The Best Little Boy in the World Read online

  Meanwhile, of course, my team captain—not the baseball team captain, mind you, though he was there, too—the color-war captain, and the head coach, for crying out loud, were telling me to take it easy: The poor pitcher was under tremendous pressure, was going to CHOKE!, and all I had to do was watch the ball closely and only swing on the off-chance that it came anywhere near the plate. A walk with the bases loaded would tie the score, and our big guns were up right behind me. WALK’S AS GOOD AS A HIT!, HEY, PITCH—CHOKE!, FLY’S DOWN, PITCH!, WALK’S AS GOOD AS A HIT!

  The pitcher, who, sure enough, was choking his brains out too, let fly with a ball that, while headed more or less in my direction, promised to sail several feet over my head. Possibly over the backstop. As it came, all I could hear was Tommy: HEY, ADAM’S APPLE, CHOKE!

  If I hadn’t swung at that fucking little ball, it might have been the pitcher who would be writing this book now.

  So in camp I was kind of a loner. I was good at the solo sports and developed a menacingly good build, at least by the standards of kids whose parents can afford to send them to $1,000-a-season summer camps. I was smarter than my peers, I never got into any trouble …. I was respected, maybe even feared a little bit—but not exactly loved or accepted.

  I wanted to be accepted, no question about that. But I couldn’t bring myself to do the standard acceptance-winning things. An acceptance-winning thing in camp would be anything that annoyed the counselors and made me one of the boys. And if whatever mischief I made were of sufficient quality to broach the possibility that I might be sent home—to me, the ultimate unthinkable disgrace—then I might even assume a leadership role among my peers. I had all the other characteristics. However, the BLBITW simply could not bring himself to any sort of mischief. He had been molded too well. Much as he wanted acceptance from his peers, he would not risk losing it with the authorities or—God forbid—risk being sent home.

  Thus I was on fairly good terms with many of my fellow campers, but not intimate. I certainly could not reveal that I didn’t know how to masturbate. Through the songs (“You ought to see me on the short strokes. It was so grand, I used my hand,” sung to the tune of “Finiculi, Finicula”) and through snatches of conversation, I began to learn the word and its synonyms. I would hear thirteen-year-olds bragging about how they could do it in ten strokes—but I never really knew for sure what it meant.

  High school was much the same: I was respected, I had some friends, but evenings I was home writing extra-credit reports to keep me on my throne and get-me-into-the-college-of-my-choice, and weekends I was up in Brewster, no longer bored, writing extra-credit reports.

  I heard enough to know that everybody did it; I couldn’t risk asking anyone what or how. That couldn’t be the way you find out, anyway, for crying out loud! You don’t get hair to grow down there by asking someone how—it just happens. It is part of adolescence and puberty. Can you imagine the ridicule if I admitted that masturbation hadn’t happened to me yet? WHAT ARE YOU, ANYWAY, SOME KIND OF HO-MO?

  So I didn’t ask any of my friends in high school either. I just kept wishing it would happen, yet knowing deep down that things were out of kilter down there—the varicocele, and all….

  There was one instance that might have been taken as an encouraging sign, around the age of thirteen, that, had it not been for one integral aspect, might have buoyed my self-confidence markedly. At home on the East Side one night, I had a wet dream. Not that I knew the term for it or made any connections.

  I remember that it took me some time to decide for a certainty that I hadn’t just wet my bed, that there was a difference, that there was nothing to be embarrassed about, that this was one of the things I had been waiting for. Nor did I tell anyone about it. Actually, my wet dream left me quite upset. So upset that—zoologists, Guinness, Ripley take note—it is the last one I had.

  I had apparently repressed all future wet dreams, though I didn’t know it at the time. I just began to assume, when there were no repeat performances, that things were rotting away down there. And under the circumstances, I felt that was maybe all for the best.

