Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  "What the fuck are you doing?" he demanded shrilly. I didn't get it at first, my face going blank with bewilderment. Then he made a motion of spitting at me. "You faggot—get the fuck out of here."

  Now it began to dawn on me: he was trying to end it by pretending we'd never played before. That today was the first time I'd ever taken him in my mouth, molesting him as he slept. I couldn't help the bitter mirthless laugh that broke from me. He yelled for me to leave, the door opened, the roommate came in. I stood up from the bed embarrassed, beating a hasty retreat.

  I sat in my room with the lights off, frozen, staring at the brick wall we were about to hit. Within the hour Greg ran away without a pass, bound for New Jersey. I learned this at the ten o'clock check-in, from his terrified roommate. It was obvious that Greg had told him about my sex offense. I covered for Greg's being AWOL, writing him a pass after the fact, saying there'd been an emergency at home. But I was only spinning my wheels. I knew I'd just kissed off my teaching career, wondering if the mess about to break would involve the police.

  At midnight Greg called from New Jersey. His parents were on vacation somewhere in the Caribbean, and he was sitting in his room with Lisa. I realized he wanted to make some kind of deal, but insisted he come back to school first. "No," he retorted, "I want to talk about what you did. Right now." And then he coldly accused me of trying to queer him while he slept, defying me to say it hadn't happened. In the background I could hear the rustle and click as he fumbled with a tape recorder. So he was going to play hardball, was he?

  "Greg, what happened today isn't any different from what we've been doing for the last year. You ready to talk about that?"

  He hung up. I felt white rage at his manipulation of the truth. Could taste the carnal longing of revenge: if I was going down, I would take him with me, a double drowning. I tore up the pass I'd written and called the dean, told him Greg had run away home. I added gravely that the boy was about to precipitate a scandal, and that I was prepared to take the consequences. I felt as cool then as a man smoking his final cig before a firing squad, a curious relief that there was no place left to hide. The dean was brisk, asking no details, saying only that he would get the headmaster on it.

  I had to wait two days for the final battle. Good soldier that I was, I went about all my weekend duties and graded the rest of my papers. I could tell the whole school had heard about the incident: so many gazes dropped, so many mumbled hellos as I passed. I figured I'd be out by Monday morning. Though I didn't exactly pack, I imagined myself getting in the car and driving to California. To lose myself in a pseudonym and a job at minimum wage, no forwarding address for the shame and failure I'd be living with forever.

  Sunday at dusk, the headmaster called, summoning me to his office. I was putting on a tie for my execution when Harry knocked at my door. Haltingly he informed that all the students were on my side—which meant the gang had decided to cast in its lot with me and would keep the rest of the school in line, whether they liked it or not. I explained that there were no sides here. Greg and I had gotten too close, and the rules of fraternization had so unraveled that someone had to pay. I felt oddly noble saying this, getting deeper into the role of sacrificial victim.

  Dr. Richards, the head, sat fatly behind his half-acre desk. We barely knew one another, since he spent most of his time fund-raising and left the daily running of things to the colonels. The younger faculty considered him borderline schizo, given his penchant for sudden rages—hurling boys down the stairs for insubordination, arbitrarily issuing school-wide punishments if no one stepped forward to confess a crime. He had a twitch in one cheek worthy of Captain Bligh and a strange habit of clutching a pair of handkerchiefs in his balled-up fists, to alleviate his sweaty palms. Reminded me of Nixon.

  "You understand what he's accusing you of," asked Dr. Richards rhetorically, peering at Greg's file before him. I nodded. "He says you crept into his room while he was asleep and tried to... fellatio him." He grimaced at the mere idea. "Is that true?"

  I swallowed hard. "No, it's not. We've been having a relationship since last winter—"

  But he clearly wasn't listening. He tapped the folder and still wouldn't look at me, awkward as the Navy intern who couldn't say the word. "It was the same thing at his last school," Richards intoned. "He turned on a teacher who tried to help him. That's his pattern."

  I was still a full step behind. Turned on the other teacher how? "But this is different," I said. Then realized with a rush that left me faint that there was a ray of daylight here, a crack in my fate. Shut up, I told myself.

