Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  And so they embarked on this journey, Paul and Jackie. How prepared, by what clichés of fortitude, I can't imagine. Apparently they were given to understand that Bobby would likely die before he was five, then ten, fifteen—on and on, an everpresent shadow never quite disappearing, all the time on its side. But here was the remarkable thing: They went at it as if there were nothing wrong, as if we were normal. No complaints, no tears I ever saw. Yankee tough. I don't blame them for this anymore. Grit is an ethics all its own. Except, I needed to talk to somebody about it, so I could stop being invisible.

  We moved again, to Florence Street, a bare stone's throw from the center of town. In second grade at Central, I got all A's. Paul is perfect, it says on one of Mrs. Rumfield's blue report cards. Me against the evidence yet again. I even blended in with a neighborhood gang of thugs, though never straying any farther out of line than Mr. Krinsky's junkyard, where I was forbidden to play. I loved that Caligari junglegym of rusty bedsprings and dead appliances. I knew the rules: the slightest cut, and you'd end up with lockjaw, and never hide in an icebox. Memento mori. When you opened an old Amana in Krinsky's yard, you always held your breath in case there was a smothered kid inside.

  Already I'd started to flirt with genderfuck. I clumped up and down on the hardwood floors in my mother's heels, prancing even, right in front of the grownups. And I had a thing for paper dolls. I almost remember the tail end of a flareup between my parents, over the issue of my inappropriate fascinations. No word like sissy yet, and the only subtext I picked up was the pleasure of being fretted over. Because otherwise, Paul is perfect left no room for anything, sealed like a box at Krinsky's.

  Possessive mother? Absent father? Not especially. I thought they were both quite nice, and beautiful as movie stars. If anyone was distant, I was. Secretive and isolated, conscious of being a cool observer, all those A's a kind of shield. Besides, my brother was the one who had to be taken care of—literally, carried. That's the most vivid image I have of my father's strength, bearing Bobby in his arms whenever we all went out, long after the infant years. If it made me jealous or left me out, I can't summon the feeling.

  I remember the moment in art history at Andover, when the terra-cotta image flashed onscreen, Zeus carrying Ganymede away, the boy in his arms. It was my father and my brother. But I put the lid on the memory right away, vaguely aghast, because the statue was about lust, the hunger of the god for mortal youth. It didn't bear too much thinking, wrapped as I was by then in the bodiless cocoon of my own adolescence. I got an A in art history anyway.

  My father's efforts to redirect me from paper dolls to right field were half-hearted enough, and I bless him now for not forcing the issue. Happily, within a few years my brother was as mad for sports as Big Paul, and that took the heat off me. I admit there's a boggling irony here—that my brother turned into a sandlot star of sorts, batting from a seated position and crawling around the bases, dragging those atrophied legs behind. For me it proved an unutterable relief; I put away my Wilson fielder, never quite broken in. Let them be the male-bonded unit. They still are—swapping ball scores, crowing over the Celtics as they sit down to a killer game of cards. Me, I can't tell the plays from the players even with a program. And ask either my father or brother: I play the dumbest cards of anyone in the family, so passive when it comes to bidding that I am barely there.

  A little theory here, or anti-theory. A debate is brawling these days among the gender scholars, between the "essentialists" and the "constructivists." The essentialist argues that there is a genetic predisposition to being gay and lesbian. Thus gay people have always existed, "different" from the mainstream but crucial to the health of the race. This separate kind has always been a class of nurturers and teachers, healers and shamans—consciously so, and cherished, even, by tribes from Arizona to Tahiti. In the formulation of sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, "Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of mankind's rare altruistic impulses."

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  The constructivists would have it that gender and sexual identity are wholly modern ideas, that nobody in the deep past could have thought of himself as "gay" because there was no such thing. Gender is a social construct of a post-agrarian age, or post-industrial, or post-something. I admit my own sympathies lie with the essentialists—though it's clear enough that a modern queer, his brothers and sisters no longer hidden, engages a larger identity than his mute ancestors ever could. A self among others.

