Logical Family: A Memoir

by Armistead Maupin

  It was maybe a year later that our doctor noticed something amiss in the cleft of my butt, up at the very top, near the bottom of my back, a dimple of sorts that apparently was the vestigial remnant of the glands birds use for preening their feathers. Lots of perfectly normal young men had these, my mother assured me, but they could sometimes become infected. And, since tens of thousands of servicemen had been hospitalized during the Second World War with “Jeeps Disease” (so named because it was thought to be caused by bouncing in a Jeep), my “pigeon preener” (as my mother cheerfully called it) would automatically exempt me from service. This distressed my father, who had big plans for me, military-wise, when the time came.

  Not to worry, said the doctor. He could perform a simple operation in his office, just a few stitches with the shades drawn, and no one would be the wiser. I knew already that there was another way to be disqualified for military service, but that would not betray me unless I waited too long to get married. My father got married when he was twenty-six, so I figured that was how long I would have before anyone became suspicious. In the meantime, I took my cues from Dear Abby, who had recently told her readers that parents should be concerned if their sixteen-year-old child had never kissed a member of the opposite sex. That was all the expert advice I needed. I took a girl I barely knew to Roy’s Drive-In and gave her desultory kisses while the windows fogged up. It felt like earning a merit badge.

  I knew I was mentally ill. I had read it somewhere in a magazine. I’d heard that there were ways to treat it, too, if a psychiatrist was alerted early enough. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell my parents, even if it could save me from permanent insanity. There were mornings when I woke up thinking, Tonight I’ll tell them. After supper, maybe, or after Gunsmoke, when Tony and Jane and Mimi are in bed. But I never found the nerve. (Had I done so, I would no doubt have other stories to tell you now, ones about homoerotic slide shows with electroshock devices that attached, ever so correctively, to my genitals.)

  I decided that one way to thwart my inevitable shame would be to become paralyzed from the waist down. If I couldn’t use that part of me, no one, including my wife-to-be, could have unrealistic expectations. I would have lots of sympathy, too, as well as an air of nobility. Exactly how I was to achieve paralysis was never clear to me. A car wreck, perhaps, if it wasn’t a really bad one. Polio might work, too, though people rarely got that anymore; we had had the shots.

  I can pinpoint the day when I knew there would be no fixing me. It was a muggy summer afternoon, and I had just dropped Mimi off at the beauty parlor in the old Carolina Hotel on Nash Square. Killing time, I wandered into the newsstand—the “blind stand,” as they were called back then, since they were traditionally staffed by blind people. There, prominently displayed on a rack, was a magazine called Demigods with a blond, bare-chested man staring at me from the cover. I had seen photos of shirtless men before—in the Sears catalog, for instance—but this guy was not there in the name of haberdashery. He was lolling in bed amid a tangle of satin sheets, and, quite clearly, he wanted me.

  Since the blind cashier was the only other person in the room, I could easily have flipped through that magazine. Hell, I could have bought the damned thing. I could have told him it was Time or Field & Stream, left a few coins in his dish, and sailed out of the room with my prize. But I knew that the blind had other senses that were highly developed. What if the mere sound of my footfall had betrayed my exact location and object of my lust? What if he could smell me loitering there?

  I fled the magazine and the newsstand with a feeble Thank you, sir just to make it clear to him that I hadn’t been shoplifting, and sought refuge from my panic in my new car, a cherry-red VW bug that enveloped me like a blast furnace when I unlocked the door. I turned on the radio to collect myself, only to hear a song called “Walk on the Wild Side,” which seemed the perfect soundtrack for the moment, since it proclaimed with sultry trombones that I had already begun my slide into hell. (This was not the famous Lou Reed song but an earlier one of the same name, written for a movie starring Jane Fonda as a New Orleans hooker.)

  How could I argue with that? I had seen the abyss now, and it was blond and bare-chested. Apparently, there were whole magazines out there devoted to my secret mental illness—or, as the state of North Carolina had officially phrased it, “the unspeakable crime against nature.” I knew that term already because of my trigonometry teacher, a man I still think of as the meanest teacher I ever had. On the very first day of class he appeared to delight in our confusion over our daunting new subject and threatened to flunk us all if we didn’t get a grip on it, and quick.

