Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  As for me and Liz, it was a weird concatenation of forces that brought us together. Her trio of bad-girl performances—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Butterfield 8—happened to coincide with the bee-swollen alienhood of my early adolescence. Meanwhile, Francis's parents were such good Catholics that they posted the Church's monthly sin list of movies on the kitchen bulletin board. All Liz's movies were branded with a C, for CONDEMNED. This only made me wilder to see them, thus my cajoling of Aunt Grace to take me, sharing a box of Milk Duds while the beach hustlers cannibalized Sebastian. The others I saw on my own, afternoon matinees in Lawrence at the Warner and the Broadway, gilded palaces in the old style, putti-carved boxes for the royal family.

  I was ravished by the sight of Liz in a slip, tossing her raven hair as she hissed some Tennessee shocker of a line. I loved the brazen adulthood of the themes, the dangerous vulnerability of those National Velvet eyes staring out of a hooker's face. I'm not quite sure what I identified with, but it seemed to amount to a kind of emotional drag—trying on those steamy, gaudy feelings as if I were sitting in the dark wearing Maggie the Cat's lingerie. Which fit me better than the soccer drag at school—the shin pads, the steel-plate jock, the gray and maroon Greek jersey. Ever perverse, of course, I would soon enough go the other way in spades, so enamored of gym drag I could hardly put on a jock without getting hard.

  Still, I probably would've left Liz in the bijou dark of the theater, returning to my doggy life, if she hadn't exploded into the headlines. My father brought home every night from Nick's the green-stripe edition of the Boston Record, the Hearst rag. Dad liked it because it carried the late ball scores, while I would take a break from my homework and read Dear Abby and the funnies. When Liz was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia, then underwent an emergency tracheotomy, the tabloid banners of the Record trumpeted the news full-volume. LIZ NEAR DEATH, ETC., DAY AFTER DAY OF LURID UPDATES.

  I started cutting out the stories, as fascinated by the churning flood of publicity as I was worried about the lady herself. I wonder now if it wasn't a sort of symbolic ritual; if I didn't archive all that noise and drama because it was so opposite in character to my brother's hospitalizations—which by comparison seemed almost secret. And then the Liz publicity acquired a life of its own, as the Cleopatra scandal erupted. Liz and Eddie and Richard and Sybil, every day a new revelation. I can't remember a single thing I studied in ninth grade French or science, but I still recall how much it cost to fly chili from Chasen's in Beverly Hills to the Cleopatra set in Rome.

  So began the white leatherette scrapbook. Doubtless I was the only student at Andover who faithfully read Photoplay. I still worked Sunday afternoons at Nick's, and one of my jobs was to weed the outdated magazines before the new shipment came on Monday. I'd tear out picture spreads of Liz from all the fanzines, rill I had duplicates of certain shots, like baseball cards. I got so I could recognize her jewels—I always liked the emerald set.

  Don't ask me why. Nobody ever talked Hollywood gossip around me, especially at school. Even Francis and Gene would roll their eyes at my "hobby," and they were the only ones permitted so much as a glance between the leatherette covers. Anyway, it wasn't just Liz. When Marilyn died in '62, I wore a black crepe-paper armband all that Sunday at Nick's, the customers looking at me as if I was deranged. I watched The Late Show every night on weekends—anything black-and-white with Deco sets—then told the plots to Francis and Gene in the graveyard: from the cocktail repartee of Nick and Nora Charles to the saucer-eyed bride's first sight of Frankenstein. Little did I know there were men out there, in the cities, who could quote whole Bette Davis scenes to one another, shrieking with laughter, though her movies were not exactly comedies. If someone had told me I was exhibiting a sensibility, I probably would've frozen in horror, terrified my wrists were going limp. I certainly couldn't have told you what Hollywood had to do with going to bed with men.

  One day we were laughing, the three of us in a row on Harriet's grave, when suddenly a shadow fell on the marble, and we looked up into the white-lipped visage of Mr. Brownlee, who was standing on the path with grimly folded arms. "What're you boys doing?" he demanded—but surely I've misremembered it, giving him my mother's exact line from the day of the Kite ambush. And yet there was the same tone of shocked disgust. Mumbling sheepishly, the three of us slunk away, banished to the library.

