by Larry Kramer
To be followed by the guilt.
“It’s not very large,” the professor later said, which also didn’t help.
This was the first verbalized confirmation of Richie’s suspicions. Not only was he a faggot, but his flagpole was not quite the standard-bearer a Bronstein boy was meant to hoist in battle.
“But,” the professor continued, bending down to lead the troops to action once again, “it certainly tastes splendid and your pectorals are perfect. You have the body of an ancient Greek. I believe you’re what’s called a Number.”
I want to be a Number! I want to be a Number!, Boo Boo realized over the succeeding weeks as he moped still lost on campus, his eyes to sidewalk or well-trod grasses, acknowledging no one, or as he sat alone in his Silliman single (who would want to room with him?, a feeling no doubt emanating from those earlier formative years when he shared a john with his older brother, Stephen, who had nicknamed him Boo Boo for his petulance and his whining insecurity: “It’s either ‘Boo Boo’ or ‘Lemon,’ take your choice, I suggest the former, at least it’s euphonious”), staring at the pea-green soupy shade with which Yale walls are nourished, and thinking of his teacher’s mouth and trying very, very hard not to seek it out again. I mustn’t do it, I mustn’t do it, it is Wrong! Even though for those three seconds prior to ejaculation and two seconds post, on each of the many succeeding encounters during the semester (he received a final A), Boo had dim thoughts of what he’d been missing all his years.
The guilt, however, ah yes, The Guilt!, was such as to eventually extrude into a courageous confession to his Pop that he was suffering mightily, “Pop, I got these female problems,” so that Abe, himself in guilt that, like father: like son, financed what amounted to two years of intensive psychoanalysis at Yale’s famed Child Study Center (Richard was never to know that his case had entered the international journals as “A Famous Son: The Transmission of Psychoneurotic Mishegas from Old World to New”) with a Dr. Rivtov. For four hours a week, through his junior and senior years, Richie, as the dour doctor waved his club foot by the reclining patient’s right eye, was shrunk, wherein they both discovered how terrified were his kishkas of: a) his poppa; b) his momma; c) himself.
Armed with this useful knowledge, he graduated. And disarmed by the additional enlightenment that his cock still saluted his fellow men only, a reflexive action not dissimilar to the knee that jumps when struck by the hammer, of which both he and Dr. Rivtov naturally disapproved, though neither carpenter had come up with anything remotely resembling a new set of drawers, he tried to make the best of it. And not to be terrified that his Pop would find out. And not to be terrified that his Pop would find out. And not to be…
This had amounted, up till now, to allowing his flagpole to be saluted and nothing more.
But he knew there was more. He saw it with his eyes and he dreamed it in his dreams and he fantasized it in his daytimes and he knew he was in trouble.
For he knew there was a pit of sexuality out there and that he longed to throw himself into it.
I have to! I have to! he would torture himself before several hours napping in his lofted bed. Because it’s part of the faggot life style—to find abandonment and freedom through ecstasy—fucking and being fucked and light s & m and shitting and pissing and Oh I want to be abandoned! and where’s my copy of the Avocado…, which he would then reach for and wonder when he could courageously answer those ads placed by seekers of “willing victims” and “hot humpy young dudes to do things to.”
Then his torture thoughts stretched out to Fire Island. This weekend I promise I’m going to try! He’d never been there before, not because of its physical inaccessibility but because of his physical fear. How to parade around, half-naked, along those fabled boardwalks and strands, in front of all those staring eyes, eyes belonging to humpies far humpier than he? Could he do it? And into that fabled Meat Rack! The sexual pits incarnate! Could he do that, too? Throw himself down there? And could he do it with class, so that they’d look at him and point him out enviously, and say: “There goes that rangy cowboy, Rich Bronstein! You know who he is!”
Yes, how to throw himself into those pits? How?!
One million smackolas. Wouldn’t they help?
And then my Pop could find out. And then my Pop could find out.
But by then I’d be free!
And Rich!
Yes, one million smackolas. They would surely help.
