Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

The neighborhood kids were mid-50's wholesome with a vengeance. Play was much more organized than on High Street: twilight games of hide-and-seek, croquet and badminton in the yards. Though we all had bikes, we never seemed to ride them any farther than school or one another's house. If there was anything slightly askew about my presence among this butter-melt species of nice kids, it was my being a couple of years older. Eleven now and pushing the envelope of adolescence, I consciously avoided boys my own age.

  In part this was due to the Ball Problem: too many of my peers in the thick of Little League and peewee football, while I couldn't hit the side of a barn. But more than that I recall it as a deliberate shying from the brink of growing up. At school I was already straining to laugh when one of the sixth- or seventh-graders told a dirty joke. I never got the punch line.

  "This guy's fucking a girl name Snow, and he leaves the bathtub running." Ronnie Carew regaled us boys as we waited our turn at the jigsaw. It was fifth-period Shop, and we were cutting out leaf-shaped nut trays. "Guy downstairs bangs on the ceiling and yells, 'Hey asshole, we got three inches of water down here!' 'Oh yeah?' says the other guy, 'Well, I got you beat then, 'cause I'm six inches in Snow.'"

  I literally hadn't a clue what was meant: why did he leave the water running in the first place? Not even the basic physiology of intercourse had filtered down to me. I was still wrestling with Ruthie's got nothing down there, though admittedly I'd made great strides with Kite in the penis department. But I wouldn't have dreamed of asking anyone in my class to explain the joke, because they all seemed to know already. I had to pretend I understood. The slightest hint of naïveté, and I could find myself lapping spit off the wall. I was already starting to be more open with girls than boys, but not too much, not so anyone like Vinnie would notice. The gulf, after all, was widening, as surely as the girls split off to Home Ec while the guys did Shop.

  My nut dish, incidentally, was a travesty. Also my desk lamp, a short circuit waiting to happen. The two ways in which I was bodiless—a dweeb at sports, and closed off to the male bond of sexual misinformation—somehow reinforced each other, leaving me almost spastic, at war with my physical self. I stubbed my toes and slammed my fingers in doors. No finesse, no body English. Already there were boys at school advancing through the portals of manhood—muscling up, shaving already, even sporting hair down there, though this was only speculation till the first shower of seventh-grade gym.

  The only thing I recall about my body in those middle years was being allergic to bees and wasps. This curious aberration began in my twelfth summer, at first just a run of bad luck, it seemed. Every week or so I'd be mowing the lawn or picking blackberries, and I'd swat at the buzzing around my head, thinking it was a fly, and pow, I'd be stung. Wailing and tears and local swelling were all it amounted to at first, my mother plastering the spot with a paste of baking soda "to draw out the fire."

  Until August, when we caravaned the family to Hampton Beach, a rental cottage in a piney grove. These yearly two-week jaunts were happy times, even to one whose memories of childhood are so unrelentingly blank. I remember I was sitting on the porch swing after a swim, my baggy suit still wet and dripping. I caught sight of a bee in the morning-glory trellis, watched him doze from flower to flower. Then, as if in response to some bad karma I was giving off, he made straight for me, dive-bombing before I could move, and stung my thigh.

  It didn't hurt any worse than the others, but now I was convinced I had the whole species after me. That none of the summer's stings had been an accident, after all. A week later came the coup de grâce. I was hanging up that same wet bathing suit on the clothesline—was the color too bright?—when a wasp swooped down without warning and stung the crown of my head. My shrieks this time were as much from the paranoia as the pain.

  Within a half-hour I started to swell—all of me. The memory is quite specific still, the feeling of my pudgy fingers rubbing numbly against each other as my parents raced me to a doctor. My head was swollen round as the moon, and I could hardly breathe. The doctor gave me a shot of adrenaline fast. I remember him and my parents gaping at me, waiting for me to unballoon. I was calm as you please by then, comforted, I think, by all the fuss, and being so vividly noninvisible.

