The Best Little Boy in the World Page 7

  In our college we did have one “avowed homosexual,” Jon Martin, a student in Brook’s class and one of his good friends. Brook could afford to like this lisping, shrieking long-haired kid, because Brook was at peace with his masculinity. Jon was particularly threatening to me because along with exposing himself as a homosexual, he had taken it upon himself to expose everyone else. He talked constantly of “closet cases” and “closet queens.” He believed in liberating the world. He thought it was sick and hypocritical to hide one’s true sexual preferences—so anyone who got involved with Jon could not be assured of having his confidences kept.

  I dumped on Jon Martin at every opportunity. I was an Uncle Tom, a peroxide-blond Jew with a nose job and blue-tinted contacts who persecuted other Jews to keep the Nazis off his back—a schmuck of the worst order—but I had to dump on Jon Martin all the same. What would people have thought if I had befriended him? If I had even laughed when he “camped it up”? If I had looked interested when he talked about the gay bars he had been to—or asked him for the address of one? Tommy would have been disgusted by Jon’s antics, so I was disgusted by them. Hank had no use for an oddity like Jon, so I had no use for him.

  In fact, I realize that my near hatred of Jon Martin was genuine. Here I was centering my being on the cosmic feelings I had and the burdens I bore, here I was carefully cultivating all traces of normality and masculinity—and here was Jon Martin spitting on the temple, laughing at closet queens, ridiculing my entire value system. He was saying that the Great Scorekeeper gave points for being yourself, for being honest—not for being a consummate, cosmic phony. He was saying that all my effort and pain of the last several years had been laughable. I could not accept that, so I was repulsed by Jon Martin, and dumped on him and his mixed up value system, his lisp, his swish, at every opportunity.

  There was no way I was going to go to someone like Jon to tell my secrets and unravel all my knots. These were knots I had managed to live with for ten years and would manage to live with for the next forty. Whatever pain they gave me was unavoidable, and there was always the cosmic depression that they afforded.

  But if only—if only I could somehow find someone like Hank or Tommy who had my same inclinations, my same fantasies. There had to be people like that. It was just a logical impossibility to find them. There was no way each of us could be sure about the other before talking honestly.

  I felt a little like the character in one of those totalitarian stories—1984 or Animal Farm or The Grand Inquisitor or We—the character they have somehow forgotten to brainwash, the one for whom ignorance is somehow not bliss. There must be at least a few others out there like you whom they have also missed, who have the same odd ideas. But spies and informers are everywhere, so in order to keep from having your brain amputated, you act and talk exactly as though you were like everyone else. But you desperately want to find your fellow oddballs. How do you find them? How do you communicate in a way only they will understand? If you tell the wrong man, you are zapped.

  And who hasn’t heard stories of plainclothesmen inviting eye contact with homosexuals, making friendly conversation with them, agreeing to go back to their places for drinks—and then busting them on morals charges that ruin their lives?

  Even if stories like that weren’t true, my self-respect would have been destroyed if I admitted the truth to a sympathetic, but straight, friend. And my perfect record, ten years of absolute loneliness and silence, would have been broken. And then what would the best little boy in the world have had? Neither normality nor martyrdom.

  If only …

  I graduated from Yale. With honors, naturally. I had been a moderate big shot on campus. The future was golden. Everyone told me I could write my own ticket. But where?

  A few things were automatically ruled out. I would not do anything even vaguely related to art or hairdressing, because you know what kind of people do that. I would not try politics, because you need a pretty wife and adorable kids for that—or at least you have to like cocktail parties and $100-a-plate dinners and dances and socializing, always with a date, and I was not up to that. I couldn’t expect Hank to keep me in blind dates forever. Of course, to a lesser extent, that would be a problem in any field. To get ahead, you have to socialize; to socialize, you have to have a date; to have a date, you have to know a girl who will go out with you; and to have a girl go out with you, more than once, anyway, you have to have sex with her. Or so I thought.

  I was very sorry to leave Yale.