  I’ll tell you this, though: I was one energetic teenager. Talk about repressed sexual energy! I swam a mile before classes, won all the academic honors, swam miles after classes, ran cross country, wrestled, played soccer, did untold millions of sit-ups, headed the lab assistants, wrote for the yearbook, edited the newspaper (respected, mind you, not loved like the class president), and wrote extra-credit reports until they were coming out of every teacher’s ears. One such in the eighth grade had the unimposing title “A History of the Balance of Power in Europe, 476 A.D. to 1053 A.D.,” which I managed to cover in about fifty pages, plus maps.

  And then I got to Yale and shared a room with Roger Ritter, a young man not unlike Tommy Roth, who, although not necessarily destined to graduate with high honors, really knew where it was at. Roger had fallen in and out of love a hundred times. He spent the first week, while I was reading the orientation materials, driving around, to Vassar and Barnard and Wheaton. He was forever asking me to excuse him and his date for a few hours while they used the room; and those evenings when he hadn’t used the room, he would wiggle his toes against the sheets, ever so softly, the way my brother used to do.

  Only he must have had a slightly different technique, as every morning when I woke up there would be a Kleenex next to his bed. By Thanksgiving of our freshman year I had made a remarkable deduction.

  I was confirmed in my suspicion when Roger started asking me why there was never any Kleenex at the foot of my bed in the morning—particularly, I suppose, because I never asked him to let me borrow the room. Well, I was just your typical attractive-but-shy Yale freshman, perfectly healthy, just a little naïve.

  Luckily, I remembered hearing one of the counselors in camp state that wet dreams were by far the more mature alternative to beating off. So, by the age of seventeen, having begun to debug many of the flaws in my defense department computer program, I simply answered that I did beat off a couple of times a week, that I preferred to do it on evenings when he had not yet come in or was already asleep, that I didn’t happen to use the same Kleenex-by-the-side-of-the-bed choreography, and—the clincher—that actually I preferred to have wet dreams. He was impressed, and I avoided yet another chance to learn how to beat off.

  Though I had bluffed Roger, his prodding had been enough to get me to make an all-out effort for normality. I forced myself to remember clues from an awful story I had heard in camp:

  The way it works, see, you get a dozen guys in a cabin for a round-pound, see, with the lights off, see, and you offer a banana split to the guy who shoots first, right? Well, you let everybody but Joey in on it. Then you turn off the lights, see, and start slapping your wrist with the first two fingers of your other hand, like this—thap, thap, thap—and pretty soon Joey starts panting and shouts that he’s won, see, so you turn on the lights, and you’re all dressed, going thap, thap, thap against your wrist, and he’s sitting there all messy, looking like an idiot!

  And one night, in private of course, and halfheartedly, I guess you’d say, and certainly not fantasizing anything sexy—just waiting for it to happen, but not really expecting that it would—I started thap, thap, thapping down there, Kleenex at the ready just in case. Ten, twenty, maybe thirty thaps, and nothing had happened. I remembered my fellow campers bragging about how it only took them ten strokes, so after a few more, rotting away down there for sure, just as I had suspected, and simply not wanting to think about it, I quit and went to sleep, feeling sorry for myself.

  When I say feeling sorry for myself, I do not mean depressed. That was entirely another feeling. I enjoyed being depressed. I would spend hours being depressed, walking around thinking cosmic martyr thoughts about the great burden I was carrying and about the delicious irony of the best little boy in the world’s being so bad, after all—but, as only the best little boy in the world could, bearing all the pain himself and sparing his lo
ving parents. And so on.

  I did spend hours like this, wondering whatever would become of me, how I would cope—fantasizing stunning confessionals that would shock the New York Times into omitting the Sunday edition and causing me to be sanctified in my own lifetime, or maybe only after being burned at the camp totem pole—pondering suicide—all these juicy thoughts which even I realized were not really so terribly painful. I would never have admitted it, I suppose, but being a martyr was kind of fun.

  But when I really got down to brass tacks—when I was in the shower and I looked down at that varicocele or thought I saw others looking; when my group was assigned to baseball for the afternoon; when form demanded that I get a date for the senior prom or Dr. Whatshisface wondered why I hadn’t told anybody about this—then I felt real pain, I felt sick inside, I desperately wanted help I couldn’t ask for—and I felt sorry for myself.

