The Best Little Boy in the World

by Andrew Tobias

Monday I began to feel just a little gloomy.

  When I hadn’t heard from Freddie by Tuesday, I called him. His lover answered. Freddie was sick, he said. He had a fever and something wrong with his mouth. When Freddie woke up, he would give him the message. (Would he, really? I wondered.)

  He didn’t call me back Tuesday. He didn’t call me back Wednesday. What was he, in a coma? How could he do this to me? I knew he liked me. He had to know how important he was to me. And now it was as if he had forgotten that I existed.

  Thursday I decided to sit by the phone no longer. I got in my car and headed for Provincetown, punching the buttons of my car radio any time a happy song came on, cosmic as I ever had been, and none the worse at it for my lack of recent practice. Color this page cosmic black. Black on black, easy on the eyes.

  By Thursday evening I was light-headed and my gums felt as though my wisdom teeth were parading around my mouth. But I was not too light-headed to stop by B.U. on my way home from the elusive gay beach to see whether Freddie had bothered—the very least he could do, even if accompanied by his lover—to come to the meeting. I ascribed my light head to the long day in the sun and the driving. As for my wisdom teeth, they do occasionally make trouble. Mainly, I was thinking what I should say to Freddie when I saw him at the meeting.

  He wasn’t there, he hadn’t been there, and, according to someone who knew him, he and his lover had gone down to Washington for another long weekend. Without so much as calling me to say good-bye!

  Friday I was in bed with a temperature and what was either a mouthful of wisdom teeth or the same virus Freddie had. I must have caught it from him. (Germs! See? I knew it all the time!) That was delicious, cosmic-wise. Not only was I despicably wronged, I was now felled by grief and some mysterious, unidentified virus which would no doubt kill me by the time Freddie bothered to return my call and tell me what it was.

  By Monday afternoon I knew Freddie had to be back, because he was not the type to miss classes, and yet he had not called. How was it possible? Telling my wounded pride that I was calling for medical reasons rather than emotional ones—chicken noodle soup felt like barbed wire in my sore mouth—I called Freddie that evening to find out just what strange disease I had contracted and how to cure it. This time I got him. Oh, hi! He apologized for not having called me back on Sunday or after I had called Tuesday; but he was feeling really rotten, and then there was no answer at my place on Thursday, and then they went down to Washington. How had I been? Oh, no! He was terribly sorry to hear I had caught his virus. I should just drink fluids and take aspirin. It took about a week to wind itself down, he said. I should feel fine by Thursday, but he felt terrible that I was sick.

  That’s all. No big deal. He had tried to call when he felt better, but I was away. Sure, he liked me. Sure, he wanted to get together. But I began to understand that he did love his lover and that I was just another friend he was glad he had met. Maybe even very glad—but for crying out loud, keep things in perspective.

  I still felt bad that I wasn’t the biggest deal in Freddie’s life but I felt better. At least we would be good friends. At lgast the virus had only a couple more days to run.

  Right on schedule, the virus vanished. Freddie called to see if I was better and invited me over to their place for a solid meal. That evening I got to know Freddie’s lover, Cap. Cap knew enough about relationships to know there was no point trying to keep Freddie locked up, and it was fine with him if we wanted to pal around, he said. I stopped pretending I liked him, and liked him.

  Freddie was my first gay “love,” and I went into the brief episode defenseless. I had developed defenses for lots of things, but I was new to trying to develop love relationships. I had loved straight people before, but I had not expected them to love me back and had not been hurt when they didn’t. It was pure Ricky Nelson, aged sixteen, in love for the first time on Ozzie and Harriet.

  Eric and I went down to Provincetown, and this time I was steered to the left as we walked onto the beach.

  I had gotten used to heads turning when I passed in the bar. Well, to be honest, I enjoyed the ego boost. Even if there happened to be no one of great interest in the bar, it was still worth driving down there just to reaffirm my own “power.” Having for so many years lived in the shadow of truly charismatic campers and collegians, the looks I got as I walked around the bar were like electric impulses charging my ego battery. I could even afford to attach my cables to some other ego I was not sure operated on the same current, to see if I could get something started, because if I failed, my battery would still have enough juice left over to start my own engine going around the bar again while I recharged.

