by Bob Mould
I really started to get into music when I was six. It’s funny: although my father had been a saxophonist in the army during World War II, stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, I don’t ever remember him playing a musical instrument, and yet he was the person who brought music into my life. A local company stocked the jukeboxes of the two truck-stop restaurants in Malone, one on each end of Main Street, and when songs ran their course, they’d pull the singles out and replace them with new ones. My father somehow realized music was important to me and would buy the old singles from the vendor for a penny each. “Happy Jack” by the Who, “Strawberry Fields Forever” by the Beatles, “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, “There’s a Kind of Hush” by Herman’s Hermits. In 1967, those were my toys. They were also my refuge, a way of blocking everything else out. And I studied those singles more closely than anything I was taught in school.
I had a little record player, and I’d put a stack of singles on its spindle. The turntable would start up, the arm would lift, the two rabbit ears on the spindle would retract and drop the first record, and then the tone arm would pull over and drop into the groove. Once the needle wound down all the way to the catch groove, the tone arm lifted, pulled back, and another single would fall—then the arm would swing back over to play the next song. I would sit for hours with stacks of records, putting them in different sequences, fascinated by the endless combinations.
I’d study everything, right down to the design of each label and how they looked when they were spinning: Capitol with the yellow and orange yin-yang design; MGM had the rainbow letters and roaring lion; Motown had the map of Detroit; Roulette had the gambling wheel pattern, the o in Roulette as the ball. I’d read the precious few notes on each label: the songwriters, the publishing companies, and the length of each song. The writers were usually faceless names like Goffin-King, Boyce-Hart, and Jimmy Webb. I had no idea what these people looked like or how they created these miniature masterpieces, but I knew some of the performers from seeing them on television or in the newspapers. Their clothes, hairstyles, and all the other visuals added to the sum total of their musical work and the impressions they left on me.
On special occasions, I would go to Newberry’s department store with my mother or grandmother and buy a long-playing album by either the Beatles or the Monkees—I didn’t know or care that the Monkees had started as a prefab version of the Beatles. In my young mind, the two bands were equally cool.
I knew I could make music too. Around this time, I would occasionally accompany my grandmother to her work caring for a woman who had been struck by lightning. The woman was essentially paralyzed in situ, fingers gnarled like animal claws and a facial expression that was apparently frozen at the moment she was hit. I wasn’t afraid of her though. There was a piano in her house, and when I heard a song on the AM radio, I’d walk over to it and within seconds would be able to figure out the melody and even the rudimentary chord structure.
I started writing full songs when I was nine. My parents bought me a small plastic Emenee organ with two octaves of keys and six sets of chord buttons. I’d type out the lyric sheets in stanza form on a mechanical typewriter and carbon paper, notated with “© 1970 ABC-Easytime Music”—my first “publishing company.” There were songs like “Let Me Live Today,” which was about my dog, Tipper, and there were songs about flowers, songs about being a kid. I taught myself how to record these simple tunes, including overdubbing, using two small reel-to-reel tape machines. I got two of my friends to help me play my compositions, with me on my chord organ. One of them had a toy drum kit and the other had a toy guitar—they just sort of held the instruments and pretended to play along.
My teachers knew I had an aptitude for music since I sang in the school choir, and in fifth grade, they wanted me to play the tuba. I was a larger than normal kid, big boned and growing fast. Even so, I looked at the size of the case and said to myself, There’s no way I am dragging that thing back and forth in the snow. Besides, I thought the kids in band were a little nerdy. They would do the one rock song and let the drummer have the one solo, really letting their hair down.
* * *
In 1970 my mother developed rheumatoid arthritis. Her joints swelled to dangerous proportions, and when she had to give up her job at Bell Telephone and go on disability, my parents bought a mom-and-pop grocery store at 23 Elbow Street for roughly $10,000. It was attached to a big two-story house on a large parcel of land not far from the center of town—not a desirable neighborhood, but it was right near the Glazier meat-packing plant, the Tru-Stitch moccasin factory, and the Royal Crown Cola bottling and distribution plant, which provided many of the store’s regular clientele.
