases a night, and my projects at IBM. That was less painful than trying to explain it in terms of what was really happening.

I was happy. I had the advantages of the relationship without the claustrophobia. I made friends with a lot of other people besides Chris. I thought we would just drift apart. Surely by June, when Chris went down South for his summer job, things would just naturally come to an end. I knew Chris too well to think he could spend a whole summer without finding lots of other people to replace me. When he returned in the fall, we would be good friends—I did want that—but we would be free of each other.

In fact, the end came even before the summer, late in April. It was very painful for all three of us. But I must introduce some of the people I met in the months before that disastrous April.

Some of them, like Rick Swidler from IBM, were faces from the past. I ran into two of my old high school classmates, both of whom had apparently been active even back then. One described the affair he had had with our music teacher, aged fourteen and thirty-two respectively. The other claimed to have been "experimenting" with some of the stars of the class, many of the ones I had been dying to befriend, though not with Brian.

Where
was
Brian? Neither of my two fellow alumni knew. The last I knew of Brian was that he had been expelled two days before our graduation. He had been sitting in the back of a large lecture room. One of our more conservative teachers, who used to sprinkle his patriotic lectures with long pauses, placed at random to emphasize his failing mind, was giving one of the final sermons of the year in our American history class. People were fidgeting and rustling and snapping and clicking and whispering, bored to tears, thinking of the GTO's they had been promised for graduation, but our mentor pressed on. He was saying that teachers should be investigated by the FBI before they were allowed near the pliable young minds of our great nation. "Such a system would"—pause—"be worth the inconvenience it" —pause—"would cause and the"—pause—"indignation it would no doubt arouse among some of"—pause—"the fanatics we have teaching"—pause—"today. But it would eliminate unsavory" —pause—"and subversive people like—"

"You!"
Brian stage-whispered only loudly enough to be heard over the background noise by his friends sitting near him in the back of the room. Unfortunately, at that moment there was a lull in the shuffling and rustling, and Brian was expelled two days before graduation. You won't believe this next part, but no matter: His father sent him off to a school for rich dumb kids in need of high school diplomas—in Wyoming. I have heard nothing of him since.

Jack Simmons, my old counselor from camp, was sitting with four other guys in a predominantly gay restaurant. I had become fairly adept at picking out the subtle clues—a little too much Braggi, something in the facial muscles, the Levi's that belonged on younger legs—anyhow, one glance at the five of them in their early thirties without dates made me certain that Jack had been craving my suntanned body those three summers in camp. I came up behind him and said: "Hey, mister—want a blow job?"