I don’t remember how this episode finished; there were so many of them. Did I punish them for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six? Was I harsh? Mother says I became a writer solely to sentimentalize a vicious past, to cast myself as an innocent trying to get along. Yet consider what I was up against. It was not only moon mice raids and the battles over bedtime, never finally won—for, like evil Sauron of Middle Earth, parents may at times retreat but will never give in. It was the totalitarian climate of the American family in general, the tenderness applied as blackmail, the mischievousness expressed as “concern.” It was the simple day-to-day madness of intimate strangers experimenting on one another. By day Andrew might be Tony’s ally; after dark he would join up with me in the kitchen, where Tony, the world’s foremost aficionado of presweetened breakfast cereals, would in advance of the morning have laid out a bowl, filled it with Sugar Jets or such, and arranged the box at an angle conducive to breakfast reading. Andrew and I would look upon this egregious decadence holding our noses, then, with delicacy, would each drop a dollop of spit into the bowl.
Don’t look away, reader; for a wise man, asked what were the three most powerful forces in the world, answered, “the revenge of fathers, the suffering of mothers, and the guilt of brothers.” To which I would add a fourth, the memorable vehemence of a mother whose kitchen has been violated. Eager to free herself of having to make lunches for her little men, Mother taught us all how to make bacon and eggs. On the other hand, our pottering around in the kitchen—anywhere in the house, really—made her nervous. She was only content when we were asleep or away. One day, I was fixing myself lunch while the maid, Mildred, sat to a cup of coffee, muttering gospel to herself. Confidently juggling the toast, the pans, the bowl, and so on, I poured the boiling bacon fat into the great American coffee tin with one hand while I broke the eggs open with the other. Too confidently. Fastening the plastic lid on the tin, I lost my grip and plunged my hand into the fat, yanking it out to see layer after layer of skin calmly peeling away. The pain was so terrible I couldn’t say anything, just stood there hypnotized. You could die in a kitchen, I thought. Mildred screamed and Mother came raging in. In silent horror, I showed her my wound. The damn thing was actually smoking.
“He burned his hand in the bacon fat!” Mildred wailed.
Mother looked at it in cold fury. “And who,” she asked, “told you to make bacon?”
The suffering of mothers! To this day, when I hear the word “bacon” I can smell my hand cooking—and, as with Andrew and the Celebrated Pizza Incident, I fail to smile when someone reminisces in this territory.
* * *
The pressure did not let up as the years went on. On the contrary, as I neared the end of my high-school period, I was expected to take up the duties of man’s estate—to wit, a summer job. The only jobs available in summers on Long Island, whither we had moved, were bagging groceries and pumping gas. Of course I refused. I had just got my driver’s license and a motorcycle, and looked forward to idling away the days with my school chums. What was the point of belonging to the upper middle class if you had to waste a vacation laboring tediously for a minimum wage? Here we see Rule Five in its most practical application: this was a major battle.
How to proceed? The devil in me longed for an all-out offensive, but wisdom advised me to whittle them down, bargain, stall. We skirmished. “Next week,” I assured them, then the week after that. “Now,” they said—or no allowance. Fine. My comrades had wheels, so they picked me up and we passed the time at each other’s houses. Who needed money? Anyway, I had a huge collection of rare opera scores, and could always sell off the duller ones, or those irreparably grunched by the moon mice, to used music dealers. It was delicious seeing my parents fume, frustrated by their own law; nothing incenses them more than a cure that doesn’t take.
Finally they pulled out their ace, never before played in our lifelong game: “Get a job or move out.”
I moved out. No forwarding address, no farewell, nothing. My father went into a panic, my older brothers shrugged, Andrew and Tony danced a jig and, as the moon mice, held solemn festival in my room. But Mother stormed through the house inveighing against my mutinous wickedness. “No more breakfast in bed for
him!
It’s a new regime!” This was her theme song whenever one of us was in trouble, though we had never had, or wanted, breakfast in bed. The very notion appalls me—toast crumbs everywhere and jam all over the sheets. That Mother would make a mantra out of a notion that didn’t even apply to the local scene reveals another convention of the parent, the stock retort. (Others in the repertory: “We nurtured you!,” “Because I said so, that’s why!,” and, my personal favorite, “Every day is children’s day.”)
