Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent

by Anthony Rapp

  I had only kissed two boys before Ricky. It had always felt like a forbidden act with boys (never with girls), and even though my friend Stephen and I had touched each other and touched ourselves in each other’s presence, we had only kissed once, when we were thirteen. Standing and facing each other in the dark of his bedroom, both of us naked, his soft, pale skin almost glowing, he reached out for me and brought his mouth to mine. We kissed for a minute or so, his tongue awkwardly probing its way into my mouth, both of his hands cradling my face, and then we stopped and pulled away, both of us flushed and breathing heavily and embarrassed. We jerked off and came on our own at a safe distance, and never kissed again and never spoke about it.

  The other boy I had kissed was Josh, my friend at Interlochen National Music Camp. We had met the summer prior to my night with Ricky. Josh and I were cabin mates, but he was two years older than I, taller, dark haired, and handsome, and the large mole on his upper lip was a kind of beauty mark to me. He was also fiercely intelligent and intense and witty, and a really good actor (he had played Creon in Anouilh’s Antigone), and I had a huge crush on him, my first real crush on another boy; in the couple of years I had spent fooling around with Christopher and Stephen, there had been no crushes anywhere to be seen, at least on my end.

  One of the rituals among our group of friends at Interlochen was called starspinning, a name coined by Josh. We would gather outside on the soccer field beyond the boys’ cabins, not long before the lights-out call, which didn’t give us much time, and stand out in the middle of the field and lean our heads back, staring up at the spectacular splash of stars that only exists in the darkness of the middle of the countryside. We’d hold our arms out to our sides, like helicopter blades, and spin and spin and spin our bodies around, all the time still gazing at the sky, until we couldn’t spin anymore. Then we would suddenly collapse to the cool, wet grass onto our backs, and as we lay still, the stars continued spinning and spinning and spinning, until at last they slowed and then stopped. Then, laughing and exclaiming “WOW!” and “Oh my GOD!” we would get up and start the whole process over again. Eventually, we would all just lie there and talk, or just lie there and say nothing.

  One night, only Josh and I trekked out to the field. It was nearing the end of the summer. He lived in Los Angeles and I lived in Joliet, and I was very, very conscious of the implications of that enormous distance, of how little we would see each other, of the possibility that our friendship would probably fade with time. We starspun for a few minutes and then lay there on the grass in silence.

  “Josh?” I said, after a while.

  “Yeah?”

  I didn’t know how to say it. I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at him. He continued to lie on his back. I felt focused and calm and happy and scared, and I knew clearly and powerfully in that moment that there was nothing wrong with how I felt about him. I just didn’t know how to say it.

  “I really like you,” I said at last.

  He looked at me. “I know you do. I really like you too.”

  “I mean I love you.” At Interlochen this wasn’t such an unusual statement, and I had said it to Josh before, and he had said it to me, and I had said it to other friends, and they had said it to me. All of us at Interlochen unself-consciously loved our friends, and told them, and were told.

  “Can I kiss you?” I asked.

  A long silence passed. Josh regarded me, an unreadable expression on his face. I looked right back at him. My skin was tingling, and I was barely breathing, but I was calm. Finally, he leaned over to me, and we kissed.

  The tiny needles of his stubble poked at my lips, which felt strange and surprising, but I was thrilled by our embrace and our kiss. It was more curious and tentative than passionate, but I was still ecstatic that it was happening. It felt absolutely right to be out under the stars kissing him.

  When we finished kissing, we separated and lay back down.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Thank you,” Josh said.

  About six months later (three months after my night with Ricky), I was staying with Josh in his house in Los Angeles for a few days while I screen-tested for Adventures in Babysitting. One afternoon I found myself alone in the house, and I poked around in his room, looking through his books and tapes, when I found his journal. I held it in my hands, not sure what to do, and at last opened it. We hadn’t talked about that night and that kiss, so I quickly flipped through the pages until I found this, scrawled in his tiny, almost illegible handwriting:

  Tonight Anthony asked me to kiss him, and I did. I could feel his whiskers. EWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!

  I didn’t read any more, I just read those lines over and over and over and over again, my stomach plummeting and my cheeks on fire. How could he feel that way and not tell me? I had felt his whiskers too, and it was strange, it was, but I loved him, and he loved me too, and we had kissed, and it was so nice, and all this time I thought he thought so, too, but he didn’t? He was disgusted? I stared at the page, at those two lines, and finally shut the book and put it back exactly as I’d found it, feeling terrible for having read it, for having snooped. I shouldn’t have snooped, it was wrong, I deserved to see that, what did I expect to see? I’d asked for it.

  I never talked to Josh about it.

  But three months before that trip to Los Angeles, there I was on the floor of Andy’s living room, drunk and naked with Ricky, kissing him, and enjoying kissing him, and enjoying him kissing me. And if there was stubble I didn’t notice it or didn’t care, and his skin was smooth—it was the first time that I’d really felt a boy’s skin and noticed just how smooth it could be, almost like a girl’s—and we were kissing and doing everything else, when I heard a voice. Ricky must have heard it too, because he stopped what he was doing and looked up at the voice with me.

