The Best Little Boy in the World Read online

  I didn’t want him to love me back. That would probably have ruined it. (Well, that would have made him queer, you see, and who wants to be cowboys with a queer?) As it was, we were simply best friends. We did a lot of stuff together. We helped each other out. And I just had to keep from going overboard. For example, I could buy him more gifts than he bought me, and more expensive ones—but I had to know my limit. I could go far enough that he would react: Hey! Terrific! Thanks! But a hair farther, and he would think to himself: Jesus Christ, what’s he doing?

  Sometimes I would buy him things, because I wanted to, and tell him I had gotten them free, so it wouldn’t look bad. I bought four season’s tickets to the Yale Playhouse and told him I had gotten them free. So he accepted a pair, and I was guaranteed of doubling with him six times that year. Of course, I would have preferred going just with him, no dates. But I had an image to build. If I had to date, it might as well be to a bunch of plays, where all you have to do is sit and watch—nobody makes out at plays—rather than to dances or parties or drive-ins. In case the girls came back to our suite after one of the plays, I was in no great danger. You will recall that my room was so small I had to suspend the bed like the Brooklyn Bridge over the wardrobe closet and the bookshelves. I had arranged the room this way, and failed to build any kind of ladder, at least in part to keep all but the most vigorous of pole vaulters out of my bed. And I was careful not to date pole vaulters.

  I was sneaky, but I had to be. We would frequently go out hunting for a little pussy. (I could never bring myself to talk that way.) Girls always travel in pairs, and, fortunately, the pair is always a beautiful girl and a dog, for obvious ego-boosting reasons. Hank was better-looking than I was, so I would simply say: Oh, wow! Sure, let’s make it with those girls! Yeah! I’ll take Kathy; you can have Gladys. Hank, of course, would no sooner have gone to bed with Gladys than with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. But, to his everlasting credit, he was too considerate of his best friend to say Go Screw, or even to go home with Kathy and leave me to fend for myself.

  So, while I am not particularly proud of having aborted so many of Hank’s copulations, I always managed to make it home with my image of normality intact.

  Almost always. One summer we went to Europe together. (It wasn’t Wyoming, but it would serve.) We were in Tossa, on the coast of Spain. The Sangria in Tossa is made the way it is made here; only to each glass they add a jigger of 100-proof brandy and a jigger of 100-proof Cointreau, and then it costs only a quarter a glass. Hank was drunk. The inevitable Kathy and Gladys, British birds this time, came into view, and we spent the customary hour walking around with them, looking for a place to dance, telling them about Yale and about our nifty hotel room. Then, while they went off to the bathroom to reconnoiter, Hank and I went through our little ritual. Wow, those chicks are dynamite! They’re dying for it, too! Yeah, let’s screw ’em! I think they’ll come back with us! Yeah, wow! “I’ll take Kathy, if that’s okay with you, Hank.” “Yeah, okay, what the fuck,” Hank said, obviously drunk out of his mind, and the world caved in. What a funny way to mete out the death sentence: “Yeah, okay, what the fuck.” But that is of course what Hank had done. “How should I know whether he wets his bed?” “Why didn’t you call me about this when you first noticed it?” “Who has the red crayon?” “Do you want a blow job?” And now this, the worst of all.

  The girls came back; my head was awash in adrenaline. Hank asked them if they wanted to come back to the hotel. Sure they did. Hank took Gladys’s arm, and Kathy and I followed. Gladys was chewing gum, obviously delighted. Kathy was less than delighted—yes! she would find a way to avoid sleeping with me!—but, while I wasn’t Hank, I was apparently, to my dismay, good enough. I was silently going bananas.

  Hank and I, of course, were sharing a double hotel room. Not one of those where we slept together in the same double bed, though there had been many of those. (Can you imagine sleeping like that—with Ali MacGraw, if you prefer—and not being able to touch?) This room had two single beds and was ample for the four of us. But whatever was going to happen with Kathy, it simply could not happen in the same room with Hank. I could accept death. I could not accept torture.

