Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Did they turn me on? I don't think I dared to consider the possibility, or I told myself that I had higher goals. It didn't feel sexual, but what did I really know about the displacements and disguises of desire? For once the hero worship was going the other way. They delighted in my intensity, the poet's dare that I could live on nothing but words. I'd ransack all my bookish past for tales to spin, translating every story into street talk they could understand, convinced I was giving them myths to live by. My own performance surfeited me—Merlin among the squires, whipping them up to knighthood. I didn't need the carnal. In those first months the only coming I did was in dreams. Otherwise I stood at the center of their collective male power, eye of the storm, smiling indulgently as they groaned for girls. It felt as if I could live all that vicariously. Better to be a voyeur than nothing, as long as we could keep meeting like this by campfire.

  It was Greg who called me Merlin. More of a hanger-on than the others, not so aggressively courting trouble, and no leadership position in the gang. A voyeur himself, I would've said, as well as a bit too obvious in his flattery. Co-captain of the tennis team, but a team that always came in dead last in the league. Not much of a student either, though he talked a good line, especially when he was out to raise the grade on a paper from C to B. Greg got by on his insolent good looks—his insolence in general, I should say, a Holden Caulfield sneer for the boobies who ran Sutton Hill and a rich kid's certainty that he'd never fall very far down. And nobody hated his parents more, which was some kind of feat among so many blood-curdled sons. Greg laughed when the call came in that his mother had cancer; he bragged that he was one step closer to his inheritance.

  Did he turn me on? Eventually, but not at first. Too self-absorbed, too eager to please, the smile too calculating. The laughing man I was looking for was older than I and working-class, certainly no preppie. So I considered myself immune to Greg's transparent need for attention. Always asking if we could talk in private, and then nothing much to say except he wanted to kill his father. Preppie histrionics. I tried not to give him too much time, sensing an emptiness no counselor could fill. If he wanted to hang out with me, he'd have to take his place among the group, no "special" relationship available. Seeing my coolness toward him, my preference for Harry and the others, with their armor of self-sufficiency and swagger, Greg resorted to melodrama. Unaccustomed to having his insolent charm spurned, he knew exactly how to raise the stakes.

  One night I shooed my regulars out early—midterm grades due in the morning and a pile of papers to slash with red. They left pissing and moaning, no other place to have a smoke except out in the rain. I emptied the ashtrays and went around into the bedroom alcove to open a window for air. And there was Greg sprawled on my bed asleep, a book overturned beside him. I hadn't noticed him slip away from the group. It wasn't as if my bedroom was off-limits, since one or another of the gang was always walking through to take a leak in the bathroom. What was out-of-bounds was the hard-on throbbing in Greg's sweatpants.

  I shook his shoulder to wake him. He moaned and stretched, arching his torso so as to thrust the bulge in my face. I looked the other way and said, "What're you doing in here?" But it came out bewildered rather than indignant, and anyway I knew in the pit of my gut what the answer was. Groggily he got to his feet, one hand idly scratching at his crotch. "Just fell asleep," he shrugged. "I guess I didn't want to be alone." And, as if there was nothing suggestive in that at all, he scooped up his book and shuffled out.

  Leaving me with a pounding heart. More scared that he'd guessed my secret than affronted by his cheek. I don't know how the colonels would've handled it, there being no "it" you could put your finger on. No rule broken yet. just a dare. I suppose I should've confronted him on it, but that would have been to confront myself. I knew we were right in the heart of darkness: teacher molesting student, Dr. Rohmer's infamous backrubs at Andover. But I kept telling myself I hadn't done a thing, and anyway it was all my overactive imagination seeing this as a tease.

  My behavior changed toward Greg. I became extra solicitous, including him more and more in the inner group—over the silent disapproval of the toughs. Not to seduce him, no, the opposite: trying to satisfy him with comradeship so he wouldn't resort anymore to the other. A rank delusion on my part, to imagine I could defuse his sexual power over me, or avoid for very long the hunger he had tapped into. I was already in quicksand, panicked that if Greg had my number sexually, then maybe they all did.