  The anti-theory involves the repudiation of so-called classical analytic theory, where the homosexual is "deviant" because he never resolves the Oedipal riddle. It turns out not to be so classical after all. Freud himself, in his famous letter to a gay man's mother, suggested that being queer was inborn and healthy. More to the point, as Dr. Isay argues, it was the immigrant psychoanalysts after the War who pumped up the deviant model when they settled in America. For purely political reasons: they saw the drift of McCarthyism and made their second-best bed with rigid conservatism, betraying the radical, antibourgeois thrust of psychiatry in Europe. Conformity became the only truth.

  Which isn't to say we weren't as dysfunctional as any other nuclear meltdown family in the 50's. Still, my family didn't make me queer. The deviant is the homophobe, but you've already thrown your youth away by the time you've learned that. As for denial, the Monettes were registering off the graph by 1953. We'd moved yet again, to 37 High Street—37R, the house in the rear. My father, who'd been promoted from the truck to the office of the coal company, had scraped together the down payment on a pair of two-family houses.

  My brother was two years old and still riding in a stroller, otherwise carried by Zeus. In other words, no wheelchair—as if that would be somehow admitting defeat. In the house my brother crawled around—creeping, we called it, unaware that it sounded like the way ghouls moved in horror movies. Bobby's condition didn't seem strange at all to us; it was simply a fact of life. Until we went out, and strangers stared, and everyone seemed to know.

  My brother has swallowed a lot of bitterness about the absence of that wheelchair, for which he says his body was designed. They were holding out, I expect, for a proper March of Dimes sort of miracle. The glowing grin of a kid on crutches, one step short of dancing. And eventually that's what the cripple doctors pushed for, too, the sentiment of the poster child: The lame shall walk.

  In her last years, my mother was passionately outspoken about the lack of guidance and resources, especially when I'd tell her about all the AIDS support groups. Paul and Jackie had had to go it alone. No place to process their own suffering, psychiatry being out of the question, not for the working class in a country town. Just the church, in our case Christ Episcopal, a Richardsonian brownstone Romanesque tucked between the white-spired Congregational and the third-hand Greek revival of the Baptists.

  The rector of Christ was one John Moses—a booming Old Testament voice worthy of his name, and a heartiness so visceral, he took your breath away. My father taught sixth-grade Sunday school, my Aunt Grace fourth. Nana Lamb went to eight A.M. communion, "because they get you in and get you out." Fond of the prophet Moses as all the rest of the parish ladies, Nana was never big on sermons. She also worked the Saturday shift at the church thrift shop, practically a fixture there, dressed to the nines with her upswept steel-gray hair, an unmistakable air of noblesse oblige. She took to the Anglican edge of it all like a duchess, though without the icy permanent sneer and fish handshake of a Brahmin.

  And the invisible boy? Well, I almost never missed a Sunday all the way through sixth grade, and got confirmed besides. I like to think I was always a closet atheist, but for a while at least I went along with the others. I hadn't started having it out with Catholics yet, except for a small encounter with Maidie Lynch. A budding moron in third grade, somehow Maidie had missed the cut for parochial school, and she came to us instead at Central, offering up novenas with delirious abandon. Apprised by some little inquisitor, Maidie discovered that my father had converted from the R.C.'s wh
en he married my mother. Stalking up to me in the cafeteria, Maidie pounced.

  "You're going to go to hell, Paul Monette," she informed me with glittering eyes. "Conversion's a mortal sin! You'll burn forever—and your brother's the proof!"

  My first acquaintance with the sins of the father, how they passed down and damned his issue. I laughed in Maidie's face. And though I continued my perfect attendance on Sundays, the eight-year-old had had his first real lesson in religion. God didn't come out on top.

  Sunday afternoons we'd go over to Lawrence in the '51 Buick, to visit the other side. The Monette grandparents were as stubbornly French as my mother's people were English. They lived in a great peeling pile of a gingerbread Victorian, where Grandpa Joe still had his shingle out, though he was well into his eighties when I knew him. An awesome presence, who ate onions raw like apples and stilled his own liquor in a bathtub. The parlor walls were chockablock with glass-fronted bookcases, leather-bound sets of authors, mostly French immortals. If his learned gravity was unapproachable, he was kind enough to us kids and always gave us quarters. Invariably Bobby and I stayed meekly at floor level, eye to eye with the black gryphons that held up the library table.

