I was in love, by the way. Heidi was a Richmond, Virginia, Lutheran minister’s daughter, which, if it’s the first thing you know about her, unfairly suggests she was as horny as a drunken pirate. She was intoxicated by the idea of “know thyself.” In adolescence, she said, she’d read books on teen psychology to anticipate the crises and emotional cul-de-sacs she was supposed to suffer through. She decided to avoid them by skipping straight to the mature outcome, a developmental shortcut she figured would save everyone time and grief.
“And it didn’t work!” she cried, genuinely irked that her mind couldn’t out-think itself. This made me love her. I judged her for giving up, though. I thought, “I could probably do it,” the way I often did about things that someone said were impossible.
Heidi had the soul of a kindergarten teacher. She carried Crayolas and Scotch tape in her purse, had glitter on her nightstand, sewed her own Halloween costumes. There was no reason for her to stand up for this kind of domestic work publicly at Wesleyan, where feminism was cutting-edge in a humorless denim skort kind of way. Further, arts & crafts would be humiliatingly uncool at Alpha Delta Phi, gender-based uncool, multidimensionally less cool than finger-snapping, and yet she could not be persuaded out of it. She took over the wine and cheese parties, and added crayons and butcher paper.
But just as I was flinching, the coolest poet in the house, who was a lesbian that semester, closed her eyes and remarked on how the smell of Crayolas brought her to a beautiful, innocent place, and then everyone used the crayons. Safety scissors came out of hidden drawers. Heidi was a hit.
This should have been a lesson to me in the power of being yourself. Heidi was funny and she cared about me, and this shook away questions I’d been living with for a long time. Freshman year questions, like: “Who am I?” and “Does anyone see me?” and “What happened to me after I broke my nose?”
One weekend, I brought Heidi to my mom’s apartment in New York. Mom was in the midst of moving back to California, so we had the place to ourselves. We cooked, we saw a play, we were served drinks at restaurants, we took our room keys, which the university had stamped DO NOT DUPLICATE, to a bored locksmith on 72nd Street who promptly duplicated them.
My mother was moving, I told Heidi, because a great opportunity awaited, and fortune favored the brave, and it was make-or-break time. This seemed glamorous to Heidi and that made me believe it a little more myself. In a way, we were making an agreement: she was the one who was slightly sheltered, her parents still together, good church people; I was more worldly, and my mother was a little bit exciting.
In truth, I wasn’t quite sure what was happening to my mother, except it was clear that none of her investments in her boyfriends—first Trevor, then Anton—had panned out. To me, her move to California was a way to restart her life without expecting anyone else would come through for her.
On the last night in the apartment, I stood behind Heidi in the living room, wrapping my arms around her and kissing her on the neck while she stared up at the wall. Here was the 1930s oil painting of George, my grandfather. I had seen it so often I could no longer see it clearly. I wanted to apologize for the figure peering out of a mire of history, enrobed in muddy colors, that cool white stare from a face that might be louche, judgmental, or campy.
Heidi said he was sexy.
I hadn’t thought of that before, and it made me look at him again. I decided she was right—George was sexy. A sexual gaze broadcast desire or autonomy, and his was about autonomy. That thought—I am autonomous—was attractive. Long after we went back to school, I thought about it, and I thought I had an answer to those old questions about myself. That’s me, I thought, or That should be me, which is different.
* * *
—
One Sunday evening just before I turned eighteen, in deep March, the kind of March unknown to me in California, high snowbanks behind Olin Library and wind rattling empty bleachers, I stood still on the football field under arc lights singing with the strain of winter on them. I was listening. There had been a voice inside me my whole life that said “I can be happy when…” When I get published. When I have a girlfriend. When my mother is happy. When it’s safe.
Safe? It was the streetcar theory. I’d read the first few pages of The Master and Margarita, and had concluded that if I declared myself happy, a streetcar would leap its tracks and smash me flat. But right then it occurred to me that Heidi was happy. Nothing bad had happened to her in response.