  After the first volley, a week or two went by. Greg was feeling his oats, knowing he had my full attention, but keeping it neutral and kissing my ass, as if I was still on top. Then one night we were eight or ten around the campfire, Fresh Cream blaring from the speakers, and I watched as Greg stood up from the group and sauntered through the tie-dyed curtains into the alcove. Tensely I waited for him to return—five minutes, ten. Abruptly I ordered the other guys out, pleading a headache, terrified they knew what was waiting behind the curtain.

  Which was what? A confrontation at last, I thought—no more games, leave me alone. I stepped into the alcove, resolute. Greg was sprawled as before, an arm across his face to hide the sleep he wasn't sleeping. Only this time his other hand stroked the bulge in his baggy shorts, no pretense of innocence now. "Greg, wake up," I ordered him sternly. No move, just the stroking. "You can't fall asleep in here," I stumbled on. "It doesn't look right."

  But that wasn't really the issue, appearance's sake. The question was, did I want it? Tell him you don't want it, I prodded myself. Moving to the bed and shaking his shoulder again, bristling with offended propriety, lips pursed like a schoolmarm. "Get up," I said, "you have to leave." And again he raised the dare: pulling down the waist of his shorts so his dick sprang free, pumping it now in plain sight. "Greg, stop it." I tried not to look—tried to stay offended. His eyes were still shut, as if for him it wasn't even happening. I bent down to heave him bodily off the bed, ready to call in the colonels. He gripped the back of my neck, started to pull me down.

  Until that second I'd been certain I was resisting, fate and temptation both. But denial is compulsion's middle name. It required no further force to bring me down. I bent and took him in my mouth. I'd come a long way to taste the sweat of this damnation, and knew, the moment I took the dare, that we'd never get out of this alive. He groaned and bucked his hips to drive in deeper. Behind the gritted teeth of the passion I heard the ripple of laughter, so one of us must have been having fun. Must've been Greg, for I was too busy feeding on sin and death to play.

  He came in my mouth, but I never touched myself. I stayed crouched between his legs, my face against his pelvis, waiting to hear what we would say. He gave a yawning stretch and rolled away, keeping up the fiction that he'd been asleep the whole time. He shinnied back into his shorts and stood up. "G'night, Merlin," he said, grazing my shoulder with a soft comradely punch as he went away to sleep among the boys, this time for real.

  And the pattern was set, once or twice a week for the next year. It was Greg who always chose the time—usually late at night but sometimes right off the tennis court, and once before breakfast, the morning of his history final. I stood ready to drop whatever I was doing to follow him through the flame-print curtains. The pretense of sleep soon fell away, but the encounters passed in wordless silence. Not that I continued to be such a passive player: usually whacking my own meat while I sucked him, even the occasional sixty-nine if Greg was in the mood. We didn't do any fucking, neither of us wanting to take it—a nod to the bullheaded macho of Sutton Hill, where a real man would rather die than submit.

  I lived in thrall to Greg's unpredictable needs. This strange underground passion was the only thing of consequence that happened to me in my two years in reform school, and the only thing I think about in retrospect. If I am particular about the fact of being seduced—putting it all on him, the will and the dare and then the control—it doesn't mean I didn't feel the guilt. I racked myself with self-loathing, first to last, a shame th
at pursued me like the Furies from school to school till I finally bailed out of teaching entirely. For I had become the thing the heteros secretly believe about everyone gay—a predator, a recruiter, an indoctrinator of boys into acts of darkness. Sullying my mission as teacher and guide.

  I don't think that now. Twenty years of listening to gay men recount their own adolescent seductions of older guys has put it all in a different light. Indeed, the guilt has abated enough to allow the memory finally to generate some heat. Still, I should've stopped it, if only because it never made me happy and shut me deeper into the closet. I thought I could separate the sex from an unbiased grade when I marked Greg's papers, but that was just another delusion, as foolish as thinking that somehow I'd found love. In fact I felt more dead inside with every month that passed.

