The Best Little Boy in the World Read online

  One ingenious defense was to remain as ignorant as possible on the subject of homosexuality. The less I knew, I reasoned, the less chance that I would start looking like one or acting like one. I wasn’t one, damn it! Those people I saw on the streets with their pocketbooks and their swish and their pink hair—they disgusted me at least as much as they disgusted everyone else, probably more. I would sooner have slept with a girl, God forbid, than with one of those horrible people. Do you understand? I wasn’t a homosexual; I just desperately wanted to be cowboys with Chip or with Tommy.

  So I never read anything about homosexuality. No one would ever catch me at the “Ho” drawer of the New York Public Library Card Catalog. Bachelor J. Edgar Hoover and his lifelong friend Clyde Tolson would have to be a lot more clever than that to trip me up.

  All I knew about it was that it was awful. You could pick this up from the one-liners that fellow campers and classmates threw around or from occasional references in books or even the newspapers. But the most coherent explanation I had was from my father. One of his favorite stories between my ages of twelve and fifteen or so—my formative years, he thought, though I think he was about ten or twelve years too late—was about how his father had heard a rumor that one of my father’s teachers was a homosexual, so when my father came home from school, his father asked him whether that man was indeed one of his teachers, and my father said yes, and his father beat the living daylights out of my father, who at the time it happened was always about the same age I was when the story was being told. Have you got all that? The two morals were unmistakable: I should be eternally grateful that my father was not the unreasonable tyrant that his father was. And homosexuals are the scum of the earth.

  That was the extent of the knowledge about homosexuality I allowed to penetrate my defenses.

  Another important line of defense, the most important on a practical day-to-day basis, was my prodigious list of activities. “Highly motivated; a self-starter,” the teachers would write on my character reports. Hell, yes, I was motivated! No one could expect me to be out dating on Saturday nights if the school paper was going to be on the stands on Tuesday. No one could expect me to be partying over Christmas vacation when I had a list of seventeen urgent projects to complete—I would be lucky to find time to open my presents, let alone go to parties or date, for crying out loud.

  And who do I know who gives parties in Brewster? That, of course, is where we went each weekend and holiday, which was a line of defense all its own. For all my classmates knew, I spent Saturday nights whoring it up in Brewster.

  Really, it was not awfully hard to fake my way through high school. High school was more talk than action. At least my kind of all-boys high school was. And I did my best to learn to talk, or at least listen, as though I were just like anybody else. The better-looking, more outgoing kids were dating and partying; but nobody’s parents were paying all that tuition to have their sons turned down by the college of their choice, and I was far from being the only one chained to a desk on Saturday night. Who would know that my chains were self-imposed?

  I went to just enough parties to remain credible, though not enough to learn all the new dances, notably the twist, for the rapid demise of which I prayed religiously. The relationship between dancing and sex was all but inescapable. Sex got me nervous; dancing made me self-conscious. And I have since learned that it takes only one thing to dance creditably: self-confidence. The twist lingered for years and was a continual source of embarrassment. You can’t do it? Really? Why not? Well, Doctor, you see those thousands of people out there on the dance floor? They’re all normal, Doctor. The guys are going nuts over the girls; the girls are going nuts over the guys. But me, well, I just can’t tell you why I can’t do the twist, Doctor, but it would make your hair stand on end if I did. Just let me suffer.

  Of course, I tried to avoid doctors and would no more have considered talking to a psychiatrist than one of the ten most wanted criminals would consider stopping to get directions from a cop.

  The closest thing to a shrink we had in school was a math teacher named Sir who doubled as the guidance counselor. Sir took psychology courses at Princeton every summer and liked to play heavy little mind games with his students. He was married and had kids, so he couldn’t be accused of anything.

  Sir had developed one of his heavy relationships with me—twisting my words, insisting I must be hiding things when I wasn’t (Well, I was, of course, but those were other things and surely none of his business), talking about love-hate relationships, for crying out loud, when all he was supposed to be was adviser to the student newspaper. That was our official connection, through the newspaper, and he was telling me I hated him. I didn’t—although I began to when he kept insisting I did—you see! You do hate me! Now why? What’s really on your mind?

