Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  The immensity of Antigone's grief for her brother, burying him in defiance of the king. "Why, why does she do this?" Fitts would plead with us. "Doesn't she know she's going to die?" Coaxing from us a halting grasp of the fight between conscience and law, man and the state. Radical stuff—from the Latin radix, for root. Then he'd recite it in Greek, from memory, Antigone's dirge, while we followed along in English: O tomb, O marriage-chamber...

  He would have us so rapt, or me anyway, that we all forgot that he never rose from his chair or wrote on the blackboard. Because he was brutally disabled, some kind of degenerative muscular disorder, MS maybe. He'd park his car in the bushes behind Bulfinch Hall, then come in the basement door to his classroom, propelling himself on crutches with arm clamps. Stupid useless legs, just like my brother's. And though nobody ever, ever made fun of Fitts's shaky walk—too much in awe of his mind—it did tend to make people shy and look to the side.

  But not me. Ten years living with Bobby had taken all the weirdness away from the specter of disability. Physically challenged, differently-abled—the new euphemisms are not just phrases but a recognition of life force, the dispassionate second nature that gets the disabled from room to room. So I'd walk right next to Mr. Fitts, chattering like a bookish magpie, while he made his slow way to his car. And we'd drive over to George Washington so he could pick up his mail in the faculty room, a far better ride than Apollo ever got in Nindle's T-Bird. Because I knew his son and daughter from grammar school, I'd ask about them sometimes—anything to get the great man to talk. I don't doubt I was insufferably fawning, with my small and earnest questions, but Fitts was ever-patient and wry, and encouraged me in my reading.

  After that Latin play the year before, I'd sworn never to memorize another line of a dead tongue. But under the spell of Antigone and the fire that breathed through the ancient texts of Fitts's class, I volunteered again to take the lead. "Tried out" would imply that anyone else wanted it. This time I was stuck with eight hundred lines of classical Groucho, another comedy of Plautus called The Captives.

  I don't remember a moment of it now, a plot so twisted and turned, I could hardly follow it then. The pictures that survive, however, show the scholarly pains taken by Dr. Rohmer, our director as well as my Cicero teacher. Enormous painted backdrops of a Roman town, and our motley troupe in gaudy capes and tunics out of Spartacus. One of which gave a side-slit view of my unmuscled body in a skimpy loincloth—necessitating a constant vigilance on my part, so as not to show my slit side to the audience.

  What I recall with a flush of pleasure still is that Mr. Fitts reviewed it on the front page of The Phillipian, the school weekly. The Latin was as alive to him as the demotic South Boston slang he fell into with such relish. He got all the jokes—practically the only laugh in the house. And when he praised the comic bewilderment of my performance, I felt as if a direct line had been drawn between me and the theater festivals of fifth-century Athens, Antigone on opening night.

  From this vantage I think it was those Latin plays that got me into Yale. I certainly wasn't any great shakes as a scholar in Classics, given the fact there were boys taking both Latin V and Greek IV, the lofty heights of Ovid and Sappho. But the interviewers from Harvard and Yale were suitably nonplussed by my drama career—"You mean it was all in Latin?" And thus I managed to fill some rarefied slot in their calculations, as they rubber-stamped admission to the whole Andover hockey team.

  Our triumph with The Captives in the provinces was shortlived, however. Mid-winter, Dr. Rohmer suddenly vanished from Cicero class. A younger instructor took over, as Rohmer and his wife and kids were hustled out of the dorm he supervised, a moving van right behind them. The story came to me in unnerving bits and snatches—how Rohmer had taken to giving backrubs to certain of his seniors, and one night went too far. I knew exactly who the victim was, the tennis prince with the flawless line of hair bisecting his torso from chest to crotch. He was close to the top of my own pantheon, a gentle-spoken youth who wore his Apollo laurels with appealing modesty.

  For his sake the gossip was kept to a Marine-rigid minimum. But the lesson was devastatingly clear, even in the stunned silence that sealed off the scandal. You could throw your whole life away by a single wrong move, a hand that lingered too long on the buttocks. Even marriage was no security. There was one taboo that brooked no violation, a warning to the Nindles of this cloistered hothouse world to back the fuck off.