  No one at Sutton Hill would have guessed, given the manic compensating I did. Never saying no to any kid's need for extra help, doing somersaults in class to preserve my status as favorite teacher. Courtier to the rest of the faculty and their wives, charming the dead-eyed colonels till the bullets of suspicion melted in their guns. Always I could feel the hot breath of discovery at my back. Sometimes Greg would slip out of my room after midnight, disheveled and still half hard in his pants, and come face-to-face with one of the proctors prowling the halls. Naive wasn't part of the program here: there had to be guys who suspected. Especially when I began cutting back on the nightly bull sessions, keeping my space free for Greg.

  But nobody ever called me on it, even by way of a third-hand rumor. Perhaps they averted their eyes from the obvious desperation in mine. They had almost as much invested as I in my role of anarchist poet. In any case I resolved every month or so to put an end to the madness, shutting my door to everyone including Greg, on the pretext of being seized by the inspiration to write. But it was like burning the porn at the beach house, a symbolic measure at best, and only leaving me hungrier to start all over. Greg understood better than I that his power increased exponentially after one of my chastity breaks. In the war game of our coupling, a broken will was the best turn-on.

  Somewhere in there came the Stonewall riot, when the queers finally drew the line in the dirt and declared they'd had enough. The start of a revolution, only seventy miles from Sutton Hill, but it might as well have been another planet. I don't recall reading a word about it, nothing to do with me anyway. Despite being the school's most vociferous antiwar agitator, running the moratorium for the country towns that circled us, speaking at rallies on village greens, heckled by blue-collar patriots. What had any of that to do with a ragtag bunch of fairies throwing bottles in Greenwich Village? As usual, my leftist politics stopped at the closet door.

  I convinced myself that a summer off would put the final period to Greg and me. He told me pointedly that he planned to date a girl back home who'd been writing him all year and was ready at last to put out. Though I was choked with jealousy at the prospect, I also felt relief: I hadn't turned him totally queer. I managed not to think about him much during the summer term at Andover—though he'd call me every week or so, full of that Merlin flattery, keeping his bases covered. And if I was so indifferent, why did I sell the leaky Triumph and go into hock to buy an Opel GT, the lemon of lemons that happened to be Greg's idea of a hot car?

  Even so, I worked at being indifferent. Just before school resumed in September, I actually cruised a man in Harvard Square, right off the street. A few years older, more tentative even than I, but I steered us to a motel and wrestled him into bed—over his unconvincing protest that he wasn't really gay. I tried to cadge his phone number, but he balked at that and wouldn't take mine, agreeing only to meet me the next Friday night at Exit 14 off the Mass. Pike, about an hour's drive from Sutton Hill. He was there as promised at midnight, and we shacked up at Hojo's, from which I had to depart at six A.M. to go teach my Saturday classes. An arrangement so cumbersome it hardly seemed worth the brief vanilla sex we had, especially since after he came, he wouldn't talk about anything but his girlfriends. Nevertheless a bird in the hand, and for a month of Fridays he made me feel sufficiently independent that I was able to keep Greg at arm's length.

  The only time I ever held the power there, and I could see how it ruffled Greg's feathers, though he affected indifference.

  He'd come back from summer vacation more prickly and arrogant than ever, getting in pointless fights and alienating the gang leaders. When his grades started showing up C's and D's, as his dorm master I had to call him in for counseling. He shrilled with bitterness and contempt, how he hated Sutton Hill and everyone in it. All he wanted was to go back to public high school in New Jersey so he could be with Lisa, but his father wouldn't let him. I warned him he was jeopardizing his chances for college, and he shot back that I didn't give a fuck about him either, so stop pretending.

  It stung me, the way it was meant to. And then the next Friday my commuter buddy didn't show at Exit 14, and I slept at Hojo's by myself, feeling ridiculous and unloved. Just a few nights later, Greg came in and asked for some time alone, spilling with tears that he and Lisa had been terrified she was pregnant. Finally she'd gotten her period, and now he wanted to beg forgiveness—please, would I help him get his grades up again? Of course I would. I recall the specific relief, that I was no longer included in his blanket contempt of the school, a second chance to prove my doggy faithfulness. So every night I'd give him an hour's tutoring, all across the board, from French to geometry. It only took a couple of weeks before I was sucking his dick again.

