Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  I turned at the sound of laughter, recognizing Richie even before I saw him. He was sitting hunched a few rows up, talking to a couple of kids I didn't know. I grinned and said hello, because Richie was looking straight at me. Our naked wrestling and smutty play in his parents' house had not prevented us from being friendly at school, if not exactly chummy. For me anyway, the casual nods in the halls set off a kind of illicit thrill, to think we shared a secret other life. I took a tentative step toward the bleachers—then stopped, noticing Richie was smoking a cig. I never saw him smoke before, and suddenly felt I was intruding.

  "Hi, Paul," he said, flashing his crooked smile, but the words came out in a mocking tone that threw me. I glanced at the others, trying to pick up on the joke. Both of them wore an identical smirk, superior and arch. Whatever the joke might be, I was pointedly excluded.

  I don't know what I said to get away, some inanity about homework—addressing myself to Richie. I waved a curt goodbye and headed off across the field, with as much nonchalance as I could muster. Before I'd gone three paces, a conspiratorial snicker stung my ears. One of them grunted "Homo," making no attempt to whisper. I like to think it wasn't Richie who actually spoke the word.

  I had to trudge a hundred yards across the muddy ballfield, water seeping through my loafers, before I reached the cover of trees and was out of their line of sight. Every step a pathetic attempt at the bow-legged swagger of Vinnie's boys, somehow trying to show my tormentors that they were wrong. The pain in my chest was as sharp as the flush of red that burned my face, as I grappled to understand the Judas betrayal of my comrade in pleasure. I'd never been able to tell him I loved him, because I knew the least declaration would drive him away. Now all I had left was my pride, to try to show him when next our paths crossed how much I didn't care.

  The pain was my heart closing. I knew now what a delusion it had been to think I passed for normal. But instead of freeing me—if you can't hide it, you might as well live it—the betrayal made me more bleakly determined than ever that no one would tempt me again. The determination didn't happen overnight, but the seed was planted. To avoid the sudden cut of a boy like Richie, I would remain barren for the next ten years, unseducible and impassive, defying anyone to prove that Paul Monette was queer.

  My bridges were burned in Andover, that much was certain. I dutifully finished the last few weeks of school, nodding and pleasant as ever, even to Richie—especially to Richie. If anyone noticed a difference in me, it was in the courtier department. The Noel Coward breeziness, the fawning attentions on pretty girls, the standup routines at dancing school—all of it started to mute and dissipate. My prattling subdued, my eyes cast down, I attracted as little notice as I could. In a word, I turned invisible again, but even more invisible than when my brother was born, for this time I chose it.

  So I had come up with the right mask after all, to see me through the journey up the hill to prep school. In the process I thought I could leave behind forever the pagan world of the woods beyond Denning's pond. My new face—meek, colorless—was almost a kind of relief, hardly worth a second look in the mirror, because hardly there at all. I would learn to be the person everyone saw through, walked through. Not worth mocking.

  That summer provided me with the perfect stage to try it on. Somehow my father managed to land me the plummest job in town: clerk/cashier at the Andover Spa. This combination grocery store and soda fountain, a stone's throw from the triple intersection of Main and Elm and High streets, was the true magnetic center of the town. A convenience store ahead of its time, long before the numbing takeover by 7-Eleven of all the Mom-and-Pop traffic. Open till 10:30 every night, including all day Sunday, a feat of unheard-of daring in a state with such strict blue laws.

  The Spa was famous for homemade ice cream—including an actual cup of brandy in every five-gallon drum of peach, thus sticking it twice to the blue laws. There was a vast humidified cigar case, stocked with everything from two-dollar Cubans to nickel stogies fit for souses and hobos. Plus the only full-scale magazine stand for miles around, leaning heavily toward the girlie peekaboo and Police Gazette, no law against browsing. By the storeroom stood a mahogany phone booth with a chair inside. The Spa was sole purveyor to the town of goods by S. S. Pierce, the Brahmins' high-toned brand name, pronounced purse unless you were lower class. In December a Christmas tree lot was set up in back, two dollars or three apiece, depending on the height. And always in the front window were laid out white-pine crates of pristine fruit, each piece wrapped in green tissue, the very best in town.