  My father would pick me up late every night behind the chapel, since with all that history to read I never left the library till it closed. We didn't talk about anything much, but nothing felt wanting between us either. I remember the night he told me Nana was rushed to the hospital, a blood clot in her leg. All that week I walked from the library to the chapel, tensing to hear the morbid update. She might lose the leg—they were trying to save the knee—they'd had to cut mid-thigh. By Friday she was amputated, and I still had Saturday classes and a history monthly on Monday. I no more thought of mentioning the tragedy to anyone at school than I had my brother's brush with death. It would have been calling the wrong attention to myself. This, mixed with a curious shame about coming from such a messy family.

  One Sunday in the winter, I was taking a break from homework—leafing through Muscleboy with a boner while Judy sang on the stereo, speaking of curious mixes. My mother walked in without knocking, and I managed to slip the magazine under the album cover, but guiltily. The swelling in my pants I covered by hugging my knees. Whatever she'd come in to say was quickly settled, but clearly I was hiding something. Her eyes darted to the album cover, and she inquired with a grisly attempt at empathy, "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

  Now honestly, what else could I have been hiding except a hard-on and some porn? State secrets? In a flash the two of us were back to being out of our depth, and I was ten instead of seventeen. What is the etiquette, after all, of walking in on your son's jackoff session?

  "No," I answered succinctly, but knowing that we'd just picked up the interrogation of seven years before, the question still unanswered: What were you doing with Kite?

  A moment of prickly standoff, then she said, "You can always talk to us, Paul.” Us, this time. The beginning of recognition that Dad was the one who ought to be doing the talking. As soon as she left, I stuffed the magazine in the back of a desk drawer, where I kept the omnisexual stash of Tomorrow's Man and Playboy. I had nothing to say to either of them, but felt dirty all the same at almost being caught red-handed.

  And, the next night, walked unthinking from the library to the chapel, having put the whole thing out of my head. I got in the car, Dad and I exchanging the usual laconic pleasantries. Then he said, "There's something we have to talk about. Your mother was cleaning your room this morning..."

  Hunkered against the car door in the dark, I could see her methodically tearing my room apart, going through everything till she found the evidence. I reeled from the violation as Dad went haltingly on. "There's nothing wrong with those girlie magazines," he declared. "That's perfectly natural, you're almost a man. But the homosexual ones... that's not good."

  I don't think it went any further than that, no hellfire and damnation. It seems almost decent in retrospect, compared to the ugliness and disownings that have rung down on my brothers and sisters, killing off parent and child for good. I nodded and agreed politely, every nod producing a thousand more miles of distance, from him and from myself. The only thing I would learn from this was to hide the evidence even better. And so with a mutual promise that I could always talk to Dad if I wanted, about anything, we rode home in the dark.

  The seniors got the word on college April 15, D-Day in the mailroom. Three letters waited in my box: Harvard, Yale, and Brown. I ran out into the courtyard by the Drama Lab and tore them open one by one—all yes. It still amazes me, the stifling assumption of privilege that advised me to apply nowhere else hut these three, with Brown as my "backup." I graduated eightieth in my class, ordinary in every way except fo
r my secrets. Not to say I wasn't insanely glad about winning the triple crown. But ten years later, when Roger told me how it broke his heart to open those rejections from Harvard and Yale—and he smarter than I by a factor of ten—I developed a bad aftertaste for the politics of entitlement.

  The politics were obvious enough, even at the time. I was in a delicious quandary, not knowing which way to go. For some reason I never went to have a look at any of the three, though Harvard was only a half-hour away. Still a village boy at heart, for whom the distance between home base and anywhere else was immeasurable. Believe it or not, I was leaning toward Yale over Harvard because they were giving me more of a scholarship—$1600 a year versus $1550. So my future was riding on fifty bucks, when I got a note from the Dean of Students asking me to come in.

