A Boy's Own Story

by Edmund White

  Chuck was famous for his escapades. He’d regale me for hours with the details. His current girl was the pert granddaughter of an almost comically conservative senator, one of those mastodons my father voted for. At the moment Janie had her own house, an unusual possession for a girl of seventeen. Her mother, who was supposed to live with her, was off sailing the Aegean with an Argentine. Her playboy father, about to divorce his third wife and already separated from her, lived on a neighboring estate by himself. He’d lost his license after repeated arrests for drunk driving, and his daughter had to chauffeur him everywhere. They looked like brother and sister. A maid cooked and cleaned for Janie, but the maid didn’t live in. Someone else maintained the indoor pool.

  At night Janie was alone and she was free to invite anyone she liked to stay over. That would usually be Chuck on weekends. Even on some weeknights Chuck would escape the dorm after lights-out. Janie would be waiting for him at the gate in her battered old MG, lights off. She’d return him to school before dawn. In the interval he’d persuade her to perform some new sexual stunt. They’d experiment with exotic lubricants (papaya juice, chocolate syrup, cold bacon grease). He’d insert a balloon in her and then inflate it. Eventually she would return the favor as they both drifted on an air mattress across the heated swimming pool on a sub-zero December night. Snow blew up in banks against the thick glass doors and spun in minor swirls under the porch lights. Farther up the hill stood pines laden with snow like ermined dons gathering for the procession.

  Chuck grew more boisterous, reckless, impatient after every adventure. No outrage was enough for him. Only a war would have been equal to his hunger for danger. He and several members of the Butt Club became friends with Beattie. Just before supper every other afternoon they’d sit around with him down in the music building and smoke cigarettes in one of the record-listening booths. They’d spin jazz records. Sometimes Beattie would play along on his own drums. The noise of their talk, laughter and drumming was confined to the soundproof room. Whoever might report they were smoking off limits and at an impermissible time of day could be spotted at a safe distance through the glass window set into the wall separating the booth from the glee club’s big practice room.

  Beattie wore black suede shoes and had his hair cut in a flattop, longer in back than in front. It sloped down toward you like a ski jump. If he bent his head, his scalp showed white. His handshake was limp, but a second after he’d removed this cold, boneless fillet from your hand he was slicing the air with a powerful snap of his fingers in response to some mental or recorded riff he was hearing. He’d squint and bite his lower lip and his head would bob up and down in an accelerating rhythm. Soon he’d be whispering, “And-a one, and-a two . . .” He had, it seemed, only one suit, a shiny gray sharkskin, the baggy pants radically pegged, the jacket’s lapels narrow and usually turned up as against a draft. On off hours he wore no tie but just a black shirt buttoned tightly at the neck to give him a throttled look. His neck and face and hands were pale and big; he seemed like a prisoner in a cheap suit he’s been given on dismissal. He projected a strong, almost rancid sexuality, but it was hard to place. It was too canny and too asymmetrical to seem robustly masculine in the old sense. He had a way of grabbing his crotch and holding it, sometimes even shaking it for a second while he was talking. I suppose he’d picked this up from the Negroes he’d met in the jazz world.

  This gesture seemed designed to lend an extra weight to his words. Or perhaps it was a proof to the listener that he was being honest, all there, a body behind his words.

  His ears were a shade pinker than his pale face. His eyebrows were very solid and dark and looked as though the draftsman had pochéd them in quickly. His upper lip was so thin as to form just a line, but his lower lip was full. On some days he laughed hysterically at simple statements; he’d double up and keep repeating an ordinary word someone had chanced to use as if he hoped to wring some new meaning out of it. When he held his crotch, his baggy pants would ride up to reveal how powerful his thighs were. He wore socks of bright pinks and purples and they were only ankle-high. His responses were sometimes weirdly delayed. Someone would ask him a question and he’d study his face a moment, two moments, before saying a soft, feathery yes or an even less audible no.

  I sat around with the Butt Club boys and Mr. Beattie on two or three different afternoons, but I didn’t like him. He reminded me of that hustler I’d met two summers ago. He had the same air of being a con man. Something shifty.