  "I'll take care of it, Paul. Why don't you wait in the dean's office?"

  And he steered me out through the back door so I wouldn't have to face Greg and his parents in the outer office. I waited in the dean's anteroom, staring out at the winter dusk, feeling dirtier and more of a coward than I ever had in my life. But no less determined to survive. I heard later how Greg stuck to his story that nothing unnatural had happened before, that he'd had no clue to my deviance till I molested him two days ago. I told myself it was a moral draw: if he was going to lie about how many shots were fired, then let him take the bullet. I'd tried to tell the truth, hadn't I?

  Well, not very hard. The dean came in to say it was all over—Greg had been expelled. He added with an avuncular hand on my shoulder that "This kind of thing happens to all bachelor teachers." Which kind of thing, I wondered, twisted affair or false accusation? He asked me to wait an hour before going back to the dorm, so Greg could clean out his stuff and be gone. When I returned, Harry and the others told me how Greg had exulted as he packed, bragging that he'd got exactly what he wanted, a ticket back to high school.

  I was glad he went with such bravado. It made it easier for me to believe he'd gotten what he deserved. In the weeks that followed, my students bent backwards to convince me nothing had changed: I was still the best, and we were all well rid of the bad apple of Greg. But it was never the same for me at Sutton Hill—I was unable to shake the feeling of being watched, on permanent probation. I punished my dick by refusing to touch it, trying to starve it to death, so revolted was I by the moral chaos it had brought me to. The feeling of being unclean. And, under it all, a vague disappointment that the scandal had resolved itself without setting me loose. As if I had lost by being exonerated, having to stay now and prove myself, no chance to get in that car and drive till nobody knew me.

  Somehow I got through the rest of the year. I smiled like a good little eunuch, toed the line and worked my butt off. There was never any question but that I would be leaving in June. I wasn't so self-flagellating as to want to stay and outlive the memory of the scandal, guarding my every move in case a limp wrist or a lingering look betrayed me. I sent out a raft of letters to colleges in Boston, appending a sheaf of my poems and asking if anyone needed a writer-in-residence. I wanted nothing further to do with boys or colonels or country life. Since I had no advanced degree—and no idea at all of the crowd of writers scrambling for slots in the brain hub of the Northeast—I quickly received a pile of form rejections.

  But I was accustomed by now to having no future. Anyway I was still choking the water from my lungs after the near-drowning in January. I drifted from day to day, my public self as manic and animated as ever, the rest of the time lying on my bed, hearing that accusation over and over: "You faggot!" My vision of the laughing man died. No chance that love would find me now that I bore the stigma of pederast, invisible though it might be. I would be spending the rest of my life keeping it in my pants so it wouldn't destroy me. How old would I have to be, I wondered, before it hung juiceless between my legs, no more throttling me with the pain of desire? I felt old already, exhausted with life.

  In April a group of my seniors placed high in the college sweepstakes—reflecting glory on me, who'd pushed them to go for the top. Their parents sent me champagne and gift certificates, praising me for making the difference and turning their boys into men. This had no effect on the fe
ver of humiliation that held me in its grip. By then I had gotten myself embroiled in an ill-advised backstairs plot by the younger faculty to get rid of the headmaster, whose tyrannical rages had grown increasingly wacko. I let myself be volunteered to present the case to the Board of Trustees. A losing battle before I opened my mouth, since Dr. Richards informed them I was on probation after a sexual incident with a student.

  I remember meeting Dr. Richards next day on the quad by the flagpole. He stuck his jowly Nixon face in mine and hissed: "Your dirty little plot didn't work. And I should've canned your ass when I had the chance. I see now that that boy was telling the truth."

  A day or two later, I couldn't get out of bed, short of breath and slightly delirious. By nightfall my fever was 106, and I thought I would die before morning, drowning in phlegm I couldn't cough up. Next morning the dean drove me over to Danbury Hospital, and I was diagnosed with bacterial pneumonia. Dicey, because I was allergic to so many antibiotics. While they played hit-or-miss with medication, I lay there through the whole last week of school, feeling as if I'd finally been expelled. Contagious, I wasn't allowed any visitors, except a brief half-hour when my parents drove down from Boston—required to suit up in masks and gowns and stay ten feet away from me. I had only one call from the school, to tell me my insurance didn't cover hospitalization.

