“Your records stink anyway,” said Chris. “All that pussy folk music.” T.J. rocked backwards on his bed and smiled a very private smile.
Chris pulled off his headphones again. “You know why T.J. is going to the dance tonight, Pete? ’Cause he’s still looking desperately for his first lay.”
“Actually, I’m looking for my first blowjob from this guy named Chris.” Chris threw his book at T.J., hitting him in the shoulder. T.J. started laughing. “Come on, Chris. Do me.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not into giving head.”
“That’s not what Duncan Roth told me.” Duncan was a weird little bookworm in the Sixth Form who was reputed to be queer.
“I got the solution, T.J.,” said Chris. “You can find one of those immigrant women who needs to get married to stay in the country. She’d still have to be pretty desperate.” T.J. turned to me and shook his head and smiled as if he was in bliss.
I decided I’d seen enough. T.J. was too excited for a serious guitar lesson, and I wasn’t in the mood for horsing around. I left the two roommates trading insults and hurling sneakers across their room.
The Milburger Dormitory, where Chris and T.J. lived, was at the far north end of the campus. It was a large, gray brick building, recently constructed, designed more fancily than the older dormitories. I lived in the old Greylock dormitory, which was near Milburger around the corner of the main lawn. Keith Hanson also lived in Milburger, in a single room two doors down the hall from T.J.
As much as I liked T.J., Keith really was my best friend. Ever since Third Form, we’d spent most of our free time together. And we were more than just social buddies. Keith and I spent hours in mutual psychoanalysis, trading dark Freudian secrets, trying to shock each other with ruthless self-excoriation. One night we’d confessed our greatest fears. Keith feared graduating from engineering college and then ending up a bum on 125th Street in Harlem, his useless degree in his back pocket. “If that happened, I’d kill myself,” he said. I confessed that I was worried I was turning out socially odd. I was too moody, and my sense of humor tended to the bizarre. I had to double-check my jokes before saying them aloud to make sure they weren’t too weird. Keith agreed that I was strange, but said this was okay because I could still function in day-to-day life.
Keith and I were cofounders of the Briarwood Black Student Union, which we modeled loosely after the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Keith was the actual founder, lobbying the faculty for a black students club room and convincing them that we weren’t actually race terrorists. He devoted great energies to the BSU, I thought, to deflect the charge that he wasn’t really “black” because he came from Long Island.
As cofounder, I was dubbed the Minister of Information. My duty was to foment the black cultural revolution by writing articles for the school newspaper and organizing drama and music programs. For our yearbook photo, the BSU posed in black berets and raised fists. Keith’s room became de facto revolutionary headquarters, and the black students on campus gathered there to listen to music and play cards.
Working together in the BSU, Keith and I became very close. We got together in New York in the summers, spending days at Jones Beach. The summer before, we’d walked for hours along the shore, and I’d barely made it back to catch the train back to the city. I was planning on going to law school, and I offered to draft Keith’s engineering contracts and construction tax shelters when I got out. Of course, Keith was straight and I was gay, so there was a limit to our friendship. While Keith would jerk his head around to look at girls’ behinds on the street, I was more interested in keeping my Popsicle from melting, or scanning the hairless armpits of the boy who’d sold it to me.
Since the start of the new school year, Keith had become more militant. I figured the politics were just going to his head, but he was noticeably less friendly to the white students. I was really surprised when he snapped at Chris in the woods on Briarwood Beautification Day. When the three of us were assigned to the same dinner table, Keith pretended not to hear when Chris asked him to pass the salt or the milk. Later he told me that the Thayers were corrupt capitalists who financed apartheid in South Africa.
Keith had made his dislike obvious, so I was surprised when Chris started coming down to Keith’s room to visit when I was there. I had no idea what Chris thought he was doing. Keith wouldn’t speak to Chris at all. Needless to say, I felt the tension, and I didn’t say much either. At first Chris just sat quietly, mentioning that he liked soul music or that he respected Martin Luther King, Jr., and watched as Keith and I cracked jokes or made plans for the BSU.
