by John Rowell
“Go back to your room and go to bed, then, little Hunter boy,” he said, kicking up leaves and stretching his muscular arms. He yawned.
“I’m gonna sit here for a while,” I told him. “You go back to your room.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, squealer,” he said. “I’ll do what I want.” After a few seconds, he kicked his way through leaves until he was standing in front of me at the bench; he was very close, closer than he needed to be. In his right hand he held a twig.
“So …” he said, in a low voice. “What are you gonna do? You’re just gonna sit here?”
“Yeah, I thought I would. What’s it to you?” I looked up at him. He had a little smirk on his face, and he was staring at me. I stared back. For a very long minute, neither of us stopped staring at each other, though neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other, smirking and breathing. Then he lifted the twig and guided it softly against my cheek and over the top of my hair and down the other side of my face, and under my chin, keeping his eyes locked with mine the whole time. My heart was pounding so fast I thought it would burst my chest wide open.
“Excuse me,” I said, using acting skills to speak in a normal-sounding voice. “Get that twig off of me, please.” I made no effort to move away from it myself, though I could have.
“Why?” he whispered, still tracing me with it. “Doesn’t it feel good?”
I looked away, finally. “You’re nuts, Dalty.”
He smirked again. “Maybe.”
“OK, well then I need to get going,” I whispered, and I hated how hoarse my voice sounded all of a sudden. I started to rise, and his palms glided down onto my shoulders, pushing me back on the bench, but gently. He lowered himself at the same time, crouching on his knees.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Don’t go, man.” He lifted his index finger to my lips and began to trace them. I closed my eyes …
Now the alarm clock suddenly jangles madly, wildly, and Dalton reaches over to turn it off with one hand. “OK, quick, first line of dialogue,” Dalton says. It’s another game we play: recite the first famous line from a movie that pops into your head.
I’m excellent at this. “What can you say about a twenty-four-yearold girl who died?” I say immediately.
He giggles, and strokes my hair. “No, don’t do a morbid one. Do a happy one.”
“OK. What can you say about a twenty-one-year old boy who … lived? That he had hair the color of honey, and, uh … Carolina-blue eyes—”
“That’s cheating, but keep going.”
“That he stood six foot two and weighed a hundred and seventy-five pounds, except in the summer when he ate too much of his mother’s cooking, and then he—”
“Fuck you. Revise.”
“—That he stayed slim and desirable at all times, and was the envy and unattainable object of desire of everyone and everything on campus, teacher or student, male or female, dog or cat, bush or flower—”
“You’re crazy. Keep going.”
“—that he was the pride of the metropolis of Rocky Mount. That he loved English, and drama, tennis and basketball, the theater, movies, literature, even his infantile, stupid-ass fraternity, a house of morons known through all of Chapel Hill as—”
And at this point, he hits me, but not hard. “You, son, are consumed with jealousy,” he says.
“Yeah, right, fuck you too—that he loved beach music, Broadway cast albums, Baskin-Robbins, masturbation—”
“Highly accurate, son. Any others?”
“—and me.” And he smiles, but he doesn’t say anything, just rests his head on the pillow.
“Is that it?” he asks, finally.
“Well, yeah. I saved the best for last, didn’t I? Didn’t I?”
“Hmm … if you’re lucky,” he says. “On your good days.”
But the boy can’t lie. I know I fascinate him; he claims I’ve “unlocked” (his word) things inside of him that he never could have unlocked on his own. He told me this, though he didn’t have to; I see it in his eyes, I feel it when he touches me and holds on to me all night long, refusing to let go of me even when I try to pull away from him, which isn’t often.
I lean over and kiss him, and run my hand along his tanned chest, smooth and hard as alabaster. Last fall, before Dalton and I got together that first night, I was a determined, focused college senior full of drive and ambition; this spring, I’ve been nothing but a dopey, dreamy mess—it’s a wonder I’m going to graduate at all. I don’t remember much about turning in papers in January, or taking midterm exams in March, but I must have passed. I know I’ve spent time with other friends, played Trofimov in the drama department’s production of The Cherry Orchard, had front row seats for the Hall and Oates concert at “Spring Thang,” even had my little brother Henry come stay with me on two separate weekends. But all of that is a blur; it’s the time I’ve spent with Dalton that plays like a movie in my head—clear, sharp, in brilliant focus—and I can concentrate on nothing else.
