by Rob Spillman
After Mark brought into the open what I already subconsciously knew, I kept thinking nothing should be the same. I wondered if I was in shock or denial, but in the weeks after, I stuck to my routine, which was that nothing around Aspen was routine and that everything was possible. I biked around town and out to Woody Creek, climbed the Ute Trail overlooking town, and scrambled up the Hunter Creek Trail and bushwhacked back through the aspen groves on the side of Red Mountain. With Mark and Tommy, fellow faculty brats, I snuck into the Continental Inn and would jump into the pool from the second-story balconies, practicing for when we went to the Grottos, six miles above town, where we plunged into icy water from jagged cliffs and where kids were always breaking legs or arms or necks.
When I wanted to be alone I walked up toward Independence Pass and fished in the Roaring Fork. I sat in the bright sun breathing in a mixture of strong smells—the fishy rot of my salmon-egg bait, the sweet scent of coconut suntan lotion, and the cool, clean smell of the spraying river. The boulder had a fissure running through it, about a half-inch wide, and a family of black snakes would poke their heads out to watch me and steal stray salmon eggs. I could pass hours there, and was content to catch one or two trout, or even zero trout. These moments of just being, where I had no thoughts, where I simply existed, were bliss. But they would be interrupted by worries. Why wasn’t I passionate about anything? How could I not have known my father was gay? Was I gay?
Late afternoons I cleaned up and went to the music tent for the afternoon concert. Or maybe my father would go over alone and I’d start manning the balcony for the start of the Sunset Society. Watching the sun go down before others arrived, I’d say aloud what I had felt but had never been able to put words to: “My father is gay.” I’d say it again, waiting for it to change me; maybe there would be some kind of molecular shift brought on by repetition.
Still, no matter how I added up the facts, the logical equation came out wrong. If A equaled B, and B equaled C, therefore A equaled C. But A didn’t equal C. I had been around gay people my entire life and had no problems with homosexuality, either in general or specifically with my father, so why was I freaked out? Maybe it was Peter himself. But I liked Peter. Although, I thought, he could be my dad’s son. My brother. I felt I ’d been replaced and sent into exile. But I couldn’t be mad at my father. He was all that was good and perfect and magical. My father had made paradise for me. I loved my father. I would die if he went away.
And what if I was gay? I didn’t think so, but I was going to drive myself crazy unless I seriously studied my own reactions to attractive men. For the entire summer I had been drooling over every girl in town—but what about the guys? So I looked, I mean really looked, at my friend Bill. He was three years older than me, from Oklahoma. Slender, red-haired, with freckles, he had come out that summer, and I guess I could see why gay guys were attracted to him, but I didn’t get any tingling or weird feelings around him like I did around pretty girls. I figured maybe he wasn’t my type, so I went to an opera rehearsal and checked out Dan, the choreographer, who was more classically good-looking, as in San Francisco queer–looking—petite, short-cropped hair, always dressed in tight, fashionable black clothes. Again, no disorienting sensations like when I was around attractive girls.
I tried to think if there were any famous musicians, athletes, or actors that made me feel off balance. There was one instance I could think of, and that was at a cast party early in the summer, when someone put on David Bowie’s concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and my mouth went dry and my head felt like it wasn’t attached to my body. But most everyone in the room, straight or gay, was in some state of swoon. I figured that Bowie was a category beyond heterosexual or homosexual—just sexual.
“I wish we could be here when the leaves turn,” my father said.
I knew he had to leave for a dress rehearsal soon, and that this might be our last alone time on the porch for the summer. Here’s what I wanted to ask: Why do I have to go back to Baltimore? Are you replacing me with Peter? This is what I said: “Why would you live anywhere else than Aspen?”
My father smiled and looked up and down the valley. “It is beautiful,” he said, “but you’d run out of people to talk to. When the festival ends, Aspen will be a ski town again. Without culture, this place would get pretty dull pretty fast.”