Chris didn’t appreciate the cooler treatment I gave him around Keith. He’d interrupt us in too loud a voice, or frown at me and leave. One Saturday evening, he was determined to get my attention. He danced in his underpants to the Aretha Franklin record playing on Keith’s stereo, repeating over and over a rhythmic little two-step he’d mastered. Then he plopped himself on Keith’s bed and interrupted our conversation.
“That was a great football game today, Pete,” said Chris. Varsity football had beaten Trinity-Charles with a fourth-quarter touchdown, though I’d spent most of the game pinned under the elbows of a two-hundred-pound offensive tackle.
“You go completely borneo on the football field,” Chris went on.
“Pete’s always been a wild man on the inside,” Keith said. “The quiet man with the hidden wild streak.” Keith was always quick to analyze my brain for me. In this case, he was right. For me, everything was a matter of permission. On the football field, I had permission to lose control. I exploded in fury when the other team scored or when our team made a bad play. I hurled myself through the air to make kamikaze tackles. I really am lucky I never broke my neck.
“A wild streak, huh?” said Chris. “We have to bring that to the surface.” Chris was rolling comfortably on Keith’s bed now, inspecting his body, looking over his shoulder at hard-to-see places. He circled his thumb and middle finger around his wrist, then ran his forefinger along his arm as though measuring himself for a suit.
“I can’t stand being so small,” Chris murmured. “I need to put on about twenty pounds. What do you think, Pete?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You look okay to me.”
“Pete,” Keith interrupted. “How are we going to raise money for the BSU?”
“You think so, huh?” Chris jumped in, keeping me on the subject of his body.
“Sure,” I said. I liked Chris’s body. It was small and compact, like a miniature halfback, except his muscles were hidden by a smooth layer of baby fat, so that he resembled a dish of pudding. I didn’t want him to gain weight.
“I should lift weights and get really big,” said Chris.
I turned away to talk business with Keith, but Chris continued to distract me. He sat up on the bed and pretended to hold a movie camera in his hands, peek-a-booing through one hand and circling the other in the air as if rolling the film.
“How does it feel to be famous, Mr. Summus?” he asked from behind his invisible camera. “Mr. Summus” was Chris’s new nickname for me. “Summus” was the Latin term the school used for high honors. Chris was in a silly mood, and he might have been stoned. He lay back on the bed and started making funny, incoherent sounds with his mouth. His front tooth was chipped from a soccer accident, and his lips were thick, almost Negro thick, which made him speak sometimes with a slight, alluring lisp.
“I love the way you nailed that guy on the kickoff. You speared him with your helmet. Wham!” Chris lunged upwards on the bed with his hips. “I bet you sterilized the guy.”
Chris was beginning to embarrass me. He and Keith were ignoring each other and talking to me as though this scenario made sense. I tried to carry on two conversations at once, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Chris, who was now practically doing a striptease on Keith’s bed. Chris sensed he was winning me away and became more animated. He rubbed hard between his toes w
ith his fingers, then lay still on his belly with his head on Keith’s pillow, facing me. “Mr. Summus,” he repeated several times quietly. His cooing repetition of my nickname — air squeezing past chipped tooth over bitten, pursed lips, his head snuggled brazenly in a strange boy’s pillow — was almost a sex act in itself.
Chris turned over on his back and beat on his stomach like bongo drums. He snapped the elastic band on his underwear with his thumb, then snapped it again harder, then again, raising the elastic band inches above his waist.
“My nuts hurt,” Chris said, smiling at me and tugging at his balls. “I think I need a nut transplant.”
“Too much sex,” I suggested. Keith let out a strained laugh.
“Not enough sex,” said Chris. He pulled at his balls again, and ran his fingers under the bottom edge of his shorts. Then he hooked the two front flaps of his underwear with two fingers each and pulled the flaps apart.
“Looks like a clit, doesn’t it?” My heart jumped. Without thinking, I raised my head to get a better look at the opening in his underwear. All I could see was a patch of blonde pubic hair. I craned my neck even farther to peek. I didn’t mind Chris’s antics at all now. I didn’t mind his rudeness, and I didn’t mind that he was embarrassing me. As Chris explored the suggestive potential of boys’ briefs, I almost forgot that Keith was in the room.