Nobody in my dorm knows about us, as far as I know. You can get away with this kind of stuff when you blame it on alcohol, and lots of weekend-drunken guys crash in each other’s rooms, too tanked to drive back to an off-campus apartment, or even just to walk a few yards back to their own dorms. Most guys have some sort of couch in their rooms, and nobody knows where anybody sleeps once doors are shut—and locked.
“Gotta go, Hunt,” he says suddenly, kissing me on the forehead and tumbling out of bed, pulling on his “Property of UNC Athletic Department” sweatshirt and khaki shorts and Chuck Taylor All-Star high-tops. “Susan’s parents are taking us to breakfast. I gotta look decent.”
Usually, I deflect these tidbits of Susan information. I’ve practiced. This one, however, has caught me unaware. It grazes.
“Fuck that,” I say, angrily, for once.
He looks at me, a slight expression of bewilderment on his face.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing. I just wish you didn’t have to go is all.”
He turns away. He’s too smart not to see through this, and too unwilling to allow it. I instantly know I’ve screwed up.
“Hunter,” he begins. “Don’t get weird about Susan, OK, buddy? I thought we had worked through all that.”
I don’t want him to get mad at me, so close to graduation, the end of our student life together. We’ve already made plans to go to New York in the fall, just the two of us; we’ll get an apartment and start auditioning for theater. It’s all planned, has been since January 21, the night of the year’s first snowfall in Chapel Hill, when we held each other all night under the covers, riffing nonstop about our dreams and plans, laughing and kissing until the sun came up on the white-frosted campus.
“No, it’s not that, Dalty, come on,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
He leans in close.
“You’re my buddy,” he says, nuzzling me nose to nose, lips almost touching. “My special buddy. OK? There’s nobody else like you. But Susan is … you know …”
“Yeah, I know.”
You have to understand the way I am, Mein Herr …
He kisses me, full, with his tongue, holding the back of my head, pulling me into him. I would gladly fail all my spring semester courses for another year of this.
“Gotta go, bud,” he says.
“Hey. Tomorrow night. The new Al Pacino film at the Varsity. Are we still going?”
“Is that the queer one?” he asks, crinkling up his cute nose.
“The queer one? Jeez. Well, yeah, I guess. I mean it’s called Cruising. But it’s a major studio film, it’s not like it’s gay pornography or anything like that.”
He thinks a second.
“We’ll talk about it later, OK, bud?”
“OK …”
He gets to my door, slowly opens it up, looks out in the hallway to see if anybody’s there, and, seeing the coast is clear, turns back to look at me. Whispering, he leaves me with this: “Forget it, J
ake. It’s Chinatown.”
After what we now refer to as the Baby Jane night, we accelerated our “special” friendship; or more to the point, our special friendship accelerated on its own. Being in the drama department made us naturally suspect anyway, and some of the majors, mostly those we didn’t hang out with or know very well, spread rumors. Some of the male theater majors were openly gay, but they were pretty swishy and didn’t live in dorms or belong to fraternities; we were cautiously friendly with them, but didn’t seek them out outside of classes and productions. Soon after Baby Jane, we both got cast in the winter undergrad production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; I played Lysander, and Dalton, rather conveniently, played Demetrius. Of course, in the play, Lysander is in love with Hermia, but then, because of the magic and the spells and the dreams, goes after Helena. We did Shakespeare one better offstage though, because this time Lysander really wanted Demetrius, and Demetrius pursued Lysander, too, and, for all we could have cared, Helena and Hermia could have just gone off and mated with the Rustics.
