The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (16 page)

So the year passed, and despite completing a thesis that my adviser called “a model of the form,” and graduating with low-level honors, I was still a very confused and stunted young man. All the more confused and stunted, perhaps, with every passing day.

After college I moved to Washington, D.C., I know not why. That first month I lived in a townhouse next door to the Dixie Pig Barbecue in Alexandria; to be exact, I lived in a room a little bigger than a closet with a twin-sized mattress on the floor. My three housemates were recent graduates of OU—also fraternity boys, as I recall. A paralegal in my father’s office had put me in touch with them, since I hardly knew a soul in Washington. One was named Scott, and the only reason that sticks in my head is because he shared a name with my brother, who otherwise might have been a different species—nay, from a different planet in a distant (and really much nicer) galaxy. On weekends, when Scott #2 and the others would get drunk in their colorless way, they’d clatter down to the basement, where I was watching TV for want of anything better to do, and indulge in a little bedtime ritual: swaying slightly on the carpet, baseball caps over their hearts, they’d stand watching (over and over) the 1984 Reagan campaign ad set to the tune of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” I didn’t comment; I didn’t mention that I was a Democrat who’d voted for Mondale, nor did I point out that I’d been raised in a liberal family and spent the best times of my childhood in the company of gay men. I just sat there and wondered, in effect:
what the fuck.
The question was directed at me rather than them.

Meanwhile I worked as an intern in the office of Don Nickles, the baby-faced junior senator from Oklahoma. A Republican of the most guileless, God-fearing variety, Nickles had appointed my father as the token Democrat on a federal judiciary review board; otherwise I would have been an even more improbable member of his workforce. For a few weeks, though—for the sake of my father and certain vague ambitions—I did my best to fit in. I even attended one of Don’s weekly Bible meetings in his office; I can’t remember what we discussed, only that Don (as he insisted we call him) responded very politely to whatever ass-kissing, disingenuous piety I’d advanced: “That’s a very interesting point, Blake . . .” He was a nice guy. Aside from (elective) Bible meetings, my job entailed answering the phone, entering data from the
Congressional Record
, and writing thoughtful, well-researched letters to constituents such as the woman from Broken Arrow who’d complained about airport noise. My letter to her was such a triumph of obliging, knowledgeable niceness that Senator Nickles himself, rather than the appropriate legislative assistant, saw fit to sign it. That, for me, was the high point.

I pretty much decided to rest on that laurel. Quite aside from Don’s politics, which struck me as odious, the whole ethos seemed ill-suited to the wisenheimer I was. When I was answering phones, for example, I shared the reception area with a young woman named Nikky—a Baptist, of course, who was mystified or downright appalled by any observation that failed to confirm her own sunny but rather stern view of the world. Once, when her boyfriend had been “mean” to her in some way that seemed benign to me, he showed up in the office wearing a rented knight-errant costume and bearing (a) flowers and (b) a boombox playing “Lady,” by Kenny Rogers. He got down on one knee and begged Nikky’s forgiveness while everyone in the office gathered around laughing and clapping—it was
so
cute—and really, you know, that’s what it took with Nikky! My own hands clapped mechanically, but I thought
What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck
. . . this, again, directed at me rather than them.

I knew the jig was up when I entered the Hart Building elevator one morning—at least fifteen minutes late, as usual, and getting later every day—and found myself face-to-face with Don, who murmured, “Good morning, Blake,” in a markedly sorrowful way, the nearest thing to a snub he could muster. Sure enough there was a note on my desk from Don’s administrative assistant, Doyce, a lanky freckled fellow with a reddish white man’s ’fro.

Doyce greeted me, all smiles, a vacuous-looking Kurt Vonnegut, and asked me to shut the door. He was poring over my résumé and shaking his head.

“Says here you graduated with honors from Tulane! Heck, that’s a good school! Bet you could get just about any job you wanted with this.”

I gave sort of a demurring whimper, and Doyce got down to brass tacks. His smile faded into a pained look, as though he were passing something sharp in his stool. He wondered, rhetorically, whether my heart was really in the job anymore: my daily tardiness hadn’t gone unnoticed, and just in general my comportment seemed a little . . . but Doyce was too nice a guy to take any pleasure in reproaching me, and whatever he was about to say dwindled into a wince. But finally he came out with it.

“Apparently, Blake, you’ve been telling our constituents over the phone to vote for George Nigh?”