  One day Chuck told me Beattie was about to receive a shipment of marijuana. Did I want to buy in or at least try a joint or two?

  “What is it, exactly?” I asked. “Isn’t it like heroin?”

  Chuck laughed. “No. Great stuff, Beattie tells me. Makes you happy. Good for sex. Good for listening to music. Come on down next Wednesday to the music room and we’ll blow some weed.” He snapped his fingers with a hard snap. But this was precisely the invitation to a lifelong addiction I’d always heard about, a fate so dire no one actually had ever had to warn me against it. Not that I’d met an addict, but I had seen movies in which a handsome musician – exactly! – sweated in a hotel room and vomited and pleaded with his girlfriend to put him back on the needle or weed or whatever, but she refused him for his own sake, despite his hallucinations and writhings on the floor. Why had Mr. Beattie come to Eton? Perhaps he was so addicted to marijuana he could no longer afford to maintain his habit unless – that’s it – unless he also became a dealer to bored teens.

  In those days all drugs except alcohol, tobacco and diet pills and sedatives were unknown to conventional Americans. I wasn’t sure what I should do. I wanted to do the right thing. Chuck and the other guys in the Butt Club seemed hopeless to me. They would succumb to any temptation, I knew, but not if the temptation was removed. They valued nothing. One of them had lost an eye in a fight, but all he could say was, “So what? I’ve still got one left.”

  During my next session with Dr. O’Reilly I asked him for advice. He didn’t want to discuss my problems. He was telling me about his daughter’s latest escapade. While he had been addressing a parents’ group, she had gone into the best restaurant in town, been careful to identify herself as his daughter and then tried to set the place on fire.

  When I brought O’Reilly back to the subject, he snapped, “I can’t tell you what to do, you know that.”

  “Then give me some information. Is marijuana dangerous?

  “Can be.” He was picking his nose in an elaborate way, examining his handkerchief for portents.

  “How?”

  “It can cause a psychotic break.” He had just received a shipment of Polynesian carvings, statues with real human hair and giant phalluses; three of these totems stood behind his chair, lending force to his opinions.

  “What’s a psychotic –”

  “Craziness.”

  “And does marijuana always lead to heroin?”

  “It can, if only because you start living in the drug world and you think you might as well try everything.”

  “What does it do, marijuana, to ordinary people?”

  “Makes them paranoid.”

  I thought I knew how my father must feel all the time: lonely and responsible. No one looked to my father for amusement. He was dull. He wasn’t fashionable. He was deliberate, but he didn’t shirk his responsibilities. He could always be counted on to do the right thing.

  I went to the headmaster’s secretary to make an appointment. “I must see him now.”

  “What is it exactly?” she asked. “Do you want to argue over a grade? It’s too late for that –”

  “No, no,” I said disdainfully. “It has nothing to do with me personally. It concerns the reputation of the school and it can’t wait a moment.”

  She nodded and went into the headmaster’s paneled, carpeted office for a moment. When she emerged she told me to come back at four.

  I was agitated. I knew I was doing the right thing and yet I feared what Chuck wo
uld say when Mr. Beattie was fired. Would Chuck drop me, persecute me, organize a cabal against me, tell everyone I was a hateful little prig?

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to face Mr. Beattie. I’d never spoken out against anyone before. Would his wife and children go hungry? Would he ever find another job? Never before had I wielded so much power over an adult man; the power excited and scared me. Paradoxically, I who didn’t much like Eton, I who concealed sexual longings most Etonians would have condemned far sooner than dope peddling, I who had rejected the school’s religion and slept with a master and his wife, I who had once bought a hustler ten years older than I and last summer had slept with a boy three years younger, I who’d serviced Ralph, the special camper – paradoxically I was the one whom circumstance had chosen to defend this institution I despised. I was to be the guardian of public morality.

  Anxiety swept through me. Like most of the other students I refused to wear an overcoat even on the coldest days. Now I was trembling as I hugged myself and hurried down the brick walkway toward the music building. My teeth were chattering by the time I ducked in the door.

  There was Mr. Beattie picking out chords on the piano. No one else was around. “Hi,” he said. He stood and gave me his limp hand, a courtesy that puzzled me. No other master routinely shook hands with students. I felt shame rise to my face. I looked at the clock: it was three-fifteen.