Naturally I reestablished myself in the family in due course. But I exacted heavy peace terms, including an immediate cash settlement and the promise that this nonsense about a summer job would be decked for life. Mother, when she heard, went into turbulent despair, like the melodrama character who cries out “Foiled again!” And I never did tell them where I had gone, nor ever will. But something interesting happened to me while I was away, and this much I will tell.
* * *
I had gone to Manhattan on a lark, yet for a purpose. This was the mid-1960s, before gay had asserted its style, and there were intriguing mysteries in the air, enigmatic looks from strangers as they passed, the sensation of belonging to a club so secret it hadn’t yet held its first meeting. I had the feeling that to explode this mystery would be a major rite of passage in my life, the next thing to do now that I was on the edge of leaving home for college and the great world. My day trip to Manhattan, then, was by way of sifting and watching. I sold off a few scores, strolled here and there, and paid a visit to one of my choice haunts, a huge store on the west side of Sixth Avenue in the low forties, now long vanished, that sold old magazines of every kind. It was a grand place, where one could browse for hours as if in a library, and where two dollars netted one a week’s elite reading. That these “back-date” parlors were in fact the early equivalent of the porno shop never entered my mind. They were stocked mainly with
Theatre Arts, Popular Mechanics, Life, The New Republic,
and the like; and I thought these were their intended ware. Actually, the respectable titles were simply a front for the skin magazines, which—in a time when
Playboy
was still considered daring—I ignored.
But while paging through an old
Opera News,
I found hidden inside it another magazine, called
Physique Pictorial
and filled with the opulent beefcake drawings that I later learned to be the work of that arbiter of classic gay type, Tom of Finland: men in cowboy hats lounging by the corral, men in (and promptly out of) leather, lumberjacks, lifeguards, hitchhikers, hustlers. I feasted my eyes. I had heard of this, or imagined it, but had never been there.
“So you’ve found Griselda’s secret file. She loves to look, but she’s afraid to be seen. Isn’t she silly?”
I looked up, and there was this tall, thin, fortyish, effeminate man, arms folded and fingers twitching. I think he worked in the store.
“We call him Griselda,” he went on. “His real name’s probably Joe, and he thinks he’s fooling the world, reading trash behind the cover of
Opera News.
” He peered over my shoulder at the drawings. “Oo, look at that one. Do you know Griselda?”
I shook my head.
“He comes in all the time. Poor thing. She’s quite talkative, too. Tells me all about his wife and his little girl. I hope you’re shocked.
I
am. Poor Griselda’s such a mess—everything happens to her. Her car breaks down, her little girl wears braces, her transvestite balls keep getting raided. She’s all upset now because she has to have a colostomy operation—and she’s afraid she won’t be able to find shoes to match the bag!”
He bustled away, and I noticed a pleasant-looking fellow about my age across the table from me, who had been looking through
The Illustrated London News.
He seemed as bemused as I was by what had just happened. Suddenly, we both smiled.
“What was in that magazine?” he asked.
I held up the secret.
He nodded. “Griselda,” he said, savoring it.
“I hear his real name’s probably Joe.”
He laughed. “What’s your real name?”
“Dorinda,” said the effeminate man, dancing by us. “Am I right?”
Now I laughed.
“And you’re Samantha,” he told the
London News.
“You know you must have a name that your lover can whisper to you like music. You
know.
”
“Frank,” said the
London News
to me, with a smile.
“Bud,” I said, as we shook hands.
“Frank! Bud!” the effeminate man cried. “Oh, my goodness gracious, it’s the Garden City Little League!” Nevertheless, the first meeting of my chapter of the club had come to order. For till that moment I had thought of gay life as a choice of Griselda or
Physique Pictorial
cowboys. It was neither—these are the fantasies of gay. Gay naturalism was Little Leaguers with real names and good manners. Gay was … possible, legitimate, a reflection of oneself. Returning to the family nest, I sadly realized that the war would be winding down at home, its great issues dwindled into a nostalgia, into quaint farces flickering through the home-movie projector. Now I reckoned the final entry in the handbook, Rule Six: Self-knowledge is the final power. And I came home ready to leave it.