“No way,” I protested. To me Aspen felt like its own oasis, like a temporary Berlin, but devoid of danger, or history. It was a beautiful, gay-friendly, safe island in the mountains where culture was dropped in for months at a time. Wouldn’t it retain some of this when the circus pulled up stakes? I wanted to ask him. Instead I waved as he got up to leave.
34
“I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn’t matter—it’s only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.”
—Henry Rollins
Soundtrack: Black Flag, “Rise Above,” 1981
AS THE MOUNTAINS SLID into the haze behind us, the road ahead rippled, the temperature and humidity rising with each eastward mile, creeping up almost imperceptibly as the elevation gradually fell. But I felt every mile of the slow slide into the eastern funk. Another trip, another silent handoff from one parent to the other. As we drove into Goodland, Kansas, I wondered how many times I’d been handed off. Every beginning and end of summer. Every holiday.
With each mile east the world outside of our bathysphere grew hotter and more humid, and also uglier, as we traveled from the simple beauty of the sunbaked Kansas wheat fields to the chemical-clouded skies over Joliet. The threshed Midwest fields blurred by, then the strip-mined Pennsylvania hills, and, at last, the reward for two thousand miles of driving: the filth-covered streets of Baltimore, with boarded-up row houses and listless, half-naked citizens sprawled on stoops, the air so still and hot and damp you could swear that the mosquitoes were stuck in midair.
It was as if I were watching a movie and the frames start jumping and all of a sudden there I was, numb and alone in my room on the third floor of 2819 St. Paul Street. But at least there I had sanctuary. I had the third floor to myself, and my mother rarely ventured upstairs. The month before, while I was finding out that my father was gay, my mother had called to tell me that my cat Linus had developed a bladder problem and had to go live on a farm where it was okay if he peed all the time. I believed her.
Outside of my room, the house had to remain immaculate. No mess, no noise. My mother banned shoes indoors, for both the noise and the dirt. My room was directly over my mother’s bedroom, and even without my shoes, I worried that I would be heard, so I never lifted my socks off the floor, silently sliding my feet on the old floorboards. I aimed to be so quiet, it was as if I weren’t even there.
We had left David’s small house in rough, blue-collar Hampden for a bigger row house near Johns Hopkins. Ten blocks north were the mansions of Roland Park; ten blocks south, east, or west you stepped into the crack- and poverty-blighted world that would be so well depicted in The Wire. Borders were porous, and the poor public-school kids made easy sport of dorky private- school kids like me. Waiting for the Baltimore city bus on rainy or icy days was terrifying. Clear days I rode my bike four uphill miles to the city limits and the suburban Boys’ Latin campus. The 7:52 A.M. city bus stopped at Calvert and Twenty-ninth Streets, around the corner from our row house on St. Paul. The probability of getting mugged increased exponentially with each minute that the bus was late. Black kids on their way to their metal-detector high school thought it was hilarious to shake down the white kid in his stupid wide tie. “Let me hold your watch,” one said the first time. I stared at the kid like he was speaking a foreign language, and then a slash appeared on my forearm and my watch was ripped from my wrist. I never saw what produced the long, thin cut.
Once safely on the bus, I was usually the only
white person on board. The other passengers headed out of downtown were mostly older black women who had gotten on before me, around North Avenue, and were going to clean my classmates’ big suburban houses, as well as a few black grade-school kids using city passes to get to the last public school before you hit the strip of private high schools—Roland Park Country School, Friends, Gilman, Bryn Mawr, and Boys’ Latin.
As the bus made its way up Roland Avenue, the houses grew larger and larger. The black kids got out at their school, then the black maids got off at the next few stops, and I was the lone remaining passenger at the end of the line, which still left me with a three-quarters-of-a-mile hike to Boys’ Latin. One morning early in my freshman year, I was thinking glass-half-full thoughts like At least it isn’t raining too hard as I trudged through the muggy air, my fellow students whooshing by in BMWs, Mercedes, and Jeeps. I kept an eye out for a shiny green dune buggy driven by a kid named Dennis. At the beginning of the week the shaggy blond senior had taken pity on me, pulling over and yelling out, “Hey, Germie, need a lift?” That was the best my classmates could do—“Germie,” because I had lived in Germany.
