Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  All the while rocking Cody deadweight in my lap, closer than we'd ever been and just as far away. Reciting the poem to myself, I think now, trying to rouse the vulture in me to break the cocoon and coma of my secret. These bitter midtown tears were a sort of bon voyage as well, a plea that I would find myself in Europe somewhere. As I curled to sleep beside Cody, the first time I ever really held a man, I knew it was all goodbye for us from here on. Time to set forth alone and find out what sort of man I was, instead of being a mirror to somebody else. Swearing a blood oath, even as I clung to this ghost embrace, that I would never hold another man who wouldn't hold me back.

  Five

  THE DREAMING TOWERS OF CAMBRIDGE were so ancient—centuries of English rain softening the golden stone like sand castles—that Yale's cookie-cutter Gothic felt like a cheap subdivision. I stepped off the train with my duffel bag and walked straight to Kings Chapel to gape at the fan vaulting, as always putting the sublime before a place to sleep. I didn't know a soul. A porter at one of the colleges, eyeing my baggage, allowed as how he and his wife had a room to let, so I ended up in a thatched cottage with full English breakfast—full of grease—at five guineas a week.

  Next day, I presented my credentials at the bleak central library and found myself assigned a seat in the reading room, boxes of Tennyson's letters heaped around me. I was cross-eyed with boredom within an hour, sitting across from a gloomy nun in full regalia, her head bent as she scratched a note on her millionth 3 x 5 card, looking as if she hadn't moved from her spot since the Middle Ages. In five long weeks she never smiled or spoke a word. It wasn't much livelier down in the basement tearoom, where the scholars dipped and sucked their biscuits like pacifiers, trading sour opinions of the outside world, anything Not English being the same as Doesn't Exist—me included.

  Itchy and impatient, I speed-read the letters in great gulps, a language so flowered and courtly it seemed to say nothing at all. I was more depressed than Tennyson seems to have been those seventeen years of blubbering quatrains over the death of his friend. What irritated me most, I think, was the way the histrionics of grief masked the homoerotic. With all Tennyson's keening about home and hearth, his crushed hope that Hallam would have married the poet's sister and become a brother for; real, the whole thing sounded as stupidly unrequited as Cody and I. And the two-line refrain that served as the Hallmark Card of the age—

  'Tis better to have loved and lost

  Than never to have loved at all

  —only made me wonder with a bitter sneer, loved how? Say it, goddammit.

  But Tennyson didn't have to say it. His brand of soul fusion bypassed the baser passions entirely. Love was the province of spotless knights and maidens pining in towers, all dickless and exalted, perfectly suiting the reign of the widow Victoria. I never felt so much at war with poetry as I did that summer, the prettified sentiment and the long morbid sighs for a lost Arcadian world. For once I wanted poems and life to lead me out of feeling into experience, raw not cooked, and no more perfect phrases.

  So I played hooky. I'd planned to spend eight weeks in Cambridge and then push off for the Continent, but every day I revised my departure closer. Meanwhile I hitchhiked all over England—to Stonehenge, Oxford, up to the Lakes for a three-day tramp in Coleridge's boots. But mostly I determined to meet a man and get laid once and for all. Every night I'd wander into the Cambridge pubs, always an alien, too shy to talk and too much a spaz to play darts. In the workingmen's pubs especially I'd get stared at now and then, and I could feel the carnal in it, but just being there was the best I could do. These guys had to break the ice first, and they didn't, because of their own closets. Or else they were the kind you needed to meet in an alley, and I didn't know how to do alleys any better than bars. But I felt supremely ready to be picked up, if only someone would make the move, and that alone was thrilling.

  On Saturdays I went down to London to take in a pair of plays in the West End, catching the last train back at midnight. For a couple of dollars I could sit way up in the balcony, close enough to touch the cherubs on the ceiling. Back-to-back one day I saw a matinee of Sybil Thorndike in Arsenic and Old Lace, then Noel Coward's Song at Twilight, starring the Master himself. I'd seen or read nearly all of Coward's plays and musicals, could hum my way through a good two dozen of his songs. "Heigh-ho if love were all" was my anthem already, and I'd never even kissed a man. I don't think I'd ever put it together how gay the songs were, all those sailor sighs and "Mad About the Boy."