Later, at a school dance, I realized Keith knew exactly what was going on in his room. We were drinking punch with Nancy Lane, a thin blond girl from our sister school, Sarah Waters. Nancy had seen me playing basketball earlier. After the game, she’d complimented me on my “legs.” At the dance, when Nancy told me, “I want to get to know you better, Peter,” I reacted as if she’d asked me for directions to Ireland. Keith told Nancy not to bother. “You don’t know Pete like I do,” he said casually. I guess I had been kind of obvious.
Two days later, I was walking with T.J. to French class. It was close to Thanksgiving, a very cool time of the year in Connecticut. I had on my wool-lined windbreaker and was still shivering, but T. J. wore just a gray wool sweater under his blue blazer. The cold didn’t seem to bother him. He was in a rare, quiet mood, distracted by some intensely private thought. I kept glancing at him, trying to catch his eyes, but he avoided looking at me, looking off over the slope of the hill, towards the chapel. I, too, was thinking hard.
I was wondering about T. J. and Chris. After his exhibition on Keith’s bed, I had to wonder whether Chris was gay. When he pulled open the flaps of his underwear, I’d almost fainted. Could Chris not have known what he was doing to me?
And all those jokes between Chris and T. J. about blow-jobs and Duncan Roth. I wondered. Was Chris crawling into T.J.’s bed at night, and T.J. wasn’t telling me?
I was fascinated by the possibility. T. J. and Chris together in bed was the sexiest sight I could imagine. I visualized a tangle of cream-colored arms and legs, a head sticking out of either end of the pile. At least with me and T.J., you could always tell what belonged to whom.
T. J. wanted Chris to screw him. I could tell. I didn’t mind. I was intrigued by the idea. I thought then that it was all about Chris, but I know now it was really about T.J. My feelings for T.J. were stirring quietly inside me — germinating like life inside a seed pod, not yet strong enough to push out and show bright, sparkling green. Chris had touched T.J. in ways that I had not, and didn’t want to. It was T.J.’s strength I craved, just as I craved Kelly’s softness. But the thought of someone else, of Chris, finding the little girl inside of T.J., the softness behind his strength. I wasn’t just curious. I wanted it to happen.
I know this now, but at the time I didn’t know anything. I just felt — curious, fascinated, affectionate. For a moment, my body was flooded with fondness for T.J. A ball of warmth circled inside me, rose quickly, and burst into my face in an unrestrainable smile. T.J. saw me smiling and turned towards me, curiosity in his face.
“Why was Thayer kicked out of Whitehaven?” I asked. “Drugs. Sex. They caught him in bed with his housemaster’s daughter.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
This was disappointing but not conclusive. Better the housemaster himself, I thought. “I saw the two of you walking together yesterday. You looked like you were in love, T.J.”
“Get out of here.”
“You get out of here. You had this big, dumb smile on your face. You almost looked shy.”
T.J. looked at me briefly and then at the ground.
“He came into Keith Hanson’s room the other night in his underpants,” I went on. “Boy, did he put on a show.”
“What kind of show?”
“Rolling around on the bed, sticking his hand down in his shorts.”
“And you liked it?”
“Sure I liked it.”
“This is a strange conversation,” T.J. said.
“All my conversations with you are strange.”
We walked in silence for several yards. T.J. was still looking at the ground. “Would it bother you if I was in love with Chris?”
“No.” I paused for a moment. “Maybe a little.” I thought for a second of what T.J. was getting at. “I don’t think of you and me as lovers. We’re just friends who fuck each other.” T.J. slowed down and lagged a few steps behind me. He looked puzzled, as though he were trying to figure a math problem in his head. He squinted his eyes, looking hurt.
For a moment I felt burned, as though I’d cheapened myself. I wondered how well I knew T.J. There were things at work in him, feelings churning inside that I didn’t know, didn’t understand. I realized I’d been taking him for granted. My simple, sexy, happy little imp. And the one to take all the risks. In a flash it hit me — I wanted T.J. to seduce Chris, like he’d seduced me, so that I could then sleep with Chris. Now I was sorely embarrassed. I felt like a swine.
I’d never thought of T.J. needing anything, let alone me. I didn’t want to deal with this new complexity, with him hiding thoughts and feelings from me, or making demands I couldn’t meet by simply surrendering to him. “Come on, T.J.,” I said. “We’re gonna be late for French.”
