My infatuation with Cady was bizarre and hopeless. We never spoke to each other, communicating solely through eye contact across the dining room or at football practice or in the hallways of the academic center. I invented vicarious ways to connect with Cady: I imitated his quick, side-swaying walk. I drew pictures of him in art class. During the summer, I studied roadmaps to find Cady’s hometown, a small, rural village in northern New York State. Looking at the tiny dot on the map, I imagined that I could be with him, perhaps go pony riding with him on the giant spread of farmland his family owned.
While working on cleanup detail, I sneaked a look at Cady’s confidential file in the Headmaster’s library. Cady had come to Briarwood as a Second Former. Though his grades were fair, his IQ score showed he was still an underachiever. He’d become erratic and depressed in his first year. In counseling sessions he’d admitted he missed his Red Setter puppy “Roxie” at home.
In the springtime of my sophomore year I got to know Cady’s best friend Kelly, who looked uncannily like a girl and wore dungaree shorts cut just barely below his genitals. He called them his “faggot hot pants.” Kelly and I were on the track team. He did the high jump and I ran hurdles. We always sat together on bus rides home from away track meets.
Although he was only fifteen and came from a small town, Kelly must have been exposed to an openly gay scene at some time, I think, to become so girlish. He had been in boarding schools since he was eleven years old. He received a new stereo for his birthday, and he invited me to his room to listen to records. Kelly loved the Beatles and the Alice Cooper Band. He was dancing to Alice Cooper when I walked through the door.
“What’s happenin’, man?” Kelly thought it was cool to hang out with the black students and to mock our way of speaking. He bobbed up and down and shook his hair as Alice Cooper screamed out hard electric riffs. “Man, listen to that guitar.” He had on his faggot cutoffs and white, low-top sneakers with no socks. I couldn’t keep my eyes off his long legs and bare ankles.
“What are you looking at?” he asked.
“Nothing, Kelly.”
“Nothing, huh? That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. ’Cause I already know.” He smiled. My voice was naturally soft, so I had trouble talking over the music. Kelly turned the speakers down and led me by the wrist to his bed. We both sat down. He leaned back against the wall, put both feet up onto the bed, and crossed one leg at the knee.
“Pete, you’re cool. I like you. You’re quiet but you’re cool. I’ve got plans for you, Mr. Givens.”
“Oh, yeah? What kind of plans?”
“Go turn the music back up and I’ll show you,” he said as he jumped up to lock his door. I walked across the room to Kelly’s stereo and he followed a couple of steps behind me. “We gotta cover the noise,” he whispered.
Kelly wrapped one wrist behind my neck, standing arms’ length away from me, and with the other hand unbuttoned his shorts and shunted them down over his hips so they fell to the floor. He lay back down on his bed, naked except for his sneakers, and threw his legs up and over his head. Though his legs were skinny, his ass was wide and round, like fat white melons. He tucked the heels of his sneakers behind his neck like a contortionist. His ass stood up like a separate, living entity, and his head appeared disembodied, encircled by his skinny legs.
“Come and ball me. I’m helpless.”
I’d been thinking about doing this ever since T.J. mentioned it. I jumped out of my clothes and slammed into Kelly as if sucked down his ass by a vacuum. His asshole was smooth and easy to enter. I thought I was supposed to do this roughly, so I bounced Kelly’s buns up and down on the mattress while he whimpered and blew his breath into my face.
Kelly strained into an even more abject position. He pushed his legs backwards farther and stuck his ass up higher. The toes, and then the soles of his sneakers were mashed upside down against the wall behind the bed. His knees were bent backwards so they touched the rumpled sheets, and his calves pressed meanly against his earlobes. We french-kissed while we fucked. I could smell cigarette smoke on his breath, and I tried to suck the tobacco flavor out of his tongue, as though I were sucking the last drops of fruit juice out of a Popsicle wrapper.
