Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  We walked on the beach for hours, practically to Rhode Island, talking talking talking. No, I never told her I was gay, but perhaps for the first time in my life I didn't pretend I wasn't. Between us, it didn't resemble a lie, even if I couldn't say the word. And ever after I would measure intimacy against what Star and I achieved that year. And measured what a woman was, for this was the closest I'd come since Lois Bronner. I finally saw the lie in the stereotype which had it that fags hated women. And if one of those sick know-nothing bigotries was wrong, then maybe they all were.

  In June I went to her Wellesley graduation, then drove her to New York to catch the plane that would take her to Asia for seven years. The last thing she told me was to keep on writing. Back in New Haven, relinquishing the beach house to the simpler tenants of summer, I told myself that was all I needed to accomplish that year—not to stop writing. The novel was dead in its tracks, but I had a sheaf of poems now, which I would read aloud at the drop of a hat. What I didn't have was a job for the fall, or any prospects either.

  How I could have left myself so high and dry again, with my draft board hungering after my butt, I can't even begin to fathom. This boy didn't want a future, clearly, or at least made no attempt anymore to shape it. Hurting as much as I did, perhaps nothing seemed better than anything else. There was still a vague outstanding offer from the graduate English department, that I could sign on for the full embalming of a Ph.D. But the draft board, not into Literature as essential to the war effort, told me to prepare to be called on a week's notice for my induction physical. Curiously I don't remember any fear or drama in the waiting. I simply knew I wouldn't be going. Maybe Canada would be a more congenial place to find me a laughing man.

  Meanwhile I'd landed a gig to teach at Andover's summer session—a six-week sleep-away camp for the brainy and over-privileged, but more to the point coed. For me the first time since seventh grade that I'd been thrown in with men and women together. The intern teachers were a hip and shaggy lot, unrelievedly counterculture, the eastern prep division of flower power. Most of them still had a year of college to go themselves, were therefore hardly committed to teaching. They treated this ivy-covered summer as a resume lark, pairing off for steamy idylls in the staid old dorms once their charges were put to bed. After my lonely winter at the beach, the camaraderie touched me like a thaw of passion and laughter. Overnight I became a compulsive extrovert, manic as a dervish as I ran around becoming everyone's confidant. I cast myself as a cross between a troubadour and a cruise director, keeping the party going at all costs, knowing the induction notice might arrive any day.

  Barefoot almost the whole six weeks, cavorting on the very lawns where I'd been so miserable in high school. Having seen Bonnie and Clyde four times, I wore a beaten-up slouch hat just like Clyde's and tie-dyed motley and jeans, a clatter of peace buttons across my heart. What I relished most of that summer was strolling downtown to the village, seeing old neighbors and former patrons of Nick's who knew me as the smiling good boy with A's. They looked at me, in my hippie garb, with horror and disgust, the Decline of Western Civilization suddenly plopped in their midst. It was the queerest I'd ever allowed myself to be, all theatrical gesture, my last painted dance before my rendezvous with the Selective Service.

  Not that running around dressed like a third-string rock star translated into sexual freedom. The young Turk who ran the Art Studio course came crawling into my bed one night, and I went rigid and feigned sleep till he stopped the stroking and slunk away. A week later, as I closed up the Saturday coffeehouse, the dean of the summer faculty lingered to be my cleanup crew. Married and with five children, he seemed safely outside the changeling world of midsummer, unmoved by my pied-piper enthusiasm. But that night he declared I'd driven him mad and mauled me around the Drama Lab while I laughed him away. A new twist of perversity: I liked the idea of being pursued and felt superior saying no. Driving the dean to distraction was the closest I'd ever come to those Andover jocks who used to torture Nindle with their youth. It felt as good as I always thought it would.

  By the time the summer term ended, with still no word from the draft board, I decided on a whim to drive to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. The trouble brewing in Mayor Daley's police state made it sound like just the place to take my hippie theatrics on the road. I made arrangements to stay with a Yalie I'd met that year, a freshman whose anarchic humor matched my own and who always had a plentiful stash of high-octane smoke. I half-understood that John had a crush on me, and this half had a vague notion that the political heat at the barricades would fling us together like warriors in a foxhole.