Nigh was then governor of Oklahoma, a Democrat, and Don’s opponent in the next election. I certainly preferred Nigh’s politics to Don’s, but honestly I couldn’t remember making the comment in question, so I protested my innocence with a sweaty little Nixon-giggle. It was dawning on me all at once that they really, really disliked me in that office, and it seemed absurd to defend myself.

“You were overheard by a . . . by a pretty reliable source, Blake.”

Nikky. Well, that made sense. Probably I’d mentioned Governor Nigh in a way that didn’t entirely savor of rebuke, a seemly loathing, and to Nikky’s pea-brain that was tantamount to a ringing endorsement. Anyway, I was out; no use refuting a paragon like Nikky. Doyce and I agreed to disagree and manfully shook hands. I heard him wadding up my résumé as I walked down the hall.

By then I’d moved to the paneled, fluorescent-lit basement of a ranch house in Arlington, which I shared with a large, unhappy woman named Faye and her fifteen-year-old daughter. Once upon a time Faye had taught at my high school in Oklahoma; we were mutual friends with a gay theology teacher, Mr. Osborn, who used to serve me whiskey from a porcelain teakettle when we’d meet twice a month (independent study) to discuss medieval philosophy and the like. Faye, I gathered, had moved to the D.C. area for the benefit of a bureaucrat husband who’d recently abandoned her, though he still came around for dinner once or twice a week and seemed very depressed about things. As for the daughter, she was more pissed off than depressed, as I learned one day when she came home from school and caught me upstairs watching
her
TV.

Earlier that summer my girlfriend Kate had practically begged for the privilege of shacking up with me in Washington—she was flunking out of Newcomb, and wanted a year off to consider her options—but now it was
quite
the other way around: come live with me, Kate (I all but cried), and be my feckless love! Nothing doing. Kate had visited me that first week in Alexandria and seen my mattress on the closet floor, the Dixie Pig Barbecue, my three leering housemates, and when she visited Arlington a month later and saw that things were, if anything, even worse, she decided to stay put with her eccentric mum in West Virginia. I couldn’t blame her, of course, in my heart of hearts, though I blamed her roundly in person and over the phone.

Those last weeks in Arlington were perhaps the loneliest I’ve ever known as an adult. I had no job, and no idea what sort of job I was capable of holding, if any. For my twenty-second birthday Burck had given me a spiffy new VW Jetta, which I drove up and down the Potomac, all day and (mostly) all night, stopping at bars or scenic places to brood and read. I avoided Faye’s house in Arlington as much as possible; my constant aloneness embarrassed me, and I wanted them to think (but why?) that I had somewhere to go. Midafternoon I’d come home briefly to shower, perhaps filch a few pieces of meat from a nasty, congealing stew in the fridge, then dress for a night on the town and drive away to nowhere again. I drove thousands of miles in just those two or three weeks, often tipsy, often lost; to this day I don’t know my way around Washington any better than Timbuktu, such was the total daze I was in while exploring its every goat track. Not surprisingly my favorite book from this time was
A Fan’s Notes
. I was feeling a keen affinity for Frederick Exley: his alcoholism, his morbid interest in sports, his contempt for the workaday world—the whole narcissistic juvenile whirl. It was hardly a stretch to see myself lying on a davenport reading
Lolita
for months on end, or cooling my heels in a madhouse, or even selling aluminum siding for Mr. Blue. That November, at any rate, I moved to New York, where I had a few friends at least, and was promptly hired as a waiter at the Morgan Bar, a tony crepuscular dungeon on Madison Avenue that had no liquor license because its owner (Steve Rubell of Studio 54 fame) was a felon.

DURING SCOTT’S ESTRANGEMENTS
from the family, we used to speak of him with the kind of candor one reserves for the dead, when we spoke of him at all. My father and I would ritualistically mention him toward the latter stages of a given conversation, and one night our Scott-talk took a curious turn. This was in New York, where Burck had come on business and taken me out for a rare fancy meal at the Quilted Giraffe. As ever he asked if I’d heard anything lately, and I told him what little I knew. Then, with a kind of pensive amusement, my father asked if I thought Scott was gay.

I was taken aback; I smiled. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I hear things,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, did you know he was here in New York recently?”

I did not.

“Well, he was. With—do you remember Kenny Harlan?”