  I remember how overwhelmed I felt, how completely at his mercy. And I can still feel the flood of relief that came a week later when another teacher showed up, unannounced, to replace him. Most of us assumed his dismissal had to do with his sadistic teaching methods, until an item appeared in the morning paper. He had been arrested for crimes against nature in William B. Umstead State Park, on the edge of town. When the word spread around class, I remember making a flippant joke about defacing trees, but it was no joke to me. This was my own dark forest, bristling with hideous demons; this was the very man I did not want to be.

  When I returned to the Carolina Hotel that muggy afternoon, I steered clear of the blind stand. I went straight to the beauty parlor, where Mimi was already waiting for me, her thin, mouse-colored hair artfully arranged above her sweet, plain face. I told her how pretty she looked and asked if she wanted to go for a drive. So we went to Oakwood Cemetery, where, at the nursery greenhouse just outside the gate, I bought myself a potted cactus as I often did on our weekly Sunday visits. (I had many such cacti in my bedroom window, a phalanx of telltale phalluses facing the world in stoic silence.) In the cemetery Mimi stood by her husband’s grave for several minutes, looking her best for him, until the weighing-down heat of the afternoon finally got too much for us.

  We stopped for milkshakes at the Krispy Kreme on our way home. Even as a teenager I loved doing things like this with Mimi. We went to see Lili at the Village Theatre, bonding over it so completely that we might have been on a date. To this day I can conjure Mimi up by singing the song that Leslie Caron sang in the movie, the one about love and how sad it is. Mimi, I realize, must have found that all too true.

  Forty years after that disturbing moment at the blind stand, I told that story to my friend Nick Hongola. Nick had served as caregiver for an elderly gay man, who, having no further need for his circa-1960s porn, had bequeathed his collection to Nick. “That name rings a bell,” Nick said with an impish smile, and the next day he showed up at my house with an old issue of Demigods magazine. It wasn’t just any issue, either—it was the very one—and my secret cover boy was just as splendid as I’d remembered (the arms, the chest, the rakish curl across his forehead), though his name, Larry Kunz, left a little something to be desired. As for those satin sheets, they proved not to be sheets at all but a plastic shower curtain wrapped around his waist. He was not even in bed, in fact—that was the edge of a bathtub he was sitting on.

  I was well into my fifties by then, but I tore through that magazine like a kid under a Christmas tree. Sadly, there were no other photos of the unfortunately named Mr. Kunz, but there were lots of other strapping young bucks decked out in sailor caps and pendulous posing straps. Their names were sexier, too, though possibly suspect—names like Troy Saxon and Mike Nificent. I got a kick out of the page of exotic mail-order gifts, items seemingly indispensable to the manly household of 1962: an Indian pith helmet; an antiques dealers’ handbook; a twenty-one-inch imported Italian pepper mill; a musical cigarette box that played “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” It was like one of those pages in my old comic books where sea monkeys and joy buzzers and X-ray glasses lured gullible children with the promise of power and popularity.

  But what struck me most about that fading artifact was how profoundly innocent it seemed to me in late middle age. I was hard-pressed to remember how the
very sight of Demigods had once scorched me with shame and dread, invoking that awful war chant of a word—ho-mo-sex-u-al—that I’d been trying so hard not to hear. How could I have guessed then that the thing I feared most in myself would one day be the source of my greatest joy, the inspiration for my life’s work.

  THREE

  I HAD AN AWFUL RECURRING NIGHTMARE as a child. Nothing with a narrative of any kind, just a crushing, bone-gray weight that roared in my ears like a jet engine and sent me running down the hallway in the dark to the refuge of my parents’ big Sears & Roebuck French provincial bed. There was nothing I could articulate that they could dispel on the spot, so sometimes I would sleep between them all night. Or I would wake up in my own bed in the morning without quite knowing how I got there. This nightmare didn’t happen often, but the feeling of it was recognizable when it returned, an amorphous terror without a plot or a cast of characters.