Kelly’s ass was mushy and loose, too loose for me to hurt him. Maybe he had been fucked a hundred times already. More likely, his rear end had been distended by Moonshot Lewis, a black boy who lived on Kelly’s corridor. Moonshot had Jet black skin, skinny arms and legs that were too long, and a mastodon-sized cock (easily twice as big as mine) that swung in front of his body like a cinder block. His thin black body was shaped just like Kelly’s. Moonshot could have satisfied Kelly’s longing for rectal pain. While I fucked Kelly (more like vaginal intercourse than brute, gay ass-fucking), I imagined Moonshot grinding his way into Kelly’s butt, their twin, gangly bodies double-helixed into hydraulic symbiosis, a squirming, animated yin-yang of black flesh and white boyhunger. The fantasy took me over the edge. My mind radiated when I came. I cupped my mouth over Kelly’s nose and sucked salt-flavored mucus out of his nostrils. The cerebral mush of exploded brain bits dripped down the inner wall of my cranium. I lapsed into coma, and fell asleep down a bottomless shaft of unconsciousness. Kelly and I were hot, but Kelly and Moonshot were a fuck scene for the Hall of Fame.
I became very fond of Kelly, who liked me even though I was quiet. I unknowingly craved attention, and Kelly was one of the few people who paid any attention to me. He smiled like a sunbeam, laughed in his girlish voice, snapped my butt with his towel in the locker room after track practice. For a stretch of days, Kelly became moody and troubled. He wasn’t winning in track (“falling short of his ‘potential,’” said the coach). I stupidly thought Kelly was worried about the high jump and offered moronic suggestions to improve his performance. He smiled and shook his head in pity. “You’re cool, Pete. Don’t worry about it okay?” I’d hoped Kelly would help me become friends with Cady Donaldson, or at least tell me more about him, but Kelly never wanted to talk about Cady.
My interest in Cady Donaldson never became sexual. It was more of an eerie, electrostatic obsession. His razor-sharp beauty cut through my psyche at light speed, penetrating into my subconscious. Did I love Cady more than T.J. because Cady looked more like a girl? The few times I tried to speak to him, a prickly static poured into my brain and my sight was blocked by yellow haze, like when you rise too quickly from a deep knee bend. I never understood why I reacted so oddly. The reason couldn’t have been guilt over my queerness, because I was comfortable with my attraction to T.J. and Kelly. I wasn’t afraid of gay sex, but was I afraid of gay love?
In his senior year, Cady changed his hairstyle from a conservative, preppy crop to the stringy, late-sixties “hippie” look, parted down the middle instead of on the side. I thought it ruined his beauty, diluted his aristocracy, and I hoped he would change back. Cady only went deeper into his Woodstock image. A few days before his graduation, he was caught smoking marijuana on campus (a capital offense under boarding school jurisprudence). I was in shock and terribly hurt, having internalized Briarwood’s code of behavior lock, line, stock, hook, barrel, and sinker. I felt personally rejected by Cady’s transgression.
The Headmaster decided not to expel Cady since it was so close to graduation and Cady had never been in trouble before. Cady was sent home for the last few days after final exams and returned for commencement. After the graduation ceremonies, I sat on the steps of Chase Hall and watched him load his suitcases into his father’s Mercedes. I was terrified and near tears. I felt as though the last seconds of my life were ticking by. For an instant, Cady half smiled at me and his eyes sparkled meanly. He knew that I was suffering. Our nonverbal dialogue had been finite and precise: Cady knew I was in love with him. He just didn’t care.
Later that day I rode the bus to New York for summer vacation. I leaned my head against the bus window and cried the whole way over a boy I’d barely ever spoken to.
7
I c
an’t say I was excited to be going home for summer. As I rode in the back of the Greyhound bus, headed for New York, I felt as if I were travelling in a spaceship to another planet. It didn’t seem possible that a gas-powered vehicle could cover the spiritual distance between Briarwood and East Harlem. I leaned my head against the vibrating bus window. The blankness of the highway and the running tremor of the Greyhound put me in a meditative state. I closed my eyes and remembered the place where I grew up.