  Discovering the gay beach was rather like discovering high-voltage wires. The wiring at Sporters is a fine power source, but the Herring Cove cables were more powerful in direct proportion to the degree by which my body is more attractive than my face. (Such poetic metaphors, right?) I’ve got one of those faces that is on the border line. If I am happy and smiling, sort of radiating, and if I am tanned and well rested and zit-free, and my hair happens to be at the high point in its cycle between washings, not too wispy and not too greasy, then I am pleased with my face. As long as I don’t think about it. If I start thinking about it and looking at it in the mirror, then I get self-conscious, and the radiance and the smile go, and I get more self-conscious and may as well call it a night.

  My body, on the other hand, is much more reliable. I suppose I owe it to all those sports in high school and to general good fortune in my bone structure. I don’t work out with weights or anything. We have an understanding: I don’t try to change it or elongate it or tax it greatly; it looks good when I take my clothes off. A little on the short side next to some of my friends, but well proportioned and well defined. It’s a tennis-player-in-alligator-shirt kind of body.

  Eric just lay on his Budweiser beach towel and soaked in the August sun. I walked around the beach, swam a lot, discovered friends I had met in Sporters, and met their friends. When we first arrived, the beach was perhaps forty yards wide, between the lapping ocean and the ridge of sand that hid the hot dry dunes beyond. People were scattered widely. But as the tide came in, everyone got friendlier, some more stoned, some more drunk, and the ocean snipped away at our ribbon of beach, leaving us finally with about five yards between water and ridge. Perhaps that’s what pushed some pairs into the dunes; but Eric told me it was more likely they wanted some privacy while they fucked. Oh.

  The “in” bar that summer was Piggy’s, on Shank Painter Road. It was particularly nice because the locals went there, some straight, some gay, and there was a warm Portuguese atmosphere. Well, I’m guessing Portuguese; the closest I’ve been to Portugal is Tossa. But whatever it was seemed genuine and comfortable rather than consciously designed for effect. Piggy’s seemed to have been discovered rather than promoted. You didn’t recognize much of the music they played (a pleasant change), but it made you want to dance and get into the rhythm of the place.

  For most of the summer I had refused to dance when I was at a bar or a party, or even at a gay lib dance. Cowboys don’t dance. How could guys dance with other guys? (Massachusetts did not allow people of the same sex to touch each other when they dance—tolerance has its limits.)

  As time went on, I realized it was a little foolish to stand on the edge of a dance floor bouncing up and down in time to the music, wanting to dance, but fearing that it would somehow make me less a man. Just dance in a manly way, and you will have the best of both worlds. There is a limit to the degree to which you have to feel superior to everyone else, you know. I mean, you are gay, after all. I mean, we understand that it will take you a while to get used to everything, to lower your inhibitions, to accept your new life. But you are not going to be “just come out last month” all your life, friend. So have a drink, relax, and enjoy it. People wouldn’t have been dancing throughout recorded history if there weren’t something to it. By August of my twenty-third year I finally began to
enjoy dancing, a little.

  Piggy’s was jammed with attractive people that night. There were weekenders from Boston and New York and summer residents, many of them waiters and busboys, who came over to Piggy’s when they got off their jobs around eleven o’clock.

  Who is that tall blond boy, Golden Boy, over by the bar? He was surrounded by others. Usually, when I walk closer to a potential fantasy, reality comes into focus. But not this time. Was it possible that someone that good-looking could be gay? Could be real, even? What I wouldn’t give to be six five and blond with a perfect Ryan O’Neal face like that and the same self-assurance. There is a kid who has the world around his finger.

  Eric told me he was Mike York, going into his last year of college, and president of his class, if he remembered right. Undoubtedly! Oh, how I envy people who have it made before they start. I take for granted my good fortune and envy those who are born even more fortunate. Here was John Tunney-John Lindsay-John Kennedy, aged twenty-one.