The grocery store was off the kitchen. In the back of the house, a small door led to a large storage structure that was on a separate heating system so the inventory (mainly beer and soda) wouldn’t freeze in winter. In the front yard, there was a large illuminated sign adorned with the Royal Crown Cola logo and the name of the store: B&S Grocery, named after my parents. My father stacked cases of beer throughout the garage, which also had two large green garbage bins for returnable cans and bottles. By watching the recycling, I could tell if my father was accelerating his drinking, which would be an indicator of the level of madness that would build over the course of the week.
But I spent most of my time in the driveway, playing street hockey in winter and basketball in summer. Later, my father got a large plot of land cleared behind the house so we kids would have a larger play area. But the yard was riddled with craters, so we’d often turn an ankle or stumble face-first into the dirt. I suppose that’s as good a metaphor as any for the way we lived in that house. Because of the unpredictable psychological control my father wielded over the rest of the family, we were never certain if we stood on firm, level ground.
Separate out my father’s behavior, and my childhood was like the old sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which was also set in a small-town mom-and-pop store. There was a little mechanical flipper on top of the entrance to the store that was wired to a buzzer that went off in our kitchen. Whenever the door opened, the buzzer sounded and my father would immediately let out an exasperated “God damn” or “Jesus H. Christ”; he’d say it like a hissing teapot. Then he’d rise from his battered recliner, its armrests held together with packing tape, leave the living room, and go out through the kitchen, around the stove, past the telephone on the wall, through the narrow passageway to the store, and one step down to serve the customers—the very customers he would curse because they dared to come and give us the business that kept a roof over our heads.
My father could be brutally mocking once the customers were beyond earshot, muttering things like “You no-good son of a bitch, don’t bring those fucking food stamps in here.” As he grew older, my father’s habit of ridiculing others became a comical flaw; he’d use the same phrases over and over, and the refrains became so familiar that I could sing along to them in my head, to the point that they became kind of hilarious. But still I felt ashamed because of his behavior. I rarely brought friends to my house—I just didn’t want them to see my father on a rampage. The Thompson kids were the only neighbors with whom we were close, and they knew the whole deal. My father had alienated most everyone else on the block. Anyone who thought my father viewed them favorably was just plain mistaken.
We all worked the store when we lived there. I was ringing people up at ten years old. There was an old-fashioned cash register and an adding machine, but I simply added the items in my head, the same way I added those items at the grocery store years before. I was a numbers kid. I could look at a sheet of numbers and make something out of it.
When we weren’t working at the store or getting chewed out at home, you might have found us at church. I was raised vaguely Catholic. My father’s side of the family was English Protestant, but not practicing; I don’t think my grandfather, who worked his entire life at the local bank in Malone, was religious at all.
My mother, on the other hand, wanted me to have religion, but I always went to public school because that’s what my dad wanted. Flanders Elementary School was a large three-story stone building with big, heavy doors and marble floors—utilitarian, built to last. On Wednesdays we would do an exchange program with the Catholic school Notre Dame, farther down Main Street. The Catholic school was much nicer, as if it had money, the building was newer, the desks weren’t as beat up, everything smelled fresh and clean, and the students were quiet and deferential. I eventually went through confirmation to fulfill my mother’s wishes, and I still remember the Catholic teachings—all the moralistic stories, the guilt-inducing melodrama and self-flagellation.
Still, even with my religious grounding, by junior high I was starting to drift to the bad side of things. I suppose it was inevitable. After all, I watched my dad drink constantly. And I worked in a grocery store, so there was no problem walking off with a six-pack. I could drink as much as I wanted anytime. My brother had finished high school and left home, so I had the upstairs to myself, and most days after school I’d go up there and have a few beers. I’d easily camouflage the empties by drinking whichever brand my father was having at the time: Ballantine, Schaefer, Utica Club. On weekends I’d get together with friends, go into the woods with a twelve-pack of cans—I was a big kid by now and could drink a lot—and chug them down as quickly as possible. Bottles tasted better than cans, but they were more difficult to smuggle out because they rattled and pinged.