That place was the Jefferson Housing Projects, a collection of box-like buildings made from pale orange brick that sat on the eastern edge of Manhattan. This huge housing compound, lined and seamed with gray granite and metal fences, was a city within a city, doubly urban and thus doubly removed from the land of trees and moist, pungent earth I was travelling from. The street I lived on, East 112th, was a one-way strip of tarred-over cobble that bordered the projects to the south. It was often congested with traffic headed for the entrance ramp to the East River Drive. From my bedroom window I could always hear the sounds of car horns, the atomic-powered farts of accelerating engines, the screech of emergency stops. When I was ten, a boy my age was run over on this street by a tourist trying to get to the airport. Sitting In the back of the Greyhound. I thought of the speed bumps on the back roads of Old Greenwich, built to shear off the axle of a car going fast enough to kill a child.
Across 112th Street were dusty, eroded tenement houses, rows of them spanning the island from east to west, their fronts blackened over eons with soot, their wooden frames steeped with the smell of pesticide. My sister Joselyn and Russell lived In a tenement house, three blocks west of where we lived. I remembered the nights I’d climbed creaking stairs to baby-sit Joselyn’s three children. One day the roach bomb brought every insect inside her walls panicking out into the open, hundreds of them crawling on the ceiling and the kitchen table, a crisis in the Insect underworld like the great flood or the attack of the fifty-foot woman. My sister had stood in the middle of the kitchen, beating them off the walls with a broom.
My family had lived in East Harlem since I was two years old. My older brother Malcolm told me stories about our first apartment in a West Harlem tenement, but I had no memory of living anywhere but on East 112th Street.
Malcolm had also told me that our family was descended from African royalty. “We must be. Look at Mommy.” he said, and I had nodded and agreed. I was terrifically proud and terrified of my mother. It seemed everyone was terrified of her.
Just two years before. I’d needed emergency surgery on my testicles. In the middle of the night my mother had taken me to the city hospital. When she returned to the hospital the morning after my operation, to find me recovering in the G.U. ward with ten very ill and elderly men — throat tubes. I.V.s, and wheezing, and bubbling spittle all around — she exploded in fury and demanded I be moved to a semiprivate room, which I was. within the hour.
She was the smartest woman in the projects, everyone knew, because she had two husbands who worked. My real father was a car factory foreman, and my unofficial stepfather Seth was a cook in a private hospital. Her woman friends in the projects were all extroverted and funny, like she was, and though she blended in with them — just one of the girls — she was tacitly recognized as the leader, the star of the show. Arguing with her was pointless; when she became angry — an at least daily occurrence — her face expanded to fill the room and her eyes swelled just as her facial features — brows, nose, lips — skewed towards a forceful, impaling center. In her fury she had always seemed to grow in size and power before my eyes.
East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem, is different from West Harlem. In Spanish Harlem, everywhere are the sounds of conga drums and horn music, the quick, tumbling rhythms and gum-smacking bite of the Spanish language. The Puerto Rican people lived separate lives from the blacks. Still, their culture filtered through into our world; they affected my life like a strong seasoning can affect a stew. Our next-door neighbors, the Rojas, were Puerto Rican, and we almost never spoke to them. I sometimes caught a glimpse of their living room through their open door as one of the Rojas was coming or going. I often wondered about the different world in their apartment — did their mother hit their father like my mother sometimes did? Did the brothers fight over who had to do the dishes? Sometimes I could hear the Spanish-language television station from outside their door.
The landscape along the Greyhound’s route was becoming incrementally more urban. I was becoming more anxious. I wasn’t sure if I was fit for Harlem anymore. I felt so comfortable now in my sports jackets and cuffed slacks, and if I listened to myself I could hear how my speech had become proper and lilting. I wasn’t a tough kid anymore, not that I ever really had been, but the code of ghetto manhood had once made sense to me. Now I was sure it did not. What if somebody started a fight with me? Did I still know how to fight? Would my preppy accent make me a likely target?
I’d had two fights in my entire life. The first was a mild and brief affair with a boy I liked named Wilbur. We shoved and cursed each other for about five minutes. I don’t remember what the fight was about, and I don’t think we ever actually hit each other.
My second fight was with a Puerto Rican boy named Skito. I didn’t know Skito and had nothing to do with him, but Skito’s little brother Willie had started trouble in the sandpile with my little brother Ken. Willie was older than Ken, and I was older than Willie, but Skito and I were the same age; by the traditions of interfamily warfare in the projects, Skito and I were obliged to defend our kid brothers.