And if I don’t do something quickly, they’ll make me marry that spaghetti heiress, Marci Tisch!
While Fred walked across town to the Y, now thinking of his mother, and Abe left Ephra for an early dinner with Randy Dildough, Anthony Montano left his Beekman Place penthouse and headed south. Fred’s best friend—tall, dark-haired, dapper, Omar Sharif as an Italian diplomat—was heading, oh wondrous joyful shining late afternoon in May, for the Village streets.
There he would get his cock sucked, his cock that had not come in twenty-three days, his wonderful uncut wop cock that deserved better things, as did its owner, slaving for Irving Slough was not an easy life, the Winston Man was not an easy account to square with one’s conscience, Winnie might be cute but people are dying, as am I, as is my cock, both of us feeling overwhelmingly the need for relief and release, I am working too hard, it’s not working hard enough, it’s sometimes, too often, soft and wavy, and that’s for hair sprays not for cocks, and what is happening now that I am getting older and there’s no kisser in my life?
Fred thought of Algonqua. One year ago he had told her!
Algonqua Lemish!
She who was the middle daughter of five achieving siblings of Russian peasants also making the long schlepp to the New World, from there to here, from rags, if not to riches, at least to groceries, they always ate, her poppa, Herschel the Unsmiling, and her momma, Lena the Undaunted, ran a grocery store in Hartford, where Algonqua grew up, graduated from Normal School, taught first grade in the morning, sold shoes in the afternoon, and coached foreigners in English at night. Then she met Lester Lemish, potentially so fine, and they settled down, outside of Washington, D. C., he to not realizing that potential, and she to serving humanity, the American Red Cross, twenty-four hours a day of looking after The World—Home Servicing, Bloodmobiles, floods, fevers, epidemics, fires, Water Safety, tardy alimonies, bandaged wounded, wheel-chaired to ball games, garden partied prisoners, indigent Army wives, paraplegic veterans, missing children, wayward husbands, AWOLs, yes, Handicappeds Anonymous—thus becoming a determined breadwinner, a courageous lifesaver, a tenacious turner of losers into winners, the Director of Disasters, yes, a wonderful humanitarian and A Gigantic Ma!
ALGONQUA LEMISH!
Algonqua had had her left tit lopped off a year ago. She held court from her eighth-floor bed in the Georgetown University Hospital as if deprived of her best and most useful feature, rather a startling reaction from a widow of seventy and one for whom Fred and Ben automatically assumed sex came not easily if at all. While it is generally construed by all children that their parents never fucked, Fred was reasonably certain that his rarely had, or why else would he have always had such problems with kiss and cuddle and body and closeness and semen and cock and rectum and that interco-mingling of the physical, bodily, and sexual attributes with which all man is blessed?
In that hospital room, there and then, one year ago, the commencement of the New Era, Fred Lemish had, finally, at just thirty-nine years of age, informed his mommy he was a faggot. He had not planned to do so. Had not all friends advised: Why tell? They cannot understand. It will make them unhappy. Why upset apple carts? But Fred would respond with: Why must I go on leading a secret life in the back streets? This only means I am ashamed of myself and this life and I would like to stop being ashamed of this life and me and who and what I am.