I unzipped my jacket and I stood for two or three minutes, feeling warm. I had just left rehearsal for a play. I was on my way to my dormitory, where Heidi was waiting for me. But I wasn’t wishing I was at rehearsal or at the dorm. There was no “when.” I wanted to be right here, right now. I couldn’t name this feeling and wondered if it was what being happy was.
When I walked into my room, Heidi was reading in my bed. I wanted her to know how I felt, but I didn’t want to cheapen it with words (for some reason I thought that actually explaining myself equaled cheapening). I took off my jacket and sat on the bed. I wanted to be known. I hoped she would see whatever this feeling of peace was that radiated from me, and I took her by the back of the head, brought her to me and kissed her.
When she came up for air, she said, “Thank God you kissed me. I thought you were going to strangle me.”
I explained to her, quickly, no, no, it’s this good feeling I have, but the more I talked the more it was like I was covering up a crime I’d accidentally committed. The more honest I was being, the more dishonest I sounded, and as my anxiety filled up the overheated dorm room, Heidi took on the hooded-eyed expression of my fiction-writing teacher.
There was a distance between how I saw myself and how everyone else did. This wasn’t going to clear up easily.
* * *
—
I spent the summer between freshman and sophomore years living in my father’s house in Brentwood, California. I worked at a Shakey’s Pizza on 26th Street, in one of the less utopian sections of Santa Monica.
Duane, the assistant manager who hired me, was unimpressed, beginning with my application, on which I’d put WESLEYAN prominently as my current address. He concluded that as an intellectual, or something, I wasn’t qualified to actually use the oven. So I made the pizzas and put the metal tags on them with the order numbers and they were shuffleboarded onto the burners by Martin, a surf rat with a dirty pelt of blond hair and the Santa Monica native’s accent, afternoon-length rrrs that almost made him sound like he was from Missouri.
When Duane’s back was turned, Martin let me put a pizza in, once. Two seconds later, I recoiled with a burn from the oven’s lip already rising on my wrist.
“Don’t worry, dude,” Martin said. He showed off his forearms. They were shiny with welts. “You get used to it.”
“Wow—that looks painful.”
“Nah, bud, I take a Quaalude every day before work. I don’t feel a thing.”
This was the first job I’d had where my co-workers understood they had maxed out their earning capacity. There was a sense of fatalism in the air, as if everyone had paddled away from a sinking ship onto the island that was Shakey’s Pizza, supplies were running low, there was no search party coming for us, and making pizzas and doing bong hits was only going to last so long before we ate each other.
I don’t remember talking much. The others all had nicknames—Hoss, Dutch, Tango—but I didn’t get a nickname. Whenever I added something to the conversation, the others tended to fall silent, as if they were trying to interpret how I was judging them. The fact was, I just wanted to fit in, and the baldness of this, too, probably made them fall silent.
After I’d been there two weeks, Duane pulled me aside. He whispered to me, eyes ducking left and right as if looking for eavesdroppers. “Wesleyan? My cousin just told me about that place. Wow.”
I brightened. “Yeah.”
“I mean, that’s amazing.”
“Yeah, well…”
“How’d you end up in an all-girls school, man?” He had such respect for me at that moment, and by extension for himself, for having known to hire me in spite of everything else I was. I could see in his eyes that he just knew I had stories of disdainful girls in English equitation outfits and tough, kilted lacrosse players and pledges in pink sweaters lining up, nails dug into palms with anticipation, outside a sorority house in whose chapter room, by candlelight, on a mound of silk underpants, I was the altar.
“That’s Wellesley,” I said. “I go to Wesleyan.”
“Oh.”
And just like that I was demoted again. I remember him walking away and me thinking, “Why am I that kind of person?” and wishing I’d just kept my mouth shut. How hard would that have been? The world would have been mysterious, bold, and a better place for both of us.