  I said I liked privacy when I slept with a girl—a little lame, but reasonable, and I knew Hank would prefer privacy, too. It was so late at night the front desk was deserted, so I couldn’t rent another room, even if there had been one. I went downstairs to the desk, behind the desk, and stole one of the keys hanging by an empty post box—hoping that it was indeed the key to a vacant room and that no one would be returning even later that night to use it.

  The BLBITW actually stole the key. Kathy and I adjourned to the vacant room. I immediately went to the bathroom and locked myself in, water running madly to drown out any thoughts that might otherwise be overheard. Was there any way out? I couldn’t think of any. At least Hank wasn’t there to see; that was the main thing.

  I emerged from the bathroom. Kathy was sitting on the bed. Kathy was no Hilda Goldbaum. She was one attractive girl, as even I could tell, and she was not about to do any of my work for me. But I wasn’t really up to it, either.

  I’m sure my unhappiness and discomfort showed, and that sort of thing is contagious. I doubt Kathy was much happier than I was. I took off my clothes, except for my shorts, and, as it was two in the morning and no one was helping Kathy take off hers, she had no logical alternative but to take them off herself. We got into bed together. Luckily a fairly wide bed. I put my arm around her, and after a little while I muttered something about being sorry, that it wasn’t her, that I was sorry, and I was dead tired, and would she like to go to sleep? Yeah. I turned over on my stomach and lay motionless—as far from sleep as anyone could possibly be, of course—for about three hours until there was a faint suggestion that the sun was on the rise. I rustled enough to wake Kathy and said that since I had stolen the keys to the room, maybe we had better leave before they found us. I would walk her back to her hotel room.

  We tiptoed out and back to her hotel. It must have been about five o’clock, judging from the light. I don’t know what she was thinking through all this. No doubt she thought I was strange, and no doubt it was not a pleasant experience. Conceivably she thought she wasn’t attractive enough to turn me on—well, of course she wasn’t, but I don’t mean that—and, depending on what little problems she brought to the encounter, the evening could have upset her as much as it did me. None of that occurred to me at the time.

  I left her and walked at my utmost cosmic to the beach and lay down in the cold sand to wait until it was late enough for me to go back to my legitimate room. It was a nice place to feel depressed, absolutely still except for some stuffed sleeping bags here and there in the distance; an overturned weatherworn dinghy up on the beach; a little driftwood; a pale moon growing paler as the sun rose. A nice place to feel depressed, but I was in no mood for that. I was feeling sorry for myself.

  I tried to sleep on the beach—I was exhausted—but I couldn’t. I just kept thinking. Finally the sun was well up there, perhaps eleven o’clock, but much more likely eight or nine, and I went back to our room. Hank and Gladys were asleep in each other’s arms. I lay down on the other bed and kept thinking, waiting for them to wake up. Eventually, hours later, they did. Hank had a slight cold and a hangover; Gladys lit a cigarette. I tried to grin what I thought would look like a satisfied grin and explained that Kathy and I had gone for a walk along the beach and I had taken her back before the hotel people discovered the stolen key. After her cigarette, Gladys went back also.

  Hank smiled. I tried to smile. How was it? I asked. “Good, but I think I caught a cold.”

  “As long as you didn’t catch anything else,” I managed out of my pretend-normal vocabulary of words and expressions I didn’t really understand. He smiled.

  “How was it?”

  “Good,” I said. Best friends don’t have to say more than that. They don’t have to impress each other or compete with tal
es of exploits. Hank treated sex as a meaningful thing (even a drunken one-night stand with Gladys)—he didn’t masturbate, remember—so neither of us had to go into details about our private experiences. “Good” was enough. Thank God.

  Strategically, as with the Museum of Natural History debacle, the whole thing had worked out okay. Hank had virtual proof, short of being an eyewitness, that I screwed girls. Not that he ever thought about it either way, I suppose.