  What has stayed with me from that emergency, however, has nothing to do with bees or even pain. The swollen sensation, fingers puffed and doughy, somehow stands in for the moment I turned adolescent. Changing like an alien, my bloated body near to bursting. From twelve to fourteen I played with myself almost every day but never came—so stupid, I didn't know what coming was. I'd take myself to the edge a thousand times and stop short, terrified I would explode. The throb of panic obliterated the pleasure. Suddenly the engorgement of my penis was freakish and unnatural, out of control like my body the day of the almost mortal sting. And, as with the sting, a sort of paranoia gripped me: that if I didn't keep my pleasure in check, it would drive me over an edge of no return. As if that one stroke too many would unleash a swarm that would devour me—like Sebastian on the beach.

  Can you fear orgasm before you know what it is? Apparently so. The guilt and ignorance about sex had been accumulating like scar tissue ever since the confrontation with my mother over Kite. No wonder I turned the bees into Furies. For how many summers afterwards, just to find myself in a field of flowers would bring the phobia on. I ran at the sound of anything that buzzed—ran into traffic more than once, an eruption of horns and screeching brakes. I still run. In autumn the bees in the chaparral above my house are crazy with thirst, and they skim the pool. If they buzz too close, I dart away flailing, causing even the dog to perk his ears at this St. Vitus's Dance of mine. (Runs like a girl, I can hear them sneer from the edge of the track at prep school.)

  But my bodilessness wasn't only a recoil from adolescence. The sixth grade also marks my brother's first extended hospitalization. We were all supposed to be thrilled, as it was considered an honor and a privilege to be accepted by the Shriners' Hospital for Crippled Children. Three hours away in Springfield, down Route 9 and out Route 20, the weekly pilgrimage for a two-hour Sunday visit would bring my parents home looking hollow-eyed and defeated. The poor kid was only six, and he'd sob to be taken home when the Sunday visits were over. Nobody seemed in the least thrilled.

  I think he was there for three months—almost surely over (Christmas, because I remember my parents bringing home a virtual carload of toys that the Shriners' Santa had lavished on him. There was also the provocative news that Roy Rogers and Dale Evans had paid a Christmas visit to the kids, in full buckskin. Already star-struck, I burned with frustration not to have been there for the show. But I wasn't allowed to visit at all, nobody under sixteen was. Except once, when I drove out there with my parents through a driving rain, only to stand outside, waving through the hospital window to Bobby, the glass too thick for us to talk.

  For a while he had casts on both legs, so the reset bones could heal straight and let him stand on crutches. After that were the braces welded into special shoes. I don't recall how long it took him, months I suppose, actually to walk with the crutches across a room. Our small March of Dimes miracle, though soon enough the crutches would be only for certain public occasions, going to school and church, visiting relatives. My brother's face a ferocious study in concentration as he swung himself forward, legs as stiff and wooden as the crutches.

  Most of the time, he used what we called his "cart." This one-of-a-kind vehicle was cobbled together by Gus and Abbot, the pair of mechanics who kept the trucks running at Cross Coal. In their spare time they fashioned a bare-bones iron chassis out of scrap, with four spoked wheels. It was driven by a double lever that Bobby gripped like a crane operator, sawing back and forth to propel himself forward. Once he had his cart, he was finally free to move, and there wasn't anyone in town who didn't know the sight of him pumping his way along the sidewalks. Independent, no longer carried by Zeus.

  In time he could ride it as fast as a bicycle, his upper body brawny as
a power lifter. That was much later, of course, but even in his hospital years I don't recall ever treating him fragile. When he was still in casts, we'd wrestle on the floor in front of the television, usually after remorseless teasing from me. And I mean wrestle. I was twice as big, but Bobby was strong and lightning quick and fearless. That was the first thing you noticed, watching him negotiate the obstacle course of the walking world. You never had any sense he was afraid for himself. He lunged at life, whether it was playing baseball sitting on the ground or trundling after his running friends in his cart. Self-pity never entered into it.

  I don't think I understood this at the time. And if I did, the daily evidence of his pluck and fortitude did nothing to assuage my buried guilt about being able to walk when he couldn't. Or the helpless emptiness of being alone in the house with my parents while Bobby was in the hospital. Time suspended: nothing happened and nobody moved. I had no power to lighten the gloom, no matter how normal I acted. The string of A's continued, but I could do that one-handed now. I never lost my temper, never raised my voice. A bland insipid smile glazed my face instead, twin to the sexless vanilla of my body.

