Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Awful poems, but let that go. You have to start somewhere, and I started by mimicking everyone I'd read with Brooks and Hollander. A little Waste Land, a pinch of Hardy, a sprinkle of Frost. I remember them as fairly excruciating, hadn't reread them in twenty-five years, until just now. They are infinitely more appalling, sub-literate almost. Two pompous, oracular poems in several parts are featured in The Spider's Web of March '65, the college's in-house literary rag. Suffice it to say my vision hadn't notably advanced beyond the shepherdesses of my juvenilia. I can only hope I'm the last one who still has a pack-rat copy, even as I consign it to the flames.

  Oh well, one verse. This being Part III of Fragments from the Catacombs, by Paul Monette '67, though Mr. Monette hadn't the first idea what catacombs were.

  The Rites for the Ceremony of the Burial

  Ring around the rosy

  Do you think that I want my eyes cut out

  Like an Andalusian dog?

  But would I marry my mother?

  Yes, I must upset the balance

  I won't die a traitor

  Take the razor Antigone

  I don't need a cigarette

  The subject of which is Eliot, I guess. (Fear death by imitation.) Plus a recent obsession with Euro-cinema, courtesy of the Orange Theatre, Buñuel and Truffaut double-billed. The incest trope is all my own, alas, and still six years to go before washing ashore at a therapist's.

  It wasn't so much the poems anyway. What was necessary was to see myself as an artist, so that my growing sense of isolation and depression at least had the cachet of a Higher Calling. I never stopped thinking about the quandary of wanting men and feeling incapable of acting on it. Fifty yards from the York Street entrance to the college was a cocktail lounge with black-painted windows and a dim blue bulb over the door. The Blue Note was New Haven's most infamous fag bar, the gate of damnation and object of countless jokes and hexes by Yalies. I was terrified of even walking by it on the way to the A&A Building, or glancing at the semi-porn in the window of the dirty bookstore beside it. The only outlet I had for the torments of my affliction was poetry, where I could conceal the subject—or thought I could—in the caves of metaphor and monologue. Until I came out nine years later, clear was the last thing I wanted my writing to be. Poetry served as a sort of intellectual wallpaper to brighten up the closet.

  If you were looking for a temple of art, the Art & Architecture Building of Paul Rudolph was Yale's most controversial new addition. A primal example of the New Brutalism, defiantly non-Gothic as it faced off against the dreaming towers of the university. It was fashioned of raw poured concrete, grooved like fingermarks in wet clay, with shells and stones embedded in the surface like a cross section of the Pleistocene. In its bowels was the orange-carpeted library where I studied Kandinsky and Frank Lloyd Wright. In the castle keep of its towering central space, I went to hear Chagall and Louise Nevelson. Somewhere in there, Josef Albers was teaching a master class.

  The A&A crowd was even scruffier than the drama crowd, more in-your-face bohemian and fervently iconoclast. Two guys in my class were going for a degree in architecture, and they brawled over lunch and dinner about the arcana of urban planning and solar power. I loved mixing it up with them and watching them build their toothpick and Popsicle models, for they kept the same night-owl hours I did. I'd sit in the corner of Cody's studio, slogging through a Victorian novel while he did elevations. Then we'd head out for coffee at two A.M. in an all-night diner, soulfully trading aperçus about Life and Art and being true to your vision.

  It was Cody and Burke, my two architects, who took me along to the experimental film series at the A&A. Most of which were about as exciting as watching paint dry, the maddening stasis of Warhol's Empire and other home movies of the art elect. But I remember the shock of recognition when Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising swaggered onto the screen: muscles and jackoff and Attitude to burn, the erotic charge of the Harley outlaw. It rattled my cage profoundly—and even more so afterwards, when Cody and Burke, both so unrelievedly straight, wrestled for hours with the movie's homo kinks. I remained mute, still so starved for images of the male erotic, and all the while fantasizing a walk on the wild side with Cody and Burke.

  I could only dimly articulate it then, but I think I believed that Art would give me entry into a no-man's-land where the laws of straight no longer applied. And that once I touched the soul of another artist, a comrade in arms, the bodies would fall into place like the folds of a garment, twining us in a passion of the flesh. Pretty high-falutin', and an awful lot of effort just to get a man to go to bed with you. And seduction by soul-merger didn't even work, I would soon discover, because it was all in my head. But the only other way would've been to ask a man point-blank, and that I could never do.