“Bad, evil, jilted actresses!” we would say in the safety of my dorm room, in the dark and under the sheets. “Mean-spirited evil wood nymphs! Get thee to nunneries, get thee to acting class, thou jealous drama department goons and sorority rejects! You have no power here! Be gone, before someone drops a house on you too!”
And we would laugh and kiss and strip quickly at the drop of a baseball cap, then shush each other when we heard fellow dorm rats in the hallways. We held still, listening to them: nineteen-and twenty-year-old brutes and ruffians, intent on proving their masculinity at all hours of the day and night, breaking beer bottles, playing hall soccer with discarded pizza boxes, mock-slamming each other around those ancient industrial-green corridors in their underwear and gym shorts, roughhousey and mean. Dalton and I tackled each other’s bodies too, a few inches away, separated from the guys outside by nothing so much as an old, thick door, made, I’m sure, from pure North Carolina pine.
Later that Saturday, several hours after Dalton’s fast exit to meet up with Susan and her parents, I am actually attempting to study for a theater history final when my mother calls.
“Hi, Grace,” I say. I’ve taken to calling my parents by their first names; I saw it in a movie somewhere.
“I remember when ‘Mother’ was sufficient.” She sighs.
“I was a different person then, Grace,” I say. “I’m now a new version of my old self. Sleeker, much improved.” I figure if I talk in enough code, they’ll finally figure me out. I think of myself as an interesting character in a difficult screenplay; you have to pay attention to what I say to really understand me.
“Well, all right,” she says. “Far be it from me to try to change that. I just wanted to finalize plans for graduation weekend. I hope you’ve not become too sophisticated to don a cap and gown for a couple of hours.”
“Copy. Can do. Anything to make the mother character happy.”
She lays out the plans, which I’ve already heard about twenty times. Why she wanted to “finalize” them, I have no idea; the whole weekend will follow the same scenario of her graduation weekend, the same one as Daddy’s, the same one Henry will have with them a few years from now. It’s tradition: Saturday night cocktail party at Olde Campus Hall, dinner at Slug’s-at-the-Pines, breakfast on Sunday at the Carolina Inn, the filing in of graduates in Kenan Stadium, “Pomp and Circumstance,” blah blah blah. But then she says the strangest thing:
“Do you know what I found the other day, sweetheart?”
“No, please reveal.”
“That old Mary Poppins record that you loved so much when you were little.”
“You mean ‘Super-cali-fragi-waa-waa’?” That’s what Henry and I eventually dubbed it.
“Yes. You were so upset when that thing got warped in the hot car. So sad. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah … sure I do.”
My mother narrates stories of my childhood to me so often that I have begun to feel that the little boy she talks about is not actually me, but some role I played. Sometimes, it seems that I had nothing to do with my own early years at all, that instead I am sitting in a dark theater watching some other child actor play me up on the screen. I watch him enacting events in my life better than I ever could have, and I seethe with jealousy over his uncanny ability to portray me, to capture me correctly in scene after scene, something I never seem to be able to do. A guy could watch his whole life like that … he could start to think of himself as a character portrayed by someone else, as someone he knows only in third person. Sometimes, I actually feel angry that another child actor beat me out for the role of Hunter, a part I very much wanted to play.
“Anyway,” Mother continues, “I was going through things to put out for the yard sale, but I just couldn’t part with that. Thought you might want to keep it.”
“Sure, why not? Good call, Grace.”
“But I did put out those old Partridge Family albums. You didn’t want to save those, did you, honey?”
On Sunday afternoon, after a morning of studying in which I finally ceased to care whether I could differentiate between Euripides and Aeschylus, I walk across campus to the Pi Kapp house to look for Dalton, since I haven’t yet heard from him about the movie. I’m anxious to see Cruising; it’s apparently gotten quite a controversial reception in the big cities, and on Friday night, when it opened here at the Varsity Theater on Franklin Street, groups of protesters led by the Berean Baptist Church and the Pentecostal Holiness people picketed outside. I was glad to see the Presbyterians stayed home.