He had spent the afternoon on a visit to the shrine. He had gone, after twenty years of various journeyings in the Outside World, to the homesite of his pubescent days. He had knocked on the Hy
attsville garden-apartment door with his best successful movie-writer smile, clutching an old clipping from the Washington Post with his picture (taken upon the occasion of Lest We Sleep Alone opening to the only grotesquely bad reviews it received anywhere in the world; you can’t hit a homer in your own hometown), thrusting it to the shabby young housewife and present tenant: “My name is Fred Lemish, I grew up in this apartment, this is my movie for which I was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adaptation of a Work from Another Medium, which I first thought meant something from the supernatural, would you mind if I came in and looked around?” The helpless woman, rendered speechless by such fame, allowed Fred in, in, in and back to the teeniest of rooms (they had seemed so big growing up!), look Fred, look at the corner where you first jerked off, sure still looks dirty enough, some of that schmutz is me, look, there’s where your bed was, next to Ben’s, that bed in which you had your first wet dream after reading Havelock Ellis under the covers and on which you played, though obviously not nearly enough, “doctor” with the little girl from downstairs, and look, there’s the closet you hid in to watch older brother Ben, the jock, take off same, and you later bent to smell, no one was looking, you can smell, take a heady sniff of brother Ben, and there’s the corner where, under the rug, you hid a forbidden treasure, a picture of an erect penis, bartered for three packs of Luckies and ten pink diet pills, yes, a diet even then, and there’s the same Venetian blind you pulled down and closed tightly so you could have your first experiences with another boy’s body, his name was Fred, too, your fellow eighth-grader, once a month or so, allowing sufficient time for guilt to subside and hunger to return, always during the day, when no one was at home, ah, memories are made of this.
In the hospital room, he re-arranged into their nighttime array, at Algonqua’s request, the twenty-three vases of flowers. Ben’s office had certainly sent flowers. They didn’t know her but they sent flowers. Ben was important to them, senior partner in Washington’s top firm of accountants. Where were the flowers to her from his friends in New York, who didn’t know her either but to whom he was important?
There was a strange closeness coming upon them, something Fred had not allowed for on this visit, nor allowed, indeed, since he’d gone into that Outside World, nor allowed, come to think of it, since those couplings with his fellow eighth-grader, Fred. If he’d inherited her determination that “my boy can do anything!” (“as long as she’s Jewish”), he had also inherited Lester’s fears and tremblings. Drs. Isaiah Cult, Clive Nerdley, Tracy Fallinger, M. R. Dridge—these had been his substitute nutrition, the Metrecal of his life. He’d told them everything, his system, he hoped, now purged, the colonic irrigations of his mind, psyche, brain, id, ego, superego, unconscious, subconscious kishkas (where did one become another, or were they each the same, and how connected were they with the heart, and how did any of them become the Staff of Life, that crooked crutch with which to creak along?). No, he had not planned to tell her this evening. After such radical surgery.
He was helping her to walk, up and down long corridors, past other wards and wings and basket cases, her arm through his, leaning on him, getting her exercise. Yes, he felt close to her for a change, and she felt it, and it was this closeness, for the nonce overcoming his temerity in the presence of her usual Tower-of-Power routine, which encouraged his voiding of the beans, true confessional, tonight the night, Susan Hayward letting it all hang out, radical surgery indeed.
How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella. Beat step step kick kick over out jump fall down dead. Please tell me it’s all right to fall in love. With a fellow fellow. whyamisoafraid? Ah, yes, Lester had been right. Lester had always called him a sissy.
“Ma, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. Did you know that I’m a homosexual?”
Thirty-ninth floor, Fred! JUMP!
She did not take it well. Was he expecting a trumpet voluntary, a huge welcoming round of applause, kisses to the balcony, and grateful recognition from the star? Well, the old lady looked sad. Yes, she did.
And this made Fred, growing so fast his pants were getting shorter by the second, miffed. He wanted more courage and support from this woman of gargantuan strength. Madam, if you thus elect to choose weakness, hurt, injury, frosted with self-pity, then I, at this belated bar mitzvah of growth, do not approve, he thought, being careful not to consider that he’d been choosing similar weak-necked stratagems for years, like some overgrown pansy in the garden that can’t quite keep its head from bending low. No, he did not think this. But he did think: You can’t make the rules forever.
Finally the sibyl spoke. “I always knew there was something.”
“What do you mean, you always knew?”
“That professor of yours at Harvard, I always suspected there was something. He invited you to Europe and you wouldn’t go. You paced all night in your room…” She was referring to a night over twenty years ago.
“You remember?”
“A mother remembers.”
“He was in love with me and I was frightened.” Brave as a Green Beret today, are you, Fred?
St. Joan on the Cross looked around for some words. “I only want you to be happy,” she finally said.