I did: he’d been the youngest of my mother’s gay crowd, the wispy scion of a wealthy vulgarian family (oil) who paid a remittance to keep him away. Kenny never worked or read a book or bothered much; as far as I could tell, his main occupation was getting drunk and poor-mouthing people until they beat the shit out of him. I suppose he was suicidal but lazy about getting on with it. Nonetheless I was startled to learn he was still alive, ten years later, and taking vacations with my brother.

“Old Kenny,” I said. “How is he?”

“The same. Drunk off his ass. They stayed at the Chelsea.”

We were both striving to keep up the casual tone. I didn’t bother to ask how my father knew all this. He heard things.

“So what d’you think Krafft-Ebing would make of it?” he said.

“Well—” I paused. “I hardly think it
matters
. . .”

“I’m not saying it does.”

This was misleading. Burck, to be sure, was nothing if not liberal-minded, but at bottom he was still born and raised in Vinita, Oklahoma. Just because he was tolerant of homosexuality in the abstract didn’t mean he wanted a gay son, even an estranged gay son. Though he was always kind to my mother’s friends, and amused by them, he worried about the whole scene. “God”—he remarked to me once with a sigh—“I hope you don’t turn into a cocksucker.”

I tried to put him at ease. “Scott’s always talked about how much he’s bothered by gay men—‘fucking faggots,’ that sort of thing. You remember what he said about Oscar.”

“Who?”

“His roommate at NYU.”

Any mention of NYU, in the context of Scott, made my father wince. “Not sure I do.”

“You know, he said Oscar wanted to fuck him. He said
everybody
wanted to fuck him, male or female. He said it bothered him.”

“Ah yes.”

“On the other hand, Scott’s pretty lonely these days, so who knows. He and Uncle Ronny go to church together.” I shrugged. “But do I think he’s gay? Nah. He likes girls, the younger the better.”

Then I mentioned Scott’s obsession with various pubescent starlets, his avid reading of
Tiger Beat
and the like. This for starters. Finally, once I’d finished, my father changed the subject.

MY FIRST APARTMENT
in New York was an eight-by-twelve studio on the seventeenth floor of the George Washington Hotel at Twenty-third and Lex. As I recall, it cost me $535 a month in 1986, or roughly half my take-home pay as an editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press, where I’d begun working in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences division shortly after being fired from the Morgan Bar for absenteeism and general ineptitude. I didn’t mind my tiny apartment—at least not at first. Sandra and I were in the midst of one of our brief détentes, and during a visit she’d urged Burck to buy me some streamlined Scandinavian furniture that made the most of my scant living space. The better part of my leisure, then, was spent reading on a thirty-inch-wide unvarnished wooden bed (with storage drawers); at my feet was a bookcase with a small TV in the middle compartment that I could watch when I got tired of reading. I rarely turned it on. I figured I’d better keep reading. Because of my promising honors thesis I’d decided to be a writer, though at the time I was mostly writing letters. Meanwhile I was often interrupted by an old lady next door, who on certain nights blasted Petula Clark’s “Downtown” over and over again via the blown, raspy speakers of an ancient hi-fi. When I knocked on her door (diffidently) to protest, she appeared in a soiled housecoat and stocking cap; her face looked like the chalky bottom of a desiccated lake. Her eyes glittered. She gave me a garbled spiel about a noisy man in her ceiling who was trying to kill her by somehow smiting her on the forehead from above (she pantomimed this: smiting her forehead with the heel of her hand, rolling her eyes up into her head, and stumbling backward); Petula Clark helped drown the man’s malicious racket, and since I wanted her to turn down the volume, I was pegged as another of her tormenters. “
Killer!
” she’d hiss, sitting on the steps leading from the lobby to the mailroom, where (she knew) I had to pass each day after work. I complained to the building manager, who said that they’d already been in touch with the woman’s son in Baltimore. He wasn’t eager to resume custody.

My boss at work was a gentle scholar named Susan, who appreciated my better qualities (such as they were) and quietly ignored my cadaverous hangovers. I’d never been to New York prior to my arrival that autumn, and mostly I was enchanted. Every block, even the squalid ones, struck me as a fresh romance. I remember discovering Gramercy Park and simply marveling: two blocks away I lived in a grungy residential hotel next door to a lunatic, and here was this fanciful square of grass and trees and quaint wrought-iron benches and somberly prosperous brownstones. I tried the gate: locked!
Mais bien sûr
, it was
right
to be locked; it was something to aspire to. I was still young! That seated madonna there on a bench, with her pram, she’d earned a key and I hadn’t. I wished her well.