  But I got it that night, watching Sir Noel in a wheelchair playing a broken-down writer with the taste of ashes on his tongue. I don't remember much about it anymore, except Irene Worth and Lilli Palmer running in and out with cocktails. And that the point of it all was that he was gay and got married anyway, and his whole life felt like a lie to him now. At the end he sat on the stage alone, reading a letter from a long-ago man he'd loved; then he crumpled the letter and sobbed for what he had thrown away. I'd been expecting a comedy, frankly. When I stood to applaud, I felt as if the play had struck like an arrow in my heart, a warning not to lose any more life.

  I walked in a daze into Leicester Square, part of me wanting to join the queue at the stage door and try for a moment with Coward himself. Surely he would see the desperate yearning in my eyes. Change me, change me. But instead I kept walking the streets, wondering how to find a gay bar, and knowing in my gut that I was letting the last train go to Cambridge without me. I'd either find somebody or walk all night, exorcising the suffocating tameness that had crippled me below the waist as truly as my brother was.

  At midnight I was leaning on the balustrade above Trafalgar Square, restlessly surveying the summer throng as it flowed past the fountains and Nelson's Column. Somewhere in there was the man who would change me. Had my hormones finally reached such a pitch that I gave off a palpable musk of desire, a Yalie in heat? I didn't even notice him standing beside me until he laughed and gestured to the crowd below. "It's all Americans," he drawled with heavy irony, no less so for his own mid-western twang.

  He couldn't have been more than thirty, though older was all I could think, my pulses beginning to race at the idea of Experience. Rugged-looking and a boyish grin, a streak of unexpected gray like a zigzag of lightning in his crewcut hair. He had my whole story in a matter of minutes, though I hardly knew what I was saying. He seemed to want me to be the preppy sort of Yalie, one of the frat boys, so I played down the wide-eyed poet. He'd been in the Navy himself, stationed with NATO in Scotland somewhere, and never went home when his hitch was up. Good riddance, Illinois.

  Abruptly the fountains went off, and the bright lights doused around the Square like a stage going dark. The Underground was about to close; the city was shutting up for the night. Where was I staying, he wanted to know. Uh, nowhere. Well then, why didn't I come and bunk with him—on the sofa, that is. I nodded, as scared as I was excited, but at least nobody from home would ever, ever know.

  It was a bed-sitter in Soho, down in the basement. We sat knee to knee on a pair of kitchen chairs, drinking beer and smoking my Camels. I remember him rambling on about Bill Buckley, having once read God and Man at Yale. A quarter century later, I blow a kiss to the lovely absurdity of the enemy of my people's being present at my deflowering. I waited for the man to make the first move. (I don't wait anymore, I make the first ten). "Why don't we both sleep in the bed, it's big enough," he said. It was in fact about as narrow as a cot, but I was damned if I'd get hung up on the details.

  We stripped to our shorts and folded our clothes on our separate chairs, I too shy to watch him. We lay down side by side, and the moment he grazed my thigh I was on him like a rash. Kissing for the very first time, so hungry I frightened myself. Then he licked his way down my body and gave me head while I gripped his hair and groaned, exorcising a thousand lonely nights of pulling my pud for Cody and his like.

  Patiently he maneuvered us into sixty-nine, a position I hadn't even conceptualized before, so stunted was my
erotic imagination. He was very big, and he snarled and roared softly when I sucked him, teaching me in an instant what an animal a man could be. When he came in my mouth, it was like a tidal surge in a sea cave, so forceful that the cum streamed out of my nose. When I bucked and shot myself, hearing him greedily drink and swallow, I knew I had tasted life at last—and wouldn't end up sobbing in a wheelchair after all.

  I wanted to cry for joy but played it much suaver, not breaking the spell of the Ivy pledge. He fell asleep in my arms, wrapped about his sailor's shoulders, tracing his lats with my fingertips and drinking deep the seawater stink of us. Thinking I wouldn't sleep all night because I wanted to play it over and over in my head. But I must've nodded off, for I woke up in the dark to find him biting at my neck, hungry all over again. Hey, I was game if he was. Now that I'd entered the carnal arena, man to man, sleep was for sissies.