  This crusty presence had never so much as smiled at me in four years. Meekly I sat down across the desk from him, and he peered at my name on the folder before him as he effused about my three acceptances. And which way was I leaning? Harvard or Yale, I told him politely, but probably Yale. He tutted and scoffed, drawing off his bifocals.

  "Paul, I think Brown's where you belong. Harvard and Yale are too... too much pressure. Brown's what you want."

  Trust me, as they say in Hollywood. The check's in the mail; I won't come in your mouth. I don't think I've ever had such an instant cold-blooded realization that I was being railroaded. He wanted my Yale slot for one of his waiting-list boys, one of those second-string hockey Apollos who hadn't quite made the Ivy team. Deals were being cut. Every purring screw-job I've ever been on the wrong end of, wreathed in Cheshire smiles, always brings me back to that bright May morning when Dean Dunham tried to take Yale away.

  "Yessir," I murmured politely, salaaming as I thanked him for his advice and scuttled out of there. And went right to the library, cutting French, to fill out my Yale acceptance form before Dunham or anyone else could sell me down the river.

  Which left only graduation and goodbye. The seniors spent the last few weeks working on their tans and deciding whom to room with the following year. None of the forty-three going to Yale was a friend of mine. Francis was bound for Georgetown, Philip for BU. I told myself I'd be better off starting college without the prep school ties, a chance to have the slate wiped clean. I played no part in the final sentimental burst of camaraderie that charged the green and vivid air of spring. The last teaming of Apollo and Dionysus, hurling their frisbees and pranking the trees with toilet paper streamers. I ended as I began, an outsider—if anything, relieved that I had made it through without being exposed as a queer. No one needed to say goodbye to me, who was hardly there in the first place.

  So I was flattered when they asked me to be in the senior class play, a traditional spoof put on for parents and faculty the night before graduation. The boho Macbeth was directing, a sendup of Melville called Moby Reltney. I never quite got the joke here, as usual too shy to ask. "Reltney," I think, was a code word for erection. The stage was the deck of the Pequod, with a cast of dozens recruited from the ranks of Apollo and Dionysus. Under the guise of satirizing the elaborate symbolism of Moby Dick, we were doing a riff on our own sexual randiness. I think.

  They gave me the part of a stowaway, a foppish prig called Jonathan Swope von Krohn. The crew of macho sailors takes an instant loathing toward the intruder, teasing his fussy manners and finally prodding him with a harpoon to walk the plank. By then I thought of myself as a serious actor, and thus learned my lines word perfect, working up a portrait of insufferable effeteness. There was only one small problem: John Krohn was the name of a boy in our class. A gangly lad from Texas whose high-pitched breathless voice and slight sashay suggested a sort of Ray Bolger scarecrow without the straw.

  The more we rehearsed, the more I understood that they wanted me to play John Krohn himself, and that the strutting boys in pirate clothes were lynching this homo because he gave them the creeps. I felt horribly uncomfortable now, but trapped as well, too wimpy to raise an objection or walk away. It was bad enough the director kept pushing me to mince more, an act too dose to my deepest fear, but the brutal identification with an actual boy was dismaying in the extreme. I kept thinking that John Krohn and his parents would be out there in the audience, too hurt to laugh.

  But I went along with it night after night, letting the sailors sneer at me as they sent me over the side to the sharks. The performance was only three or four days away when the yearbook came out. Each of us seniors went to pick one up in the mail room, along with a gold class ring. Here was the record of all the sunny days on Olympus, the sixty-yard runs and the noble profiles, a ruling elite on the brink of manhood. Halfway through was the class poll, a blizzard of categories from "Brain" to "Best Athlete" to "Stubble Trouble," the latter a weird listing of the hairiest among us. Three in each category, nothing too mean, or so everyone would have protested.