Wesleyan was humorless. The term “politically correct” was rumored to have started there, and in 1982 it was the front burner on which all discourse carbonized. One debate in the student newspaper was whether you could be a feminist and not be a lesbian, and the answer came down like a double-headed axe: No. No, you couldn’t. The Feminist House changed its name to the Womonist House, there was a woman’s history class for men called “Educating the Oppressors,” and men took it.
Lust was male and aggression was male, and both were clearly wrong. And so, just as political jokes flourished in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era, Wesleyan turned out to have a hidden, spectacular misogynist humor.
Q: Why do women have vaginas?
A: So men will talk to them.
That was my second-favorite joke. My favorite was courtesy of a mean-looking junior named Dan, who took the villainous roles in the theater department. One evening, as we were about to go onstage in a play, Dan pulled me aside. Dan had never actually spoken to me before and I thought he had some kind of emergency direction for me.
He whispered, “How do you make a woman come?”
“How?”
“Who cares?” He shoved me through the curtain and onto the stage, dazzled. It was an old trick to fuck with your cast mates, and I was impressed, and from then on, I had a new favorite joke.
At Shakey’s Pizza, orders started with #1 and went to #100 before going back to #1 again. When a pizza came out of the oven, any of the crew could go to the microphone and call it out. It was simple enough that Duane let me do it.
Except for one number. Every time, when it came up late in the rotation, there was a shoving match among four or five guys to grab the order and the microphone, and the winner would cry, “Calling Number Sixty-nine! Number Sixty-nine, please!”
Whoever won was looked upon as heroically as Alexander Pope pinning Dorothy Parker to a chaise longue, although I was probably the only person there who thought that. I never competed. I just quietly made my pizzas and bided my time, because I knew I could do better, somehow.
It was early August when I piped up, which meant there was still a month left for me to live with the consequences of trying to tell my joke. It also meant I’d been there long enough to understand my place if I’d been paying attention. It wasn’t that I was shunned, or even looked down on. My job was to be the guy who was in college.
There were five or six of us in the kitchen, and though it was early in the shift, it was busy, so the calling of Number Sixty-nine had already occurred. My co-workers were in a postcoital drowsiness because of that. There was some attempt at joke telling. There was subdued laughter. I was listening, nervous, waiting to make my move.
“So! How do you make a woman come?”
There was silence. Martin was looking toward the ceiling.
Duane was clenching his brow. Finally, he said, “You play with the clit, right?”
“No,” I said. “Who cares?”
Had there been crickets in the kitchen, we would have heard crickets.
Martin said, “I care, man.”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s a joke.”
“Tell it again,” Duane said.
“I can’t tell it again.”
“Sure you can. Tell it again.”
You can’t tell a joke twice. It’s like trying to chew the same stick of gum again. But: “Okay. How do you make a woman come?” As if enthusiasm would make it work, I shrieked it. But Duane was holding up his hand.
“Wait,” Duane said. “Tango, Dutch, come on in here, Glen’s telling a joke. Glen, wait, hold on for Tango and Dutch.”
I looked down at my prep table, at the cold slices of pepperoni and mushrooms and green peppers, in other words at the actual tools of my actual job. “We don’t have to…”
But Tango and Dutch were there, arms folded, waiting for me to speak.
“What’s going on?” This was Deirdre, whom I haven’t mentioned. She was the only one of us cute enough to work the counter, so she was rarely in the kitchen, except now, because she’d heard something great was about to happen.
“Glen’s telling a joke,” Duane said. “Okay, Glen, tell it again.”
There was a ring around me. I was faced with expressions of serious intent, a group of refugees around a hand crank radio during wartime. Duane was utterly sincere, hand on his chin, waiting for the joke, so he could get it this time.
“I can’t,” I said.
There were cries and wails. I had to tell the joke. Come on! But I couldn’t. I was red and shamed and I turned toward a phantom order as if it had to be made immediately.