  Anyway, my freshman roommate reminded me that every kid in the world did it, but he didn’t show me how.

  Imagine my surprise, therefore, my ecstasy, my relief, that evening of my sophomore year in college, in a room all to myself, part of a three-man suite—a room so small that I had suspended my bed like the Brooklyn Bridge between a six-foot wardrobe closet on the left and a six-foot bookcase on the right—when squirming around on my stomach and thinking thoughts I doubt I can bring myself to describe … and squirming some more, and then beginning to feel almost as though I could not stop squirming even if I had wanted to, and wanting to stop squirming, and trying to hold it back just as I had repressed my wet dreams, trying desperately to hold it back, because it was so bad, and squirming so noisily on Brooklyn Bridge that my defense department computer was sending desperate signals through my fantasies that one of my roommates might be attracted by the noise, so YOU’D BETTER STOP, you idiot, HOLD IT BACK, you … Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ….

  That great event occurred shortly before we went on Christmas vacation. I was bursting to tell someone. I had begun to develop some close friends—friends I felt I could even trust, to a point. But to tell this would have been too much. It would have completely wrecked my image as a fairly “with it,” impressive young man. However I phrased it, the listeners would have heard: “Last night I learned to do for the first time what everyone else in the world has been doing from the age of eleven.” And if they asked me—not out of cruelty, it’s just the logical question—WHAT TOOK SO LONG? (read: What’s wrong with you? WHAT ARE YOU HIDING?).…

  Then we came back from vacation, and I was in talking with my roommate and closest friend, Hank, whom I admired no end, who was so cool, who knew just what to do at all times, who was so good-looking, who could play baseball, for crying out loud—and Hank told me: “I saw a lot of my friends from high school when I was home and—well, you just wouldn’t believe what they’re doing now. Do you know what they’re doing?” He asked this with a mixture of incredulity and disgust. I didn’t know for sure, but I made a sickeningly good mental guess. “They’re masturbating,” he said.

  My ego ideal was so disgusted by the whole idea, he went on to tell me—as easily and unself-consciously as if he had been talking about the crummy food in the dining hall—that he had never masturbated. (How could he admit that?) Hank said he thought it was gross and perverted. He said real sex or wet dreams were far more healthy.

  “Masturbating?” I echoed him. “Oh, that’s disgusting.” Indeed, I was as amazed and sickened by his revelation as he was, only for different reasons.

  Thank God I hadn’t told him! Or anyone! Apparently, I realized, a few degenerates at camp did it (you know about those summer camps); my freshman roommate did it (he had indeed, I recalled, spent several years in a summer camp). But that was about it. Nobody cool did it. Nobody decent did it. The lights were on, and I was the messy idiot.

  And one final thing. I can’t put it off any longer. I should really have mentioned it several pages back where I was talking about how that isolated wet dream was, well, a mixed blessing, never repeated. My wet dream was about. Tommy Roth.

  CHAPTER 3

  All right, so you had a wet dream about another boy. Is that what knotted up your adolescence so badly? Look. The famous statistic is that one out of three males reaches orgasm with another male at least once in his lifetime. That’s from Kinsey. So relax. You didn’t even have physical sex with him, did you? You just dreamed about him, right?

  RIGHT! Oh, RIGHT! I swear to you that I am desperately trying to keep this wicker-weave throne, to live up to the image all the authority figures have of me. RIGHT! Even if I had wanted to play out my—wait, strike that—even though I wanted to play out my fantasies—even though I longed to play out my fantasies—I would never, never have done so. And as a result, no one will ever find out that I have such fantasies. I’m clean, Officer. You’ve got nothing on me.

  But now that we are on the subject, Officer, I can tell you a thing or two. I happen to know that some of the kids at camp were doing more than just fantasizing. Please don’t say I told you, but there was a lot of experimenting going on. And with some of the counselors, I think they weren’t just experimenting even, if you know what I mean.