  It must have been spring then, by which time Brownlee was a three-headed misery in my life. He taught us freshmen Ancient History with ancient pastel-shaded maps, making it all sound rather like a football game that lasted several thousand years. Just out of college himself, as fatuous as he was earnest, Brownlee was bound and determined to shape us up. Compounding all that classroom rah-rah, he was one of the coaches for spring track—thus stood witness day after day to my panting last-place finishes in the warmup sprints. "Move, Monette!" he'd bark at me as I staggered past, clutching the baton, the weak link in every relay.

  And if all that wasn't enough, he was also my freshman adviser—necessitating a squirming series of meetings on both sides, he sitting beneath a grinning wall of team pictures from his glory days at Cornell. Hard to say which of us floundered more, but he certainly never asked me how or who I was. Yet the trump card proved to be his: a written report that went out with my spring grades, delivered three weeks into the summer and thus avoiding a face-to-face.

  Paul spends too much time acting silly with his day student playmates. It's not healthy. He's got a lot of growing up to do if he wants to be a man.

  I knew what the reference was—that laughing day in the cemetery—and the not-so-subtle implication too. He'd pegged me as a fairy, though holding out a certain chilly hope that I could still snatch the baton and get on with the race. I don't recall my parents being troubled by the report, too coded perhaps, and anyway my B/B- grades were respectable enough. As for Brownlee's plea that I show a little more gumption in athletics, he allowed as how maybe I hadn't found my sport yet.

  Oh, but I had. Without any formal instruction I'd finally figured how to bring myself all the way off. It happened at my desk one winter Sunday night; I was stroking my meat when I should have been studying Alexander's march through Asia Minor. Maybe I was pricked by one of the naked marble gods who decorated the text. In any case I finally went too far, and my long-muted instrument reared and shot. Ropes of foam splashed across the coast of Asia Minor like a tidal wave. I hadn't a clue what cum was, and in the ensuing panic thought I had somehow discharged bone marrow, the only white stuff I could imagine.

  For a week I left myself entirely alone, convinced I'd be pissing blood next. When no further strangeness ensued, I knew I was home free. My soon obsessive riding of my joystick was surely no different from anyone else's at school. Despite the coaches' fervid belief that two hours' daily combat on the playing field would cool our hormones, boys would be boys and pull their puds. But I had no way of knowing anyone else's autoerotic score-card, and in any case my superheated fantasies seemed to me entirely and painfully unique.

  For I had become the possessed voyeur of the locker room, dumbstruck by the Parthenon frieze of heroic male flesh parading to the showers after practice. Upperclass men, the varsity Olympians, strutted and feinted with liquid ease as they flicked their towels at one another's butts. It wasn't just their bobbing members I was fixed on, or indeed a specific carnal hunger that left me dazed in their presence, the wind knocked out of me. This went far beyond wanting to suck. Such roaring self-assurance and aching good health they glistened with, these warriors of the afternoon, proportioned like Renaissance bronzes. A musculature as effortless and natural as the structure of a flower—none of that built and studied look, the overdetermined bodywork of the Nautilus age.

  These were pagan demigods instead. In old Greece they would've been worshiped, and one day I would come to see how the closeted teachers did just that, bending the rules and even the grades for the right kind of smile from a jock. Not that the straight teachers
weren't susceptible too, living as they did in a dewy nostalgia for the days when they ran like the wind themselves. Thus was manly beauty rewarded from every side. And the manly beauties received their due and tribute with a coy half smile of modesty, no less coquettish for being unconscious.

  In Delphi and Thera, the gymnasiums where the heroes trained and worked out naked stand in the shadow of the Delphic temples, for the athlete in his prime was as close to Apollo as the oracle. But this was not the Greece in Brownlee's book. Brownlee's Greece took a long cold shower between battles, a fig leaf firmly in place to cover the privates. The pagan had no place in a world of clean-living men, who owed their fealty to the gray and buttoned-up God of morning chapel.

