5
“At high school in U. City we have a fad—we go around asking, What kind of gun are you? You don’t have to answer . . .”
“A six-shooter,” Daniel said after a moment—and wryly.
I knew some of the kids at school who practiced some of the separate disciplines of homosexuality—a group homosexual tone—and some who were temporarily homosexual; and a church group of believers who were intellectual and who waved their hands around but who used funny voices and had funny stares they gave people but they were earnest in their religion. Daniel is not part of any group stuff of that sort—he is a rigorous enemy of that stuff. He is rigorous, severe, stern toward loose mannerisms, but he is, as it were, overly musical in a foreign way, pleading some sort of special meaning as if la-la-ing it; he offers some sort of special melodic humor.
“Are you an opera lover?” I ask as the train goes bumpety-clack over wartime roadbed.
“Yes. What kind of gun are you?”
“People change every day—you get to have moods—I’m a cannon . . . an old-fashioned railway cannon . . . I’m slow . . . I’m a lot of work.”
The judging when you partly disapprove of judging and the fencing and the offering(s) and the flags of truce, the lying down and showing one’s belly, or the showing one’s neck while sitting up, or one’s presenting one’s hind end—and hiding your mind (under leaves so to speak, or behind systems of chatter or of silence)—mind, will, ambition, calculations, or showing them like a passport—one did those things long before one read about them in anthropologically and biologically slanted pieces in Reader’s Digest. One is judged as an uncertain anthology of traits—it is like being a horse buyer at a country fair, since, after all, one may be lying or simplifying or simply be in a special state—like being drugged up or having your hide painted, as living horses’ pelts were—a smile, some sort of brains, a physical height, a character-as-a-fighter (or not) or as sweet or not—the ways one is courteous or not (in terms of male effrontery, impudence, sass, and so on, or not) . . . but not in a naturally pluralistic sense at all. Mostly one measures one’s danger from him and one’s chances of having him for an ally if one is in danger.
One measures, one makes a finding, a drill sample, of him offering amusement, companionship, good advice, money . . . love, admiration-in-spite-of-doubts, and so on. His decency or indecency . . . his beliefs—his code—one’s sense of how many people already usurp his time . . . What is left for friendship, for oneself in this regard, what are the possibilities for one in the offer of attention that he is making . . .
I can’t say I was entirely unfamiliar with the sexual idea of the boy in the (nearby) bed or exactly familiar with it.
One’s traits are those of an available orphan . . . available for daydreams: that is something Lila said. That is a form of glamour that one has in an underclass way—Gypsyish. Mind, or school abilities, can be looked at in relation to money and standing.
Or to originality. Temperament. Dangerousness . . . Do you have a stomach for this, or the stomach for it? This stuff is resident in one’s circumstances—you learn it because it’s at your school, it’s in the locker room; your brothers and mother teach you it; your father meddlingly teaches it—or an uncle.
And books often teach it . . . Books, looks, and being a crook . . . the wavering willow branches, pseudopods, dreamed hands and dreamed lips of others, and others’ sense of their own circumstances, often erotic or amatory circumstances . . . Sometimes you measure people by how sought after they are or have been: have they known what it is to be romanced and married and divorced and abandoned from early childhood on? How much nerve do they have toward the world? It’s true I like some of the openly faggy guys at school, like them quite a lot, because they are so nervy, as tough-nerved, as bold as the high school quarterbacks, varsity and junior varsity. I admire the extraordinary audacity of one guy who says he kisses guys’ asses, and other guys say he does. I can’t yet bear to think of it, and I would swear it was no desire of mine to have my ass kissed (and it never did become a desire). Back then it is forbidden ground, but I admire that guy for his nerve and energy.
And guys who are bulkily foundations of stability in school, who take boxing lessons and who are good at sports and who are sports fans fans—who never fool around . . . I like them, too.
I was never so thoroughly bought by Lila and S.L., or by the school, that I lyingly hold their opinions as my own.