Once we’d gotten tipsy, my friends and I would go to the seedy downtown pool hall, where kids with homemade prison-style tattoos sold pot, or to the pizza parlor to play foosball. Sometimes we’d go to other friends’ houses, usually the nicer homes in the hills that had finished basements with wood paneling, and sit around and listen to Foghat. I think their parents knew we were drinking but decided it was better to keep us inside under light supervision, as opposed to letting us race around in cars on unlit country roads.
I don’t think my drinking was a direct manifestation of misery. Despite the turbulent home life, I wasn’t a particularly unhappy kid. I wasn’t the sullen kid in black. I was fairly well-adjusted, somewhat popular, a middle-of-the-pack type of kid. Part of the reason for my drinking was the fact that Malone was terribly dull and seemed more tolerable when I was inebriated. Part of it was peer pressure; my friends were doing it, and in order to be with them, I drank as well. And part of it was emulating my father, with the major difference being that my drinking almost never made me violent.
I started drinking beer at thirteen, and I went for many years without stopping. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t drink during that time. After putting away at least a couple of beers and smoking a little bit of pot every day, I’d turn it up a fair amount on the weekends. My parents expected me home on time each night, and I was able to follow that rule, even though I was coming home trashed, trying to get upstairs as quickly as I could so they wouldn’t smell the booze or pot on me. The fact was, I was staying out of trouble with the law, I was making good grades, I wasn’t wrecking the car, and I wasn’t stealing. So, as they say, I was functional, and that gave me the latitude to do what I wanted.
* * *
By the beginning of high school, I knew I needed to get out of Malone as soon as possible. There are some college towns relatively close to Malone, like Potsdam, Plattsburgh, and Burlington, but otherwise it’s a very isolated place. And I really wanted to get away from my family.
And there was the other big reason I had to get out of Malone: I knew I was different. The actual word for it—homosexuality—I didn’t know, but there was never any question as to my sexual orientation. I knew by the age of five. I’d experimented with other boys my age—nothing serious, and probably nothing out of the ordinary. But at the edge of puberty, eleven or twelve, I started doing things of a certain… weight. There are boys who grow out of it, and there are those of us who know, the second we start doing it, that that’s what we’re going to do. It’s our sexual preference. I never questioned it.
All my other friends were starting to get girlfriends and I wasn’t. I tried to have physical relationships with girls, once at an end-of-year high school dance and another time during a group camping trip. Nothing happened. Nothing clicked. I just wasn’t interested in girls. So I accepted the fact that I would be attracted to the male form for the rest of my life and began to make the adjustments and provisions to my behavior that would both facilitate those desires and disguise my orientation.
There are archetypes that emerged with my initial feelings: Batman, athletes, even my childhood barber. I can look back and say, “Yeah, the barber was sexy, his crotch used to touch my forearm while he was cutting my hair,” and I still remember the smell of the shop. That’s something a twelve-year-old boy doesn’t forget. I know where a lot of my preferences got stuck in. To this day, moments like this still dictate a fair amount of my desires as a sexual being. I think most gay men, like just about everyone else, remember those markers, and those early experiences inform our fetishes and desires, how we lead our lives, sometimes even our professions.
I certainly don’t hold the barber responsible for my homosexuality; I’d been engaging in and acting on my sexual feelings for some time. But that kind of experience did, however, heighten and validate those feelings. I’ve learned the ritual of trying to complete yourself, the events that get you there—events from your childhood that you keep re-creating over and over. We all reenact and try to find completion. Whether it was intentional or accidental, what I thought was happening was occurring with an adult, a figure I was entrusted to. And as a teen, every time I went to get my hair cut, those feelings came back. Every time.
