Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  In a way I couldn't begin to explain, Alex was defining himself more truly than I with all my school credentials. He said whatever came into his head, nothing to lose, go screw yourself if you didn't like it. Two months later I would have been mortified if any of my Yale friends had seen us laughing together, so desperate was I to pass. But in that summer of finishing life in the provinces I took a curious refuge in the camp of Alex Anestos, who might say absolutely anything and usually did.

  "Good morning, sir," he'd greet a bleary customer. "You look like you need a little Ex-Lax, or is it a Kotex?" And they didn't quite hear it, because they couldn't believe it. There was something about these manic sendups, murmured just under his breath, that suggested a marvelous anarchy. Pinning a KICK ME sign on the seat of pompous WASP and shanty Irish alike.

  Alex went with me to the mall one day, a half-hour's drive to Peabody. I was meant to buy clothes for school, but I'd been fretting that my summer savings weren't enough to steer me through the uncharted waters of starting college. We wandered around looking for sales, I wistfully passing up sweaters and jackets I couldn't afford. Without any premeditation I can recall,

  I found myself at the underwear counter at Kresge's, surreptitiously stuffing a package of Jockey shorts into my shopping bag. I think the idea was to rip off the little stuff so I could buy a sexy sweater. Unless I was simply out to prove that Paul was no longer perfect.

  With scant experience at thievery, I was blithely unaware of mall security. In the next store I took my time picking a nice pair of flannel pajamas, then dropped them into my bag. (From that day on I never wore p.j.'s again.) Suddenly a hand grabbed my elbow, and I was dragged unceremoniously to the store's office, matrons gaping at me from every aisle. I broke into a cold sweat, half fainted. The plainclothesman, who reminded me of my father, summoned a cop who formally arrested me. Both stores were pressing charges, and I was to appear the following morning at the Salem courthouse.

  All the way home, Alex tried gently to laugh it off as an adventure, but I was profoundly rattled. I told my mother with shamefaced tears. Though she was pained, she hugged me and promised we'd get through it. When Dad got home, he looked like he'd taken a punch in the gut, but as usual he was unbearably decent. The hardest thing was the drive to Salem at seven A.M., just he and I, the feeling I had of his sidelong looks, as if he didn't know what to make of me anymore.

  The judge saw us in chambers. After hearing the cop's testimony and a halting plea from Dad, he turned to me and said, "You realize, don't you, if Yale finds out about this, you're out." Now it was my turn to squirm and plead, how I understood the advantages I'd been given and would hereafter be a model citizen—a speech of Ciceronian clarity. He listened with pursed lips, a moment's silence as he toyed with my fate. Then gruffly dismissed the case, with a warning that I was persona non grata at the Northshore Mall forever.

  We drove back to Andover wilted with relief. And yet I remember being struck by the most perverse thought: If Yale found out about this, I wouldn't have to go. Unthinkable really, that I should seek a way to derail my glorious rise to privilege. I buried it rather than face it. But the incident shows how conflicted I was about sailing into the future, as well as an instinct for sabotage. Something in me didn't want more schooling, dreaded the claustrophobia of being one of the guys. Alex's life by contrast was utterly free to happen, changeable as the color of his hair.

  But as I say, I buried all that along with my police record. Yale was the next step, period. My mother and Nana dutifully sewed the nametags into my clothes, Nana's dignity much offended by the artificial leg and cane that had lately become her cross. She might have been going to Yale herself, so passionate was the vicarious thrill, for I was the first on the English side to ever get to college. The night before we left for New Haven, my Uncle Dan, with eight kids to feed, tucked ten bucks he couldn't afford into my shirt pocket. "Go buy a round of beers at Mory's," he said with a fond wink, sending the family hero off to claim his knighthood.

  The next day, driving down, we stopped at a Hojo's just out of Hartford. ("Is that New York?" my brother asked in an awestruck voice as we swung by Hartford's three tall buildings. "No," we all laughed, though scarcely more worldly than he.) My father and I had a moment alone as he paid the bill, Bobby and Mother off to find the washroom. With an unsettling depth of feeling Dad put his arm around me and said, "Now remember, don't get involved with the wrong kind of girl. Okay?"

  I nodded dumbly, seized by a rush of sorrow. Sad that my secrets kept us eternally out of phase, and hopeless of ever changing things.