But at school, everyone, in a way, picks-on-me, picks a fight with me sooner or later: I am the guy in school with the best grades (by far), the front-runner in that sense; but it isn’t just that . . . It’s more that my parents are ill or in trouble and that a number of people like me, that when I guess what to do, it often comes out okay. The what-I-know has some of the erotic qualities of a guy’s chest. Or of a girl’s chest. The what-I-know— the life-I’ve-had—the life-I’m-having and the theories I come up with now because of my unowned, unlucky, life have a feather-headdress quality, maybe. The school superintendent is a sort of off-again on-again fan or devotee or friend—the tonality of what he is in regard to me wavers and changes, day to day, time to time—he’s a little bit anti-Jew, but he’s a nice guy, he’s nice about it—he assigns bodyguards to me at times when I’ve done something, made an enemy in an argument or won an award, say, or written something for the school paper or even for the school system and some kids get threatening—or, a couple of times, when I fell in love, was infatuated or whatnot, and some guys said they’d get me then . . . It’s funny when someone, a gang, is out to get me, how the politics at school moment-by-moment change. He has a funny attitude toward my helplessness. Like my mom, he says I’m going to get killed. See, books are vague in the kinds of power they ascribe to a given character, even really good books; but in life you are measured as a magnet and as an-influence-on-others and in all kinds of ways relating to what powers you have. I have quite a lot in an odd sense of things. You still have a crotch, Wiley? You still got a banjo between your knees? I get mocked a lot. But I’ve been to one or two small parties and two big ones where the chief thing, or one of them, was to get me undressed or partly undressed and see me dance and so on.
I don’t know what this means. A life, no matter how eerie or weird, is only a variant—I mean, of life, and then, of species life, an example, unideal as hell, of gender and era and so on. That he and I—Dan, Daniel, Danny and I—have lives, minds, purposes, views, needs (a popular word back home at that time), and have legs, and pricks between our legs, and nerves and moods—I think one is forced to enter onto madness—a segment of the population did that back then at school—or into a certain sort of propriety, into manners—and mental fixity; it depends on the form one’s interest in real life takes . . . But other things go on as well . . .
I am aware of outbursts of anger and even of rage and certainly of curiosity in me, but more oddly than that, of curiosity-and-dismissal at the same time, of a no thank you or an oh no which is pretty firm, which includes fighting and maybe even death. Death rather than giving in.
To the thing-in-general, to how it is presented, or offered, or is forced on me, physically or through some kind of attempted blackmail.
Of course, I am new at it all—new at this stuff at this size, in this scale of being at this age. When I do stuff now, I am aware of carefulness in me at being this scale, this size, this age; I do a balancing thing; I try to keep my balance; but this can shred into wildness pretty quickly—I can make up my mind in advance but I still don’t know if I will do a yes or a no thing, when the moment comes, if it comes, in which people decide to love or not love. Or to fight or not fight. Or whatever.
I don’t fight. I’m a pacifist. I can’t help it. Because of all the suffering. But I sort of fight. I don’t like being pushed to the sidelines by guys who are willing to be unpleasant.
I defend myself by saying that each time such stuff happens it happens in a specific way, with a degree of openness and a varie
ty of meaning and is different . . . Or not . . . Love—or enmity.
With guys who are fruits openly and in a group—fruits was the word some guys used for themselves back then—depending on how systematized those guys are in what they are, the presence of my mind and my judgment, such as it is, seems, in a way, to be opposed to the effrontery of illusion-ridden and absolutist daydreaming, including their sense of whatever it is they like and their sense of being driven to do certain things and of having a right to do them, maybe . . .
6
“Do you believe all is fair in love and war?” I asked Dan.
“Well, I never trust a Gentile epigram,” he said with a smile.
“I don’t believe in that. I don’t think that stuff is so. You’re outside the law in some ways but that’s all.” Outside the law in some ways in love and war. “Maybe I’m wrong . . .”
A lot of people back off; some become, uh, semi-frozen when you talk in certain ways.