  Except he wanted to fuck me. He rolled me on top of him, sitting me up so I straddled his crotch, his horse dick poised in the crack of my ass, the clench of my virgin pucker. I started to balk, bells of panic in my brain, but he found that sexy and gripped my wrists. "I'll go in real easy," he murmured. "Just let go."

  Let go? After twenty years of holding it in—swimming my whole life underwater, lungs bursting to breathe. I wanted to run away then, and the only thing that kept me there, gritting my teeth to take it, was a refusal to admit I didn't know what I was doing. From first to last the pain was excruciating, but I was too ashamed to say so. Now I see it would've turned him on to know he was taking my cherry. I was still trying to be suave, a pledge who could take a good hazing. Luckily we were in the dark, suave not being the easiest thing to pull off when you're sitting on a fireplug.

  I don't think he got very far in, or that it lasted as long as it felt, about three days if you want to know the truth. Lifting me off, he drew me tight against him, surrounded me with the barrel of his arms, and in a second was asleep. And then the guilt began—that I'd gone too far and split myself in half, the pleasure erased by the violation. Hating myself for acceding to the woman's role, when what I had been so desperate for was to prove I was a man. I couldn't have got it more wrong, but didn't have a scintilla of political consciousness to save me. Didn't know about the exchange of power, the wild circle of top and bottom, the challenge two men fucking made to the slave laws of the patriarchy. I was just a scared kid with a throbbing hole.

  Is this more than you want to know?as Stevie used to say, listing the weirdo side effects of chemo, the propulsive diarrhea. How was your trip to Greece, his friends would ask. Oh, fabulous. I shit in my pants in the Parthenon. Pile of fuckin' rocks, if you ask me. And when I'd talk about this book before he died, balking at the details of my first fuck—even with the man who swam in the sea caves with me, breathing underwater—Stevie would wag his finger at me and say, Rub their faces in it, Paulie. Nobody told us anything. You tell them.

  He slapped my butt to wake me in the morning—affectionately, no doubt, but it made me cower against the pillow. He was wearing Navy sweats as he poured me coffee, chatting amiably. Asked if I wanted the first shower, hot water being a dicey business Sunday morning. I shook my head, unable to speak. He grinned at me. "You're even better looking in the daylight," he said, then trundled into the bathroom himself. I wanted to cry but had to get out of there first. I waited to hear the water go on. Then scrambled out of bed and yanked on my last night's clothes, checking my wallet to see if he'd stolen money. Frantically looking around in case there was anything he could track me down with.

  On the kitchen counter, curled like a megaphone, was the program from Song at Twilight. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my jacket just as the water went off with a groan in the bathroom. I ran up the steps to the door, clawing at the deadbolts, all the locks suddenly foreign and my fingers numb as frostbite. I heard him come out of the bathroom. The final lock released. "Where you going?" I heard him call out, bewildered and, yes, wounded.

  But by then I was running. Past all the hip and chic of Soho, windows full of glorious kink, groggy couples in leather and feathers shambling home from Saturday's final party. I was afraid to go into the Underground in case he'd follow me there, and I'd be trapped with him in a rocketing tunnel and have to explain myself. I ran halfway across the city to reach St. Pancras's Station, ran onto the Cambridge train without a ticket as it pulled out. Ran very well for a boy crippled below the waist.

  My breath didn't stop heaving till we were nearly there. My whole body was clammy with sweat, and I was doubled over with cramps. My mind utterly blank. When I stepped off in Cambridge I looked the same as ever, I dare say, a trifle rumpled perhaps. I walked home to the porter's thatched cottage and prayed that I'd get upstairs without any of them seeing me. But they were all having their full grease breakfast, the two sticky kids in their highchairs, so I had to sit and drink tea with them, nattering on about Arsenic and Old Lace, not a word about the Coward.

  Until the cramps were so bad, I excused myself and wobbled downstairs to the common loo. I sat on the can, and a great slug of his cum exploded out of me. I stared between my legs at the water, the milky swirl of life. And felt a kind of emptiness and shame deeper than anything I'd ever known. As if I'd aborted the dream of my own manhood, or coughed at the wrong moment and missed the line in the play that would have made everything right. But that's probably more than you want to know.