  The homesick blues were intolerable that first fall semester of '63, especially because I denied them. My life in 1068 Bingham Hall was a full-time job, chameleon and ventriloquist, so there wasn't a lot of time left over to feel how lonely I was. A two-bedroom suite, with bunk beds in each. The powers that be had paired me up with a studious lad from Andover, though we had barely been on nodding terms at school. This Russell (never Russ) had already decided on Chinese Studies, arriving at Yale with several thousand vocabulary cards and a placid air that was positively Confucian. He took the upper, I the lower.

  Our two California roommates arrived in tandem: Sean and Jake, respectively a rock climber from Marin and a tennis jock from Santa Barbara. Outsize figures from the moment they walked through the door. They'd been buddies at the Trimble School—best of the West, old California gold, where every boy was required to keep a horse because it built character. Jake was third generation Trimble himself, grandson of the founding gentleman cowboy. He and Sean were smart as anybody from Andover, but not so polished, and proud of that. As to the mores and climate of Yale, everything struck them as being so Eastern, which only fortified their free-range superiority.

  I was smitten by them both inside of twenty minutes. Not sexually, exactly—sexually was the least of it. Though they were strapping good athletes and frontier rugged, they never occupied a slot in the Olympian frieze of my fantasies. I needed them both to be more real than that, or else how would they ever transform my doggy life? For I quickly came to see them as my salvation, the pals I never had among the Apollo and Dionysus ranks of Andover. I’d never been on the inside before, shooting the breeze in a bull session. Never been anyone's confidant about women.

  I took to the role with near-demented enthusiasm. To curry the favor of Sean and Jake I underwent a personality change—voluble where I'd been tongue-tied before, flattering them at every turn, adopting their sneering distaste for the East, I who'd never been west of the Hudson. I dressed like they did, took every meal I could with them. Courtier is far too pretty a term for my servile hero worship; sycophant is closer. Yet it wasn't at all unconscious: I saw my new friends as a last chance to leave behind the nothing I was in high school.

  Thus I stopped answering Francis's letters from Georgetown, sealing the tomb on our old playful style, because it felt tainted with faggotry. Till the first snowfall I'd get up with Sean on Sunday mornings and pile in a van with the Mountaineering Club, to spend hair-raising afternoons climbing the sheer faces of northern Connecticut's bony hills. Graceless and panting, biting the tongue of my acrophobia, I clambered up the gorse till my knuckles bled, all for a macho nod from Sean at the summit. Back at the dorm, I laughed myself hoarse at Jake's razor wit, becoming his personal buffoon and comic foil. He wanted to be a writer, and therefore so did I. Prose was his meat and potatoes, and therefore I took poetry.

  It amazes me now, that I made life choices for no other reason than to get in Sean and Jake's good graces. Today I haven't a clue where they live or what they've done since Yale. I realize college provides a classic ground for reinvention of self, but self had nothing to do with this. The very opposite: all I wanted to be was the two of them, burying every trace of Paul Monette.

  Bury especially the hungry voyeur with the secrets. Jake had what amounted to a knee-jerk loathing of queers, every third remark a withering bash of anybody who seemed the least bit eccentric. He'
d pout his lips and affect a nancy lisp and a wobbly wrist, dismissing whatever felt effete or even intellectual. Since there were so many closeted teachers about, Yale was fertile territory for his HUAC-style snipery, every bachelor guilty till proven innocent. And I was the first to go along, frantic to hide my own fellow-traveling. Eagerly I learned how to mock my brothers behind their backs—anything to make Jake laugh.

  But more was required to prove one's manhood than just the putting down of queers. In those pre-coed days, Yale men hardly talked of anything except getting laid, unless it was getting drunk. The best of all worlds therefore was scoring in both at once: a dream Saturday night where you'd be shitfaced from the rotgut punch at a mixer and mauling some poor townie girl. Jake and Sean were more than eager to get in on the action, pestering me to set them up with dates since I was the one with the East Coast connections. I could no more admit I'd never dated than I could my heterosexual virginity. So I invented my own modest tales of carnal prowess, cobbling details here and there from other men's boasting.