  Meanwhile, I was afraid that we might run into Kathy and Gladys again—or that Hank would. Kathy had undoubtedly decided I was queer and had undoubtedly told Gladys. Either Kathy or Gladys would undoubtedly tell Hank. Hank would ask me why I had said, “Good,” if I hadn’t touched Kathy—and why hadn’t I touched Kathy? Then he would leave me the keys to the car, pick up his suitcase, and, sickened by the thought that I had even contrived to sleep in the same double bed with him, rush off to Paris as fast as he could, never to speak to me again.

  The hotel people had apparently figured out about the other room. They asked us to pay for it and said they were sorry, but they had no more vacancies, we would have to leave.

  Wonderful! Tossa was packed with tourists; all the other hotels were full, too. We had to leave for Paris that morning, and we never saw Kathy or Gladys again.

  When I got back to the States and had to do some heavy normality pretending, I would tell how we were evicted from our hotel in Tossa for raping two English birds.

  The dates I had in college were almost always friends of Hank’s girlfriends. I had no black book of my own. I got along with them okay. One in particular I saw on and off during a whole year, and she would come to all the mandatory football weekends and college parties. I felt bad about “using” her as a cover, but I needed a cover. Her name was Hillary, and she was Hank’s girl’s best friend.

  She was not unattractive; she was bright, considerate, and, best of all, something of a prude. Just what the doctor ordered. I could make all kinds of advances, trying to get my arm from around her shoulder (a position that I had mastered and that she allowed) over and around her breast. She would never let me touch her there, or down below, which was fine. She could go back to Vassar and tell Hank’s girlfriend about my advances; Hank’s girlfriend would tell Hank; Hank would think I had normal inclinations, if less than normal success. And if Hank ever asked, I just might suggest that things had gone a little farther than Hillary wanted to admit.

  Of course, I began to wonder why Hillary wouldn’t let me do anything. Not that I wanted to—just that I wanted to know what was wrong with me. That is, what other people perceived as being wrong. The bad breath syndrome.

  It was not bad breath. Once after the play or the post-game party, back at Hillary’s hotel room, on the same floor as Hank’s girl’s room, I got my hand around her shoulder and started moving it across—and Hillary explained that she liked me well enough, but she just couldn’t let herself go with me because—get this—she thought I was only interested in her body. Hah! I hadn’t opened up to her, she said. She didn’t know the inner me.

  Hank would usually get home from these evenings around three, and for all he knew I had come in only a few minutes earlier. Sometimes I would wait up for him. We frequently had the post-game beer parties in our suite (all the more reason for needing a date), and I would clean things up while I waited. How was it, Hank? “Good.” How was it, he would ask. “Good.” (If you are wondering why Hank came home at all, as well you might, I have to say, first, that sometimes he didn’t, but second, and mainly, try to remember how much different things were just a few years ago. Short hair, no dope, all-male schools, virginity … very few years ago.)

  Though I managed my way through these evenings with Hillary, I didn’t enjoy them at all. I didn’t enjoy pretending. It went very much against my superhonest instincts. But I didn’t enjoy always getting home before Hank, either. Why did I have to be the social cripple? What were he and my other roommate going to think if I always got home before they did?

  One evening I decided it was time for me not to be the first one home. I was walking back from Hillary’s hotel. Instead of going back to the dorm, looking first to see that no one was watching me and feeling tremendously guilty—I ducked into another hotel and asked for a room. “No luggage, sir?” “No luggage,” I gulped, feeling exposed, guiltier still, but determined. “Then you will have to pay in advance.” Twelve dollars.

  I went up to the room and tried to sleep, with only moderate success. There was no clock or radio in the room, and no phone. When the sun in the window woke me, Sunday morning, I had no idea what time it was. I waited in bed as long as I could, and then went out into the street—again stealthily to be sure no one saw me. It is unlikely any of my friends would have—it was seven-fifteen.

  That’s what the clock above the newsstand said. So I walked around feeling guilty for two hours and then went to make my grand unshaven entrance in last night’s wrinkled clothes, hoping my roommates might possibly have woken by this time and noticed that my bed was made, and no me anywhere in sight.