  Hank was going to Paris to take a postgraduate year in political science prior to becoming a United States Senator. (That was my goal for him, not his; I was sure he could make it. I would be his campaign manager.) I couldn’t think of anything to do in Paris.

  I would have loved to move in and smoke Acapulco Gold with Brook, who still had two years to go at Yale, and with Fred, who still had nothing on but his shorts. But what kind of career could I build in New Haven? Career, after all, was a key word. I had no intention of falling behind, “handicaps” notwithstanding. I had become too accustomed to sitting on wicker weave to settle for anything less.

  I received a number of job offers, including one tentative one from the government known as a “preinduction physical” notice. From the time the notice arrived until the morning of the physical a month later—that’s six o’clock in the morning in case you didn’t know—I could think of nothing else. For a combination of selfish and ethical reasons, I had decided that I would leave the country sooner than be drafted. Would my varicocele be enough to keep me out? Would I “check the box” on the long list of defects and depravities they handed you—the box next to “overt homosexual tendencies”? And then what?

  I stumbled into the giant Whitehall Street draft center at five forty-five feeling much as I had in that Tossa hotel room. Everything was coming together this day. All my knots, tightened to the point of strangulation, were to be exposed to a bunch of unsympathetic crew-cut drill sergeants.

  From six to seven we stripped to our shorts and stood in line waiting to be weighed. Standing in line with 1,000 naked black, white, and Puerto Rican strangers, all disgustingly normal-looking, who did not get embarrassed in situations like this, not a virgin in the crowd but me.

  At seven they discovered that I weighed 151 pounds. By eight they knew I was five nine. (In elementary school I had been third tallest in the class—remember how important that was?—but my Naderlike pace in high school robbed me of sleep and stunted my growth.) By nine o’clock they had a vial of my blood and my chest X ray. Next they wanted a flask of my urine. I can’t piss when anyone else is around.

  I had always been able to piss like everyone else until shortly after that experience in the American Museum of Natural History. Some weeks later I was in the men’s room of a New York movie theater. There were men pissing on either side of me, and I thought I saw one of them noticing me. That made me think of the man in the museum, and all of a sudden I could not relax. If you cannot relax, you cannot piss. It is as simple as that. I thought of my Big Secret, of my varicocele—this had never happened to me before!—and I got very embarrassed about the people waiting behind me to use the urinal. What was the Great Phonifier doing to me? I zipped up, having to piss more badly than ever, tried to look relieved, and left, feeling sorry for myself. From that day on, I could not piss whenever anyone else was around, or even if I thought someone might come in while I was trying.

  Now, I wasn’t stupid. I knew more or less what was happening, that I was psyching myself out. HEY, ADAM’S APPLE! CHOKE! I knew all I had to do to piss was to relax and not think about how embarrassing it would be if I couldn’t. But I could no more keep myself from thinking about that than I could fall asleep by trying to fall asleep.

  College football games had always been the worst. Sitting for three cold November hours on a cement stadium seat fills anyone’s bladder. Though I had learned not to eat or drink much at the pregame cookouts—“What! You don’t want a brew? Come
on, have a brew!”—I still would have to take a leak at half time. Me and 10,000 other men of Harvard, or in this case Yale, all lined up along a hundred-yard partitionless urinal, all looking at me. The stadium had no stalls, just the urinal. What if my bladder actually burst one day? Surely that was a physical possibility. Balloons burst; bladders must burst. Or what if I doubled up in a cramp on the way back from the game, passing out from the pain, only to have the doctors diagnose it as a severe case of suppressed homosexuality? I learned to relieve myself at the crucial point in the game, when no one in his right mind would tear himself from his seat. Better to be thought soft on football than to explode in the stands.