  Yes, I was only vaguely aware of it as I became an older camper—like the time Tommy and that counselor kicked everyone out of their tent and closed the flaps on a sunny day—but I was aware enough not to let any of those counselors give me back rubs. I was particularly cold to that one who couldn’t take his eyes off my body. I was so disgusted by the thought that this ugly man wanted to touch me, it made me shiver.

  But, oh, what I would have given to be Tommy’s real best friend. God, how I wanted to be like him, to do the same mischievous, self-assured things he did, to have muscles and blond hair and a smile like his. Nothing in our relationship would be disgusting, nothing unmentionable. Just to be like the Hardy Boys, two blood brothers, two cowboys … that’s it: two cowboys.

  In elementary school I had felt the same way about Chip Morgan. We would go up to his apartment after school and eat Oreos and watch TV, or play knock hockey, or play that board game called Baseball, where hitting and fielding are determined by a spin of the plastic spinner. Or Chip would put on his swim trunks and bathrobe, like Joe Palooka, and we would mess around with his boxing gloves, or wrestle, like we used to watch on Channel 9. Then his mother saw him that way once, in his trunks and bathrobe—well, I guess it was underpants, not swim trunks—and got angry and said never to dress like that again. But I was eight, nine, ten those years and too young to know what was going on. I just liked it.

  I was going through what they call a stage, right? I was supposed to hate little girls when I was a little boy. I was supposed to hate those dance lessons we were all forced to take, aged ten, those multiplication dances where my ego required that I be chosen at any early round in the progression, while at the same time I was praying madly that if the progression caught me at all, it would be for the last round only so I would have to go bumbling around the floor just once, and then only while everyone else was too busy dancing, and maybe trying to sneak a feel, to have time to watch me bumble. Everyone else, of course, had things well under control, like that pitcher in color war.

  I was going through a stage. Sure enough, young boys all knew: One of these days a little hair would start to grow in odd places (it did); the clerk would stop calling you “Miss” when you phoned in a grocery order (he did); muscles would begin to bulge all over your body (they did); and those little girls you had been ignoring would begin to drive you wild. I was waiting for those girls to start driving me wild, but I was very skeptical.

  I was all of eleven when I first “knew” what I was, in a tentative, semiconscious sort of way, hoping to be proved wrong, but knowing for certain, down deep, that it was snake eyes for keeps. No fingers crossed.

  My parents were having a party in Brewster: mostly businessmen, a few doctors and a few lawyers, some real estate types, their wives—the standard grown-up dinner party. Sports jackets
and slacks: pipes, cigars, and cigarette smoke; the hubbub cresting, hushing momentarily, then rushing to crest with even greater force.

  I was watching Superman in the den. My father passed through with one of his guests. He was saying something like: “I’ve read that, too; but ten percent just couldn’t be right. There couldn’t be that many people with homosexual tendencies….” Something like that. Frankly, I am surprised I do not remember the exact words, because the incident itself I will never forget. That is all there was to it. They passed by; I sat there with my head aimed at the TV—but my face on fire with recognition. I knew, I’m not sure how, but I knew I was in that 10 percent. So that’s the word for hating dancing school, for not playing baseball, for admiring Chip’s athletic prowess, for the phony feelings, and lonely feelings, I sometimes felt.

  It was hazy and vague, aged eleven. But I had gone off to camp the previous summer, and I was about to enter junior high school: I was being jolted into thinking a little, into becoming aware of myself. I no longer just looked at the picture of the Golden Gloves boxer in the magazine and liked it—I started to wonder why I liked it. And whether I was supposed to like it. And if not, whether I would stop liking it.

  By the age of thirteen I was poignantly aware of what I was. But my inner shell of defense was impregnable. I had found out about myself, but no one else would ever find out as long as I lived. That stigma and keeping it a secret were the fundamental core of my mind, from which all other thoughts and actions flowed.

  I would somehow cope. I would somehow enjoy hour after hour of cosmic depression, day after day, year after year. I knew what was happening now, and I spent most of my time writing programs for my defense department computer. You would never catch me spilling the beans in my sleep. You would never catch me electing art instead of science, playing Hamlet instead of tennis.