Getting into a fight was like jumping off a high diving board. You were instantly committed, there was no turning back, and now you didn’t know what was going to happen. You’d relinquished your fate to the momentum of pride and the will of the crowd of spectators that always gathered around and screamed for action. Usually, there wasn’t much. Most fights were more like dances, two boys circling in esoteric boxing stances and strange circular gestures with the fists. I think the idea was the stranger your stance and the more schizoid your hand gestures, the more terror you struck into your opponent. I always thought this was silly. If you’re going to fight, fight. If you’re going to run, run. But don’t dance around like an autistic scarecrow. I didn’t box, I wrestled, because I watched professional wrestling on TV, and because boxing took skill and I didn’t think I had any, and because I was too embarrassed to strike a funny boxing stance.
Skito started circling me and winding up his fist, expecting me to do the same. I dived headfirst into his stomach, wrestled him to the ground, and climbed on his back. In seconds he was helpless. I pounded on his back and yanked his hair. I could have banged his forehead into the ground and knocked him out, but I wasn’t mean enough. Skito’s big brother grabbed me from behind and pulled me off of him.
Skito jumped up raging. His nose was spilling blood where I’d scraped it on the concrete. He punched me hard in the stomach and I fell backwards into the crowd. Then my brother Malcolm stepped in and stopped the fight. Skito’s friends led him away, and a little black boy congratulated me for winning. “You fight good,” he said, and I think he meant that I skipped the dancing and got right to the action.
Skito’s brother asked me later if I wanted to fight Skito again. “You think you bad ’cause you fought Skito,’’ he said. I wasn’t interested. That punch in the stomach had really hurt.
One of the worst feelings I ever had growing up was seeing my brother Malcolm beaten in a fight. I was coming back from the supermarket, and I saw a crowd of boys hollering. Through the crowd I recognized Malcolm’s sneakers and shorts sticking out on the ground. Malcolm was on his back and another boy was on top of him. It didn’t matter that the boy was a year older than Malcolm, or that he came from the Johnson Houses, four blocks west of Jefferson, which was like coming from another province. Malcolm’s defeat made me feel vulnerable, as though a gap had been torn in my family line of defense.
I arrived at the Port Authority Bus Terminal with my s
uitcase and duffel bag and took the subway uptown to 116th Street. Then I walked south and east to our apartment building. My mother saw me coming and called to me from our fifth-story window.
“Didn’t Malcolm meet you at the station?” she asked when I got upstairs.
“No,” I said.
“I told him to meet you at the station. Did you have trouble with your bags?”
“No,” I repeated. I lumbered to my bedroom with my duffel bag bouncing against my knee.
I had a feeling of vague oppression as I entered the room I’d shared with Malcolm growing up. I looked at the walls, which were bare except for a small, square painting of a farm house. In my room at school I’d hung up posters of pro football stars and the TV threesome of amazon commandoes. I tapped on the cage of our parakeet Pip, and wondered if my face still meant anything to him. I dropped my bags and then stopped in to look around my younger brothers’ room. Ken and Tyrone had both left already for Boys’ Club summer camp. Our beagle puppy Caesar stayed in their room. He was ecstatic to see me, jiggling like a slinky and fretting with happiness. I sat down on Tyrone’s bed and played with Caesar until it was time for dinner.
My stepfather was working late, so my mother and I had dinner alone. She had made cheeseburgers and french fries and baked a cream pie. Sometimes when we were alone together, my mother entertained me like a stand-up comic. I always suspected she was showing off, since I could never keep up with her sparkling charisma. My own puddle of emotions, no more than a finger’s depth, was pitiable next to her Croton Reservoir of energy and feeling. In her best moods, she was like a circus bareback rider on a champion horse, or a surfer at one with a monstrous wave, or a chameleon-like wizard, metamorphosing himself with repeated taps on the head from his magic wand. At times I felt my mind was moving in slow motion, trudging through quicksand, while hers darted around like an annoying sprite.
The Color of Trees Page 8