  Stuck in that narrow bed, barely breathing so as not to cough, I was a man without any prospects when the call came, out of the blue, from Canton Academy, a prep school just south of Boston. The chairman of their English department had taught with me for two summers at Andover and had been impressed by my fire and enthusiasm. He had no way of knowing the intervening winter had extinguished it. He offered me a job for the fall. Which I accepted without a second thought, just as I had at Sutton Hill. So much for my resolve to eschew the teaching of adolescent boys.

  At least the place was coed, I told myself, and anyway I knew what situations to avoid. I explained to the man from Canton that I didn't want to be involved with running a dorm or coaching a sport, the subtext being: keep me away from too much naked boy. No problem: a poet was what they were looking for, not a babysitter or an aging jock. It sounded as if "free spirit" was part of the job description. With the barest regret I let go the fantasy of breaking loose and heading for California. Now I could hold my head up at the Sutton Hill graduation, bragging about my new job, for Canton was as close to the top of the heap as Sutton Hill was to the bottom. That day I was sure I could leave the shame behind, like the seniors flinging their mortarboards into the air, bound for a life free of colonels.

  All I had to do was keep my secret—which wasn't just being gay now but the crimes of a practicing deviant. Weak from the bout with my lungs, I couldn't have been more disembodied as I made the pledge to live my new life without the physical. Being a poet would be enough. Besides, I didn't have any more chances. Fearful they would find out about Greg at Canton—or that Greg himself might track me down and expose me—I made no formal goodbyes, left no forwarding address. On a muggy June night I skulked away with all my belongings piled in the car, leaving without a trace the rural green of my two years' prison. Still locked in a schoolmaster's fate, no Merlin powers to change my life, unaware that my rights had been won by the brave queens of Stonewall. All I would have to do was not exist below the waist, and the future was mine.

  Seven

  THE FIRST YEAR AT CANTON I think all I did was recover from Sutton Hill. The contrast couldn't have been greater: the maximum-security bleakness of the one, the ivy Gothic and pillared neo-classical of the other. The sons and daughters of New England's aristocracy had been polished at Canton for generations, learning the Protestant ropes of austerity and service to others—that is, how to behave modest and just like folks before they came into their trust funds. They had summer homes with names like The Maples and Cliffedge, and grandmothers out of Jane Austen with diamonds as big as their rheumatoid knuckles. Not to confuse it with Exeter or Choate, oh no. Canton was smaller-scaled in every way, with special individual attention to every kid, and none of that vulgar high-poweredness.

  There was a boys' side of the street and a girls' side, tensely separate centers of power like contiguous Baltic states. The boys were ruled by the supercilious bow-tied Mr. Phipps, so ingratiating he would shake hands with a coatrack. His opposite number across the street was the parched and flowerless Miss Jameson, last of the iron-gray headmistresses, whose mere presence in a room could lower the temperature till everyone's lips turned blue. To Miss Jameson life was not a cabaret. She and Mr. Phipps oversaw distinctly different faculties, the girls' rigorous teachers tending to see the boys' teachers as overgrown C students with no intellectual backbone. No wonder Miss Jameson had to be dragged kicking and screaming into fall coeducation—which had been mixing boys and girls in class only for a couple of years when I arrived, and then only the top two grades. Otherwise the street that separated the sexes was as formidable as the Berlin Wall.

  And indeed, the boys' faculty had its share of duds and duffers, men with names like Cabot Adams that sounded more like law firms than people. Gentlemen teachers, they were heavily trust-funded themselves, with summer places in Maine cheek by jowl with the aforementioned Mayflower aristocrats. Canton was very much about keeping things in the family, as tight in its way as a pack of Sicilian mobsters. The older ones had faces mapped with broken blood vessels, tribute to the Martinis they sloshed while grading papers and lab reports, a cocktail hour that stretched from five P.M. to unconsciousness. Meanwhile their wives poured tea at school functions till it came out of their ears.