  What was really on my mind was that he only did this kind of thing with the best-looking boys in the school, and the same ones I liked—so if it takes one to know one, maybe he was on to me. Perhaps I hadn’t hidden everything as well as I had wanted. That suspicion caused me to be all the less communicative. Why aren’t you communicating with me, young man?

  One day I had to deliver something to him just before class. Usually, this would have been routine: Weave your way through twenty noisy kids; excuse me, Sir; a handed note; exit. I handed him the note and turned to leave. DID I TELL YOU YOU COULD GO? Sir had been in the Navy and was a stickler for manners.

  “I’m sorry, Sir,” I said, standing about a yard from him.

  “Come here,” he said. I inched a little closer, hoping not too many of the students were watching all this.

  “Come here!” he demanded, so I inched some more—what the hell, did he want me sitting in his lap, for crying out loud? As I was inching, he started to reach out to grab my wrist, as he would occasionally do—no big thing; teachers grab students’ wrists sometimes when they are talking to them—but I … instinctively … jumped back. WHY DID YOU BACK AWAY?

  I didn’t know why I had backed away. And if I had known, I am sure I could never have articulated it there in front of the class. I muttered something about its just having been a reaction—nothing intended, and I was sorry. A REACTION! You see! You see how much worse that is? That proves that subconsciously you are afraid of me, that shows that subconsciously …

  Subconscious, hey? Well, we were indeed nearing Secret City. But he could delay the start of class no longer, and our stage-whispered exchange was tabled. He was on to me. I avoided him for the rest of the year.

  Close as Sir came, neither he nor anyone else ever penetrated my defenses. The guns of Navarone were like water pistols in a shoe box compared to the fortress that guarded my secret.

  Short of doing myself in, which, like every adolescent, I enjoyed contemplating from time to time, my last line of defense was to turn and run. I only had to resort to it once. I was sixteen, researching one of my extra-credit reports at the Museum of Natural History. On satellites, I think it was. I was examining the Explorer capsule that was on display, watching the continuous film strip that simulated its flight through space, looking at the plastic astronauts cramped in the cockpit, when a man next to me asked some question about the capsule. I hadn’t noticed him before. He was unassuming: average height, maybe twenty-five, slim, wearing a gray windbreaker zipped up halfway. Your nondescript man. I answered his questions; he asked a few more. We speculated for a while on what it would be like to be an astronaut—drinking Tang, floating weightless…. Then he said: “Now let me show you what interests me.”

  What interested him was the tropical bird exhibit, dimly lit, birdcalls echoing around the halls—a nice enough exhibit, but evidently of little interest to others. It was deserted. We looked around for a little while, he told me that some of his friends had painted the backgrounds of the exhibits, and I began to wonder how I was going to get away. Mainly I was bored, but I was also beginning to feel uncomfortable with this man. Then I felt his hand DOWN THERE! JESUS CHRIST
! No one but the doctor had ever touched me down there. As I pushed his hand away, he was saying, “Would you like a blow job?” I was terrified. Half because I was being molested by some perverted old man (twenty-five), and half because I didn’t know what a blow job was. The world was caving in again, my inadequacy on display right there in the American Museum of Natural History. I choked out a tortured “No!” as I ran out of the exhibit, out of the museum, and most of the way home. He shouted after me—shouted in the hush of the tropical bird exhibit—“How can you be so NAÏVE?—AÏVE? ïve? ïve?—ve?”

  I wonder what made him think I was naïve? I hadn’t stopped to tell him I didn’t know what a blow job was. He must have read it from my behavior. Maybe he figured that anyone who would bolt from anything so pleasurable had to be naïve. And of course he had to say something; it must have been an uncomfortable minute for him also.

