by Lee Siegel
The two of us inhabited a neatly ordered kingdom, populated by clearly defined good and bad animals. In this made-up universe, nothing happened. Most important, nothing changed. We played word games, fabricated incidents and events, invented other characters—a histrionic wolf, a pathetic panda bear—that had no consequences, possessed no egos, and were invulnerable to changes of heart, personality, or time. We became children again in each other’s arms. Doug was meant to be part of our escapist game, another frictionless fantasy.
* * *
Along with our similar backgrounds, we shared a growing resistance to Bradley itself. I had not been aware of how dominant a role the fraternities and sororities played in the life of the university. During orientation, over three hot days in late August, when an older student mentioned the robustness of “Greek culture” on campus, I thought he meant that Bradley had a strong classics program.
If you didn’t belong to a fraternity or a sorority, you were belittled as a “GDI”: a “goddamned individual.” Hearing that, I got my back up. The ideal state of being that I strove for and navigated by was my individuality; this, combined with the fact that I was not sure who I was, made up a good part of my personality.
At the same time, like an actor actually becoming who he is pretending to be, my wanting to be sovereign and autonomous imparted those qualities to me, in tiny, mismatched pieces.
Resisting my parents had instilled in me a resistance to any external force that tried to influence my thoughts and feelings. Few types of authority, to my mind, were as menacing as a group of like-minded people.
Still, as with just about every other incoming freshman at Bradley, I was swept down the sluice of “rush week” into one fraternity house after another, as they tried to woo new members, or preened themselves on being wooed. In the weeks before Claire and I became an established couple, I attended the various frat parties in hopes of meeting a girl. Friendless and alone, I was nevertheless elevated by the Old Man’s commentary above my discomfort to a plane of gimlet-eyed superiority—“He stood at the party by himself, gazing with a cool eye around the room that was filling up with chimpanzees dressed as humans.” However, my sacred individuality did not develop into a romantic asset on these occasions. My gimlet-eyed superiority was lost on the girls I met. I responded by turning to my other incentive for going to the parties, which was to get as drunk as I could.
Even when I was in that condition, the fraternal spirit of those places eluded me. The Greeks and the aspiring Greeks drank with the objective of fusing themselves into one mighty, unified will, capable of impressive feats of confidence building. I, on the other hand, drank to obliterate the social life around me, with the goal of establishing the illusion that the world moved in harmony with what I thought and felt.
I usually left the parties on the early side, not wishing to be stuck there with the fraternity boys. Feeling lonely one night, I lingered. Drunk to the point of numbness, feeling that the room had become a carousel, and just at the edge of stumbling, I made my way upstairs. A crowd of boys were standing outside the narrow doorway of a bedroom. In contrast to the raucous atmosphere, they were hushed and mostly still. Some of them politely pushed their way forward now and then to try to peer into the bedroom.
Unwilling to attract attention to myself, I resisted the impulse to find out what was happening and stayed just beyond the small crowd. One of the boys standing outside the door leaned forward and supported himself by gently placing his arm on the back of the boy standing in front of him. The impersonal intimacy of his gesture, the group tenderness of it, nurtured by whatever forbidden thing was happening in the bedroom, infuriated me.
I stormed down the narrow staircase, seething against the fraternities. Hatred was an old reflex that won me a measure of superiority to my environment. Yet even as the alcohol was filling my head with fantasies of violence and rescue, I could not get the bedroom out of my mind. You consciously abide by your finest instincts and then up rises this vague, weightless countercurrent of depravity running inside you: base, beyond thought, a sensation rather than a feeling, disgusting.
I spent the next night with Claire in her dorm room. I did not tell her about the unseen, unknown incident that had taken root in my mind, only about the indignation that the frat boys aroused in me. She listened with kindness and understanding. That was when I started to fall in love with her.