  We ended up at the wrong demonstration, nothing so bloody or glamorous as the melee in Grant Park. But we burned a dime-store flag and felt like budding revolutionaries, facing a line of Chicago cops who quivered with hate and called us faggots. I remember finding that strange, since most of the demonstrators were just generic students, nobody gay that I could tell. Apparently long hair was enough to make you a faggot in Chicago in '68. But I also felt a surge of something like pride—to have goaded the pigs to spew their poison, to know that I was its target and that they'd kill me as soon as look at me, just for being queer. I can't explain how liberating it was, not to feel battered by the hate but dizzyingly alive. And how it's only a short step from there to what my friend Mark Thompson says: "I eat their hate for breakfast."

  For all our revolutionary fervor, John and I didn't quite make it to bed. There always seemed to be a group around us, shouting to be heard above the sound system—especially his friend Julia, a ringer for Louise Brooks and the woman who five years later would finally break the coma of my sexuality. John and I danced around instead, neither of us ready to make the move. A curious paradox here: hand in hand with the political rebellion of the age went a certain omnisexual freedom, but that meant you could sleep with anyone, not that you could be gay. We understood the politics of women and color and war, but gay had no political meaning, to us benighted Yalies anyway. Even with the cops calling us fags. It would take another year of evasions before John and I finally stumbled our way into bed—the day The White Album came out, I remember quite distinctly, though he swears it was Joni Mitchell.

  I arrived back in Andover from Chicago on a Friday night, and Saturday morning found myself in a school bus bound for the Boston Navy Yard. I had marshaled letters from various doctors detailing my precious allergies to bees and penicillin, but they seemed like such pipsqueak excuses as we were herded in our Jockey shorts from indignity to indignity. A couple of the army doctors actually snickered at the bee letter. I knew and didn't know that push would come to shove in the psychological exam. They sat us down to fill out a Q&A, and there it was, point-blank: "Are you a homosexual?" I looked around guiltily, then checked YES. I remember thinking it had caused me so much pain, I might as well get something out of it for once.

  I was called to a cubicle, where a nervous Navy intern shuffled my papers and wouldn't look me in the eye. "Have you tried to change?" he asked irritably, not mentioning the word. The question struck me as incredibly stupid and beside the point, but in case it was some kind of trick I answered sadly, "Yes—but I can't." I thought it made me sound more hopeless. He made a mark at the bottom of my form and waved a dismissive hand, still not looking at me. As I rose to go, I felt like laughing, to think that military policy was so tongue-tied and amateur. I was out of the war because men like this were too scared to talk about dick.

  So the future I had no plans for had suddenly been restored to me, official notice of my 4-F status arriving three weeks later. I didn't have two nickels to rub together, having blown my summer savings getting to Chicago. Nevertheless, this was the moment I should've fled, as far as my restless heart could take me. Odd jobs and begging if need be, anything to put some distance between me and too much school. I couldn't have been more lonely, so I had nothing to lose by going alone. All I wanted to be was a poet. I'd never stopped dreaming of California since the day I lef
t the Bronners' ranch. Go, I told myself.

  And didn't. Instead I moved back into my old bedroom under the eaves on Stratford Road. Taking supper with Paul and Jackie as if I'd never left home, even keeping my mouth shut about the war so as not to bite the hand that was feeding me. I applied to a couple of teacher placement services that specialized in secondary schools, though by now it was September and every job was taken. Not to worry, the placement huckster assured me, someone would surely get sick before long, or a scandal would open a slot.

  To pay for my keep, I painted the porches of my father's apartment house, then wallpapered the fetid hallways and lino-leumed a couple of kitchen floors. A handyman who was all thumbs, taking a break every twenty minutes to jot down a line or two of verse. I couldn't stand meeting people in the street, feeling like such a loser, as if they were thinking, at the sight of me in paint-spattered overalls: But didn't he get all A's and go to Yale? Self-important despite no self-esteem.