  I was in knots. The experience was so unpleasant, with so many implications and ramifications for me, I couldn’t even analyze it clearly, as I had learned to analyze most things. And the worst part was, I didn’t know what a blow job was. Sure, I had heard the expression, but I never thought I would have to know what it meant. Anointeth? Surely no teacher would ever put it on a quiz (although in my more paranoid moments I would imagine such quizzes—perhaps given by that guidance counselor). Nor would any classmate ever ask me what it meant. In the first place, they all knew already. And if there were, conceivably, anyone left in the world who did not know, he would be just as mortified at the thought of asking as I was.

  Needless to say, when I got home, I locked myself in the bathroom with the dictionary and read all forty-three definitions and connotations of “blow.” Equally needless to say, you can’t buy mental health for the price of a dictionary.

  Of course, I regained my senses quickly, thankful that no one would ever find out what had happened. In fact, I quickly turned the incident to my advantage—psychological judo: The next summer in camp I told the story, more or less as it had happened. I related my genuine disgust. I heaped all the worst invectives I could on that perverted thing, to establish my own normality—and I even managed to deduce from the subsequent conversation what the hell a blow job was.

  My counselor at that time was Jack Simmons from the University of Pennsylvania basketball team. He would frequently joke about my muscular calves, with what I thought just might be more than casual interest. Jack told me I had overreacted to that situation in the Museum of Natural History. He told me he let females or males suck his dick because it felt good. (“So that’s what it is!”) Hadn’t I ever been blown by a girl? he wanted to know. Sure, I let chicks suck my dick, I told him, but I would never let a guy get near it, you could count on that!

  Another time, the same year, sixteen, our English class had to go downtown to see the off-Broadway production of Moby Dick. We could go when we wanted, with whomever we wanted, so long as we saw it in time for the exam. I somehow contrived to go with Brian Salter, surely the dumbest boy in the class and surely the most attractive. Oh, how I wanted to be cowboys with Brian! He was, of course, the star of the football team (not big and heavy: coordinated), the basketball team, and, yes, the baseball team.

  I had managed to become friends with him, despite my good grades and good standing with all the teachers, by drinking. By this time I was able to convince my parents to let me stay alone in the city some weekends (“I could get more work done that way”), and I would either borrow some liquor from our cabinet or drink the liquor Brian’s parents had given him (his parents had read a different edition of Dr. Spock) or else go with him to buy some on the street. We couldn’t usually pass for eighteen, but we could persuade passers by the liquor store to get it for us. And we would walk up and down Madison Avenue drinking from a paper-bagged pint of some awful-tasting scotch, which I detested and loved at the same time.

  Anyway, Brian and I went to Moby Dick together. I spent most of the performance fantasizing how he and I would become blood brothers and go off to Wyoming—soaking up the cosmic tragedy of its impossibility—and occasionally having to change seats in the theater. It seemed that wherever we sat, someone else would come over to join us and be, well, obnoxious: looking all the time, crossing his legs like a pair of scissors instead of like a doughnut. When we left the theater, two of these effeminate types, immaculately dressed, carrying umbrellas in the midst of a water shortage, followed closely behind us. Brian didn’t seem to be particularly bothered by all this. He had nothing to hide. I pointed out the menace, and we quickened our pace. They managed to keep up. Dis-gusting! I mean, sure, I wanted to be cowboys with Brian in Wyoming, but there was no telling what those queers wanted.

  Adrenaline flowing, I decided to build up some normality points, just in case Brian had ever wondered. I stopped short, turned around, and in the middle of an intersection, as a matter of fact—I shouted that if those two queers didn’t stop following us, we would bust their little asses! They flushed, brandished their umbrellas, and fled.

  So I was not exactly taking all this lying down. I was working very hard to maintain my cover. This double agent was going to keep his lines straight and die a natural death. Perhaps I would instruct the Chase Manhattan Bank to open a sealed letter upon my death and send it to the publishers of the New York Times—a letter that would stun the world. What had been planned as a half-column obituary for this upper-level public servant would suddenly become front-page news. Every playwright in the land would strain, and fail, to capture the true agony and magnificence of the burdens I had borne, the brilliance of the ruses I had constructed to throw everyone off the trail….