“Okay.” Duane sighed. “I’ll tell it. How do you make a woman come?”
“How?” someone asked.
“Who cares?”
A spurt of laughter. Deirdre, who’d been drinking a root beer, coughed and hacked and as she recovered, she howled. “ ‘Who cares?’ Ha! That’s so funny! What a guy joke!” Duane told the joke over and over, all night, each time getting fresh laughter as I glowered from the sidelines.
There, take a picture of that: that guy, the one standing behind the counter with his little paper hat on, the one who lacked courage, the one fuzzy around the edges, the one who wasn’t quite himself yet, or prepared to defend who he actually was. That was the person I no longer wanted to be.
GENEALOGY & SCRAPBOOKING
MY JOURNALS from then are punishing to read. I was self-centered, the kind who goes out of his way to show he is not self-centered, and thus struggling with why he’s so distracted by his profile reflected in store windows. My notebooks are abattoirs for hundreds of pages of crossed-out, rearranged, gutted sausage casings stuffed with poorly raised fiction. Every word there mistakes clever for genius. My stories have characters named Upton, Ilyssa, Austin, Lamont, Marshall, names no actual parent has ever given a child, and the dialogue is arch, aging as badly as situation comedies with laugh tracks.
On the cover of my first journal, next to the Wesleyan University crest, is a list of books I read, with dates inked in to indicate when I’d finished them. Lies. I finished maybe one in four of those books. I recorded them thinking I would fool my older self, whom I apparently thought would be unscrupulous and forgetful.
But I can’t hate everything there. The words also describe an attempt to be a better human being. I was still struggling to finish a sentence, like this: I am the kind of person who ____________.
“Write a scene,” I wrote, “where it develops backwards—dialogue not spoken backwards, but each following scene actually precedes it, chronologically,” along with a disappointed note that it turned out someone named Pinter had already done this.
I worried that I wouldn’t remember the things I hadn’t written down. I worried that what I was writing down were the wrong things. My emotions, I wrote, were the depth of a penny’s edge. Among a lot of badly done Kanji, I set out rules for behavior,
one of which was “You must be arrogant. Without being pretentious.” If you are wondering whether I’d meant not “arrogant” but “self-confident,” this is the remainder of that entry:
Not self-confident. At the end of the night, self-confidence feels good enough about itself to take the bus home while arrogance is fucking self-confidence’s girlfriend.
I’m not sure how I meant this arrogance to fit with my simultaneous urge to radiate a Zen master’s calm.
I started taking notes on things beyond myself, as my family suffered a tragedy. I wrote on March 10, 1983, that my mother’s older sister, Rosemary, had died in England.
Rosemary had washed down a handful of Valium with gin, which the coroner recorded as an accidental death. The family wasn’t saying “Valium with gin” aloud, much less speculating how that could have happened. My mother suspected they were being British and more discreet than she wanted them to be. She hinted that Rosemary had spoken darkly of how depressed she was. What was an accident, anyway? I had only met Rosemary a few times, so the news came with oddly syncopated echoes: I was sad, I hardly knew her, I was sad for the people who loved her, I pretended I knew her better and that her death meant more to me than it could. There is a shameful feeling in adolescence where you make fictive kinship with the victims of terrible news, a way of feeling excited without the pain of actual involvement. Jeremy Leven in Creator calls it “keeping the marquee lights flashing.” A kinder way to say it is that I had never suffered a close loss and this was my way of trying to feel something.
I’d already taken to answering friends’ questions by saying, “I was raised by wolves.” But Rosemary’s death reminded me that I did come from somewhere. Mom’s family myth was about potential, and it was a complex one. It was as if each child were taught, along with how to tie her shoes, and not to make crumbs when she ate, that she should always keep her hopes up, and know they would never be realized. Something would reliably hunt down your dreams and kill them. But still, chin up.
I Will Be Complete Page 19