  The fruit was a sort of immigrant's link, since the Spa had started out as a two-man fruit store, cobbled together at the bottom of the Depression by a pair of Greek brothers just off the boat. Nikos, the surviving brother, still ran the whole operation with a fiercely patriarchal hand, and indeed the Spa was never called by its proper name at all. The whole town knew it as "Nick's." Though Nick himself had grown a bit rickety by the time of my tenure there, he could still stand up to any hood from the high school who lingered too long at the fountain or littered the sidewalk in front.

  The bane of Nick's life was his nephew Stavros, whose father's will had made him fifty-fifty partners with his uncle. Colorful didn't begin to describe Stavros. Possessed of the naughty good looks of a Greek Sinatra, as well as a pilot's license, he was a shopkeeper waiting to be a playboy millionaire. His manner was as brusque and confrontational as Zorba, his sneering parodies of Andover's high and low bourgeoisie always dead-on. Nick thought Stavros far too noisy and full of himself, and they disagreed about absolutely everything in the running of the store. Both had terrible tempers and stewed for days, barely speaking. Then various cousins and brothers-in-law would bustle in and drag them into the storeroom, hammering out a truce worthy of the Iliad.

  To me they were both unfailingly kind and protective. I started at eighty-five cents an hour, a princely sum, joining a motley crew of regulars. Behind the counter I bagged for Joanne, the day cashier—a bad girl who cracked her gum and was rumored to have pulled the train for the varsity football team. I went back and forth from stockboy to soda jerk, throwing down sawdust to sweep the floors, squeegeeing the front windows. We were four doors up from the Town Grille, so there wasn't a drunk in town I didn't know by summer's end, including the red-faced Irish priest from St. Augustine's.

  It was all such a gaudy new world, as if I'd signed on with a traveling carnival, except that this one stayed in one place. I would probably spend more time at Nick's than anywhere else in the next four years, certainly as much as I would in the tweedy halls of the Academy. In a way, it saved my life, otherwise so confused and closeted, by forcing me to mix it up with people of every stripe, high and low. At Nick's, Peyton Place met The Dead-End Kids. The Norman Rockwell burnish was all on the surface. And I who was such a model worker, infinitely well-mannered and unobtrusive, never missed a trick as to who was sleeping with whom and who got beat up at home after the Town Grille closed at night. A fly on the wall, so insignificant nobody saw how observant I was.

  All summer long they swaggered in and out, the high-school boys in their chinos and white bucks, a pack of Luckies curled in the sleeve of their tee-shirts. Sporting ducktail haircuts, they huddled with Stavros by the ice-cream maker, buying rubbers for a buck apiece, no other place in town to get them. These were the older brothers of Vinnie O'Connor and his boys, a ceaseless flood of invective spewing out of the side of their mouths, a misanthropic loathing of everything different, especially blacks and Jews. Hate was their compass, these Irish toughs, bitter to think they'd end up in the same factory jobs as their fathers, and no place to go at night but the Grille.

  I realized with a shudder that if I stayed in public school, these were the boys who would terrorize me. The tortures they could devise were surely more exquisite than the phlegm that Austin had to lick. In the meantime I was on neutral ground by working at the Spa, saved by my proximity to Nick and Stavros, the town's unofficial Greek chorus. For so
meone who already hated himself as much as I did—a weakling's body, an outcast in love, nothing like a man—I'd stumbled onto a sanctuary. Nick's was the town marketplace and school of life rolled into one, a concept old as the agora.

  Even so, I kept my mouth shut, constructing hot-fudge sundaes for the portly burghers, serving up Alka-Seltzer to the morning-after crowd. The racial and ethnic slurs never stopped, till I wondered even then if hate was genetic, an instinct like fear. Without it ever being said, I knew that queer was close to the top of the enemies list. And allowed myself to hope that the new world I would enter in the fall was somehow more civilized, not so quick to break the spirit of the different. Because there was no looking back anymore. If I stayed here in this pretty town, I'd be torn apart by beasts.