  Totally inappropriate, then, my fleshly worship in the locker room. How small I felt beside them. This intersect would never have happened in a public high school, where a wimp like me would've had no business being in the gym at all. It was Andover's stubborn insistence that every one of us have a go at the ball—wimp and Olympian alike—that dragged me wincing into the showers, me who hated the soft androgyny of my body, which somehow managed to be both scrawny and plump at once.

  Add to that my fear, eyes fixed on the tile floor, not to be caught staring. Then jerking off every night in the dark thinking about them, summoning them in their nakedness, but without the least desire to fuck with them. That's the oddest thing—that none of my Kite and Richie acrobatics had any relevance here. The gods were too far above me for me even to think of touching. I lay cocooned beneath the covers and whacked my meat in solitude, running the video over and over in my head, that antic frieze of demigods at play. This was like saying my prayers before bed, a lowly and humble offering to their greatness. Then, by way of Amen, I'd wipe up the marrow with a Kleenex.

  Basically that's where my sexuality stayed for the next twelve years, locked in the locker room of my brain. Talk about arrested development. At twenty-six, when I finally staggered into therapy, I was still able to picture in stupefying detail a hundred different naked bodies from Andover—my pantheon, unchanged by time, like Keats's urn.

  I never wanted to fuck them, because I wanted to be them, Had he known this, I wonder how choked poor dim Brownlee could've been as he typed my freshman report. Actually, I'd teamed the lesson of manhood, Andover-style, all too well. You either had it or you didn't—and I didn't. What was "it"? Good white genes, ramrod posture, a hearty comradeship on the field of honor, and no bees like Furies to plague your summers. I admit quite freely that I got it all wrong—that a basic decency was there on the elm-covered hill as well, trying to make room in the circle of men for more than the athlete heroes. It's not as if anyone ever acted brutish like Vinnie O'Connor. But that went right by me. I was already too far gone in being different, the hiding of which was turning into a full-time job.

  At Nick's that summer I worked four days and three nights a week, including a marathon thirteen hours on Sundays. Nick and Stavros trusted me now to cash out the registers at closing time, laying the banded bills in a canvas bank pouch for the morning deposit. Everyone in town knew me more or less from Nick's, and also that I went to school "up the Academy," as they would say in that flat laconic townsman's voice, swallowing half their words and all their R's.

  And the curious thing was, I didn't really mind the distance it put between me and the town, being identified with the world of privilege. Though I lived a wholly disembodied life at school, no self to speak of at all, nobody seemed to know that in the village. At Nick's therefore I could hold myself slightly aloof, as if my real life were somewhere else. When in truth my life wasn't real anymore in either place, uphill or down.

  My brother says he thought of me as being away from home from the moment I started Andover. He'd already be in bed when I came home late—from the library during the school year, from Nick's in the summer. He'd hear me go into my parents' bedroom to check in for the night, tossing off the G-rated version of the day's events. Thus Bob remembers it better than I, who can't recall a single occasion with the Monettes in those first two Andover years. I say that strangely without regret, relieved to learn how well I passed for normal, at least on the home front.

  I'd outgrown going to the office with my father on Saturday mornings, and anyway we had a half-day of Saturday classes. But I'd still spend Friday nights at Nana Lamb's whenever I was on vacation, always a morning walk through the woodland paths of the mill owner's estate. My Uncle Don had moved in with her when he came home from the Air Force—stationed in Barrow, Alaska with the polar bears, the coldest front in the Cold War. Don would usually be out with his poker buddies on Fridays, then sleep in till almost noon on Saturday. So she and I would have each other to ourselves, and she was the one I was closest to in the family, more even than when I was little.