I saw on the news that certain homosexual groups also have come out against the movie because of the violence and for what they claim is an inaccurate depiction of gay city life. Since I don’t know any New York homosexuals, I won’t have much to compare it to. We have a grad student in our theater department—a large guy with a pompous personality—who has a tendency to walk across campus on Saturday nights in this head-to-toe leather get-up—boots, cap, vest—but he always looks kind of foolish walking down Franklin Street by himself dressed like that, huffing and puffing his way through a sea of people in polo shirts, plaid skirts, and Top-Siders. His acting, we’ve noticed, always seems to be about expressing anger.
When I get to the Pi Kapp house, Dalty is out in the front yard, tossing a football with some of the brothers. It’s hot seeing him “act” like a jock—he’s very convincing—but I can’t help resent that he goes to the trouble to do it, when he could just be alone with me, talking about movies and making love. It’s funny to me how we make fun of fraternity boys when we’re alone—we call them “fratty baggers”—since, in reality, we can both “pass” for one when we want to, or have to. The difference is that Dalty actually thinks he is one, which is laughable to me, but I don’t tell him that. It’s his own dream factory. But what do I care, really, as long as I get to watch him playing football with a bunch of real jocks, all of them in sweaty jerseys and tees, gym shorts and sweatpants. It’s all I can do to keep from grabbing Dalty and throwing him down right there on the Pi Kapp yard …
“Hey man,” he says when he finally looks over and sees me watching him, perhaps not as discreetly as I should. He turns back to them. “Um … you guys know Hunter, right?”
Yup, yeah, how’s it hanging, Hunt.
“We gotta go study, sons,” he says, and I can tell he’s trying to figure out how to ditch them for me. “Got a big ol’ fuckin’ exam tomorrow. Last one, then I’m a FREE MAN!!” They chortle fratspeak back at him, clearly charmed by him, too; yes, even them, leading men themselves. When he snaps, they respond—they are a part of his dream, he is a part of theirs; in his dream, they do as he commands, in their dream, he indulges their every wish. As they head off into the house, the brothers flash clandestine hand and finger gestures at each other, the meanings of which, I guess, only Pi Kapps the world over would know.
He saunters out to the perimeter of the yard, toward the street, and I run to catch up wi
th him.
“You looked great out there, big guy,” I say.
He rolls his eyes. “Thanks, Coach.”
I punch his arm. “Hey, the movie starts in an hour, I thought we could get a pizza or something first.”
“Yeah. Hey listen, Hunt. I can’t go to the movie, OK?” He doesn’t look at me when he says this.
“Oh … OK,” I say after a moment. We’re standing on the edge of Cameron Street, on the curb, looking out at this little corner of the campus known as Big Fraternity Court, watching students go by on bikes, staring out at the tops of the Franklin Street buildings in the distance. The trees have turned leafy and light green now, and white, flowery dogwoods are out in full bloom. It’s like a photo out of my parents’ old ’50s yearbooks, two young college students in love, in April, standing side by side on a Chapel Hill street: “Spring and a young man’s fancy …”
“Why not?” I ask, finally.
“Well … I don’t know, man … I don’t think it’s too cool, OK? It’s just kind of … I don’t know, it’s a queer movie.”
“Al Pacino is your favorite actor, Dalton! You’d bag it because it’s about homos? In New York City?”
“I dunno, man. I just don’t think it’s too cool, you know? I don’t think it would be cool for us to go to that together. I mean, I think I might go see it with Susan, I think that’d be OK.”
He stares deliberately off into the distance, and then down at his feet, pretending to be distracted by something on his basketball sneakers. I try to deflect that last comment, but this one does more than graze; it penetrates.
“You’re acting totally weird, Dalton.” I want to say more, but can’t.
“Look, Hunter, I’ve been thinking about this … you know, about us, whatever. And I guess I’ve kinda been trying to say this to you for a long time, but …”
“But what?”
He starts to stammer. “Look, man … look … you know you’re my special buddy, and, like, one of the best friends I ever had … and … what we do is cool, you know, it’s OK, but I don’t think it’s me, man … not really … I don’t know …”