  Admittedly, I'm fighting against the evidence yet again. No snapshots this time, but a grisly poll taken in seventh grade names me "Most Popular" boy in school. Not exactly a scientific sample. And the other gargoyle categories—"Best Hair," "Best Shoes"—reveal the taste of 1957 at its kitsch peak. My popularity had to do with my driven personality, distinguished in those days by grinning verbal skills and a desire to be nice to absolutely everyone. In practice this amounted to a certain desperate chattiness, just like the days when I filled the silence around my mother's brooding judgment of me and Kite. I became a comedian and a charmer, breathlessly smart and witty, the Noel Coward of the junior division. My gawkiness and pratfalls—even my flinching wimpiness in gym class—I managed to give it all a spin of endearing self-deprecation. I could make anyone laugh, a relentless gossip, but the jokes were the polar opposite of being six inches in Snow.

  How I expected to hide being gay in the role of the clown sophisticate I can't imagine—but it seemed to work. I think even Vinnie O'Connor and his boys probably voted for me. I also understood instinctively that my eunuch's charm, utterly sexless and thus unthreatening, gave me the power to talk to all the prettiest girls. Cilia Fitzgerald for one, the Elizabeth Taylor of seventh grade, with her haughty gaze and the body of death poured into angora sweaters through which you could read the cup size of her bra. She turned the sullen young men to inarticulate jelly, so hungry were they for her delights. While I, who wanted nothing from her, would have her in gales of laughter as we sat on the stone bridge in the park that fronted the school.

  The courtier's role. I learned it early, substituting my oh-so-worldly banter for the hetero rites of passage. The safety zone of that persona would be abruptly obliterated once I got tossed into the brute arena of an all-boys school. But the courtier skills were a! ways there, ready to tap into when I'd find myself with interesting women. A dozen years later, it would be my stock in trade, when I spent two years as the world's first color-blind decorator. The ladies of the suburbs could live without color, as long as they had their regular fix of my laser wit and gossip over cappuccino.

  I loathe and detest the courtier boy, so busy being popular he doesn't know how to come. I understand that he gained me entry to myriad places, and not just to the four-bedroom ranch houses of the almost divorced, who hoped that new drapes in the dining room might hold things together a little while longer. The courtier's capering dances would stand me in good stead in Hollywood too, especially with the chronically single who supervise "development," mostly young women and closeted men. As a world-weary producer friend of mine often tells the eager youths who want a piece of the business: "You don't need to go to film school. You need to go to charm school."

  There are men who live the role of emasculated courtier without the least self-doubt. The perks of being a "walker" to a rich and stylish lady are considerable, after all. The hot-lunch program at Mortimer's and Trumps is filling enough that a man could live on toast and tea otherwise. The perfect extra man for a dinner party or a country-house weekend. It goes without saying that the husbands of stylish ladies can't abide all those charity balls and special events, for which the eunuch escort was practically invented. I came so close to being a eunuch escort full-time that I can almost taste the crystallized sugar passed with the after-dinner coffee. For men who like that sort of thing—as Miss Brodie used to tell her special girls—that is the sort of thing they like.

  I should have been finding a boy of my own instead of talking to Cilia Fitzgerald about which one of her many suitors for the Junior Prom she ought to accept. That was the most sinister aspect of my courtier's self-denial: the sizing up of straight men for a mating dance I had no part in. And then later to be a shoulder for Cilia to cry on, after she'd dumped the beast in question. A sort of Cyrano without portfolio, too frightened to admit to myself that I wanted the very men Cilia cast off. The better you get at being just a shoulder, the more unsexed you become. It's hard to know what to aspire to, unless it's Truman sitting beside the pool with Babe Paley, carping with her about Bill's mistresses as the butler brings out yet another Long Island iced tea.

  Once at least it landed me in trouble—shortly after that Junior Prom, with its swags of crepe paper and a mirrored ball twirling from the ceiling in the center of the boys' gym. The theme was a sort of Elvis luau by way of American Bandstand, suffused with the bowling-trophy glamour of the mid-late 50's. And Connie Dufault, in a smoldering strapless and wrist corsage of speckled carnations, was elected Queen, which made her unnervingly good-looking boyfriend King. By the end of the night, they were dancing so close in their double tin crowns, mouths clamped together and pelvises rubbing, they might as well have been in bed.