  This time, it was his frustration at being apart from Lisa, longing to fuck her and have her go down on him. That age-old straight excuse for walking on the wild side: my girl's out of town. He'd stretch out on my bed and curse that he couldn't wait for the weekend. Which was my cue to do him, more wordless than the nights of feigning sleep and no reciprocation at all. Now and then, he'd grip my head and pump hard, groaning Lisa's name, but mostly he remained aloof and uninvolved. Leaving Merlin less and less satisfied, and doubly self-denied for being a stand-in for a girl. A Class-A porno fantasy, I realize—servicing straight men, being their pussy—but not my thing and nowhere close to the laughing man.

  But I couldn't put my foot down. Greg's grades crept out of the danger zone, though he still talked incessantly about chucking it all for public school. The fights with his classmates and the sullen attitude continued, till I felt I was the only thing between him and disaster. And that meant keeping him serviced, no matter how debased it left me. Besides, if you hate yourself as I did and think you're a worthless shit, then shit is all you deserve.

  It wasn't till Christmas break that I faced my own sense of violation. Specifically New Year's Eve, when I finally walked into the Blue Note in New Haven, having hurried by it in terror for five years now. I stood frozen in a corner, detached from the noisy partying, trying to accept it that this was where I belonged. I ended up with a guy in his fifties loaded on stingers. "You look like you just lost your best friend," he said by way of hello, leering sympathetically. I followed him home through a blizzard at two in the morning, and fucked him because he wanted so bad to ring in the New Year right. "You straight?" he asked me a couple of times while we did it. Which was a turn-on after all, that I could still pass and be as aloof as Greg.

  He was out cold within a minute of coming. I put on his robe and walked around his apartment, snooping through his desk and closet to see what a queer's life looked like. I felt the old urge to bolt and disappear, and the sight of his vodka-bloated body sleeping it off didn't help matters. But I also had this tiny impulse of gratitude for his drunken good cheer and friendliness, taking me in off the street for New Year's so neither of us would be alone. And a certain reciprocal loyalty, almost tribal, that he shouldn't have to wake up New Year's Day and find me gone, as if it had all been a mirage. For better or worse this boozy guy was one of my own, and Greg most definitely wasn't.

  So when they all came back to school a week later, I was more resolved than ever to k
eep our relationship strictly student/teacher, four feet on the floor. Hopelessly naive of me, to think I had the power to end it myself. I'd been much more on target the night it began a year before, when I knew we'd never get out of it in one piece. Greg came back from Christmas break in a towering bad temper of his own, so for the first few days we ignored each other. Then I found out from his roommate that he hadn't started his senior project, due at the end of January—shades of me and Tennyson. I confronted Greg and told him there wouldn't be any extensions, so he'd better get to work fast. And no, he couldn't have a weekend pass to go home and see Lisa. He gave me his surliest fuck-you look and turned and walked away.

  Shell shock has blurred the sequence of events, but I went down to his room just before dinner, to reason with him and call a truce. He was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. "Greg, let's talk about this, okay?" But he didn't answer, just shut his eyes and started rubbing his crotch. "Greg, don't do that. It's not going to solve anything." Then he was pulling down his pants, letting his hard dick out. We'd never done it in his room before. No locks on the student doors, and his roommate could've come walking in at any moment. Yet he seemed almost pitiful lying there, begging for it silently and driven back to the pose of sleep.

  I sat on the bed beside him, feeling the rhythmic jerk of his body. "Greg, we have to talk," I nearly pleaded. His hand came up and gripped the back of my neck, just as on that first night of damnation. I remember thinking what the hell, one last time, as I leaned down to feed on him. The risk of discovery must've felt like the final dare, all my chips on a single throw. I hadn't even started sucking, just getting settled and feeling the throb of him in my throat—when he cuffed the side of my head and roughly pulled away.