by Steve Kluger
“How come you kept them from smithereening me when we didn’t even know each other yet?”
“You never saw your ass in football pants. It would have been like letting them take a jackhammer to the Mona Lisa.”
Clayton played hard-to-get right from the start. So I let him. When he pretended to be aloof, I was aloofer. When he went out of his way to avoid me, I avoided him first. When he’d greet me with a blunt “Hey, McKenna,” he’d get an even blunter “Hey, Bergman” in return. Nothing makes him crazier than not having the upper hand. And once I’d figured that out, he was a marked man.
“Charleen, who’s the hunk with the buzz cut?”
“Sssssh!” she hissed. “That’s Clayton Bergman. He’s from the Bronx, his father was a longshoreman, and he’s straight.”
“In your dreams,” I whispered back. “Not with a body like that.” It was the second week of freshman year, and we were sitting in the fifth row of a three hundred–seat amphitheater that passed for one of Harvard’s smaller classrooms. Though I didn’t learn the truth for months, Clayton had deliberately plunked himself squarely into my line of vision so I could watch him ignoring me for an hour. It worked.
“Hannibal the Carthaginian defined modern warfare blah blah blah.” Where did he get those shoulders? “Not to be confused with Alexander the Great blah blah blah.” He could pass for a war hero. Any war. I wonder what he’d look like in a tunic? Wrestling me. “An ingenious military tactic called the phalanx blah blah blah.” He’s got to know I’m staring at him. The least he could do is stare back. “Lessons learned the hard way during the Peloponnesian War blah blah blah.” I wish I were dead.
After class, I made Charleen tag along with me as we followed him across Harvard Square. The issue confronting us was how to run into him accidentally so it didn’t look like we were doing exactly what we were doing; of secondary concern was beating the traffic light across from the Coop before we lost him in the crowd. In the process, we caused a four-car pile-up—but that was only because Charleen lost a shoe while we were running from the oil tanker just before it veered away from us and plowed into the FedEx van parked in front of BayBanks.
“That’s the end,” she insisted as we caught our breath on the sidewalk next to the Wursthouse. “Effectively, unequivocally the end. Craig, I will not allow them to scrape me up from Mass Ave just so you can get laid!”
“Look! Look!” I cried, grabbing her arm and pointing half a block to the east. “He’s going into Grendel’s!” Charleen relaxed immediately as though the whole matter were settled.
“Perfect,” she said briskly, getting her Darien, Connecticut, voice back. “They have a salad bar. Nobody’s going to suspect a chance encounter over the endive.” Yes! What did Travis used to say? The journey of a million miles begins with a single step.
The restaurant was jammed, but since neither one of us was hungry anyway, we picked up a couple of very small plates and waited until Clayton had reached the chick peas. Then we snuck in line behind him.
“Hey,” I said, looking up in phony surprise as our arms bumped over the scallions. “I liked the way you took him to the mat about Hannibal. You really put the old fart in his place.” Clayton gave me the once-over like he was trying to figure out where he knew me from, while I made a point of not staring at the sexy stubble on his chin or the way his nose wrinkled up when he was deep-thinking. It was the longest three seconds of my life. Then he shrugged and said, “So?” And he left.
* * *
“Honey, if we could get married, would you do it?”
“I don’t believe in appropriating heterosexual rituals.”
“Not even if I got you a ring?”
“Platinum?”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, over coffee at the Greenhouse, I was examining four different ways of bumping myself off when Charleen looked up from a nonfat decaf double chocolate mocha and blurted, “Oh, shut up. Didn’t you notice the way he was stringing you along until you looked away first? You couldn’t have played into his hands any better if you’d called him Captain Butler and swooned into the dill. Men are so transparent.” For just a second, all thoughts of lynching myself were put on hold while I leaned in to her urgently.
“Wait a minute,” I demanded, “and think before you answer. You mean I have a chance?”
“I mean the ever-dwindling supply of heterosexual males just shrunk some more,” she sighed.
“No, no,” I assured her empathetically. “It shrunk a long time ago. You’re just finding out about it now. What should I do?”
“Dish it right back to him,” she ordered. “He’s got it coming and you need a hobby. Besides, you haven’t mentioned Travis in four hours.”
Charleen and I had first met in the Freshman Union shortly after I’d unpacked my jockstraps and decided I hated my roommate, I hated my life, and I despised Boston. Truth to tell—and except for the roomie, who really was an asshole—I’d been moping around campus for three days, daring a broken heart to heal. (Nothing feels better than knowing you’re the only guy since Romeo who figured out true love after he lost it.) His name was Travis and I’d met him in high school. At first I thought we were just buddies—until the third or fourth time I woke up naked and found him sleeping in my arms like a fucking angel. Duh. You don’t have to hit me over the head.
“I just can’t figure this out,” I said, kissing him yet again.
“It’s easy,” he replied, kissing back. “You love me.”