  Eric managed to introduce us later in the evening, but Golden Boy wasn’t paying much attention. He was on his way out with someone else. Hello, how are you? he asked like a politician, looking at the top of my brown-haired head and then moving on to other well-wishers. Wow.

  I spent the rest of the evening thinking about Golden Boy, wishing I were able, as he was, to point at anyone I wanted, flash my perfect smile, and go off with my instant conquest to Wyoming or the Portuguese Y.

  I badgered Eric to tell me who everyone else was too—particularly the people I had seen talking with Golden Boy. If I could make friends with his friends, maybe I could elbow my way into his circle. The best looking of Golden Boy’s friends, in an objective sort of way—handsome, very handsome, but not sexy-looking, not blond—was Chris. Another Southern accent—Montgomery, Alabama—and affable. He didn’t stay long either. Someone asked him to dance, and Eric and I resumed our conversation. Eric thought Chris was better looking than Golden Boy, he said. Eric had done a thing with Chris when Chris was first coming out, the summer before me. Chris is a nice guy, Eric said—a little wistfully, I thought. He’s down here for the summer working as a waiter in Wellfleet at some spifíy lobster place. He starts Harvard Business School in a few weeks.

  Yeah, okay, but tell me about Golden Boy, for crying out loud. Who wants Harvard Business School? Golden Boy is going to be a senior in college. Do you know what the word “college” does to me?

  The next day I saw Golden Boy on the beach, surrounded, of course. I walked by his circle a couple of times; no one noticed. Again. No one noticed. Then I went for a long swim and timed it so that I came slushing healthily, glisteningly out of the water right down from where Golden Boy was lying in the sun. You know how you come out of salt water, having a hard time at first keeping your balance after the motion of the waves, eyes shut tight as you rub the salt water from your face—apparently just staggering uphill without really seeing where you’re going. You aren’t thinking about the impression you’re making or where you’re going, you’re just trying to get the water out of your ears and the hair out of your eyes—and you know damn well you look as appealing as you’ll ever look, perhaps because you know it looks as though you’re not trying to look appealing. Paying no attention to where I was going, the first people I “happened” to notice as my eyes finally were willing to stay open—were Golden Boy and his group. “Say, how’s it goin’?” I asked casually, feigning moderate surprise, the way you are allowed to when you have stumbled out of the water and happen to recover your equilibrium next to someone you recognize. “It’s Mike, isn’t it?” I asked, as though trying to remember the name of someone I had met before who had made a mild impression on me.

  Golden boys apparently have egos, too. He smiled at being recognized. Before I could be shot down with an “I can’t remember your name,’ I said, “John. I met you with Eric last night at Piggy’s.” Sure, I remember, lied the class president.

  I had learned enough about the game in those three months of being out to know not to press it any further. If I looked more than casually interested, my chances, slim as they were, would be shot. However, if I looked as though I could live without Golden Boy, I would be set apart from the crowd. I might be noticed. I didn’t look for an open space on their blanket. I just resumed my wet stumbling in the direction of my own blanket, heart pounding, to talk over this great new development with Eric.

  Eric was not enjoying the weekend. It was supposed to be our weekend, but I couldn’t control myself. I was immature; he was grumpy. I thought of staying an extra day, but Eric said he had to get back to Boston, so we left. I knew I would be back the following weekend, the last weekend in August.

  CHAPTER 11

  My Summer of ’42, if you will allow me to be sentimental, was almost over. It had been a wonderful, exciting, full summer. Even the week when I was recovering from Freddie had been a good week, thinking back on it, because it was so human.

  For the longest time, when I was growing up, I actually thought I had somehow been born without feelings. I mean I consciously thought about that in high school, wondering whether it was some sort of biological phenomenon, or somehow related to my Big Secret, or what. When my father’s mother died of lung cancer, I was nine. She had always been good to me, a wonderful woman, but having to visit her at her sickbed was an imposition I resented. I tried to feel sympathetic, but I felt put upon. After she passed away, my parents were in tears, on and off, for days. I had never seen my father cry before. I knew I should feel bad, but I didn’t really. At the funeral I felt itchy because of the wool suit I was made to wear.