He said, “Would you say you were spoiled?” Then: “By what you’ve become?”
“I would say that this stuff happens at least once, for a while, to everyone, no matter who you are, boy or girl, man or woman, child or grown-up—this is so at some point in your life. I would bet on this. Nonie knows this.”
Dan is sweating a little. Clickety-clack-clack-clickety goes the train. The difference in our ages, and all the rest of it—and it’s pretty complex-complicated—the teamwork-and-snobbery thing (of cousins), the snobbery-in-abeyance thing (sexually and because of age), the forbearance thing (the forbearance which is a sign of infatuation but which passes itself off as social okayness)—one has to ignore it. I mean, you can’t discuss it, any of it, without its all coming to a head, and how are you going to manage the consequences then? I want to go to Forestville. That today might not work out makes me quietly tense. That, overall, a lot of things might not work out, this becomes on his side a truly stringent, far-out, slightly acrid thing of an absolutist courting you (me) with an intensity of feeling varying as his approval goes up and down; but mostly it’s okay with him so far; you mostly pass this test; the whole universe (he truly believes this) is being bent for you. But still you’re put off—it’s not enough: let him bend the universe—he’s not really talking to me.
Perhaps with this kind of stuff, it’s better if you ARE put off. I’m assuming a morality in him but who knows what he’s like in a hug. The thing on my side of my being alive and grateful and cautious-and-evasive: well, few people listen to me without fighting with me over what I say; but the stuff with Daniel is different—he does not fight with me over anything. He ignores me while noticing me. If I feel horrified at moments anyway, in spite of the universe-in-a-cone-around-me-as-a-boy, it is a form of being travel sick inside the tense, unhappy thing of someone’s infatuation (with you) and your conviction that it might not (will not) work.
I feel, sitting here on the train, flashes of escape; and phallic reassurance (of a shaky sort) in mere flashes, seeds of almost involuntary smiles, half-smiles, smiles that form and then hastily are taken back. I feel we have varied and various exercises of contradictory superiorities alternately already, him and me, he and I; and we recognize this in a sort of communal charity, a mutual awareness.
But his charity in this matter is systematized, almost rote. I think he will kneel to my prick, to my youth. Guys have. One girl has. But I don’t want that: I am young still, for one thing. The reassurance would be in relation to Dad’s death and to Dan’s money. And it would be insanely disrespectful in itself. To me. It would be like being a gas pump and refuelling a car. This is a complex issue for me with most men, whatever they’re like as men, or who they are, and with some women, and a few girls.
7
My awareness is more actual than his—is less systematized. This is an intellectual choice and the result of trying to nurse my father for six years; and it comes, largely, from reading. The multiplicity of voices in a book and then the enormous multiplicities of voices of different books, a lot of books, and different sorts of books—those voices in me are not bound together into a chorus of doctrine. A doctrine is something that one applies after the fact in order, mostly, perhaps, to control the voices—I say this. I think a workable unsystematization, a constant improvisation, or recitativo (Dan and I talked about some of these things), I think of as forms of independence, of rebellion—a purposeful superiority-in-inferiority, as in being a frontier scout and having smelly buckskin clothes and being in old St. Louis among the laundered and elaborately coiffed and mustached rich.
Dan is older and is himself rich and he is smart and he is far better looking by most notions than I am, but he is at this moment in his life less attractive than I am; and I did not “know” this. But it emerges minute by minute on the train. One picks it up . . . I catch glimpses, perhaps, of what Lila thought. I catch on, in part—only in part—retroactively to stuff in the past; the now-stuff is fairly mysterious.
Dan asks me questions about Darwin and about revelation. He asks in a voice that hints he is asking ultimately and with reference to some superhumanly absolute answer. Now, an answer as a thing is a repellent idol to me. As are some images of Jesus, for instance, if they are all thing’d up. But a living-breathing dying-crying-out-and-rising-again God-Jesus is different.