* * *
I have always figured that my family was more or less like others, but the looks of horror my associates give off when we trade childhood anecdotes suggests otherwise. “You did
what
into your little brother’s cereal bowl?” they howl. Replying, “Of course, didn’t you?” makes it worse. First they’re repulsed, then they’re insulted. But, mark me, all of them now maintain extremely conflicted relationships with their folks, while my parents and I get on famously. Even my two younger brothers and I, after all that scrapping, get along. (I haven’t crossed paths with the two older ones in quite some time now; I believe that trying to accept one’s older brothers after adolescence is psychologically unsound, perhaps masochistic, not unlike keeping one’s cast-off lovers in spare bedrooms.)
Younger brothers are vastly easier to handle than older, though they do grow up and shed their vulnerability. Tony is now in computers and Andrew took up weight lifting, went into business, and became generally impossible to push around, even arrogant. I think I liked him better as a moon mouse. Nor does he approve of my cataloguing our past in these pages. After reading one, he said, “You should be locked up!”—I wonder if he knows why. Mother thinks these pieces would read better if I didn’t keep trying to slip touching incidents into them. Ours was a crisp family, no sentiment, except for my dad. His idea of family is like a TV Christmas special, in which six or seven grown-up, married offspring congregate at the manse with recriminations, wonder, outcry, two dozen grandchildren, and, at the fade, embraces and joy.
But our real-live Christmases are like “The People’s Court”: strict, neat, plain, at times grimly rowdy, and always somebody not getting what he wants. Mother set the tone for the household, but Mother lost all the wars. She dreamed of children tucked into their beds by nightfall, but, came the wee hours, there I was before the TV, taking in Ann Sothern in
Lady in the Dark,
or Rosalind Russell in
Wonderful Town,
or some other unmissable proposition for which I was willing to die. The
Mommie Dearest
movie stirred Mother:
there
was a parent who knew how to express authority. Mother didn’t like the business with the hangers—it was sloppy, uncrisp—but the scene in which little Christine refuses to eat a blood-red steak and is not released from the table till she does eat it thrilled Mother. She talked of it for days, and I could see her thinking how different her life might have been if she had instituted such procedures early enough.
I was ready for it long before it came. “I wish,” she said at last, “that you had had Joan Crawford for your mother.”
“I did,” I answered.
She laughed. She’s a good sport.
In which we start with an impressionistic study and end with a story.
As the son of a builder I spent high-school spring vacations on various construction sites in and around New York. It was my first experience of absolutely impenetrable men, not only tough but emotionally invulnerable. Ironworkers—the men who lay a building’s steel skeleton—are a class unto themselves. Passing someone while carrying a load of material, they don’t say, “Excuse me,” but “Get the fuck out of my way”—yet they say it in the tone Edmund White would use for “Excuse me.” Challenged by their own kind, they can be vivacious; challenged by an alien, they are fast and lethal.
It’s an intolerant class, racist, sexist, fascistic yet patriotic about a democracy; almost the only place to see the flag these days, besides outside federal agencies, is on the trucks serving construction sites. (They also mount a flag atop each building as the last girder is placed, as if they had climbed rather than built a mountain.) Ironworkers are not merely proletarians; they are proletarians without the barest internal contradictions, without ambition, pull, or PR. They are the cowboys of the city, skilled workers who are also vagabonds with nothing to lose. They have one of the toughest jobs in America: exhausting, permanently subject to layoff, and extremely dangerous. The raising of office towers routinely claims a life or two. At least bridgework is worse. The Whitestone Bridge was regarded as a life-sparing marvel because only thirty-five men were lost on it.
There is one major contradiction in the ironworker, his endless enthusiasm for street courtship. What other set of Don Juans ever went out so unromantically styled?—casually groomed, tactlessly dressed, unimaginatively verbal? “Got a cookie for me, honey?” they will utter as a woman strolls by. Of course she ignores them; it wouldn’t get you far in the Ramrod, either. Sometimes a group of them will clap and whistle for a ten, and I’ve seen women with a sporty sense of humor wave in acknowledgment. But there the rapport ends.