  My brother has no memory of this time. He swears I never came back to live at home. But I remember him that autumn, freer than he'd ever been because he'd just copped his driver's license. My mother's '59 Falcon was fitted out with hand controls, and the house rang with their shouting matches as she and Bob argued about who'd put on the most mileage and who owed what for gas. My brother says it marked an incalculable change in his life, like going from black-and-white to color: that people's first thought when he drove up was not his disability. After sixteen years of being stared at, he was just somebody sitting in a car.

  You couldn't mistake the joy in his face, the aliveness of him behind that wheel, almost as if he was dancing inside. What I didn't know then was that he and Brenda had already connected—the two shyest kids at Andover High, two Lauras from The Glass Menagerie. Once they had wheels, they probably went to every rickety drive-in in the county, no wheelchair access necessary, no compromise to love. I'm sure he wasn't keeping it a secret, not from me. I was keeping it secret, maybe because I was afraid to know he'd found himself the laughing friend. Even he who couldn't walk was dancing, while I still couldn't figure out how to put one foot after the other.

  Three or four times in late September I was called for interviews at various private schools, places off the beaten track in the Berkshires and Connecticut. Four brick buildings around a flag-pole, barely accredited, ruled with an iron whim by the last of the desiccated spinsters. After a certain age you couldn't tell the schoolmasters from the schoolmistresses, since they both appeared to favor the drag of an army nun. But I begged like a dog for a biscuit, available I assured them on twenty-four hours' notice, silently praying that the bedridden third-form English master would croak so I could have the job.

  I remember driving away from one of those schools in Vermont, horrified at the thought of being trapped there all winter. I got lost on the country roads, arched over by the delirious red and gold of October. I stopped beside a lake and walked all the way around it, slogging through marsh and then upland fields. I took off all my clothes and sat on a rock in the chilly sun. Trying to feel free, or daring, or something. And I suddenly threw back my head and screamed: "Somebody find me!"

  It echoed across the fields and lost itself in the woods, the cry of an animal dying in a trap. Nobody came, of course, not even a hunter to put a bullet through my misery. I put my clothes back on and drove home in silence, to paint another porch and read in my room with half a heart. When the call came through from the Sutton Hill School, two days before my twenty-third birthday, I said yes before the dean could explain my duties or my salary. I would've mowed the lawns if he'd asked. Of course I would run a dorm of thirty-five boys, and forty-eight hundred a year was more than generous. I was on my way the next afternoon, books and stereo piled in the Triumph, thrilled to have something at all. But nagged by worry too, as I wound my way through the barrens of central Connecticut, wondering how anyone would ever find me here.

  It felt more like a reform school than a prep school, and not just because it was run by retired colonels and defrocked monks. The grisly austerity of the place wasn't so much a matter of buildings that looked like barracks or tin-tray meals of prison swill, or even the lockup rules and the petty authoritarian discipline that passed for social graces. Smallness of mind was a given, an aridity of spirit that made schoolwork feel like memorizing a telephone directory. No, what lent the place the aura of a penal colony was the sense it gave you of being every kid's last chance—thrown out of every place else, or fallen through the cracks of a bad divorce, or dyslexic to the point of bed-wetting. A school full of gaping wounds in jacket and tie.

  But tough. Never a snivel or whine, so thick was the hide of mere survival. Raw and arrogant, trusting no one, and yet underneath pathetically eager to please, squirming like puppies if you gave them a pat. I don't doubt they saw me as a pushover from the start. When I met my classes, they told me proudly how they'd hounded the man I replaced into early retirement. Old and slowed by minor strokes, he'd lose his train of thought in class. Then they'd talk crazy at him, answering questions he hadn't asked and pretending they were in algebra class, till he must have felt vaguely psychotic. In the winter they spread wet newspapers on his windshield, pouring sugar in his gas tank for good measure. "That old homo," they called him—laughing right in his face when he appeared one morning a few days after my arrival, expecting to teach his classes again. I led him out of the room as gently as I could. No one had bothered to tell him he'd been replaced.