  He asked me if I played the piano and I said just a bit. He surrendered the instrument to me. I played a recital piece from long ago, something simple by Brahms my father used to like.

  “Hey, Mr. Beattie,” I said, “Chuck tells me some famous jazz guy’s coming to visit you this weekend.”

  “Bugs Tice,” he said. He was standing in the incurve of the grand piano’s embrace, one hand pressing down on the polished black lid. “He’s staying in the parents’ suite here at school. You’ll have to hear us jam – he’s the greatest on the horn.”

  Somehow I was picking up the sound of sex. I was always on the alert for it. I studied boys as they came out of one another’s dorm rooms, I lounged on other guys’ beds during free time, always in expectation of a held glance, a missed beat, but I never heard a single hint. Now I was hearing something – tentative to be sure, but something real.

  “These jazz guys?” I said as I struck the final chord.

  “Yes?”

  “Some of them are oddballs, right? No offense, Mr. Beattie. I mean, the jazz world’s pretty progressive, right?”

  “Yeah. We say hip.”

  “Is this Bugs hip?”

  “How do you mean, exactly?”

  I smiled. The clock hands refused to move.

  “No, how do you mean?” Beattie repeated. He was also smiling.

  “Well, I was just wondering why you were putting him up in the parents’ suite instead of at your own house with your wife and kids.”

  Mr. Beattie’s eyes widened rhetorically; he wanted me to see them widening. “Boy,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re wild.” He covered the next beat by miming playing a saxophone. His fingers ran up and down imaginary keys and his cheeks swelled. He closed his eyes and rocked back on his heels.

  “Seriously,” I said, breathless and exhilarated but only in my capacity as spectator; as a performer I was beautifully calm. “Chuck says that marijuana –”

  “Sh-h-h!” Mr. Beattie hissed. “Don’t go talking that shit. That’s real bogue, man.”

  “Sorry,” I said, “Mr. Beattie.”

  “So what did you want to know?” His smile had migrated back and now he was wailing one more long note on his imaginary sax.

  “I just wanted to know if it’s good for sex.”

  “Is it – ? Well, yeah.” He laughed. “Yeah. I had you pegged all wrong. I thought you were the Little Lord Fauntleroy type, but you’re hip. I like the way you just truck right in.” He mimed driving a truck. He took a swerve, then pressed down on the brake, glided to a halt, switched off the key, pulled it out, twirled it once and pocketed it. “Just as neat and simple as you please.” Very deliberate, now: “Yeah, kid, it’s great for sex. Next question.”

  I played a C-major scale. “Are you going to make me do all the work in this conversation?”

  “Possibly.” He grabbed his crotch, then looked down at his white hand, the white of cooked ham, gave it an extra shake and, as though satisfied with his test, smiled. “You’re a good kid,” he said, releasing himself.

  I could hear the football team shouting as the guys entered the athletics building next door; that must be the thunder of their cleats on the stone floor just inside the double doors. “Say you and Bugs are listening to music or something and you’re all alone in the parents’ suite and nobody’s around, because it is real isolated after all, and say you smoke some –”

  “We get high. So go on.”

  “You both get high and . . .” I closed the lid over the keys and rested my hands on the curved, reflecting wood. “Suppose he was the kind of guy who wanted to fool around. Who wanted to party.” I used the word the black whore had used.

  “I’m with you. You’re amazing. Here we are in goddamn suburbia and I’ve got some fuckin’ teenager hipster on my hands. Go on.”

  “Well, suppose he gets high and wants to blow you, nothing more, you don’t have to do a thing, just dig the music, would you let him?”

  Mr. Beattie was brushing his right hand back and forth over his crew cut. He seemed to be concentrating on this job, getting the feel of those soft quills against his palm. He wasn’t looking at me. “That’s a pretty funny question. Why do you ask? Is your question academic or what?”

  “I’m asking,” I said, “because I’d like to party with you.”