  Of course, they were asleep, so after turning on the lights in my room for extra effect, I tiptoed back out and walked around for another hour.

  At quarter past ten they were still asleep. I hadn’t slept much myself and was exhausted by my ridiculous fraud. But I had invested $12 and lots of energy in it and had to have it go as planned. Finally, on my fourth attempt, just before noon, I walked in and saw my roommates were up and reading the Sunday Times. I walked past them into my room as nonchalantly as I could, with a simple, “Morning.” I waited a minute for the applause, or at least for a question or two. After all, we had been living together for nearly two years, and this was the first time I had ever stayed out all night with a girl. My best friend Hank should have had something to say.

  Hank kept reading the paper. I took off my tie and jacket and sat down with them to read the paper. Nothing.

  A couple of days later I broke down and asked Hank, “Hey, didn’t you notice that I didn’t come home Saturday night?”

  “Oh, yeah?” he asked. “How was it?”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It wasn’t a bad life, surrounded by Yale’s most attractive, preppie young men. A little frustrating, maybe.

  If only I had had someone to talk with. The single most important thing in my life that I thought about for hours each day, that determined what kinds of activities I would participate in, how I would spend my time, who I would sit with at lunch—the most important thing in my life had been kept a total secret for ten years now that I was turning twenty-one, about to graduate. (Applause, please.)

  Ten years, and I had never once been able to speak honestly, to open up.

  That’s not a healthy situation.

  I was so inhibited and uptight and defensive I couldn’t even get stoned. Marijuana had come into its own by my last year at Yale, and two of my best friends, sophomores named Brook and Fred, used to smoke all the time. Not wanting to be left out, I would sometimes smoke with them. I would smoke my head off down in their room, but I would not get stoned.

  Not even a buzz. Grass did not turn me on. What did were the occasional playful scraps Brook and I would have, the way college pals do. Brook had wrestled in high school back in Tulsa, I had wrestled in high school, we were both high (he on the dope, I on him)—and we would flex our competitive egos to see who could pin whom. I usually won when Brook was stoned because the grass dulled his competitive spirit. I could never pin Fred, because I could never goad him into action. He would sit in a lotus position on the floor, his back against the wall, too stoned to move, nothing on but his shorts, for hours on end.

  Wrestling around with Brook was a risky thing to do, I knew—not least because I couldn’t keep something besides my competitive ego from flexing when we did. (Jesus! What if he notices? But he never did.) And it left me feeling guilty, it was such a sneaky, depraved thing to do. I felt worse
about it when I would see the older bachelor faculty residents of the college trying to pick the same kind of friendly fights. They never fooled me. I knew exactly what they had in mind, or I thought I did. And when I saw myself acting like that, a perverted dirty old man of thirty-one—the future looked bleak.

  Although I knew what these resident perverts had in mind, and what the counselors in my boys’ camp had in mind, and what the teachers in my high school had in mind, I would never have gone to them to talk about it. They would have vigorously, if not violently, denied it, just as I would have. These were the last people I wanted to confide in, let alone have a relationship with. I wanted to ride around Wyoming with Tommy or Brian or Chip or Hank—not sip sherry with some pudgy, hairy old faggot. I was terribly intolerant, but they were terribly threatening to me. They were everything I was afraid of becoming.

  Among all my fellow Yalies, surely there were others like me. There had to be. To find one!

  I even thought of sending “sexual preference questionnaires,” marked “highly confidential, entirely anonymous,” to my 1,000 classmates, or perhaps to just a few. We frequently received questionnaires of one sort or another. I would send mine out on forged Psychology Department letterhead and have the business reply cards return to a post office box registered, naturally, under a phony name. The “anonymous” questionnaires would have been preprinted with a code that showed up under ultraviolet light. Brilliant, no? The scheme was sufficiently foolproof for me to consider it every so often, and sufficiently preposterous for me never to summon the nerve to try it out.