  Joe was a totem figure in Lawrence, lawyer and general sage to masses of immigrants from Quebec, the broken-French mill-workers who kept the hum going in the vast brick textile engines along the Merrimack. He'd made and lost a couple of fortunes, and apparently drunk his fair share of champagne from chorus girls' slippers. Decidedly anticlerical, but that was nothing compared to his animus toward the Irish. Hardly alone in that: where I come from, Micks and Canucks are the Hatfields and McCoys, with so much hate to spew about one another that they hardly had any left over for blacks and other exotic types.

  The only son among four sisters, Joe had taken his entrance exams to Harvard Law in classical Greek, because his English was still shaky. And told us once—even at eight I remember being appalled at the arbitrariness—that he'd added the last two letters to the family name because he got so tired of his Harvard profs mispronouncing Monet with a hard T. The single truly outsize figure in the family, always held up to me for the value of having a profession. Twenty years later I'd still run into the occasional elderly frog whose eyes would mist and voice choke when he heard I was Joe Monette's grandson.

  The four sisters meanwhile stayed in Montreal, becoming nuns. There's a single sepia photograph of these gaunt and basset-faced ladies in wimples. Too ugly to find husbands, my French grandmother used to remark with scathing disdain. Ubaldine, she was called, and no slouch or fading violet despite the aura of gravitas that clung about her husband. She rented three floors of upstairs rooms in the big house, to boarders who seemed like Damon Runyon characters to me—traveling men and oddly fallen women with too much rouge and fumigant perfume.

  Ubaldine was pencil-thin and caustic, and fearless at evicting. Her culinary specialty was head cheese, a sort of grainy pate that tasted wondrous but didn't bear too much scrutiny of the pig scraps that went into it. A couple of summers we stayed with her in her boarding house at Hampton Beach, over the border in New Hampshire. The clientele was even more fly-by-night—guys who ran the carnival rides over at Salisbury, or the ring-toss booths and skeeball alleys in the faded Hampton casino.

  She made her own money and tucked it away, having learned the hard way not to trust the ups and downs of the old lawyer's fortunes, and having no desire to subsidize the bubbly for the chorus girls. Years after Joe died—Ubaldine lived to be ninety, too, despite a half century of diabetes—her usual remark about the man she'd lived with sixty years was a sort of French harrumph. Sounded like good riddance. But she made damn sure she had a priest and two nuns at his wake, droning a rosary on and on, thus having the last word on his violent antipopery.

  That Sunday world of the ancients was my only regular foray into the urban stew of Lawrence, already half-dead in the 50's as the textile baronies fled to the South in droves. It always had the feel of a ghost city, mined out and long passed by. Where Andover had those woods at the end of every street, Lawrence always seemed to lead to slag heaps, the tailings and derelict factories like a Krinsky's junkyard for giants.

  Maybe once a month my father would take me over to Cross Coal with him on a Saturday morning, an irresistible time together that didn't require me to throw a pass or bat four hundred. The sheds and coalyard on Railroad Street were a moonscape of the raw and brutal. Conic piles of anthracite three stories high, a fleet of grimy dumptrucks, and coal drivers out of a chimney sweep's tale, bulked like aging linebackers and grinning through the soot.

  Big Paul was the main dispatcher, boss of a crew of drivers and mechanics whose blue trucks seemed to fuel the whole of Merrimack Valley, the industrial revolution on wheels. More and more it was oil rather than coal, my father sending out teams in the summer to refit old houses with oil burners. The company had been around since the mid-nineteenth century, delivering firewood and coal off horse wagons.

  I don't know how much I've romanticized all this, since I did it from the beginning. I thrilled to the rough and tumble of the men, the purple streams of profanity, the cowboy moves as they loaded and weighed the trucks. Mostly Canuck, with names like Gus and Fat. They treated me like a prince, letting me trail after them into the shed where their lockers were, strewn with tabloids and cartons of doughnuts. I wasn't conscious ever of eroticizing the place, but it was definitely a world of men, and I loved it.