  That same year my elementary school teacher had to be out almost all spring because of what she claimed was an appendectomy, but was apparently something far more serious. From nine to two every day she had supported my position as the best little boy in the class. She was the kind of teacher who genuinely loved her children. But while we were drawing get-well cards for her, I was feeling sorry for myself: All that work to get the best grades in the class was now in jeopardy, with a new substitute teacher who might not count all my goodness from the months before she showed up.

  I certainly didn’t hate my mother or father, but I couldn’t detect any great love for them, either. I was oddly neutral, feelingless. As for Goliath, he could go jump in the lake. And Sam? Sam had kinky hair, and when he was dog-napped, I was the only one in the family who had to pretend to feel bad about it.

  I didn’t see anything so special about the Mona Lisa. Poetry left me totally blank, bored. I did not react to love songs that should have made me sad. I had feeling for one thing and for one thing only: me. I felt guilty about that, considering the fact that I was supposed to be so good. As I said in the first chapter, it made me feel phony. It also made me feel “different.”

  As I got older, I seemed to develop some feelings, if not my full share. Our new dog was much more lovable than Sam had been, in my view, and when he finally had to be put to sleep, I was genuinely sad to hear about it. I was at Yale by then. But the Mona Lisa and the poems and the love songs still left me cold, coldly analytical, calculatingly self-centered, even at Yale. As I rose in my teens, I just gradually stopped worrying about my lack of feelings. I learned the word “hypocrisy” and wondered whether I was the only one who pretended to like the Mona Lisa. I saw a movie about a soldier whose buddy was killed in the foxhole next to him, and how that soldier felt glad when it happened. He hated himself so much for feeling glad that his legs became paralyzed, psychosomatically, until a doctor years later told him it was natural to feel glad—not glad that your buddy had been hit, but that it hadn’t been you. When the soldier heard that, he regained use of his legs. It’s natural to be selfish. All in all, I decided, I probably had fewer feelings than most people, but that was the least of my problems. It was a lot easier to pretend I liked the Mona Lisa than to pretend I liked Hilda Goldbaum, let me tell you.

  Now I had had my Summer of ’42. Now, crushed by Freddie, it was appa
rent that I was as feeling as anyone else. Sad as it had been, it was a relief to know the songs were written for me, too. I was no longer left out of the stream of common experience, no longer the superfluous man.

  I had been dashing around like crazy that summer, spending virtually every night at the bar, or else at a Student Homophile meeting and the bar afterward, and having sex with loads of different people.

  Of all the people I had met that summer, Eric and Freddie and Golden Boy were the only three I would remember for long. Yet Eric never did anything and couldn’t keep me interested, nice a guy as he was; Freddie loved Cap; and GB, well, GB would give me something to think about during the fall. I would shortly be back at work, running a feasibility study for some government work IBM might wind up doing. But I knew that I would not be working the kind of single-minded eighty-hour weeks I had right out of Yale, at least not for quite a while. I was determined to make up for the living I had missed. And I had to come to terms with such questions as: Who would I come home to when I was fifty, or even thirty, and no longer riding near the top of the gay world? In fact, who would I come home to tomorrow? Did I want to come home to anyone, or to bring someone new home every night?

  I was learning that I had some basic characteristics that would stand in the way of long-term relationships. The kind of guy who would turn me on sexually, I thought, would not be the kind I could have for a lover. He would be all the things I wanted to be when I was growing up: cool and dumb, mainly. A young, dumb, trashy truck driver with a tight, smooth, rock-hard but not grotesquely muscled body, whose only pastimes were getting stoned, listening to rock, and letting people dig his body. Too dumb to have anything to say; too cool to get enthusiastic except for an occasional “Wow, man, are you ready for this shit?” as he smoked; and too trashy to be seen with. Great fantasy material in a masochistic sort of way. Though again I find it hard to write about, I suppose part of me wants someone like that to pin me to the wrestling mat, to dominate me, to hate me for being such a goody-goody and ridicule me for being so out of it—even to do the unmentionable to me.