  He nodded quickly. “Got it. Groovy.” He looked at the clock. “I could make it real good for us both. Come back at five-fifteen, five-thirty and it’ll be dark and the fuckin’ animals next door” – head jerk to indicate the athletics building – “will have cleared out by then. We’ll be all alone down here and I’ll put on some nice classical music and we’ll blow some weed, I’ve got nice stuff, and we’ll see, just see what happens. Okay?”

  I who was always conscious of the formlessness of real life now saw it imitate art, though the meaning of this action, which was surely turning out to be tragic, escaped me. I had my appointment with the headmaster at four. At five-thirty, after I’d betrayed Mr. Beattie, I’d return to have sex with him. The next day he’d be fired. He’d learn of my denunciation and he wouldn’t be able to say anything against me. He wouldn’t be able to discredit me by saying I was a practicing homosexual since we would have practiced homosexuality together. He’d be powerless. I would have gotten what I wanted, gotten away with it and gotten rid of him: the trapdoor beside the bed. At last I could seduce and betray an adult. This heterosexual hipster would be my momentary Verlaine.

  I smiled at him, nodded encouragingly, even grabbed my own crotch in friendly imitation of his trademark gesture. Once I was outside I looked up at the gray and white clouds boiling and flowing over the tower beside the chapel, a brick reminiscence of the silo it had replaced (the whole estate had once been a farm). I hurried under a stone arch carved with the motto “A Life Without Beauty Is Only Half Lived.” A shiny black head of a woman was poised in a niche above the arch. Though the sculptor had undoubtedly hoped she would appear ageless, in fact her hairdo was all too patently a style of the 1920s, giveaway finger waves.

  But everything I observed was at the edge of consciousness, for I thought of myself as a sturdy cutter slicing through waves of cold air, as a tough, almost square vessel set on a straight course. Usually I’d sense I was permeable, insubstantial, at most a bank of moving air, a cold front, and only in conversation did I condense into a downpour of being. But now I was dense and potent. There were no eddies of empty time to swirl me off course, no horse latitudes of nothingness to becalm me.

  The headmaster found my information too upsetting to accept readily and I observed his dithering w
ith scorn. I was summoning him to battle, but he kept fussing over how he should wear his uniform. “Well, of course Mr. Beattie is not a full or even regular member of the Eton faculty,” he said, as though that made any difference one way or another. He was performing all the tiresome operations of cleaning, fueling and lighting a pipe. “I suppose we’ll have to report him to the Federal – would it be the Treasury Department? Is the Bureau of Narcotics a subdivision of the Treasury?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, by now just a boy again.

  After the headmaster had covered every subsidiary issue, as though he were constitutionally drawn to the incidental, I brought him back to what was essential at least to me. “You must promise you won’t talk to Mr. Beattie until after I’ve gone home for Christmas vacation,” I said solemnly. “And then you must make sure he’s out of here by the time I get back. I don’t want to have to see him. That might be dangerous for me.” I thought the headmaster owed me at the very least this protection in return for my having saved the school.

  “Nonsense,” he said, peeved, “I can’t promise a thing.” He looked longingly at the closed door as though he hoped someone would open it and end this eternal interview. “And are you quite sure you haven’t become an addict yourself?” he asked. “Shall I have the Narcotics people bring you some of their interesting literature on addiction? I’m sure they have some splendid brochures, they should, our tax dollars, you know . . .”And he went on mumbling to himself until I was able to slip out.

  No one was worthy of me.

  I had twenty minutes to kill before my rendezvous with Beattie, an interval I resented, so habituated had I already become to the tight scheduling of the great man, the man of the world.

  *

  The headmaster, as it turned out, botched everything. He did bring in the narcs, who did give me a brochure about heroin; I was basalt with indignation. Mr. Beattie was fired, but he was allowed to hang around until well into the next semester. Since Beattie couldn’t say we’d had sex, at a faculty meeting he accused me and DeQuincey of being lovers. Good old Quince stood by me, though he was badly shaken; the accusation had been just accurate enough to scare him. At last Beattie left us; I didn’t see him again until three years later, when I was in college and he was playing drums in a two-bit band at a fraternity dance. His eyes locked with mine. I felt I should tell him how much I repented what I’d done to him. I’d used and discarded him – just as my dad had mistreated Alice, the Addressograph operator.