Maybe my blossoming sexuality was why I dropped away from music for a few years. From 1972 to 1975, I was more into wrestling and hockey and playing basketball in the Catholic Youth Organization league. I didn’t play high school ball, but instead used my gift for numbers to work as the team statistician. I’d travel with the team to all the games, run drills, and play scrimmage games. This was an interesting time for me, being in the constant company of other boys who were also going through puberty and all the emotional confusion that comes with that physical rite of passage.
If the smell of the barbershop had been my primary olfactory association with male sexuality, it was quickly replaced by the smell of locker rooms filled with young men. Most boys were in the gym once or twice a week, but being part of the team, even if not an active player, I was always around the gym. The team would run drills in the mornings, do “shootarounds” during lunch, and play full scrimmages after class.
With all this physical activity came the need for showers throughout the day. I mentioned the adjustments and provisions, and here I had to come up with an elaborate set. There’s a lot of confusion in a boys’ high school locker room, and for a homosexual kid such as myself, the stakes were raised. Walking into a group shower with ten or more boys, I was bound to find one of them attractive. At thirteen, it’s awfully difficult to suppress the natural reactions. All boys that age have problems keeping their hard-ons to themselves, and the environment opens one up to all kinds of mixed signals. How to handle it? There’s no place to hide in a group shower. You can turn your back to the center of the group, face the wall, and think about dead kittens, but chances are, the hard-on is not going to go away by itself.
The smell of the locker room: a heady mix of chlorine from the swimming pool, cleaning agents, and dozens of boys ripening into men—it’s an odor you never forget. The visual stimulation is a lot to contend with as well. We’re all passing through puberty, all wondering why we’re going through these changes, and it’s human nature to observe those changes in others. I was an early bloomer and grew a decent amount of hair across my chest. Younger boys would look. And some boys are better endowed than others, and they become the focus of attention in certain settings.
Having already experienced the touch of other boys, I foun
d it all a lot to handle. I was a cool hand, for the most part, but sometimes I would be drawn to certain boys, and then the complications would begin. I was compelled to befriend them, in whatever ways I could devise. They like tennis? I like tennis. They like turkey? I like turkey. I imagine it is the same for boys who are attracted to girls; kids will shape-shift in an attempt to get closer to the objects of their affection. For a gay kid, the dialogue of courtship was tightly yet invisibly twined around the normal camaraderie that young boys need.
It was a confusing time. I often had trouble parsing my feelings for other males. Am I drawn to this boy because we have a shared interest in hockey or because I’m drawn to his smell, his physical being, and his features? This distinction can still be stormy for me; as with all dynamic forces of nature, that cloudiness usually rolls in when I least expect it.
I concocted ways to be close without being overt, disguised my desires for fear of being ostracized or rejected, and built the ability to store vast amounts of personal data and unnecessary knowledge in my young head. Those types of maneuvers began to create mental loops, which manifested into a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder—not the hand-washing kind, but one based around routine, ritual, and numbers. To this day, I still count my steps in sets of ten. Once I establish a pattern, even for the simplest tasks, I have to constantly repeat the pattern in the exact order I did it the first time or else I tend to come unraveled. It’s as if I count my steps so I can retrace them and become accountable for a sliver of time in history.
* * *
Even while I was immersing myself in the wide world of sports, I was listening to music, but not with passion. Maybe that’s because I was listening to mainstream stuff: Elton John, the Bay City Rollers, and especially Kiss. I was a card-carrying member of the Kiss Army. One winter, a bunch of my friends and I dressed up in homemade Kiss costumes, with full makeup and seven-inch platform boots made from work boots and chunks of plywood. On a large flatbed trailer, we built our winter carnival float, which resembled the stage from the Destroyer tour. We lip-synced to the blaring music in a fog of dry ice, dragged down Main Street by a pickup truck. I was Gene Simmons. I didn’t have a bass, so I used my first guitar, which was a burgundy Gibson SG copy that my father bought me for eighty dollars from the Sears catalog. My friend Steve Bessette, occasionally his brother Chris, and my friend Tom Browning, one of the star athletes in town—we were “the band.” (Tom went on to become a top pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds.) We were into it, but basically, we were just killing time.