  The category "Faculty Magnet" was a droll euphemism for brown-nose, the one who kissed the most ass. The three names listed below were these: Monette, Simpson, Monette. I caught my breath when I saw it, stabbed as if by a harpoon. I don't say it wasn't accurate, since I stayed after class with depressing regularity, determined to be liked by the grownups if my classmates had no use for me. But I felt the sting of ridicule in a very deep place, was suddenly ashamed to bring my yearbook home or have it signed by anyone. They really didn't like me, the class of '63. My outsider status had now been cut in stone, to be brought down off the shelf at every reunion, back to which wild horses couldn't drag me.

  I walked numbly through the tech rehearsal for the play, then dress rehearsal the night before the performance. The director continued to prod my caricature of John Krohn, embroidering it with broader affectations. The panic and shame reached a peak in me when I spoke that first line. "My name is Jonathan Swope von Krohn," I declared archly, bowing low to Ahab as a sailor behind me made a goosing gesture. Knowing now that they held me in the same low esteem as John Krohn, and that I was a traitor to him, as cruel as any boy who'd voted for me twice.

  On the afternoon of the performance we had a graduation run-through, the senior class led to the chapel by a bagpiper in kilts. Then we practiced walking out onto the Great Lawn, where the next day we would make a vast circle two hundred and forty strong, as our diplomas were passed around from hand to hand. My estrangement from the group was total, every face seeming to wear a final smirk at my new nickname, which stuck like a magnet itself.

  I had no plan at all to counter my defeat. I showed up on time at the dressing room, wearing my three-piece Krohn suit while the other boys got themselves up in sailors' rags. I held myself apart from their antic laughter, dreading the curtain's rise, powerless to stop the mockery. It wasn't a real decision. It's just that push finally came to shove. I sashayed out on deck between two burly sailors who'd found me under a lifeboat. All around were groans of sneering distaste, as the Pequod's crew took my measure. I bowed as rehearsed to Ahab. But when I said my name, I grabbed for the Irish brogue, mangling every syllable and saving John Krohn by the skin of his teeth.

  And that is how I left the place—gay in every respect except my dick, thrown to the sharks by my classmates. But with one tiny victory on my side. For once in my life, pushed to the wall, no matter how much I was no one myself, I'd moved to take the bullet for a brother.

  Four

  Audieris in quo, Flacce, balneo plausum,

  Maronis illic esse mentulam scito.

  —Martial (c. 40-104 A.D.)

  LUX ET VERITAS

  You ask at the Baths why all this sudden applause?

  It's their habit, Cabot.

  Another Yale type has stepped out of his drawers.

  —tr. Dudley Fitts

  ASSUMING THE JUDGE'S THREAT WAS REAL, I was lucky to get to Yale at all. That final summer before leaving home I worked at Nick's for the last time. I knew in my bones I was bound for a one-way trip, that as soon as I hung up my apron in the closet by the ice-cream maker, I would forfeit the
inside track on life in a small town. That strange amalgam of Norman Rockwell folksiness and the quiet desperation of Winesburg, Ohio. Vinnie O'Connor, having dropped out of Andover High at sixteen, was already picking up garbage door-to-door in his own truck, his bully days behind him. And I knew every bachelor and old maid on sight—the sensible shoes and the rubbers for rain, that wincing sense of apology for their very being. Going no place, the end of the line.

  But if I was about to engineer my flight from same, I was more overwhelmed than I'd freely admit, especially to myself. I spent most of my working days with Alex, and after work as well, a ritual stack of records on the turntable, Oklahoma to Candide. Alex, whose high school C's were making it unlikely that he could take the college route of escape, was already talking cosmetology and hair. But not at the local level, please. His sights were on Madison Avenue and Beverly Hills, centers of style and chic, and not "this Ann Taylor woolen bullshit."

  For all his queenly dish, or maybe because of it, Alex had a much more confident feel than I of a world out there to conquer. He had been noisily defying for so long his father's Greek ideal of manhood. "My son is a girl!" Nick would bellow as if accursed, Alex shaking his pompoms in retort. I can't say I actually envied him, but his raw, confrontive style had a certain antic charm about it. He was a drag queen without the dress and makeup, a caricature of a sissy, over the top in a town that had never seen genderfuck at all. Consequently the bullies gave him a sort of theatrical clearance.