  She'd make me tell her what I learned in school, would nod thoughtfully, seeming to learn it herself as I relayed half-baked chunks. She set great store by education, having been forced out of school and into the mills at ten, too many Cowperthwaite mouths to feed at home. Now in her eighth decade she wasn't about to deny herself, and always had her hat on, figuratively speaking, ready to go. Because she couldn't drive, she ran up delirious bills with the two-hack taxi service of bone-thin Mr. Morissey—whom I always thought of as her personal chauffeur, even when he was carting home stiffs from the Town Grille.

  The things she didn't deny herself were 8 A.M. Communion, white-filtered Kents in a gold-mesh case, Manhattans with double maraschinos, a proper salon wash and set, and lunch out. Any relative would do who'd run her up to Thompson's on 114 or the Howard Johnson's on Reading Road, with usually a detour to pick me up, since I was her favorite. She loved a laugh and could be quite risqué, though it never undercut her lofty dignity—what seemed a kind of patrician grandeur, though her means were modest enough. Decked out in her stylish sets of costume jewelry, she was the one who taught me how to order. I don't recall a word of the chitchat anymore, but it felt most devastatingly civilized, till the blue-and-orange formica of Howard Johnson's glittered like the Ritz. Out on the town with Nana, I was worldly, and didn't have to watch my every gesture to see if I was man enough. I felt that I was born for talking in restaurants.

  The story I never tired of hearing, pumping for more and more details, was her trip to California the previous winter. She'd gone out with Don to visit cousins in Pasadena, the first Commercial airline trip that anyone in our family had ever taken. I remember the postcard she sent of Dinah Shore's house in Bel-Air—"It's quite a life they live out here." And going in to Logan to meet her plane coming home. She walked off with an armload of birds-of-paradise wrapped in foil, specimens from Eden. My uncle had cadged me menus and matchbooks from all the high spots, including the bill of fare from the clubhouse at Santa Anita—with Desi Arnaz's autograph scrawled across the front, for he'd been loaded at the next table.

  "The homes!" my grandmother would exclaim, blinking in speechless wonder. These cousins, in the ceramic tile business, had paved acres of terraces straddling the San Andreas Fault. The breakfast oranges came still warm with the morning sun. "They live outside," Nana declared with a flourish of her cigarette, making them all sound like stars. It was the only frontline report I'd ever had of the California good life. None of this was ever connected specifically to Liz or Marilyn or anyone else in the movie firmament, but the West was clearly golden, and I knew I had to see it. Nana promised I would go with her next time.

  Sophomore year was banked in a fog of forgettable days. The afternoon tortures continued, soccer and swimming and track, as I parlayed the slightest sniffles into as many medical excuses as possible. We were allowed only six cuts per term, a half-cut for every tardiness, and I hoarded them all for sports. Otherwise we were a group of pitiful regulars at Isham Infirmary Outpatient, we derelict nonathletes who sucked up to Mrs. Furth in her white peaked cap. She knew we were shirking and yet was a pretty soft touch, dispensing three-dose bottles of codeine syrup for our nonexistent colds. />
  I started Latin that year, the only sophomore in a class of freshmen, and the drill came easy to me. By now I was wholly intimidated by the Apollo and Dionysus juggernaut of my fellow sophomores, who seemed in the intervening summer to have grown into full-blown men, while I still flailed in the shallows of androgyny. Thus did the naked frieze of my midnight longing shift, populated less now with the distant heroes of senior varsity and more with my ripening peers, beside whom I sat with unnerving proximity all day long, from English to Basic Chem to Bible class. I was far less intimidated by the Latin freshmen and so became their unpaid tutor, giving away my Caesar translations to anyone who asked.

  In a sort of grotesque footnote, pulling together the queerest strands of life, one of my teachers was Austin Singer's father. This even-tempered man was unimaginably fair, playing no favorites, time for every question. I'd watch him write his four-foot equations across the blackboard and wonder if he knew that his son once licked Vinnie O'Connor's spit. He seemed too nice, with his head slightly fuddled by so many numbers, to believe that boys were capable of torture. Austin himself, I heard, kept getting bumped from school to school, because he couldn't keep up. No chance at all that he'd ever make it to Andover and the safety of his father's ivory tower.