I am not about to be bullied by Dan’s sense of God, and he would not try to do that (bully me) if he didn’t suspect me of being untrapped: I pick this up from how he acts. I am impressed by him. He is doing this stuff with politeness, not as an ultimatum all the time but as something far out at the edge of behavior as self-surrender in a sort of mirror-occupied nothingness—one is sort of there in a blowsy cloud-riddled nowhere, as before sleep, and it’s warm, like under the blankets. This is the kingdom of the great mirror of China—where everything is parodied but with a momentary, hiddenly hysterical sincerity which is a form of thought and then it suddenly shows in the mirror, the as-if-third-person self and its history, the autobiography, the erotic self, chaste or not, whatever is objective because that is how the mirror’s attention works, if I can say that—do you know?
All another person can be to him is a thinly cavernous source of echoes of what he already knows, echoes that announce an occasion. And then one is the meat-and-potatoes of the occasion. But it is a bitch to know this, one is a bitch to know (or notice) this stuff everything is all bitched-up—you know what I’m talking about socially?—but something else is in place, too: he isn’t unfamiliar with this stuff; he knows about doing this with guys who are better at this than I am; and two kinds of allowance are present, the sophisticated or organized-and-reorganized systematized kind and the rudely improvisational kind, which is just us, us two, only us—me in my absurd degree of recent loneliness and vast, vastly devouring hope for a friendship and for a cousinly similarity, something to count on, and him, in his degree of experience and in the full armor of his beliefs, making an exception for me, making an exception of me at moments, granting me a permissiveness, not weakly, in my oddities.
Nonie has accused me of needing queers because they are the only ones who, under the pressure of things, will accept me even halfway as I am.
My hopes, my ambitions, in a sense, when most of the hopes are of the rude sort, rude meaning new and improvised, tentative and uncertain—it embarrasses him in his sophistication and intellectual assurance that I am the way I am and have hopes of a rude sort that he does not have.
And he tends to back off, to change it to the other, to him feeling sorry for me and to patience in him—he tends to choke and kill the self in him that permits or licenses the existence of a territory of companionship in which, without demure self-protection or even commonsense resistance, I feel love when I feel it and am merely (or interestingly to him) what I am.
Some sort of demand is in what he does, is in what he is. He asks questions, I believe, as a whole-life thing, a life’s work, him being himself: I am a potential (a common word then), foetal, or a cloud—of a bo
y—something long-leggedly handsome, even if not really; and that is what he is; but he sees me as that but as not in the style he is it; that is how he singularizes my life, my identity.
He is quite, quite rich—richer than anyone in school with me in U. City or than the fathers of anyone I knew well. He is polished, finished in that sense; and I am jealous, a jealous dirtier, a jealous and clean-cut virgin cutter-upper of polish and of any high degree of finish—perhaps not purposefully, though. Perhaps I am. Certainly, with some distance thrown in and some privacy as well, I am addicted to courtship. One can be addicted to courtship, to the special behaviors then, the quality of the permissions, the light that such permissions cast and then the actions, the smiles that arise under that licensing of what is almost a patience with what-you-are in real life—the illumination your existence and the existence of emotion bring then: see, the relativism of this is of things being changed by this unless you firmly and ironically keep the belief that this is all an illusion and you should not be changed, you should not carry out the rush into a different life, should not go over the falls, should not be swept into the rapids, into the bridal, sun-bitten moments—or whatever.
The different mind, the different history now, the different body (and the different sides of one’s bodily existence, the amazingly different smell or feel of the moment), some people laugh at this; but I am addicted to it, the thing of being someone else who is with someone else now and it is something else now . . .
Sometimes, in real life, sensitivity (and manners) springs from a conceited source in me such that I can, rightly or wrongly, as a bastard or okay guy, feel that what I am here reflects a lousy ripeness of self-love in someone who likes me. The kind of bomb-shelter or trench thing of them liking you, your taking shelter in that, this civilized and intricately coded, or codified, other thing is another person maybe in an extreme narcissism of sophistication, making offers to you, some of which are true and some of which are not.
The Runaway Soul Page 59