“I’m happy! I’m happy! I want you to know I’m happy. I wouldn’t have it any other way. If I had a choice today, I would choose to stay the way I am.” Good for you, Fred! Good courage! Stout lad! (Stop calling yourself stout! You’re thin, now. You’re thin!) What did it take for you to get all this out to her? Twenty-one years of Shrinkery for you to get it up guiltlessly?
“You promise me you’re happy?”
“Yes. I’m happy. I’m happy.”
“You promise me?”
He took her hand, which was through his arm anyway, and held it. “Yes.”
“Well, anything that makes you happy makes me happy.”
Lies on both sides were gratefully accepted. He walked her back to her room and helped her into her bed.
Six months later, same hospital, after her other tit had been biopsied and reprieved, she lowered her voice to ask him: “What do you want me to do with that book?”
“What book?”
“You know the book,” she lowered even lower.
“The one about homosexuality you asked me to get you so you could read and learn and try to understand?”
She nervously looked to see if her roommate was listening and had heard. “Yes,” she said, clearing her throat.
“What do you mean, do with it?”
“I’m finished reading it.” Her voice still remained much too confidential.
“It’s yours to keep,” Fred chirpily answered, full-throated, fortissimo, molto voce, bravo. “It’s not something you have to tuck away in a bottom drawer. Where is it?”
A reply was not forthcoming.
“You haven’t? In the bottom drawer?”
She busied herself with smoothing blanket and coverlet and quilt.
“I’m ashamed of you,” he said. “What did you think of it?”
“It made me sick,” escaped her lips.
Well, that’s just wonderful. Thanks a heap. That really makes me feel just swell. Thirty-nine floors up and Fred once more wanted to jump.
“What do you write about, young man? Your mother tells me you’re a writer.”
Algonqua’s eyes blinked rapidly, avoided Fred’s, ran around the room and walls and ceiling.
“My life,” Fred said to the neighboring bed, a gall bladder tomorrow morning, “Jewish,” Algonqua had identified her, “despite her name,” which was Lincoln.
“How interesting,” Mrs. Lincoln said. “What about your life?”
Algonqua coughed and looked toward heaven. Perhaps, like Clare Boothe Luce in the Holy City, some plaster would fall and change the subject.
“And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?” Mrs. Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.
A crossroads. He was tor
n. Should he be strong and honest, what care?, the bold, brave pioneer? Was this not what he was trying to stand for, The Hero in Action, since he had, a lifetime ago, dealt with his now ex-Mother?
Or was it Mature to Avoid the Issue, hiding under that rug any iota of opportunity for either Mrs. Lincoln to sympathize with Algonqua or Algonqua to feel sorry for herself?
Or should he give the old Ma one more stab of the scalpel? Take that! you old switchboard operator with your connections still plugged in! Take that! Take that! you Gobbling Turkey who’s not giving me Thanksgiving! Take that…It was quite obvious that Algonqua the Altruistic was shitting in her hospital gown that this son she no longer recognized might peel off (for the camouflage it was) her prideful labeling of “My son, the successful writer.”
Yes, Fred, anxiously desiring either a jump or a number of Greenberg’s brownies, had to decide at this moment whether to add another helpful label to her list.
Finally he answered Mrs. Lincoln: “You’ll read the reviews.”
While we’re at it, and with so many of our leading faggots yet to introduce, dare we pause a moment to tarry over the likes of kvetchy, schleppy, nasty Lester Lemish? Yes, he passed through his lifetime a sissy and a coward, a doormat with nary a star of love to guide him, though he would have named himself a true man through and through. Dare we offer a requiem moment to the ghost of Lester Lemish?
He certainly was a screamer. “Go out and play with the boys! Stop playing with the girls!” he’d helpfully bombard the younger son who wouldn’t listen to the Yankees or the Redskins, little knowing that such an impressionable lad would choose to obey both dicta to the lifetime letter. “You sissy!” he’d then helpfully append, chomping on his fat cigar, and adding further traumatic damage, as such a word delivered from father unto son and indicating a tidge of lovelessness could possibly so intidge.