  Fearfully proud of my father too, how he knew every cellar in Christendom, knew who the deadbeats were and who called only when the bin was empty. The main event of Saturday morning was eating, big stevedore breakfasts at railroad diners, a ladle of beans and salt pork running into the eggs and brown bread. They all knew Dad in Lawrence—the cops, the dolly waitresses, the bib-apron shopkeepers on Essex Street.

  I stayed back in his shadow, the kid with all A's, not shy exactly but out of my league and keeping my own counsel. And when we went back to the office, I'd play with the adding machines and a stone-age Royal typewriter, its butterfly tiers of letters slapping the paper so hard, they punched right through. I don't know what I wrote, but I practiced it like a musical instrument—two fingers, same as today.

  I figure we were at 37 High Street from '52 to '55, third grade to fifth. The neighborhood was decidedly downscale, mostly two-family and blue-collar. A couple of streets running off High were unpaved; clusters of mill worker cottages with chickens running wild. The gang of kids had the run of the backyards, some not even mowed, the derelict barns and stables fabulous places to hide. Outside our bedroom window was a yellow cherry tree, the Queen Anne variety, and something stirs yet when these appear at my upscale market in Hollywood at seven dollars a pound, the taste of being young.

  Next door was a girl my age, Joyce, whose family was French and Indian, some long-assimilated clan of the Massachusetts nation. Joyce was also in my class, crash-landing with D's and F's on every report card. For a while it didn't keep us apart, and we collaborated in fantasy games in western gear. She was the scout and I the cowboy hero, so The Lone Ranger must've been our jumping-off point. From my present vantage I have no doubt that her deep-seated tomboy nature was incubating a lesbian. By sixth grade the F's had driven her crazy, and Joyce became a duck-tailed hood in junior high, hell-raising and much expelled. Dyslexic, I suppose, but we had no word for it then. And long gone from my life, though I've always wondered what kind of chance Joyce had to come out. Our differentness from the rest was so similar in the cowboy days, despite our opposite grades. Both loners, both out scouting.

  But my main playmate was Toby, the second of three boys who lived with their mother in an achingly tidy white bungalow four doors down from us. Toby's father had died of cancer a couple of years before I knew him—the first death I ever took in on a conscious level, or at least the empty space it left behind. Not that we ever talked about it, but there was a muted quality to Toby, a wound that had grown inexpressible. It connected us under th
e skin.

  We tramped the yards after school in various psychic disguises, from Tarzan to Wagon Train, Joyce joining in if we thought we'd encounter hostile Indians. We were the first generation to enact its myths from the tube. I was already addicted to reading, and so demanded equal time for the Hardy Boys and Robin Hood, but it was no contest. I sat glued to the TV in the den—by now twelve inches and the snow just flurries—from six till nine every night of the week, drinking up stories for after school.

  As it happened, Toby was the only kid I knew who wasn't allowed to watch at all. Also not permitted candy or Coca-Cola—these bleak austerities somehow connected to the fate of being fatherless. So I was always the yarn spinner, recapping each week's episodes and using the thread to play out our own adventures. Hands down, the show that provided the most vivid terrain was Lassie. Tommy Rettig as Jeff, Jan Clayton as Mom, George Cleveland as Gramps—I can see the credits rolling even now, the names more real than the faded ghosts of High Street, cousins and classmates both.

  A thousand times we played these parts, Toby and I. As story editor, I would always get to be Jeff, leaving Toby the role of Porky—second banana, without a question. Porky lived on the next farm down the road, and besides his girth and slovenly appetite, he was notable for his breathless running and dogged loyalty to Jeff. But since Toby never actually saw the show and carried no extra weight himself, his stage name never bothered him. The canine role was given by default to our golden cocker, Skipper, no hunter and surely no warrior, so we all had to do a little stretching.

  What is it, girl? I think she wants us to follow her. And with that we'd be off through the fields and woods, rescuing children from wells and corralling runaway palominos. No dark edges, as I remember, good family viewing, every crisis wrapped before the last commercial. It would be soon enough that I'd want to be doing dirty things with Tommy Rettig, but that would come after my own blood initiation into the carnal. Meanwhile, the inseparable afternoons with Toby were the last to have the gone-fishin' texture of Boy's Life. Before Toby joined the Cub Scouts, with those sugar-free teeth of his, and before I became a wanton slut.