  Three

  I WAS SUCH A CIPHER in prep school, so out of my league in every way, that it seems a pouting evasion of my personal nothingness to say it was all their fault. Yet that's how it felt for years and years—that Andover ground me beneath the heel of its Bass Weejuns because it needed losers to make its golden Adonises shine ever brighter. I wandered through so lost and sad, I can't believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I would have said, by which I would've meant Everything. When Dorothy landed in Oz, the world burst into Technicolor. My ascent into the rarefied air of Andover proved to be the exact reverse, leaching every hue, till all I could distinguish were a thousand shades of gray.

  The very first morning, as we filed into assembly, the hundred and fifty boarders in my class were already fast friends, their hearty alliances set. Doubtless they were overwhelmed in their own way, but a glittering self-confidence appeared to be their birthright, even if it was all show. Whole squads of them were stunningly fit and poised, an aristocracy of the chosen, none of the sallow features and bad teeth that stalked the halls of the junior high I'd left behind. And the first exclusion was there from the very beginning: Day students were second-class.

  The headmaster had the ramrod bearing of a West Pointer, which he was, and an Olympian profile fit to be stamped on a silver dollar. George Washington himself had attended the first graduation. A plaque still marked the place where he'd planted a Washington elm, though the tree, succumbing to Dutch elm blight, proved less stalwart than the bronze. Our first pep talk laid it on very thick about the responsibilities of privilege, our duty to go out there and lead the charge for God and country. It felt almost as if we were being inducted into an army, albeit in the officers' corps. I wasn't sure what we were fighting yet.

  The second mark of caste was tattooed on the foreheads of those of us on scholarship. Nothing to be ashamed of, men, not being rich to begin with. The unstated promise of the system, after all, was to make sure every last one of us made it into the moneyed gentry. Meanwhile, the sturdy ethics of the place dictated that nothing was ever free, and so there was a Bureau of Self-Help which assigned all the scholarship lads a menial four hours a week. I drew library duty and Saturday switchboard—nothing so gross as Commons duty, serving swill and scraping garbage, nor as titillating as running towels at the gym.

  The gym was the third and final strike that proved I was a loser going in. For at Andover a strong body was the vessel of a strong mind, and two hours of teaming occupied the center of every afternoon. At the first muster of new recruits, the Neanderthal-browed Director of Athletics went through the rigors of every fall sport, from football to cross-country. Words cannot even approximate the bone-zero dread I felt, who had only played the outermost outfield, cringing at every fly ball.

  I elected soccer, seeing that the drift of the meek and the chubby was in that direction. Below varsity and JV were four intramural teams—Gauls, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons, as I remember. We chose by lot, and I became Greek for the next four years. Tortured afternoons beneath the pewter skies of autumn, running at half-speed so as never to catch up with the ball, let alone score. Scared of getting hurt but scared more of doing it wrong, in a constant state of humiliation. The real Greeks would have stoned me as a coward and sent me into slavery.

  It's true that the triple skein of fate that marked me as an outsider—day student, nonathlete, on scholarship—was borne by many others without any obvious burden. The challenges only toughened them. But it's also true that before the first week was out, the class had divided itself, by a sort of unspoken agreement, into three parts. Brains had nothing to do with it, since all of us had come in with a lifetime glut of A's. First were the Apollo athletes, effortless on any field but primed for special glory one high season a year, in hockey perhaps or lacrosse. Equal to these in loftiness were the Dionysus boys—gentleman athletes with gentleman grades, unique by virtue of worldliness and suavity. Some had got that way by being well-heeled, others by early conquest of women. They shared with the athlete-kings what Joan Didion calls the conviction that the lights would always turn green, wherever they traveled.

  Which left a ragtag bunch of misfits, oddballs, and eccentrics. Among them, a pair of inseparable fat boys, called Tweedledee and Tweedledum as soon as we all read Alice in freshman English. Also a scowling stork of a boy with a green bookbag slung over his shoulder, defiantly peculiar and seeming to thrive on the snickers and finger-pointing. Then the various Holden Caulfields who found the rigor and uplift of the place embarrassing and contemptible, their bad attitude worn like a badge.