No Dennis on that rainy day, but a gold BMW wagon changed lanes and slowed down. I hoped it wasn’t some Boys’ Latin joker about to toss a beer bottle at me. Not this time. It was another senior, a longhair named Luke. Rolling down his window, he said, “Hop in, Shorty.”
I jumped in the backseat next to Jake, a junior. Jesus Christ, be cool, I thought as another junior in the front, Steven, took a long drag on a short, fat joint. The whole car was filled with skunky-smelling blue smoke.
“Give Shorty a toke,” Luke said with a laugh.
Steven smiled and handed me the joint. “Go ahead,” Jake said with what I thought was way too much glee.
“Um, okay,” I said, trying to look pro as I tentatively pinched the joint between my thumb and middle finger. I sucked on the thin end and hot, acrid smoke raked across my throat and poured into my lungs. I felt like I was sucking down lava. I gagged, but held it, my eyes watering uncontrollably. Don’t cough, don’t cough. You’re cool. Don’t cough. My lungs were on fire and I started coughing and hacking and I couldn’t stop, my three companions howling with laughter. As a thirteen-year-old freshman, I was strictly JV. Yet, what an honor to be in the cool kids’ car, even if I was like a stray dog into whose face they were blowing pot smoke.
My anxiety about showing up for school stoned was mild. You could show up dead and still pass. I got straight A’s with the barest of efforts. The educational philosophy of Boys’ Latin was along nineteenth-century British lines: rote memorization, no questioning, no interpreting, minus any rigor. On the first day of ninth grade, I was given a swift reminder of the rules by Mr. Shriver, a small-eared, narrow-eyed soccer coach who also taught chemistry. He had gone off on a tangent about the chemical properties of a lead musket shot during the Civil War, and I made what I thought was a clever aside about war profiteering. He strode over, kicked my foot off the seat in front of me, and said, “Damn smart aleck.”
A good number of my classmates had ended up at BL after being booted from more prestigious schools, mostly for drug use. Boys’ Latin was 99 percent white, 98 percent WASP. The one Italian-American kid stood out and was heckled on the sports fields by opposing schools’ fans (most of the schools in the area were also all WASP) with taunts of “WOP, WOP, WOP.” If he hadn’t been the most athletically gifted kid in school, he would have been taunted at Boys’ Latin as well. There were two black kids, both on athletic scholarships, and they were left alone. They posed no threat to the country club, since it was assumed that after graduation they would never be seen again.
The one Indian-American kid wasn’t hassled because he was the main drug dealer. Whatever Satish brought into school was quickly snapped up. Five hundred hits of speed: gone by noon. Five pounds of sticky bud: gone by first period. Fifty hits of PCP: well, that was a harder sell after the first Friday of school, when Sammy, a popular stoner, took two hits and wound up on top of his Nova, frothing and ranting incoherently.
Why my mother sent me to a fuckup school, I’ll never understand. I had always been a straight-A student and had never had anything resembling a discipline issue. Maybe she thought it was the least preppy of the prep schools. But there were alternatives—like Friends, the coed, liberal Quaker school down the road from Boys’ Latin, where I took a typing class, with girls no less, and was surprised to find that the boys and girls could talk casually to each other, without the insanity that gripped single-sex-school students when thrust into the hormonal maelstrom of interschool mixers.
At first I wanted to embrace the school’s fuckup image, imagining myself as a Sweathog in a more upscale version of Welcome Back, Kotter, or, on more sinister-feeling days, as Malcolm McDowell in If . . . . , plotting the destruction of his repressive British boarding school, the fantasy morphing into his brilliant “droog” badass in A Clockwork Orange. Now there was someone who lived balls-first, unlike me, whose balls were pulled up so tight they might as well have been in my stomach.