  I taught at Canton for six years, and there were those among the old guard who never once locked eyes with me or addressed me by name, so suspicious were they of "new blood." Yet there were a few marvelous others, crusty eccentrics who'd been there forever and never quite toed the line. Iconoclasts to the bone, who managed to kick the stuffiness out of the place. Archer Smith was their leader, with a deadpan gravel delivery worthy of Bogie, mangling the school's thin-lipped motto—Dare To Be True—by substituting Glue or a baby-talk Twue. Archer would enter a classroom, scowl at his charges and announce with a wagging finger, "Remember, gentlemen—five minutes' pleasure, a lifetime of repentance."

  Archer and his raven-haired wife Felicia, who taught Spanish at the girls' school with a wild Flamenco beat, made room for me at their endless dinner table. Avast pot of paella on the stove fed us like the loaves and fishes. Always a spot for Mrs. Washburn, "Chips" to her friends, the dowager duchess of girls' English who suffered fools not at all, her Swiftian wit delivered in a bourbon-dry Virginia drawl. In the salons of Canton, literate meant civilized, and I quickly claimed a place among them because I'd been reading instead of living for years. Besides, I could always be counted on to "square a table," as the Brahmin hostesses went about the delicate business of finding bachelors to partner their widow friends at dinner.

  And they all liked having a poet around. A role I took on with a new vengeance, keeping them laughing around the table with horror stories from Sutton Hill, otherwise smoldering with a passion I hoped was Byronic. I sported cowboy boots and various improbable hats, especially a wide-brimmed herder's number. Never a jacket and tie, to the silent chagrin of Mr. Phipps and the old guard. But if my major job was striking a pose as the renegade poet—renegade in a fenced-in yard—at least it got me sitting down to do the work.

  It's all I really remember about my first two years among the gentry, writing poems late into the night, usually while puffing on a joint. I lived at the top of Upton House, a big-bosomed mansion with a carriageway and a sweeping drive lined with oaks. The house had been deeded to Canton by a spinster alumnus and broken up into faculty digs. I had the south garret, with dormer windows that looked away to the Blue Hills. There I hammered out my obscure and tortured quatrains, finishing a poem every three or four weeks, then papering my colleagues with copies. Since I didn't have to coach or oversee a dorm, I figured I'd better sing for
my supper.

  The students were a blessed relief after my scruffy and needy delinquents at Sutton Hill. Mostly they worked with dogged industry, too well-bred to misbehave. It took me a while before their silver-spoon insecurities oppressed me, and the presence of women among them was terrifically bracing. It also happened that I arrived at Canton in the autumn after the school had suffered a general strike. The previous spring a group of radical students and teachers had actually shut down classes for a week. In protest of the war, as I recall, though a lot of mud was slung as well about Canton's world of white privilege, the moat of indifference that separated the school's green suburb from the Dorchester ghetto. Most of the revolutionaries had graduated in June, but a truculent contingent of seniors remained, sticking it to the authorities wherever they could.

  The school writhed in conflicted feelings—dauntless in its defense of free speech, pained at the specter of disrespect and anarchy. Meanwhile the last of the radicals gathered around the school paper, hitherto a gung-ho mix of team standings and satire bland as oatmeal. The new editors meant to change all that, firing up to expose the vast hypocrisies of preppie life. I'd been appointed faculty adviser, so it was left to me to oversee and shape the tantrums. Not that the end product ever seemed very hard-hitting, just a new and more self-righteous form of blandness, but we redesigned it bolder and threw out the old staid masthead. What had been called for eighty years The Green and Blue—the school's colors—was now untided, strictly downtown and underground in tone. The old guard were suitably apoplectic and shunned me even more.

  Fine by me. My rad status kept me from having to show up at functions where tea was poured. I played hooky from faculty meetings, and I avoided getting too close to any students—boys anyway. The senior girls were safe, and more open than the boys to the dazzle of poetry and its wells of feeling. It seemed a natural thing for them to have a crush on the bard in residence—the next step after their raptures over horses. Besides, as the savvier ones told me later, they knew I was queer even if I didn't. Queer was part of the romance.