  By now I know that I was simply “Pee Shy,” that millions of people are, and that it is nothing to worry about. That knowledge has gone a long way toward helping me relax, and I’m not nearly as Pee Shy as I used to be. But standing at the draft physical in front of a long trough with a paper cup in my hand, next to hundreds of naked kids with their things out, pissing merrily away, and others waiting to take my place at the trough, and all of them, no doubt, watching the freak show that was me tickling my penis to relax it, but knowing I didn’t have a prayer—I just didn’t have a prayer. I went to the nearest drill sergeant and said I couldn’t piss in front of other people.

  How was I to know, too embarrassed and guilty ever to have told anyone of my hangup, that they had instructed this guy: “Look, Joe, somathese little peckers won’t be abladoit without goin’ to the can. You stan’ here and whennay ask you, tell ’em the can’s over there. Got it?”

  Before I had gotten my sentence half out, he pointed over there to the can. I went into one of the stalls, locked the door, filled the paper cup, and sneaked back into line.

  By eleven they knew I could see well enough to shoot gooks and that I could hear well enough to duck when mortars were headed my way.

  At noon we were allowed to get dressed again. They gave us a ticket we could exchange for food. I just walked around the block once and then sat down to wait.

  At one we were given a mental examination. I passed. I had heard that it didn’t do any good to flunk if you had gone to Yale; they wouldn’t believe you. Then they gave us the list of Depravities and Gross Defects. Had I ever had a venereal disease? Hah! Was I an epileptic? A diabetic? Was I fatally allergic to Beegee buts? (I had a friend who got out on that.) Did I have any false limbs? Transplanted organs? Was I a hemophiliac? Had I ever been convicted of a felony? There must have been at least a hundred things on the list, all of which I checked “no,” in the left-hand column. It made a long neat column, everything lined up just so. Except on number 93, I think it was—was I homosexual?—I had faintly checked “yes,” which stood out of the column as though it were lit in neon. I erased it and checked “no.” Then I thought of two years in the Army, where they have no doors on the latrine stalls and I wouldn’t be able to piss for two years, and I checked “yes.” But I thought I might be able to get out later in the day on my varicocele, and it would be the height of folly to check “yes” unnecessarily, so I erased it again and checked “no.” I finished the last few items, then thought of everyone going on leave in Frankfurt or Saigon or Honolulu and running to the nearest cheap bar to buy a good lay, and them all wondering how come I wasn’t horny enough to do that after two months of being around nothing but men—and I erased “no” and checked “yes.” Ten-year perfect record, martyrdom, thrones, “no.” My ethical aversion to the war: I would say it was better to have pretended to be homosexual than to have gone to jail or given up my citizenship, “yes.”

  I don’t mean to bore you. Generally I finish true-false tests as fast as anyone else. This time I was the last to pass mine in. I had compromised. I had checked “yes,” but crossed out over it and checked “no.” I figured that if my varicocele didn’t get out, I would appeal on new grounds. And when they saw that I had struggled over number 93, it might be easier to persuade them that I was for real.

  But I could just see it, in front of three doddering, faggot-hating draft judges sitting in uniform at a small table with Old Glory off to one side, an Iwo Jima replica at one end of the table, and at the other end a screaming lavender telephone, their hot line to the Supreme Court of Brewster, New York. If I was a homosexual, it was their duty as red-blooded American fighting men to despise me. If I was not, I was a draft evader, and nearly as despicable.

  No, that’s not the way it would go. These men would be gruff but understanding, and my obvious embarrassment and good manners would disarm them:

  “Well, son, you don’t look like a homosexual.”

  “Thank you, sir. I am, though, sir.”

  “Well, then, we won’t drag this out. Just give us the names of three or four gay bars in New York by way of a sort of proof.”

  “Ahhhh. I can’t, sir.”

  “Really? But your file says you have lived here almost all your life. Surely if you were a homosexual, you would know these names?”

  “Yes, sir, but I don’t.”

  “Well, then, give us the name of your psychiatrist. You really should have brought a letter from him to your preinduction physical and saved us a lot of time. What’s his name?”

  “I—I, uh, I don’t have a psychiatrist.”

  “Well, then, the psychiatrist you used to have or a doctor you may have told?”