But Boys’ Latin wasn’t a holding pen for outlaws and visionaries. Instead it was a repository for lazy, drug-addled preppies with secure futures—they had jobs waiting for them at their father’s law firm, car dealership, and construction company. Boys’ Latin was a placeholder as they went through the motions of getting a “proper” education. There were no music or art classes; the one nod to the arts was an after-school theater club, which was strictly for losers like me.
Boys’ Latin did excel in one other thing besides drugs—sports. You were cool if you played sports and/or were a stoner. All students were required to participate in two after-school sports per year. The popular kids did the football-basketball-lacrosse triple, with lacrosse being exalted as the ultimate sport. The Johns Hopkins college team was perennially fighting for national championships, and the Hopkins head coach’s son, only a sophomore at Boys’ Latin, was the star of the upper school team. Soccer was slightly lower in esteem, but still cool, and considering I had played in German leagues starting at the age of four, I knew this would be where I could make my mark.
On the first day of upper-school soccer practice, the coach blew the whistle and we were supposed to scrimmage; he simply threw us into a full game. Back in Berlin, even when I was a toddler, my coaches had drilled discipline, finesse, and power. As we took the field, I thought Whatever as I took the ball and danced around two defenders, then streaked down the middle. I was faster than most of my classmates, and no one could match my ball control. Another defender tried a slide tackle and got nowhere near me. I dribbled right up to the box, where the last defender, Gunner, a big, beefy freshman, waited, looking as nimble and clever as a pile of horse shit. I knew that I could beat him, but I slid the ball to my left, directly onto the foot of my teammate Billy, who was surprised by the pass, bobbled it, and was creamed by the goalie.
A few minutes later I got the ball again at midfield and flew toward the goal, shimmied by a defender, Billy running to my right, this time paying attention. All of a sudden I was blindsided and sent flying. I landed on the turf hard. What happened? Even by German standards, Gunner’s tackle had been a goonish move.
I raised my head from the turf and yelled, “What the hell was that?”
“You’re just a fag,” Gunner yelled back, then booted the ball upfield.
For a second I thought I was on the school’s lawn during free period, when most kids played smear-the-queer. I stayed down, waiting for the coach to stop play, but his whistle remained on his chest.
“Coach, he didn’t even play the ball,” I yelled.
“Grow some balls, Spillman,” the coach/chemistry teacher demanded.
As I hobbled around the pitch, I clung to my German soccer-playing skills, but this was a different sport, a different country. Out on the field no one cared that I considered myself a Berliner. The next day I j
oined the cross-country team. The lowest of the low, the last refuge for the unathletic, the geeks, and all the other losers, where I belonged.
35
“There are two rules I’ve always tried to live by: Turn left, if you’re supposed to turn right; go through any door you’re not supposed to enter. It’s the only way to fight your way through any door that you’re not supposed to enter. It’s the only way to fight your way through to any kind of authentic feeling in a world beset by fakery.”
—Malcolm McLaren
Soundtrack: Malcolm McLaren, “Madam Butterfly,” 1984
“YOU GOING TO STICK IT OUT?” I asked Hank.
“This sucks,” Hank said, slamming down his chipped mug. We were in what back in the East Village would have been considered an old-man bar, but here was a leftover proletariat bar with one kind of state-sanctioned weak and very cheap beer. Ringo had encouraged the grizzled owner to now serve coffee as well, which he did, but it was as thin and watery as the beer.
“How much you have left?” I asked, and Hank reflexively touched his right sock, where he kept his passport, an open-ended return plane ticket, and the exact amount of cash needed for the train ticket to Lisbon.
“Twenty-three marks.”
I knew it was bad, but not that bad. All over but the crying, I figured, but said, “It’ll be good to get back to Anna.” Hank shrugged. “And your friends,” I added.