  “Um, excuse me,” the voice said meekly.

  Standing in the kitchen a couple of steps up from the living room was Andy’s father. I didn’t know him well—he was always so quiet when I was there, and Andy and I would usually hole up in his room and make silly audiotapes of commercial spoofs and radio skits when I came over—and at that moment when I looked up at him I wasn’t filled with any kind of panic or embarrassment; I didn’t feel caught or found out. I was just very very drunk, and I felt so good there on the floor with Ricky, and Andy’s father was simply an interruption.

  Ricky and I stared up at Andy’s father for several moments, his body a silhouette, his hair a sloppy halo. He seemed to sway as he stood there. Finally, he said, “Sorry,” and left.

  Weird, I thought, and without a word, Ricky and I resumed our kissing, which continued on and off for the rest of the night.

  “Guys? Guys? You gotta get up.”

  I cracked my eyes open, pushing Andy’s irritating hand away from my shoulder, where he’d been shaking me awake.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Come on,” Andy said. “Get up. I gotta take you home.”

  I groaned. Ricky was a big lump beside me, still asleep. I looked over at him. I felt numb and stiff and slightly hungover. Looking at Ricky, his back to me, I remembered everything about the night before, but from a distance, as if looking at a blurry black-and-white photograph of myself performing in a play. I wondered what Andy thought, but I didn’t ask him.

  “Did you have fun?” Andy said.

  “Huh?”

  “Did you have fun?”

  “I guess,” I said. “Yeah.”

  I pulled on my clothes, and Andy took me home, leaving Ricky asleep on his living room floor.

  Home at that time was an apartment complex called Cresthill Lake. Living in an apartment in Joliet had always filled me with shame; all of my friends lived in houses, as did almost everyone in our part of town, so I thought we should live in a house too. The complex looked like it had been shoddily assembled in another, grimmer town and plopped down in the middle of a field without any regard for the esthetics of its surroundings: traditional, suburban su
bdivisions complete with winding streets, sturdy oak trees, sculpted lawns, and modest single-family homes. Down the road was Cresthill Lake’s slightly more affluent cousin, Colony West, a small development of identical two-family homes, which we called town houses for some reason, all painted a faded dijon yellow and adorned with dull brown trim. We lived in a town house in Colony West for the first few years of our time in Joliet, from when I was two until I was six, until we couldn’t afford it anymore on Mom’s nursing salary, at which point we moved down the street to an apartment in Cresthill Lake. Then even that apartment became too expensive, and a couple of years later we moved again to another, smaller apartment in Cresthill Lake.

  The so-called lake was actually a large, oblong, scuzzy, sad pond, which more often than not featured a rusty dead bike stuck in the mud of its banks, and which gave off a disturbingly toxic odor on really hot days. Occasionally in the summer, potbellied tenants would sit on the edge of the pond adorned with Cubs hats and armed with fishing poles, lawn chairs, and tackle boxes. They would cast their lines into the pond’s murky water and very seldom go home with a bluegill or two, flinging them into pickle tubs after the poor fish had flopped their way to oblivion on the drab grass. I guess the tenants ate the bluegills, although I would never have wanted to ingest anything that had come out of that pond.

  The pond was ringed on three sides by the buildings of the complex, all exactly the same: three-storied with brown brick façades and tiny windows and cement steps leading to their entrances. In our building, on the east end of the complex, the apartments either faced the front, as ours did, or the back. Living in the front meant that out of our badly insulated, metal-framed windows we viewed a narrow strip of dark black parking lot, and beyond it a small cornfield; out the back window was the pond in the middle of a badly mown, perpetually yellowish-green lawn. A dilapidated, rusty jungle gym and swing set adorned the lawn, randomly situated at its edge in the farthest spot possible from the tenants.

  I hated living there.

  Nobody was home when Andy dropped me off—Mom was at work as a nurse in Joliet’s maximum-security juvenile correctional facility, and Anne was probably out shopping, or at her boyfriend’s house. I went straight to my room, climbed up my bunk bed (a leftover from when Adam lived at home), and snoozed for most of the rest of the day.

  I woke up sometime in the late afternoon, groggy and disoriented, feeling more hungover than I had before my long nap, and stumbled out into the living room, an Isaac Asimov novel in my hand. Mom was home from work, puttering around in the kitchen.

  “Hi, Tonio,” she said. She looked harried and stressed, as she often did after a long day of passing out meds to horny, violent teenage boys.

  “Hey,” I replied, and plopped down on the couch. I tucked myself up in the nook of its armrest and opened my book. I didn’t feel like talking. From the kitchen, pots and dishes clanged around and cupboards banged shut, as I sat and read about robots who helped solve crimes in the distant future.

  Eventually, the noise from the kitchen subsided, and Mom stepped into the living room, in front of the TV, and stood there. I could feel her eyes on me. I kept reading, or trying to.

  “Anthony,” she said. I marked my place with my finger and looked up at her. She was very still, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes focused and sad. I waited for her to continue.

  “I…got a call today,” she began, and stopped.

  “A call?” I asked. Alarm bells went off in my brain. I did my best to ignore them.