  At least I knew I wanted it, however beyond my reach it seemed. More than anything I dreaded becoming one of the bachelor academics who lived in the college and took their meals with us students. Unfailingly nice and cerebral, passionate about small things like the rules of the Senior Common Room, these professorial live-ins could always be counted on to RSVP yes, ever available as a fourth for bridge. To a man, they were queer but tastefully detached, with highly evolved opinions about Burgundy vintages.

  And yet they were very good to me, the bachelors of Jonathan Edwards. The college Dean invited me several times to his country house in Killingworth, long tramps in the woods with his spaniels, and martinis by a roaring fire in his converted mill. No question of sexual advances, ever. He was much more interested in teaching me how to listen to Verdi and how to whip up a Béarnaise. Sometimes there was a young historian there as well, polishing up his dissertation and having his portrait painted by yet another of the Dean's overnight companions. I don't think anyone slept with the Dean, or that the painter slept with the historian. There were lots and lots of guest rooms, and everyone slept alone. At breakfast you'd regroup for more bright chatter, and a little Callas to go with the bowls of dusky French coffee.

  As sophomore year ended, Cody Williams and I decided to room together in the fall. I liked the downtown feel of that, the architect and the poet. Already I romanticized him mightily, with his curly red hair and his paint-flecked hands. The whole package seemed very artistic, somehow: the clouds of smoke around Cody's drafting table as he puffed through his nightly pack of Camels, the wine he drank straight from the bottle, and especially his brooding sullenness. In the back of my mind I may have had us moving by slow, inexorable inches toward the bed, but it didn't feel like a crush going in. It felt like a joining of muses.

  I'd wanted to go to California again for the summer, but the Bronners were off to Europe, and I needed to make some money. I landed a job at the Mount Pleasant Hotel in northern NewHampshire—a vast ocean liner of a place, white clapboard, Edwardian grand. I went up with the promise of a waiter's gig, then found out when I arrived that the only job left was "bread boy."

  Danish in the morning, rolls at lunch and dinner, carried in a stainless breadbox that hung from a strap around my neck like a mute accordion. I had to be at the bakery by six in the morning and served my last roll at 10:30 P.M. Between meals I ran the coffee shop, which was wedged between the hotel's nightclub—Borscht Belt shtick and ventriloquists—and a small illegal casino, two slots and a green felt table for craps.

  Altogether a nineteen-hour day, for the coffee shop stayed open till the last wheeze of the last waltz had sounded in the nightclub. I had no friends among the staff, most of whom were migrant types who worked in the Florida winter-resort circuit and drove up north for the summer. The majority doubled at two or three jobs, as I did, and our brief meals in the workers' basement cafeteria were about as sociable as dining in prison.

  My human contact was limited to the small-potatoes gangster who ran the mini-casino. Hearty and self-important, rolling an unlit stogie between his lips, he'd fire off opinions at me about how Harvard and Yale had fucked up the country. The cover for his gambling operation was a cigarette and ca
ndy counter. The dice table was fitted on rollers and slid under the counter when state police were on the premises. The slots were quickly stowed in a closet. Every Monday I'd watch the state troopers come in for a Hershey bar, smiling and chewing the small talk as the candyman counted out their cut. Tidy little piles of hush money.

  The luridness of the scene was doubtless heightened by the fact that I was reading Flannery O'Connor. My only quiet time was midafternoon in the coffee shop, immersed in the peacock world of O'Connor's grotesques, the flagellants and Bible hucksters. It put a certain sideshow spin on the cast of characters that wandered in: the chubby teens who wanted to cram in one more hot fudge sundae; the "talent" rehearsing next door with the house lights on, polyester clones of Steve and Eydie; the women in rhinestone shades feeding quarters into the slots, rhythmic as a toll booth. Lonely and disconnected, I relished every seedy tableau the hotel threw my way, the pathos and the grift. If nothing else, it was good material.