“Oh. Right.” From there on it was the Craig and Travis Show—or vice versa depending on who wanted top billing. We got through final exams together, we invaded Manhattan together, we took summer jobs at Colony Records together, and we rented a one-room sublet on West 92nd Street together—with a tiny bed that was still way too big for just us. (That’s where we figured out Chin-in-the-Neck and Falling-Asleep-Kissing, two separate routines that took a lot of practice.) It was only for eight weeks and I guess I should have seen the handwriting on the wall—but when you’re 18, you always think it’s going to last forever. It doesn’t. Putting him on the plane to USC in September was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, especially with both of us pretending it was only temporary but deep down knowing otherwise. It felt like my whole life had ended before it had even geared up to start.
We sent each other goofy letters for a couple of weeks, but then he stopped writing to me. And Harvard didn’t make it any better. Our freshman orientation advisor looked like Travis, the guy in the Coop walked like Travis, the guy in the cafeteria smiled like Travis, the guy in the library talked like Travis, and the guy on Mt. Auburn Street had a butt like Travis—except nobody in the world has a cuter one. It didn’t make any sense. Fenway Park was around the corner. Carlton Fisk and my Red Sox were practically neighbors. But who cared? The boy who’d taken a piece of me with him was 2,988.2 miles away. Zip code to zip code.
Charleen was a different story. Tall and honey blonde, she’d escaped gleefully to Cambridge after a lifetime of recreational asphyxiation in Upson Downs, where she’d never quite managed to introduce her Connecticut half to her liberal half. (She showed up at her coming-out party dressed in 501s and a tank top. Darien is still reeling.) But when she plopped down next to me in the Union lounge, she wasn’t in much better shape than I was.
“Look,” she snapped, without preamble. “You’re the seventh cute guy I’ve met since I got here. The other six had boyfriends. If you tell me the same thing, I’m going right out a window.” Without glancing up, I sighed miserably—a soulful tremor that had “Montague” written all over it—and told her exactly what she didn’t want to hear.
“I have an ex. Need a push?” So for the next two hours she got my Master’s thesis on Travis; after that, we introduced ourselves.
Which is why Charleen was the perfect partner in crime. We were both single, we were both pre-law, and we both liked men. Nobody else could have piloted Project Clayton the way she did:
1.
Don’t ever look at him again.
Right. This is the same as telling an 8-year-old kid not to think about a hippopotamus—particularly when the hippo in question is built like Knute Rockne, with 52-inch pecs and 17-inch arms and a raw masculine intensity that could power the entire eastern half of Massachusetts every time he sneezed. But I tried. It nearly killed me, but I tried.
2. Wait until he’s eating alone in the cafeteria, then don’t sit with him.
An opportunity that presented itself at least once a day and four times on weekends. I’d make sure he saw me standing at the register with my tray, scoping out the room to see if I could find a buddy to join. At first he’d turn his head away in advance, until he realized that I’d passed right by him and hadn’t even noticed he was there. (By now my peripheral vision had become a sixth sense: I could walk a straight line and still tell you exactly what was happening behind me, provided I didn’t collide with a wall while I was doing it.) This went on for less than a week before it really started to burn his ass. I could tell. Even peripherally.
3. Get yourself a study group and don’t include him.
This was far more effective. Two weeks of extra-credit reports, theoretical analyses pulled out of my ass as I went along, and other more traditional brown-nosing tactics all paid off when the Psych 101 professor named me the head of group 3. In addition to Charleen, I chose four other students—the one sitting in front of Clayton, the one sitting to the left of Clayton, the one sitting to the right of Clayton, and the one sitting behind Clayton. Now he was getting pissed.
4. Create an event not to invite him to.
That one fell right into my lap when the Boathouse sponsored a dollar-a-brew talent night for any Harvard kid who thought he had an act. Even though I’d never actually performed in front of live people before (except for the boy who still owned my heart), I pulled out the acoustic guitar anyway, along with a set that—if not exactly calculated to give his testosterone a run for its money—would at least force him to pay attention (I hoped). Charleen and I ran off fifteen hundred fliers and handed them out to every professor and every freshman on campus. Except Clayton. He noticed.
5. Whatever you wear onstage, make it tight.
Try a sprayed-on T-shirt, sprayed-on jeans, Reeboks without socks, and no underpants.
“You think it’s too much?” I asked Charleen apprehensively, just before I went on. She glanced down for a long moment.
“That depends,” she finally replied. “What are you selling—circumcisions?”
6. Let him have it.
I’d figured on warming them up with a little Laura Nyro until I saw Clayton’s silhouette leaning against the packed bar. There were maybe two hundred people crammed into the joint, but when I kicked in to “Light My Fire” instead, I was playing to an audience of one. And he knew it.
7. Start reeling him in.
Half an hour later, covered with sweat and holding my trophy, I ran into him staked out by the front door. We were face-to-face. Together at last. Neither of us said anything, but I swore I wasn’t going to be the one to cave. So he didn’t have much of a choice.
“Not bad,” he grunted. I gave him the once-over like I was trying to figure out where I knew him from. Then I shrugged and said, “Thanks.” And I left.
* * *
“How come you stopped trying to get into my pants?”
“Because it was easier getting into Harvard. And my mom said you deserved to squirm.”