* * *
The school that Lydia Bradley had envisioned as a place to prepare for living a practical life in the modern world was, if anything, more successful at achieving its objective than she might have wished it to be. The combination of fraternity culture and the school’s obvious preferences for business majors mastering the skills of grabbing and getting, and for basketball stars, reduced the atmosphere on campus to a biological dimension. It was as if, after the deaths of her children, behind Lydia’s decent aspirations for the place lay her unconscious urge to ensure that the strongest and the fittest survive at all costs.
As for the journalism department, it turned out to offer a handful of courses taught by one or two indifferent instructors. It was nothing like the intensive major the brochure had advertised.
The bright side of all this was that Bradley’s small preserve of the humanities became the beneficiary of a business culture’s vain largesse. Bradley had constructed a special reading room in the library that housed the timeless works of literature and philosophy on mahogany bookshelves. Brass lamps glowed softly on long polished-wood tables. The carpet was deep red, crimson.
I tried to read my way through Western civilization there night after night, staying later and later as I became increasingly alienated from my roommate, Tad, a business major from a small Illinois town. He belonged to a fraternity, and I enjoyed mocking Greek culture to him. One weekend afternoon, I was playing an Erroll Garner record that my father had left behind in his hasty departure from the split-level house in Paramus, and that I had spirited off with me to Illinois. Without a word, Tad rose from his bed, where he’d been reading the newspaper, lifted the record, and tossed it onto my bed at my feet. This was the climax of the smoldering tension between his unbearably affable manner and my unbearably arrogant one. I leapt up and pushed him against the wall. He marched down to the resident advisor, who sent me to the dean of students. There I was told by a hastily assembled committee that if I attacked Tad again, I would be sent to the school psychologist.
This was too bad because I thought that Tad, who served as an emergency medical services volunteer back in his hometown, was the sort of guy who would sacrifice his life to save someone so long as you didn’t challenge his rigid sense of right and wrong. His inflexible morality was what made him potentially a hero. It was the herdlike quality of his morality that made me unable to accept it. Tad was one of the most decent guys I’d ever met. Still, I couldn’t stand him.
On the other hand, I would have fought to the death on behalf of the books I read in that special collections room with its bloodred carpet, books so many of which were essentially deflations of any claim to heroism that did not acknowledge humankind’s essential baseness, viciousness, and inadequacy.
* * *
Unable to fit into the campus mainstream, I moved toward people who also stood out at various angles from Bradley’s general population. One of them was Thomas. We lived on the same dormitory floor. Soon after we became friends, I began to escape Tad by spending time with Thomas in his room.
When I came to visit at night, he turned off the lights and lit candles, which produced a scent like exotic food. Thomas’s pale skin bordered on the luminescent. In the candlelight, his radiant white skin beneath his black hair seemed like a poetic frame for the upside-down candle situation he was in at Bradley, his true predilections now flickering into view, now flickering away.
I first thought, in the manner of adolescents back then, that he was one of those odd boys who acted like a girl—nothing more than that. It wasn’t until much later that I realized he
was struggling to be inconspicuously gay at a school where the faintest trace of effeminacy got you shouldered into the side of a building if you had the bad luck to be walking alone toward the wrong people late on a liquor-soaked weekend night.
He also had the half-misfortune of hailing from a small town somewhere in the southern part of Illinois. It was only half-bad because, as he explained to me, one part of a small town has its special mechanisms for protecting outsiders who have been stigmatized by another part. He laughed with a rare flash of bitterness when he said that. He aspired as much as I did to be saved by cosmopolitanism and intellectual enlightenment.
I myself never associated his femininity with his sexuality. To me, as a seventeen-year-old boy, he was a “fairy.” But I did not think of him as being a “faggot.” With the exception of advanced personalities like Alex Tarmanian and Teddy Di Buono, both of them perhaps evolved by sophisticated music into a deeper humanity, where I came from “fairy” meant not like other boys, but “faggot” meant malevolent fairy.
In neither case, though, did the image of two boys or men making love come to mind. My friends and I knew the term “homosexual,” but that was a whole other plane of meaning. Whereas “fairy” elicited our giggles and “faggot” our sneers, “homosexual” caused a mystified hush to descend upon us. As long as being gay was a question of style or manner diametrically different from ours, we could laugh or mock it away. Its true meaning, half-perceived and resisted by us, as another way to love and to have sex, flustered us into silence. After a while I stopped thinking of Thomas as a fairy and started thinking of him, somewhat nervously, as “strange and sensitive.”