  One Saturday night the headliner was a hypnotist in tails, with a lollipop blonde as assistant. I could watch the show from the doorway of the coffee shop. At one point he had a half-dozen people from the audience up on stage, sagging open-mouthed in their chairs, in full trance. He got them squawking and mooing like barnyard animals, standard stuff, but the audience was eating it up. Suddenly his antic tone changed, and he started heaping abuse on them. Screaming incoherently in their faces—making them writhe, trapped now in a nightmare. Very quickly it stopped being funny. The audience catcalled in protest, and the hypnotist turned, staring in panic, seemingly lost in a trance of his own. Then he bolted offstage and ran out of the club, pursued by the pleading blonde. They lurched by me into the empty coffee shop.

  Everyone thought it was part of the act, if an egregious lapse of taste. A moment later Mrs. Gold stalked in, the scrappy little Barnum-and-Bailey owner of this stationary ship of fools—more Leona than Leona, as the French say. She berated The Great Bamboozle and demanded that he cut the crap and go untrance her guests. I suppose she was worried about lawsuits. But the hypnotist was clearly having some kind of breakdown, sobbing now and curling into a fetal crouch in the booth. The hotel's doctor was summoned—a dipso vet whose hands trembled uncontrollably, like Peter Sellers in The Wrong Box.

  It was fabulous, as if Flannery herself were inventing it. We coaxed and soothed him and fed him chicken soup, while in the club the MC with the game-show pompadour tried to keep the crowd in check, about as amused by now as steerage on the Titanic. It took almost an hour to woo the hypnotist out of his "crisis of sensitivity," as the bimbo called it, but only after Mrs. Gold had sweetened him up with a two hundred dollar bonus for the weekend. So I never could be sure if the Jekyll-and-Hyde thing was a fake or not, and I loved not being sure.

  Maybe it was that window on the grotesque that finally broke my celibate resolve. I knew one of the waiters couldn't take his eyes off me, and at first it gave me the creeps. Lonnie was too flamboyant by half, smashing plates in the kitchen and shrieking at the cooks if the food was slow. He must've been in his forties, with a Southern delivery my mother would have called "sissified." Wide in the hips, so that he flounced when he led the waiters' parade every Saturday night with the flaming Baked Alaska. Whenever he had to steer me and my rolls to one of his tables, Lonnie would linger a hand on my shoulder or fix my collar, till I thought I'd pass out from the Aramis.

  But I let it happen, even though he repulsed me—almost to test myself, though I still don't know if I passed or failed. I started being civil to him, in a low-key sort of way, and he all but wagged his tail in response. We lived down the hall from each other in the tarpaper boardinghouse that lodged the transient workers. In the head in the morning, Lonnie would comb his three hairs again and again, so he could watch me shave at the next sink over. I began to feel this strange detached power over him, all the more thrilling because I had no emotion invested in him, except contempt.

  In other words I cockteased him in cold blood, to see what he would do, and then what I would do. Everything that rises must converge, as O'Connor had it. On the night of the Fourth we were all on the great verandah that girdled the hotel, staff and guests together as we watched the fireworks burst over the golf course. "Like Mardi Gras," a voice murmured beside me, and I turned and gave Lonnie a taciturn smile. Nervously filling the silence, he began to chatter excitedly about his years in the French Quarter, where he'd had star billing in a drag show.

  My skin crawled; at the same time I was fascinated by the lower depths of it all. I kept thinking with dark irony that exactly a year ago I was belle of the ball at the Bronner Ranch. Sure, I told Lonnie with brusque indifference, I'd come over later and look at the pictures.

  When he opened the door to his room at two A.M., he was wearing a see-through peignoir and black bikini briefs. More than anything I remember the woodenness of my own movements, sitting stiffly in a chair as he flustered about getting me a beer and pulling down his albums. I could barely grunt in response as he laughingly ran through the pictures: the Scarlett gowns he'd worn to Carnival, the Peggy Lee drag from the Bourbon Street club, his cover-girl appearance in a washed-out magazine called Female Impersonators.

  He hovered over my shoulder, brushing his crotch against me, and finally he said, "I think you're hard." In fact I was, though I could not have been more removed from my dick, which apparently had a thing of its own for Southern Gothic. Mutely I watched him go down on me, studying his vanishing hair just as I had with Raf the painter six years before. When at last he came up for air, he said, "I think you want to fuck me."