  As I grew older I learned about self-hypnosis and began putting myself to sleep with stories. They were serials, actually, each one taking up where I had left off the night before. There was one I called “The Secret Crossroads,” a mystery in the woods inspired by the Hardy Boys, and another took place under the sea, like the movies I loved at the time where strong Greek sponge fishermen bubbled around in diving helmets and got the bends if they came up too fast. I still play with stories just before sleep, believing, I suppose, that the unconscious mind will offer assistance.

  So storytelling came first; writing more or less crept up on me. When I was nine I kept a diary with a green vinyl cover and a little lock with a key. I’m pretty sure I got the idea from Little Lulu, but I didn’t stick with it longer than a few months, no longer than I’ve ever stuck with a diary. I didn’t exactly pour my heart out. I wrote about movies I had seen, and stuff I ate for lunch, and a murder case that Bobby Ballance and I were solving on the bus on the way home from school. There were several cases, so we rotated them as we saw fit, reciting the clues into a reel-to-reel tape recorder at Bobby’s house, the first device of its kind I had ever seen. The diary refers to the Skippy Goldston Case, and since I have no idea what or who it involved, I’ll have to ask Bobby about it the next time we connect on Facebook.

  At roughly the same time—or was it earlier?—I was allowed to take shirt cardboards from Daddy’s dresser to serve as storyboards for my “Little Tallulah” comics. I had updated my favorite comic heroine by merging her with my favorite radio star, a funny lady with a voice like a man, who soothed me every week on The Big Show with her closing rendition of “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You.” Her benediction meant everything to me, since she seemed so warm and forgiving.

  I had begun to mouth off to my parents as soon as I started going to school, and Daddy got so mad sometimes he would haul off and slap me hard. I knew how to handle this. I would whimper very softly in my room, keeping it pitiful until my mother sent my father in to make amends. He never apologized, just sat on the edge of the bed and called me “Sport” and talked about buying me the bullwhip I wanted so badly, or about the little shelf he would build for my radio once we got the bunk beds. Once, after another slapping, I punished him in a different way by smashing an ashtray I had made for him in school. It was a plaster handprint of my hand, painted shiny pink, and Daddy’s cigarette ashes were supposed to go in the indentations. The destruction of this keepsake really hurt him, I believed, and I felt bad for days, since it was not an action I could take back, even if I made him another ashtray.

  In fifth grade at Ravenscroft School, where children of Old Raleigh families attended class in a war-surplus Quonset hut, Mrs. Robertson encouraged us to write by giving us picture postcards with paintings from art museums. She called this exercise Word Pictures. I chose a postcard from the Old West, a night scene with a dark-blue sky above a main street saloon that glowed like a lantern. I wrote about the tinkling of the piano and the boots clomping on the wooden sidewalk and the shadow of a stranger coming into town. Mrs. Robertson went nuts over it, reading it aloud, very slowly, to the class. I had never before felt so good about anything.

  There were two short pieces in the seventh grade, both of which were mimeographed and distributed. One was an autumnal mood piece, just a paragraph, but heavy on the scenery, using words like myriad and azure that no one uses after the seventh grade. The piece came to a halt, rather rhythmically, I thought, with two short sentences: “All is calm. Tranquility reigns.” The other piece was a poem, even shorter than the paragraph, about a boy who worships a girl as a goddess until he sees a vaccination mark on her arm and realizes she is not immortal. Three guesses what was going on there. I needed credible excuses, and fast, for why I didn’t have a girlfriend yet, and perfectionism seemed as good as any. I loved girls too much to actually go steady with one. Privately, I assured myself that I would fall in love when I met a girl who looked like Kim Novak in Vertigo. Good one, since no one looked like Kim Novak in Vertigo; though, as of this writing, Miss Novak still makes a valiant effort.

  Mrs. Peacock—Mrs. Phyllis Peacock—was that teacher writers write about, the one who singled them out in class and heaped praise upon them and predicted a great career to the everlasting eye-rolling annoyance of everyone else in class. Two of her previous graduates of Senior English, Reynolds Price and Anne Tyler, had already received this anointment; all three of us eulogized Mrs. Peacock to the press when she died at ninety-four, in 1998, after half a century of teaching. She was a tiny dynamo, more hummingbird than peacock, really, and she flitted about the room with goofy histrionic flair, sometimes jumping onto chairs to make her point. A lot of kids giggled at her behind her back, but they weren’t the ones getting “Orchids to You” written on their essays, complete with a drawing of an orchid.