On those nights when I spent time with him in his room, Thomas lit the candles and talked to me about books he was in thrall to at the moment. A book he was especially fond of was a collection of short stories. He loved one story in particular. He read it to me several times, always pausing to relish this line: “With her little lacquer brush, while the phone was ringing, she went over the nail of her little finger, accentuating the line of the moon.” He liked to repeat the final cadence: “accentuating the line of the moon.”
Moon, June, croon, loon, he said.
Cautious about who he really was, he had to eke himself out to me slowly. As if his metabolism found the way to do this on its own, his face shone more intensely when he talked to me. It was like a lightbulb that burns brighter after being banged, just before it goes out.
What do you make of the moon, Lee? he asked me one night when there was a full moon in the nighttime sky outside the window. He leaned forward with a smile, trying to be sophisticated and provocative. Instead he appeared vulnerable and transparent. The vulnerability of someone who thought he was mastering a situation, but wasn’t, cut right through me.
I like the moon, I said, shrugging uncertainly.
What do you think is on the dark side of the moon? he asked me. He stressed the word “dark,” as if it was both exciting and ironic.
I had heard the phrase “dark side of the moon,” but being scientifically apathetic, I had never actually connected it to a physical reality that was part of the moon itself until that moment.
All sorts of wild and wonderful things? I said. His strangeness intimidated me. I hoped to please him. What do you think is on the other side? I asked.
He looked at me with that mixture of forced excitement and irony. The same as what’s on the light side, he said. Then, bending toward me in self-spiting, vindictive impersonation of the frightening weirdo people treated him as back home, and with a theatrical whisper, he said: Just harder to see.
* * *
The friendship with Thomas didn’t extend beyond my nighttime visits to his room; some friendships require special lighting. There were two other boys with whom I had fuller relationships. One was Simon Cahill, who had grown up in Oak Park, Illinois. I don’t remember where I first met him. I think it was in my Milton class, but maybe that would be too richly ironic to be true. Milton was famously Protestant, while everyone on both sides of Simon’s family was Irish-Catholic as far back as you could go. Simon had gone to Catholic schools all his life, and he reignited my fascination with the atmosphere of Catholic ritual that Matthew Cassidy and his family had sparked in me a decade earlier.
Simon’s head was lopsided. It was as if fate had gnawed on it for a while before casting it aside. His eyes were barely more than slits; to this day, I’m not sure whether they were brown or blue. At drunken parties, especially frat parties, boys would sometimes taunt him or give him a push. Emboldened by the alcohol, I would come up beside Simon and scream Fuck off! at them. Sometimes his tormentors backed away. More often than not, Simon had to step between them and me and wave them off as though they were a flock of crows. His blustering, cumbersome largeness created a startling effect. The other boys converted their aggression into scornful laughter and we were spared. No one really wanted a fight.
Simon’s face had a mournful appearance. This sorrowful effect was accentuated by a head of rich, wavy dark-red hair that fell over his shoulders. His hair, his physical softness—he seemed to have been piled into a large sack—and his full, drooping lips gave him a feminine aspect. In fact anytime he witnessed a Thomas-like person being spat at or pushed on campus, his face took on a stricken expression. He shook his long head with surprising anger. But he seemed to have no appetite for any type of person in particular; only a vast, general yearning. I had the sense that he pitied Claire for being with me, and me for believing that she was in love with me. He and she became good friends.
On several occasions Simon brought me home with him to his family’s tidy bungalow-style house in Oak Park on long weekends and, in one case, for a week during the summer. His height must have derived from an earlier ancestor because his parents were both smaller than he. They seemed in fantastic shape for people in their late forties: slender, ruddy-faced, their eyes sparkling with vitality.