  For Dartmouth weekend I invited a girl I knew from Rosemary Hall, who arrived with a blushing pair of her classmates. I hated attending the football game, having no idea what was going down on the held, but the worst was the mixer that night. Guys throwing up in the bushes outside and a general air of male entitlement, showing off their women and making their moves in the shadows to the tawdry strains of Louie Louie. I was engaged in the upstream battle of not scoring, avoiding sex at all costs. Here my four-year schizophrenic pattern laid itself out: the requisite girl on my arm, the looking good, the frenzied round of sports and museums and parties, anything to avoid too much time a deux, the compulsory makeout.

  I wasn't unaware even at the time what a grim sham I was putting the girls through. Oh, I made up for my carnal detachment with frantic charm and witticisms, and for a while at least found dates who seemed relieved not to be mauled. But I would almost never see a girl twice, for fear of the expectations. The girl from Rosemary Hall kept writing till Christmas, and I was too frozen to answer. Every minute of a date felt like a lie, but if you didn't date, you couldn't be one of the guys. My guys anyway, whose opinion I cared about more than my own.

  For Harvard weekend I invited Missy Cabot to come down from Middlebury, spending my self-imposed month's allowance just on tickets for The Game. As Missy wasn't due in till six on Friday, I spent the afternoon out at the soccer field, timing the freshman match between Harvard and Yale. I hadn't suddenly developed a fondness for the sport that gave me chilblains all through four rotten autumns at Andover. It was because Sean and Jake were playing for Yale, and I their constant companion could get no closer than sitting on the bench with a stopwatch.

  In the middle of the third quarter a campus policeman came up to huddle with the coach. From where I sat, the cop looked like he was crying. When he turned away, the coach walked over to me, who till now was as insignificant to him as a cockroach. "The President's been shot," he said, and at first I thought he meant the president of Yale. "He's still alive. I don't want the players told. We'll finish the game."

  I don't think I could have been less political in those days. Because of my endless self-absorption and twenty-four-hour vigilance at the closet door, I never read the papers except for the theater page. The Cuban missile crisis had passed without causing a ripple in my pond. I'd only worn a Kennedy button in '60 because everyone in my family was voting for Nixon. I had no personal investment, in other words, and yet the coach's cavalier priorities offended me for the President's sake. Would he have stopped the game if the news had come in the first quarter?

  By the time I bleated the horn at the end—a 3-3 tie—Kennedy was dead. Too late to stop Missy from coming. So the weekend proceeded, in New Haven as elsewhere, to the sound of muffled drums. We spent most of our time in front of the one snowy TV in the dorm, the world reduced to black and white. And yet what I remember most is the overriding sense of relief, as Missy cradled her head on my shoulder and cried softly into a handkerchief. Relief that I wouldn't have to make any carnal moves, wouldn't have to prove my hormonal mettle. A chaste goodnight kiss was more in keeping with national tragedy.

  A grotesque perspective, to put it mildly. The self-obsession that fears exposure will grab at almost anything to keep the closet door shut. When I bundled Missy off on the bus on Sunday afternoon—just after Ruby shot Oswald—the psychic pain had bonded us, travelers thrown together by a crash. I wouldn't be inviting her again, of course, though I basked for a few days after in Sean and Jake's praise of her winsome beauty and Mayflower cheekbones. I had turned Missy into a "beard" without knowing the term, like the artificial dates those closeted powers of Hollywood take in their limos to all the openings and awards. Except in L. A., the starlets line up around the block for such an honor.

  With ever renewed vigor I went on mimicking Sean and Jake, as spellbound and singleminded as Eve Harrington studying Margo Channing. It's a wonder I got any work done at all. Indeed I barely remember those freshman courses—Physics at 8 A.M. with Dr. Dandruff, or the English 25 seminar with sherry in a book-lined study, taught by a loser who used the occasion to get sloshed like a priest on Communion wine. My only intellectual coup was to land in a pair of upper division courses in art history, Painting and Sculpture in the Twentieth Century and Modern Architecture. I had to work my butt off to keep up with the seniors, flailing through Kandinsky's theory of the spirit in art, memorizing all the blank walls of the Bauhaus.

  But I learned the collection in the Yale Art Gallery cold, forging myself a new sanctuary. What seems in memory a daily pilgrimage to the Van Gogh Night Cafe, the boiling light above the billiards table, the delirium of genius rendering, in Vincent's words, "the passions of humanity in red and green." And to reinforce the spell of art, I had two vivid mentors. Paoletti from Andover, who was finishing up his dissertation at Yale, steered me past the freshman survey and onto the upper floors of the Bauhaus. His comrade in the doctoral trenches, Peter Bunnell, was breaking ground in elevating the discourse on photography as art. I cared about being smart enough to talk to these men in their own argot, despite Jake's dismissal of them both as "fag intellectuals."