  I wonder now if Mrs. Peacock sensed what a wallflower I was, despite my efforts at sophisticated banter in class. She once asked me to research the origins of the maypole and report back to the class the next day. I knew nothing at all—only that debutantes danced around a maypole at the Terpsichorean Ball, as did the girls at St. Mary’s Junior College, where my sister, Jane, was expected to go. When I asked my parents about maypoles at dinner, my father snorted, and my mother blushed and giggled. That night, when I went to my room, I found that Mummie had left a volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica on my bed, opened to an entry titled “Phallic Symbols.” We never spoke about it after that. And the next morning, when I made my report to Mrs. Peacock, she listened, wide-eyed and seemingly enthralled by my account of pagans and penises, as if she had never imagined such a thing.

  Her big finale for the year was to assign us literary-themed performance pieces at the school auditorium. I was already comfortable onstage, thanks to the Raleigh Little Theatre, where, at thirteen, I had been cast in their production of The Desperate Hours. I had played a suburban boy who was kidnapped by thugs and, all too briefly for my taste, manhandled by them. For Mrs. Peacock’s assignment, I paired off with my friend Sarah Pierce, a smart girl known for her large breasts, and we created a stage piece about Sleep in Literature. We dressed all in white, and made Doric columns by covering Pine State Ice Cream cartons with marble Con-Tact paper and stacking them on volleyball poles from the gym. We recited everything about sleep that I could find in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and ended with a passage from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” which I had committed to memory. The poem was about narcotic blossoms that made stranded sailors forgetful of home; according to Mrs. Peacock, Tennyson had chosen his words for their lulling, soporific quality.

  “There is sweet music here that softer falls / Than petals from blown roses on the grass, / Or night-dews on still waters between walls / Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; . . .”

  When I was done, I looked into the audience to see Mrs. Peacock feigning sleep in the front row, her head tilted to one side. After a moment or two, she “woke” theatrically, like a storybook princess shaking off a spell, and began to applaud.

  I used that poem when I wrote
Tales of the City, almost fifteen years later. Mrs. Madrigal, the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane, recites it to her baffled new tenant, Mary Ann Singleton. Several years after that book was published, I did my first Raleigh book signing at a downtown bookstore. To my amazement there was something of a line, thanks to the publicity in The Front Page, North Carolina’s first gay newspaper. Even more amazingly, Mrs. Peacock was there. She twiddled her fingers at me but insisted on waiting her turn when the two men ahead of her, both dressed head-to-toe in black leather, graciously offered her their place in line.

  I WAS BLESSED with women like that in my youth, fairy godmothers who taught me how to nourish my incipient fairy heart. My mother’s mother, the English suffragist, was an elegant, fey spirit from a time when past lives were all the rage. I was the oldest of Grannie’s nineteen grandchildren, the first of us to fall under her seductive spell. She took me to see the first run of Singin’ in the Rain, and had even let me go back twice on my own so I could master the lyrics of all my favorite songs. Since that time she had often theorized that I was the reincarnation of her beloved cousin Curtis back in England. Her bachelor cousin Curtis. Her extremely artistic bachelor cousin Curtis.

  At six I had watched Grannie rise like a genie from a trapdoor in the stage of the Raleigh Little Theatre. (She had driven all the way from Virginia in her beige Ford to visit her daughter’s family and take the lead in The Madwoman of Chaillot. I remember her huge aluminum suitcase with its sharp corners and uncomfortable wire handle that always made Daddy cuss when he hauled it into the house.) She was this stately little partridge of a woman, but there she was on opening night levitating from a cellar in Paris and playing to the kid in the third row. I was no stranger to theater—I had played a nonspeaking role on that very stage the year before as one of the murdered children in Medea—but Grannie’s booming melodramatic delivery, coupled with my first whiff of stage smoke, came as a revelation to a boy already starved for enchantment. I was beside myself.