  Mom took a deep breath. “Andy’s mother called me today, while you were asleep.” I could see her hands squeezing into the flesh of her arms. “She said…she said you were hanging out with Ricky D’Angelo last night.”

  I felt my palms start to sweat. I put my book down. “I was hanging out with Ricky D’Angelo last night.”

  She looked away from me for a moment, then into my eyes. She seemed angry now, and tired.

  “Anthony, I don’t want you around him anymore.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Andy’s mom told me—”

  “Told you what?” I could now feel the old familiar hot righteous rush of an argument coursing through my body. I sat up very straight and put my book down.

  “He’s taking advantage of you, Anthony. He’s older than you—”

  “I knew what I was doing,” I said, my voice rising.

  “You’re only fourteen, he’s much older than you are!”

  “I knew what I was doing, Mom. I wanted to do it. It was my choice. He didn’t make me do anything.”

  Mom stopped for a second. She looked as if she was about to cry. “You’re only fourteen,” she said, again.

  “I knew what I was doing,” I said, again. “It was my choice.”

  Mom looked away again. A long silence passed. Her jaw was set. I stared at her from the couch.

  “I don’t want you around him anymore,” she said, at last.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Please, Anthony.”

  “Mom…”

  “Please.”

  I just sat there. I was not going to give her this. It was my choice, it was, and I could do whatever I wanted, with whoever I wanted, whenever and wherever I wanted to do it. We stared at each other, neither of us moving. I was not going to let her win.

  After a long silence, Mom sighed heavily and went back into the kitchen, shaking her head. I opened up my book again but wasn’t able to distinguish the words on the page anymore; they blurred and bled into one another. I was too keyed up. I could hear Mom sniffling from the kitchen. She always cried the way she laughed: silently. I felt weighted down on the couch. I knew I should do or say something, I knew she was waiting for me to do or say something, but I didn’t want to make a move to comfort her or talk to her anymore. I didn’t want to give in to her. So I stayed glued to the couch. Eventually, she went into her room and closed the door.

  But I never did hang out with Ricky again.

  In the first four years after the Ricky D’Angelo incident, I stayed away from messing around with other boys, only occasionally straying when I was feeling particularly lonely and horny. This self-imposed abstention from boys wasn’t always terrible for me; I was also occasionally attracted to girls, just not as often, and not always as intensely. But I did have a couple of girlfriends during my senior year of high school, and when I was with them I didn’t feel like I was sublimating some part of myself or hiding from my true nature. For the most part, I enjoyed the physical aspect of fooling around with girls as much as with boys.

  But when I got to NYU in the fall of ’89 to study film, I found a fast and emphatic friend in a fellow freshman named Keith. We spent almost all of our downtime together, bonding through long, rolling conversations about the movies and actors and plays and books we loved, talking intimately about our families and dreams and hopes and fears. It gradually dawned on me that we had been sort of falling in love with each other, as much as two eighteen-year-olds could, anyway. So we started to sleep together, and then we started to really go out with each other, even telling our friends about our burgeoning relationship. Keith became my first real boyfriend. And one night I decided I wanted to call Mom to tell her about him.

  Mom and I chatted for a few minutes about our latest news, about the family goings-on, about school, all the while my chest feeling more constricted than usual, my voice feeling remote from my body, until I finally worked up the nerve to say, “Mom, there’s something I want to tell you, and I don’t want you to be upset.”

  Her voice got very quiet. “What is it?”

  “I’m bisexual,” I said. It seemed like the best way to say it, and it wasn’t wholly inaccurate considering I’d had a sexual and romantic history with both boys and girls; I resisted limiting myself to one gender preference.

  There was a long pause. I held my breath and listened to Mom’s silence.

  “How can you be sure?” she finally said.

  “Well, I
’ve been kind of going out with a guy. His name is Keith. We love each other.” I held my breath again and listened for Mom’s next words, whatever they would be. I pictured her moving around the kitchen, cleaning, as she always did while she talked on the phone.

  “I can understand that two men can really think that they love each other,” Mom said carefully. “But why can’t you just be friends?”

  “Because we don’t want to just be friends,” I said, my voice rising. I was trying to stay focused, trying to remain calm, but it was a struggle. “We love each other.”

  “Oh, Tonio,” Mom said. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know what there is to understand.”

  “Well…” Mom said, her voice trailing off. “I just worry about you.”

  “I’m not going to get AIDS, Mom,” I said. I could feel my old, angry self-righteousness coming back to the foreground, in spite of my efforts to stuff it down and away.

  “You’d better not,” Mom said.

  “I won’t. I promise. I won’t.”

  “You’re so young,” Mom said, her voice resigned. “How can you know what you want to be?”

  “I know I’m young, but I do know how I feel. And I’m careful. I don’t want to get AIDS.”

  “Oh, Tonio, you’d better not get AIDS…” She trailed off again. I could hear water running. She was probably wiping down the kitchen counters now.

  “Well, I just wanted to tell you about Keith,” I said. “Because it’s important to me to share my life with you.”

  “Okay,” Mom said, sounding deeply tired.