  A world of Darwinian savagery, like most places overrun by boys. I took on the task of civilizing them with the deepest trepidation, and I'm still not sure why it clicked between us. Perhaps because I was as hungry to be needed as any of them. Or because I couldn't hide how aghast I was at the idiot cruelties and humiliations dispensed by the ruling colonels. The boys came to see me as one of their own, counterculturally speaking, a long-haired older brother who could dance to their kind of music. I was too smart to be kissed off as another old homo. The sons of linoleum millionaires and Ford dealers, these kids had never met a poet before. It made me exotic, a clear outsider—and outside was exactly where they lived. They didn't mind me out-talking them with my torrent of language, because they needed words so urgently themselves, words to lance the boil of their speechless middle-class rage.

  I taught about half the eleventh grade, my main task to prep them for their college boards. But I fed them anarchic poetry between every grammar drill, till they got the idea that literature could be as bad as they were. Discussion was unruly, to say the least, sometimes bringing the colonels running with hoses to quell the riot. To them my methods were very bad form, giving aid and comfort to the enemy, which was Lack of Discipline. Happily my department chairman was a man of infinite sweet temper, who gave me my head in scrapping the standard curriculum. So I played "Tommy" and Dylan in class, rocking the walls with relevance, reading comic books for myth, and Native American prayers. Standard late-60's featherhead stuff, but it worked, engaging the truant passion of my lost boys till they roared with feelings. In the process we scrapped Julius Caesar, but they never would've read that anyway. Cliffs Notes was their only window into the classics, and Cliff hadn't gotten to The Who yet.

  Every night would find a gang of them sprawled in my room in the dorm, jostling for my attention and pushing the borders of Lights Out. Too lax a disciplinarian to rein them in and with no life of my own, I relished the street noise of theirs. The Oedipal death-duels with Mom and Dad, the suburban dreck of ranch-house hell in fifteen shades of beige, the parties over vacation that turned into week-long binges, an upper to counter every downer. They were serious druggies, a lot of these kids, whose parents' master bath was a veritable pharmacopoeia, ripe for skimming. They smiled with patronizing amusement when I told them to go easy. I smoked grass almost every night myself, secretly of course, but enough of a buzz that I felt like a hypocrite. I tried to advise them along the Athenian lines of moderation, but I was way out of my depth. Two of my proctors
were bodybuilders who traded needles, alternating steroids and heroin. Saturday nights—I didn't learn this till they graduated—there was always some kid being rushed to the infirmary after drinking a bottle of Old Spice or a can of Sterno, usually on a dare.

  But, then, they were always climbing too high and jumping off roofs. We had an expulsion nearly every week, one kid caught for what everyone did—a sort of ritual disappearance. This is not to say that Sutton Hill didn't have its share of dweebs and grinds, making their inchmeal way to college. I didn't ignore them either, recalling my own dim cocoon of high school. But the loose-knit gang of bad boys were the ones who fascinated me—cocky and suspicious, spoiled without ever being touched, and therefore having nothing to lose. I guess I thought it was my job to save them, not let them throw the future away. But I see now that mostly I wanted their good opinion. Wanted, if not to be in the gang, to be its coach, with a whistle around my neck, like a horny priest in Boys' Town.

  I'd finally kick the last ones out after midnight, the cigarette smoke in my room thick as a Turkish bazaar. By Christmas there were three or four who always stayed till the end. My proctor Harry, with those tracks on his arms I managed not to see, would wander in from his hallway rounds of putting the dorm to bed. Steel, the hockey captain, was usually at the turntable, playing some rabid album he'd brought over, hissing of acid. Over the noise Robbins would read out snatches of Eliot and Rimbaud as he rooted among the books on my shelves. I didn't have a moment's privacy till I fell exhausted into bed, to rise at dawn so I could grade papers and do reports. But I wouldn't have dreamed of shortening those nightly bull sessions, where I never had to think how alone I was. Besides, with all of them so nakedly on the brink of manhood, hormones crackling in the smoky air, it seemed they might carry me over the goal line with them. Swept along in their outlaw wake.