  I fled England about a week later, turning in my library card, never again to sit staring across the table at that nun—which was like looking in a mirror in drag. I got off the ferry in Belgium and hitchhiked up to Amsterdam, with a wired mogul in a Maserati who seemed to be trying to set a world's record in night driving. Three different times he pointed his cigar to the side of the road, showing me where he'd spun out and wrecked his last three cars. And I didn't even flinch, or I found the fear exhilarating. Sure, I was running still from my night with the U.S. Navy, sealing off my sexuality again in its old dark coffin. But the dare and the hunger hadn't died in the process, not this time. Like it or not, I wasn't a virgin, and something deeper even than guilt was clamoring for more Experience.

  On paper it looked pretty tame—the student tour of the Top 40, cramming every Rembrandt and Van Gogh I could find. Originally I'd put Amsterdam on the itinerary because of a vague and unsupported notion that it was a capital of homosex. (Why did you come to Casablanca? For the waters.) Having had my summer dose of sex—once a year, it was getting to be, up from zero—I averted my eyes from all shadowy doorways and red-lit alleys, steeling myself to walk past sidewalk bins of man-porn.

  What was different now was that I would talk to anybody. In line at the Rijksmuseum, in student cafeterias, miming my polyglot way like an interpreter at the U.N. And not just with fellow students. I'd hustle over and engage with anyone who looked alone, making him laugh but somehow not feeling the fool anymore. Even men who were cruising me, I'd grin right back at them and ask them what it was like to be Dutch. No one was going to get this little puppy into bed again soon, so there was nothing to worry about from that quarter. What I was doing instead was being a writer, getting to know my material. And letting them all know too that they were in the presence of a Poet.

  I hitched to Paris, sitting on my pack at the edges of poppy fields, one thumb out while I lurched through Pynchon's V and scrawled notes for a novel. Although the City of Light has become such a totem place for me—all bound up with loving Roger, so riddled with déjà vu that certain streets swarm with previous lives, till I'm the Shirley Maclaine of the Left Bank—I hardly took it in at first sight. I spent two days with the Green Guide, scuttling from museum to museum, but it wasn't the France I was after. I made my dutiful pilgrimage to the Rue de Fleurus, peering through a gated arch into a dusty courtyard, the very place where Gertrude Stein told Hemingway: You are all a lost generation.

  Damn right—I couldn't wait to be lost. And for me that meant the immortal South, a jumble in my head of Vincent's burning yellow fields and Scott
and Zelda at Juan-les-Pins, knocking martinis back with the Murphys and getting the best revenge. I had a very specific image of myself: baking in the sun while I wrote a novel. Paris would have to wait; I couldn't really see into its heart till I had some writing under my belt.

  The first ride, a rattling truck that reminded me of my days in the coalbins, took me as far as Lyon by noon. I still thought I could reach Marseilles by nightfall, even if I made an hour's side trip to check out a Roman ruin in the Savoie. Or perhaps it was a ruined abbey, I was very big on those. In any case I never found it, and the country roads weren't kind to hitchhikers—autostop, the French call it. Shorter and shorter rides seemed to take me farther out of the way, till I stopped for dinner in a roadside bar, no village for miles around. The rough-hewn peasants shrugged when I pulled out my map. They didn't live on a map.

  Then one grizzled farmer, mustache stiff with burgundy, shuffled over to tell me he was going to Marseilles that very night. He traced the route through Provence with a finger missing the first joint, then beckoned me to follow him out. I dragged my duffel bag after, and we sardined ourselves into his ancient Deux Cheveaux, a lawnmower masquerading as a car. But I figured I was in luck and romanticized the journey, perversely enjoying the stink of chickens and pigs that he'd transported to market.

  We went about twenty miles into the darkness—south, I assumed, no road signs here. Then he pulled to the side of the road and spoke in a country French I couldn't follow. "Je ne comprends rien," I said politely, whereupon he unbuttoned his pants and pulled out his meat, reaching to drag my head down into his lap. But I was lightning quick and grabbed my bag and jumped out defiantly, not such an easy mark as he thought. Standing alone in the drizzle as he drove away.