  Did I? Frankly, I had no will at all in the matter. I did what I was told. Didn't even get undressed as I hunched beside him in the bed and let him guide me in, smuttily praising my equipment. This is what they do, I thought with weird dispassion. The feeling was all in my dick; I was dead otherwise. And no technique or staying power: it was over in less than a minute. "Are you done?" he asked in some confusion, since I'd come without a peep, just the barest grit of my teeth.

  I pulled out—I don't think he got off—and wouldn't even look at him as I zipped myself together. "Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am," he drawled in his best Louisiana purr, trying to be light about it, maybe even seeing that I was racked with post-coital guilt. But I wouldn't give him an inch, barking "Leave me alone" as I lurched for the door. "Oh come on, honey," he clucked, bored with the drama already, but now I had slammed the door behind me and stumbled back to my room in damnation.

  Leave me alone. I hadn't learned any new dialogue since I scrambled out of Charles's wrestling embrace at Andover. Now, three dry years later, in a paroxysm of self-disgust, I was ready to have those words tattooed on my forehead. I foamed with hate for Lonnie and his kind, feeling violated, molested—though I was the one who'd done all the teasing. I didn't have the first idea that he was the healthy one, not I, he with some hard-won sanity and self-regard from living life bent and proud. It was Lonnie's kind who would start the Stonewall Rebellion four years later, pitching it back in the pigs' faces, while my kind sat in the dark with the door locked.

  I never addressed another word to him, staring at the ground if our paths happened to cross. After six weeks on three hours' sleep a night, I'd had it anyway. I called my parents to come and get me. They were spending their summer two weeks with my brother at Lake Winnisquam, about an hour south of Mount Pleasant. I wouldn't admit to myself that the guilt and confusion over the Lonnie incident were forcing me to run away—as if I could escape the darkness in my heart by changing my surroundings. I spent the next two weeks lying on the dock in the sun, as if I were healing. I read eight or ten novels by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, alternated between them, macho and jazz. I'd had enough of the violent sainthood of Flannery's world.

  I smiled through my mother's good country suppers, and went out on the lake with my brother in the runabout—a veritable yacht to him, who didn't need legs to fly across the water, the chop thudding against the hull. I may even have been t
alkative—but inside I felt this terrible silence. How could I want so badly to connect with a man, when the thing itself was always so disgusting and shameful? I didn't know then about self-fulfilling prophecy. All I knew was that in three months I'd be twenty years old, and I'd made love twice since puberty, and love had not come into it at all

  I went back to Yale in September, a ventriloquist's smile on my face, and walked into the propeller of falling in love with Cody Williams. I didn't see it coming and didn't know its name, since my previous hero worship of Jake and Sean had been an amorphous blur of self-abasement. For the first couple of months we proceeded smoothly enough along the lofty ridge of the twin muses. We stayed up half the night arguing aesthetics, taking a thousand breaks from the work at hand—Cody and his toothpick constructions, I and my windy Victorian poems. To match his post-Beat intensity I forced myself to learn how to smoke. By mid-October I could wake up just like Cody did, hacking as I reached for the first Camel before I opened my eyes.

  By junior year the pressure to date had taken a further turn of the screw. Men on every side of me were connecting up with steady girls. The girls came down every weekend from Smith and Vassar, with Breck hair and circle pins and Loden coats. They still nominally stayed in the Taft Hotel or the Whitney Motor Inn, for parietal hours were in strict force: no women in the rooms after midnight on weekends. Even so, a lot of them stayed over secretly, smuggled in and out of the bathrooms.

  I was the sort who would check if the coast was clear for them, puckish as Juliet's nurse, always glad to assist in the joys of Eros. I charmed the regular girls in the dining hall, everyone's favorite fifth wheel, and they were always trying to fix me up with the shy girl in their dorm. Mostly I managed to sidle away from these good offices, cultivating the role of the solitary poet, too burning with private fires and mysteries to have anything left over for worldly passion. In fact I was the college fool, straining for hilarity and a knockabout enthusiasm, thinking by ingratiation to keep them all so entertained they wouldn't probe too much my bachelor status.