  But most of us in the lower orders were simply gray and characterless, like the mystery meat they served in Commons. Running at full clip just to stay in one place. Grinding our way through twelve-hour daily schedules, scaling Himalayas of homework, unremarkable throughout. But that was all right, because even the lowly nerds and doofuses were on the ship bound for the yachted harbor of privilege, where the dweebiest among us would come under the protection of the old boys' network. Thereupon would follow, as the night the day, a slot in the Ivy League, and after that a berth on Wall Street—entitlements as old as the Washington elm.

  I must add here that I understand that being a nerd in prep school doesn't rank high on the scale of human suffering. I didn't have to look any further than my brother to know what a life of struggle was. There's a whine in every memory I call up from the prep school years that is so deeply unappealing, even to me, that I find myself wanting to slap the faceless boy I was. As if to become my own Vinnie O'Connor, Jekyll-and-Hyde, and force that cowering fourteen-year-old to eat some spit and get a life. But how else to explain the closet I built except to describe the unrelieved perception of being less than? My failure to achieve the school's idea of manhood proved to me I was no man at all. For there was no other kind.

  I wish I could say I hated it as Holden Caulfield hated it, because everyone was a phony. But they were not phony, they were all too real, Apollo and Dionysus both, so real they proved I wasn't. And it does me no good to wonder how it might have been easier had I only been able to come out. It's disorienting, to say the least, discovering that Andover now supports a Gay/Straight Alliance. The lesbian adviser called me last summer to request an interview for the alumni bulletin. I gritted my teeth and agreed, not just so I could fulminate against the one-way manhood taught by the prigs and strutting egoists of thirty years ago. No, it was also because I knew the captive audience of alumni still constituted the ruling class—from the current gibbering fool in the White House to sundry captains of finance. All the conspirators of silence whose straight hegemony has gone unchallenged because their gay roommates stayed in the closet. Coming out in the alumni rag seemed better than never.

  Not that I was friendless, even in that first year. I hung around almost exclusively with two other day students, Francis and Gene. Both had come straight to Andover from eight years of parochial school. They had to study double-time because their previous A's were softer than most, despite the S/M flogging of the nuns. Francis was as gentle a boy as ever walked the bosky paths of Andover. The only son of old Irish parents, strict and lace-curtain proud; his long face was always dimly lit by a melancholy smile. I think he wa
s sadder even than I, more defeated by life already. His years of playing piano led to organ lessons at school, solitary afternoons practicing on the vast pipe organ in the chapel. I can still feel an ache, like an old broken bone, that I wasn't a good enough friend to him—not kind enough or true enough.

  But that is to get ahead of myself, to the place where two closets are like a pair of adjoining tombs. We laughed at least in the first year, studying in the cemetery with Gene. Eugene was much drier and altogether more aloof than Francis and I, with a bug up his ass about genealogy and the Social Register. He was obsessed by the Mayflower succession of the ancient Brahmin families of Boston, and so the graveyard was the perfect place for him, constructing family trees in the back of his algebra book.

  I don't know what we found so congenial about the grave-yard, but we studied there every afternoon between soccer practice and Math I, the last class of the day. A hillside cemetery behind the main classroom building, bordered by a crumbling stone wall and with graves that went back to the 1820's. Unless I have transposed her from some other plot of my life, Miss Harriet Beecher Stowe was buried there. The three of us would sit on Harriet's granite steps, the last glinting light of October filtering through the yellow maples, teasing one another when we should have been factoring x.

  They were both queer, of course. I suppose I knew that then as well as I know it now. But since none of us could say it aloud, especially to ourselves, we fell into infantile parody and silly in-jokes. We never spoke of sex, ever, not even in puns. The world in which we didn't exist as sexual beings was so in control, it succeeded in making us eunuchs even among our own. And though Francis and Gene would rib me mercilessly about my Liz Taylor fetish, none of us seemed to understand how clearly it marked me as a budding queen. We invented a kind of camp out of whole cloth—bizarre TV references, mixing up idiot advertising slogans as we riffed on the pedantries of our teachers. To send up the straight-arrow earnestness fed to us every day in morning chapel, we resorted to everything short of drag. We were definitely peculiar-queer, but with an edge of desperation always. If the silliness ever stopped, somehow, we'd be left with the awful truth of being homo-queer.