  I don't recall which girls I was gossiping with on the Monday morning after, or what put it into my head, but I told them I'd heard a rumor that Connie and the King were fucking. A total fabrication, besides which I hadn't a clue what fucking looked like. But worse than the lie and the ignorance, I remember, was the prissy disdain in my voice, the huff of wounded standards. Going all the way was doubtless how I put it, producing a satisfying gasp from the "good" girls, who never went further than second base, swear to God.

  Idle gossip. Not a pretty way to be popular, but a sexless boy can't help it, spellbound as he is by the carnal moves of royalty. I couldn't tell my claque of girls how riveted I'd been on the Prom King's grinding hips—his football hands stroking Connie's bare back up and down, even cradling her buttocks, to the strains of Tommy Edwards crooning "It's All in the Game." In the absence of porn or the TV jiggle and cock-tease of a later age, the groping makeout of Connie and her King was the closest I'd ever come to the raw thing, man and woman. It seemed such a small invention, to say they did it for real.

  A couple of weeks later—out of school for the summer by then—the four Monettes were eating supper on the back porch when the doorbell rang. My father went to answer, thinking it was the paper boy, and came back nodding at me: "It's one of your friends from school."

  I sauntered through the kitchen, wondering who it could be, but pretty sure that whoever it was had been drawn by my voluble charm. I couldn't make out the half-turned figure through the rusty screen, except to see he was big. Then I swung the screen door ajar, and the Prom King stepped into the breach, glaring daggers at me: "You Paul Monette?" I nodded in dumb horror. To a ninth-grade football jock a seventh-grade peasant like me did not exist. "You and I need to have a little talk," he declared with a grim smile.

  He beckoned me outside. Even in my pounding panic I knew that if I left the house he'd beat me to the ground. Instead, with strained politeness I asked him in, which disconcerted him, then led the way upstairs so the family wouldn't hear us. I took us into Bobby's room, because my room was just above the back porch, and started pleading before he could lift a finger. He'd got it all w
rong—I'd been misquoted—the last thing I'd ever do was insult my King and Queen. I was like a prisoner who spills all the secrets as soon as he sees the torture room, before the first whip is cracked. I think I even begged: Please don't hurt me.

  He looked at me with huge disgust, his eyes darting to the crutches and shoe braces. He later told somebody—I don't remember whom, any more than I do the King's name—that I had been too pathetic to beat to a pulp. He couldn't bear to touch me, I was so slimy. His only rough demand was that I call Connie and apologize, there and then. Nearly whimpering with relief, I led him into my parents' room and made the call—fawning on Connie and praising her virgin beauty while she listened, aloof and strapless.

  As I hung up the phone, the King turned away without another word, clumped down the stairs and out of the house. And I walked back to supper in a daze of self-loathing, summoning up a soulless nonchalance, and a dumb excuse to throw the family off. But the terror and debasement stayed with me for years, twisting me up with the thousand deaths a coward dies. I knew I would do anything not to fight, betray whole armies if I had to. And understood obscurely that a wheedling tone of self-effacement—apologizing for my very being—was the only way to neutralize the force of a real man.

  Later I would learn that being a eunuch courtier to a man required a different sort of groveling, more of a flatterer than a jester. I learned to gossip more carefully, more subtly. During those middle school years I also went to dancing school at the November Club, where all the jocks were tongue-tied and stepped on their feet while I soaked up the ballroom moves and dazzled the chaperone mothers. I had no friends to speak of, certainly no other boy, but I was a whiz at a party, dancing as fast as I could.

  My brother meanwhile was going to a school out of David Copperfield. Miss Marland's it was called, a single schoolroom behind a rickety gift shop on Main Street, across from the November Club. There were three Miss Marlands, staunch Episcopalian spinsters all, but only Edna ran the little school. Not much in the way of lessons, my brother says, but everyone gathered around the organ in the mornings to sing hymns. Underfoot were enough dogs to fill a Booth cartoon, and a couple of old men boarders as well, stinking of stale urine and padding about in their p.j.'s.