  They certainly gave me more sensitive counsel than the live-in freshman adviser of Bingham Hall, Entry A, whose roaring binges usually ended with the rolling of empty beer kegs down the stairs. This singular thug, who suited up as an ROTC admiral two days a week, was otherwise distinguished by a bulletin board displaying several pairs of pinned-up panties, trophies of his many conquests. He was also a fourth generation Yalie and pledge chairman of the animal-house fraternity. Not notable for his opinions on Kandinsky.

  Over Christmas I worked sidekick on one of Dad's coal delivery trucks, the coldest and dirtiest I've ever been. But the hourly wage was princely, and I needed the money to keep up with the social life at school, the artifice of being straight. So Proulx, the Canuck driver, and I battered our way through a week of blizzards, chuting coal to snowbound customers like Saint Bernards. We filled a coalbin the size of a ballroom in the cellar of Nevins Home, a great crenellated heap of bricks where ghostly Nana Monette was creeping into her nineties. Proulx got a huge charge out of having a Yalie for an assistant, proudly introducing me to all the truckers and jobbers in the diners. "I'm his professor of coal," he'd say.

  He also used to tell me how rich I was going to be someday—with the same grinning pride, as if I would be scoring one for him too. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve we were topping the bin at a hilltop estate in North Andover, home to the only daughter of a robber-baron mill owner possessed of Midas wealth. As we were finishing up, the desiccated husband of the heiress came down the cellar stairs to give Proulx his Christmas envelope. He peered at me appraisingly, and Proulx told him who I was.

  "Ah, you're the boy at Yale," he said in a reed-thin voice. And as Proulx launched into a shameless brag about me, the guy pulled a roll of bills from his pocket and peeled me a Christmas tip. Two bucks. I mumbled tha
nk you and saw he couldn't take his eyes off me. From local lore I knew he'd been a poor lad who made a brilliant marriage with the heiress, frail of health and mostly confined to her damasked bedroom. Now I saw he was queer. And in that Lawrentian moment in the coal cellar, I realized I would be looking to make the same pact one day, with my charm and my Yale degree.

  I felt poorer at Yale than I ever had at Andover, partly because the moneyed class was unrestrained by Yankee austerity, the iron rule of prep school. At Yale the well-heeled had cars and wall-to-wall sound systems. They put up their dates at the Taft Hotel and weekended in New York. Those of us on scholarship were something of a servant class. Ten hours a week I worked in the kitchen and dining hall at Jonathan Edwards, the residential college to which the Bingham frosh were assigned and where we would live, come sophomore year. Wearing the white coat of kitchen duty, punching a time clock at six in the morning, clearing dishes and scraping garbage—we were menials and knew our place. Our democratic liberal education, free men and equal, didn't extend beyond the classroom. The rich men's sons for whom Yale was built stubbed out cigarettes in their eggs and barked for more coffee, as if we were the help at home.

  By midwinter I'd decided to spend the following summer in California, counting on the hospitality of Sean and Jake. I couldn't believe they weren't sick of me already, but I also knew how addictive flattery is, and I doled it out with Machiavellian skill. Instead of going home for spring break, I threw in my lot with Sean and another fellow who'd decided to hitchhike to Florida. I apprised my parents of the adventure by postcard from Virginia, drunk on the romance of being on the road, a well-thumbed copy of Kerouac in my backpack. Not the last time I would trace my life out of a book.

  I think I must have been in love with Sean by then. But the musketeer comradeship of the journey ceased when we hopped a flight from West Palm Beach to Nassau. Within hours my two traveling companions had picked up a pair of American blondes on the beach, leaving me high and dry. For the next week they were lost in the throes of spring break mating, while I bummed about on my own. Somehow I hooked up with a young Bahamian girl, a fierce and exotic tomboy who disdained the blond American spring invasion. She took me off on her scooter to show me where the conch fishermen lived. Then into the muggy interior, where we watched the cane workers harvesting and sucked the sweet juice out of raw branches. Midnight before Easter, I went with her to a singing mass in a tin-roofed church, more black than white and more pagan than Christian.