  “I have never told anyone, sir.”

  “Come now, young man, we are too busy to play games. You say you have been a homosexual since you were eleven and …”

  Another impossible case for poor F. Lee Bailey. Is it possible that I would now be hiring him to prove that I was a homosexual, after all my elaborate ruses to conceal that fact?

  The point is, I thought that if I ever had to try to convince the draft board that I was gay, the fact that I had checked number 93 and then crossed it out might somehow help. I didn’t know what the hell to do, sitting there on Whitehall Street with that god-damned true-false test!

  The afternoon wore on, and I was passing everything but water with flying colors. I asked to see the psychiatrist. They put me at the end of a long line. Before my turn came up, they told me it was time to go to the final desk for what I gathered was kind of the wrap-up, do-you-have-any-objections-or-forever-hold-your-peace desk. This is where I had been told that I would be allowed to display my enlarged scrotum. Nowhere else on the assembly line were they programmed to notice it. At four o’clock—a very long day—my turn came with young Dr. Heathcliffe on the wrap-up desk. He told me he had all my test results in the file, there, and I looked okay. Did I have any last words? I said I had a varicocele. He told me to go sit down in a room off to his right. He would be in in a minute to look at it. Privacy! Well, almost. There was another kid in there; evidently a troublemaker. He had refused to cooperate somewhere along the line.

  Half an hour later Dr. Heathcliffe came in. How much longer could all this drag out? The other kid, a Puerto Rican, offered Dr. Heathcliffe some physician’s letters, but a sergeant came in and said he had been a wise-ass. The kid said something to the sergeant and to Dr. Heathcliffe having to do with their collective mother. The doctor ignored the physician’s letters, whatever they said, and stamped the kid’s file OKAY. He was in.

  Then Dr. Heathcliffe looked at me, the soul of a respectful, well-mannered white young man—not unlike Dr. Heathcliffe himself a few years back, one suspects—he looked at my varicocele and asked whether it hurt. I was working up the energy to lie and say it did:

  “Well, uh—”

  “Yes, I imagine it does. It’s quite large. Okay.” And I was out, never to hear from the Army again.

  I had applied to Harvard Business School and was planning to spend the next two years there, not so much because I wanted to be a businessman as because law school sounded like too much work and medical school was out of the question. I knew a lot of my friends from Yale would be up around Boston, so there would be an ample supply of people to idolize. And a Harvard MBA was the kind of th
ing you would expect the BLBITW to have. What could be straighter than a Harvard MBA? Or more dull, maybe, but we all have to make compromises.

  I was accepted by Harvard but then got an offer from IBM. I had gotten some help from them while I was working on my thesis—“Application of Computer Simulation Technology to the Determination of Optimal Airline Insurance Coverage”—and they had apparently taken an interest in a business type (my publishing exploits) who had some familiarity with computers (my major). They made me a tempting offer. An office with a view of Manhattan, half a secretary, and lots of money. It sounded like a shortcut in my rat race to remain the best little boy in the world, a jump ahead of my classmates who would be going on to graduate schools while I was climbing the corporate ladder. It also sounded reasonably safe. I couldn’t picture IBM having weekend orgies out at the company place on Long Island, so I might not have to do much “social work” to get ahead. IBM’s reputation for prudishness was attractive. I took the job.

  I did very well. The BLBITW was indeed the youngest to rise the fastest to the mostest ever, and all that. How did I do it? It was a simple combination of two strategies: the corporate politics and ploys of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, plus really trying. I really tried, sublimating my sexual energy into my work, as usual. My boss would ask for a memorandum on such-and-such a topic as he was leaving to catch the 5:21 out of Grand Central on Wednesday afternoon. He expected to see the memo on his desk by Monday or, at latest, Tuesday of the following week. Hah! I would stay at the office most of the night writing the memo, typing it, Xeroxing it, binding it—and there it would be on his desk when he got in Thursday morning. That was as close as I could come to a sexual experience.