After a while, though, you brushed up against them or put your arms around them to say hello or goodbye and you realized that their slenderness was made up of stringy muscles and sinews. Their faces were flushed, and their eyes seemed trapped in a shiny viscous liquid. They were both alcoholics, and they were dying. Some people become clearer and clearer as they die, almost transparent. Simon’s parents had a desiccated translucency.
They were drunk when they came down to their small kitchen for lunch, drunk as you passed by them in the afternoon. At dinner, as they elaborated on the wonders of Chicago for me, and the magical visit they once made to New York, and the joy of being alive, they each had several glasses of wine. After dinner, still celebrating all the colorful places and personalities they had found in life, they each had three martinis. They never went to sleep; they passed out.
Simon himself hated alcohol, feared it, and refused to discuss it beyond that. He drank, and drank a lot, because it was in his genes and he could not resist it. This fatal succumbing to an inherited yet foreign part of his nature was probably what accounted for the expression of sorrow on his face.
During my stays in Oak Park, Simon introduced me to his closest friend, bespectacled, quiet, scholarly Duncan. They had been friends all through the many years of Catholic school. The two of them entertained me with stories of apoplectic nuns and Jesuit priests in sharkskin suits who drove around in Cadillacs with their girlfriends. One time, they told me, the two of them decided to take a rowboat across Lake Michigan to Canada. It began to storm, and they would have drowned if they had been farther away than the twenty feet from shore it had taken them all morning to get to.
With Simon, who aspired to be a photographer, I spent a good deal of time in Chicago’s museums. At night we sat in his kitchen, drinking ourselves numb and talking about Hemingway, who grew up in Oak Park, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed several houses there. Simon remarked on the similarity between Hemingway’s spare, flat prose and the straightforward verticality presented by the town’s row upon row of oak trees. He connected
both to Frank Lloyd Wright’s sincere planes—half-Japanese, half–midwestern prairie. Simon’s parents were overgrown children who drank out of helplessness, the alcohol devouring their self-destructive innocence and corrupting their transparency. In unconscious response, Simon was profoundly moved by sober sincerity and clarity. When we were ready for bed, we put our arms around each other for support and quietly climbed the stairs to our bedrooms on the second floor.
* * *
The other boy I became close to was Eduardo Caravantes. His family was Mexican. They had emigrated to Chicago when he was a small child. Eduardo grew up on Chicago’s south side, in a neighborhood known as “back of the yards” because it was located directly behind where the city’s famous slaughterhouses once stood before they were relocated to Joliet, fifty miles to the south.
Chicago cops, Eduardo told me, used to drag him and his brother, Mauricio, onto the slaughterhouse grounds and beat them for fun. They got beaten like “little hamburgers,” Eduardo said, his eyes wide not with pain at the memory, or a sense of drama or fascination with his own story, or detached amusement. I could never figure out why his eyes widened like that.
At a certain point, Eduardo’s reactions drifted away from what he was saying and from the situation he was reacting to. He was eccentric, perhaps a little unhinged. He laughed often, yet he had no sense of humor. The warmth of his laughter made up for it. He liked to wear an old green army jacket and refer to himself as Hawkeye, after the character in the TV series M*A*S*H, about a medical unit in Korea during the Korean War. Eduardo wanted passionately to be a doctor, though you couldn’t be sure whether it was a fantasy inspired by the TV show, or a genuine aspiration on account of which he was drawn to the show. What was clear was that between his odd disconnectedness and his struggles to keep up with his science classes, he faced a difficult path to medical school.
Eduardo’s pathos was what drew me to him. Failure, or the near certainty of it, seemed to me concrete evidence of someone’s humanity. Wealth and privilege, on the other hand, were the conditions for heartlessness. Magnanimity generated by material good fortune was, to my mind, merely shrewd cover for the driving ambition that accrued and sustained the material wealth. I thought I detected this calculating social intelligence whenever I encountered scions of old midwestern families at Bradley. Another person’s ambition had no room for me with all my emotional needs and embarrassing shortcomings. Rich people were too used to advancing on forward-sliding circumstances and with forward-moving people to pause with someone who had no advancing motion to offer them at all.