I started going to Chris and T. J.’s room as much as possible. How could I stay away? Chris and T.J. were the two cutest boys at school, superstars of sex, and it was amazing to see the two of them together, sprawled out on their beds or carousing and carrying on. If I was lucky I might catch Chris coming from the shower. He wasn’t shy about being nude, and he never hurried to get dressed. Moonshot Lewis lived upstairs in Milburger, but often came down to be with us. We sat around listening to T. J.’s stereo and talking about sex and sports and which masters we thought were assholes.
T.J. didn’t bring up the matter of us being boyfriends again. He didn’t seem bitter or mad at all, he was as friendly with me as ever. I was relieved, but not because the idea of being T. J.’s boyfriend didn’t appeal to me. It just made me vaguely nervous. Why did I act so strange with boys? I thought about my weird, confused behavior with Cady Donaldson. And my unreasoning dislike of Barrett Granger, my freshman roommate. I’d hated Barrett as soon as I met him, and I realized now it was only because, living in the same room, he was too close to me. As much as I liked T.J., there was still a certain distance I had to keep from him, perhaps from any white boy. And so I was relieved to see T.J. falling in love with Chris.
Still, I wondered whether T.J. wasn’t heading for trouble with Chris, who remained a mystery as far as being queer or not.
Chris and Moonshot talked about girls all the time. Sometimes they were very silly. Big boobs, watermelon breasts, Titty City, deep dish pussy pie. It didn’t matter to me. I was still meeting Kelly in the gymnasium attic, and I still went off to T.J.’s house once or twice a term, so I didn’t need sex with Chris or Moonshot. It was enough just to be with them and to look at them in the shower, and they were both accommodating.
Except for some curiosity when I was twelve. I’d never really thought about girls. When Nancy Lane practical
ly asked me to sleep with her, I reacted as if she’d asked me to jump off the roof. I really thought it was just that silly a question.
T.J. had slept with girls, at least so he told me, but he’d never been in love with a girl. I think it bothered T.J. that Chris slept with girls. He always turned quiet when we sat around joking about sex. That’s how I could tell that T.J. was falling in love — he was jealous. Jealousy is the sine qua non of love.
Spending more time with T.J. and Chris meant spending less time with Keith Hanson. Since Keith’s room was two doors down the hall, he could hear us in T.J.’s room making noise. Sometimes he would walk by the door and look at me with disapproval. Once he complained that the music was too loud. Chris snapped, “So what?” but T.J. got up and turned the music down.
Keith cooled to me noticeably. When I sat with him and John Shepherd in the dining hall, he would look away from me, and try to exclude me from the conversation. He started talking more and more about “black identity” and “the black struggle.” He managed to get these words into any conversation I had with him.
I was mad at Keith for giving me this attitude. I liked my new group of friends. I still wanted to hang out with Keith and John, “the Brothers,” as they called themselves. But I didn’t like being pushed. I felt freer with Chris and T.J. They had no expectations of how a black kid should act. If my hair was combed out of style, they didn’t notice. If I acted like a nerd, they didn’t care. I was free to be my weird self, and they just assumed it was normal for someone from Harlem.
Besides, I was changing. I started to like the music Chris and T. J. played. T. J. liked folksingers and acoustic rock, like Bob Dylan and The Band. Chris liked heavy metal — the James Gang and Blind Faith. I liked both. The blues-based acoustic music was soulful and authentic, but the hard acid rock was just plain fun, like going to an amusement park. Moonshot said it all stunk, but I could tell he was starting to like the fluid, razored wildness of electric guitar. Chris worshipped all the great guitar players. He called them by their first names, as though he knew them personally. Eric, Duane, Ritchie, especially Jimi. “You have to realize, it’s a tradition,’’ he told me. “It’s more than music, it’s a whole cultural lifestyle.” We argued about our favorite bands, and our least favorite. The transvestite rock star Alice Malice brought unanimous hoots of derision, especially from Chris. “I hope he ODs on his estrogen shots,” Chris muttered venomously. T. J. and I, though gay as Christmas trees, saw no connection between sucking dick and wearing women’s clothing.
The Color of Trees Page 13