  But until that time, mum’s the word.

  I somehow managed to keep from getting a hard-on in the showers. And I somehow managed to avoid attacking Brian. Well, only the way cowboys would attack each other on TV, you know—maybe a hard, but basically comradely, fight, which would end up with us both exhausted and even better friends, arms around each other’s shoulders for support—he could win if he wanted to; maybe I wanted him to.

  I went out for wrestling, but not for the reasons that you might expect. Not consciously, anyway; I swear it. I had been a swimmer during the winter season, but all those miles before classes and miles after classes must have built my stamina to the point where I lost all concept of speed. Year after year, as my stamina improved, my time got worse. When I showed up at the pool after soccer season was over one year, the swimming coach suggested I try wrestling instead.

  I was not a terrific wrestler. It takes practice, and while I was strong and had stamina, so did the other, veteran wrestlers. Still, I won my JV matches and then made the varsity when the boy ahead of me got his neck broken. (It was a tough weight class.) Everyone I was scheduled to wrestle turned out to be the team captain or an AAU champ. The coach would huddle with me before I went in there, massage my neck muscles a little (he was married with kids, too), and tell me, “Just try to stay off your back.” Sometimes I did manage to keep from being pinned, which meant the other team got only three points, not five, for winning my weight class.

  Once, though, I came up against an even match. I was even winning, riding my opponent as I had been taught to in practice, accumulating riding time on the clock, which in the event of an otherwise-tied score would determine the winner of our match, and basically, for the first time, really in control. It was a good feeling, for a change. Perhaps too good. About three-fourths of the way through the match a hot shiver went through my body, and I went limp—my weight still on him. He was too exhausted to take much advantage of the fact that I had, well, lost my wind—and the match was over. I won, but I try not to think about it.

  Somehow, as I say, I managed to cope with high school. I had serious doubts about my ability to cope with college. You have to date in college. You have to know what’s coming off. Goliath had already had about eleven passionate affairs in college, which, without any embarrassing details, were top-priority dinner table conversation back home—an
d the Supreme Court was beginning to send interrogatives my way. They wanted to subpoena one of my girlfriends.

  CHAPTER 4

  In high school it had been enough to learn to check out attractive girls on the street—look them up and down, leer a little, nudge my companion (naturally I only bothered with this nonsense when there was someone else around), maybe sigh or pant a little, or mutter something dirty—and then go back to noticing the boys.

  Noticing attractive girls was not as easy to learn as it sounds. There was no department in my subconscious responsible for spotting pretty girls out of the corners of my eyes, as there was in the subconsciouses of my friends. I had to remind myself consciously of my friends. I had to remind myself consciously to look or else suffer the embarrassment of being reminded by a friend’s poke to catch those legs—oooo WEEEEE! But I ran a significant risk in leering and nudging: As I was attracted by boys, not girls, I had to use the most mechanical techniques in deciding which girls were “attractive.” (If I knew instinctively, I was afraid to trust my instincts.) While others would have a simple groin reaction, I would nervously rush through a little checklist. I knew girls in laced shoes or combat boots were out. I knew legs were important and had heard someone talk scornfully about a girl with “piano legs,” so I tried to avoid those. I would ignore any girls whose heads did not at least come up even with the parking meters as they walked by, as well as those whose heads brushed the bus stop signs. Frizzy redheads, for some reason, were out. Girls who looked like boys except with ponytails were out. The hardest part, especially under winter coats, was to determine whether a girl was “built” or just fat. There was nothing whatever to be gained by leering and chortling over a dog. One slip like that and my cover would be blown: You’re not really attracted to girls! YOU’RE FAKING IT!

  My back-up defense in such situations was myopia. I purposely kept my glasses off—they weren’t very strong anyway—so that any omitted or mistaken leers and nudges could be blamed on my ophthalmologist.