“Your mother hates me.”
“Come on, Clay! What did she ever do to make you think that?”
“She told me so. There wasn’t any guesswork involved.”
* * *
I knew I was making progress a few days later when he bumped into me in the Co-op and mentioned this tai chi class he was taking. He didn’t actually invite me to it, but it was the way he didn’t invite me that got me to go along with him—and to suspect that maybe he’d arranged the whole encounter. (I was right.) And within a week we were sitting together in the cafeteria and seeing Casablanca at the Brattle Theater and having brief but meaningful conversations over fries and cream sodas at the Tasty.
“You ever been whitewater rafting?” he asked hesitantly (managing to avoid my eyes while he was doing it—which I loved).
“No.”
“Oh.”
But it was the riot that clinched things.
* * *
“Remember our first time?”
“Like I wouldn’t? December 7, 1978. Harvard Yard. You were singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and I had a hard-on.”
“I didn’t even know you were there.”
“The hell you didn’t.”
* * *
Right around Thanksgiving, San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by a twinked-out homophobe named Dan White. By the time we’d gotten back to Cambridge after the holiday (Charleen and I had done the turkey thing in Aryan Darien), White’s attorneys were already planning an involuntary manslaughter defense by implying that Milk was just a queer who didn’t rate a murder rap for their client. Now, if it hadn’t been for Travis, I might have slept through news like that the same way I’d slept through most of my life before I’d met him. But he was the one who’d taught me about getting mad and getting even—all you had to say to him was “Anita Bryant” and his ears stayed red for three days. Now it was my turn.
“This is bullshit,” I blurted in the middle of Philosophy 108. “What’s this got to do with what’s happening in San Francisco?” The prof, an old guy in his forties who was used to this kind of thing, stopped dead in his tracks halfway through one of Plato’s tired old dialogues and tried to keep it light.
“As it pertains to Ovid?” he asked with his constipated grin and the usual stick up his ass. I could hear a couple of snickers in the amphitheater, but so what? Let ’em laugh. Right, Trav?
“No, goddammit! Those guys have been dead for two thousand years. Who have we had since then except Eleanor Roosevelt and John Lennon? Okay, look—” By now I was really getting up a good head of steam. “There’s straight people and there’s the rest of us. I’m not asking for a new Bill of Rights, but I want some answers. This is Philosophy, isn’t it?” From the back of the room, a kid wearing an Indiana T-shirt began to clap slowly, and then a guy on the rowing team stood up.
“He’s right,” he said. “Me and my boyfriend got the shit kicked out of us in Marblehead and all we were doing was linking pinkies on the beach. What’s that all about?”
“Yeah,” said another. “The same thing happened to us in Gloucester.”
“Shut the fuck up and sit down,” said a third. “If you don’t like it, go back to Provincetown where you belong.” And that pretty much did it for Plato and Ovid and the remainder of the toga club. By the end of the class I had a B+ in Philosophy and twenty-three freshmen of every orientation imaginable crowded in a circle around me as though Ann Landers had grown a dick. Nice going, McKenna. Now what? So rather than own up to the fact that I was an ordinary fraud with a big mouth, I just pretended to be Travis and said the first thing that popped into my head: Harvey Milk had believed in dignity for everyone, so we were going to honor him with the same kind of respect. We’d celebrate his life with a rock concert in his memory, and we wouldn’t stop singing until Dan White found his sorry ass behind bars for the next 120 years. Craig, dude—where is this coming from? As I watched them tumble out of the room with an energy that hadn’t been there before, I turned to Charleen, mystified.
“Uh—what just happened here?” I asked mildly.
“You’re a troublemaker,” she replied with a smirk. “I knew it!”(P.S. I’d been doing the peripheral thing from force of habit and noticed that Clayton hadn’t taken his eyes off of me for forty-five minutes. But for once I didn’t give a shit. Much.)
Charleen squared everything with Harvard, though it wasn’t easy. After they found out what the concert was about, they didn’t want to give us the
Yard between Memorial Church and Widener Library—until Charleen began shooting off her mouth about civil liberties violations and de facto discrimination and wouldn’t it be unfortunate if the Boston Globe got their hands on a story like that? (When Charleen puts her mind to it, she can be a bigger pain in the ass than I can.) Within an hour and a half, she had a permit, a stage, eighteen speakers, four electricians, and the phone number of a hunky little math major she’d met in the elevator.
The night of the concert was practically tropical by Boston standards: 41 degrees and dropping. (Of course, had I known I was going to wind up stripped down to my underpants, I might have been more cautious. But I didn’t, so I wasn’t.) Thanks to Charleen, who’d blabbed to the Globe anyway, we’d lined up eight solid acts from the student body and two real ones: a first-ever reunion of Buffalo Springfield and the eternally subversive prodding of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. (Let’s face it. How much consciousness were we really going to raise on Craig McKenna and his magic guitar?) I thought it was kind of fitting that our Harvey Milk tribute was taking place in front of a church—an irony that wasn’t lost on the Archdiocese of Boston either. So in response to their hate mail, we gave them a free ad in our program.