The Best Little Boy in the World

by Andrew Tobias

  Still, Goliath is no dummy, and blood runs thicker than water, and I really didn’t look or act any differently from the way I had always looked and acted, so perhaps I was going through a stage that a good shrink could hustle to a hasty conclusion.

  No? Well, then, what could he say? He was terribly sorry for me and—

  Goliath, you’ve got it all wrong. There is nothing for you to be sorry about, no need for sympathy. You didn’t pay attention when I went through that long preface about this being good news, not bad news—that I had worked things out.

  I proceeded to run through my sales pitch for homosexuality, which is something of an exercise in counting one’s blessings:

  After paying due respects to zero population growth and the ancient Greeks, Julius Caesar, and Tiberius, I went through my list of contemporaries—famous, productive, ostensibly happy people whom society admires without knowing they are gay. This may be a childish, “Johnny-did-it-too” kind of defense, perhaps even a subconscious exercise in “misery loves company,” but it is gratifying all the same to see the mouths of wholesome Midwestern football fans gape when they hear the names of a couple of pro football players who are gay. Or politicians. Or actors. Or actresses. Or models. Or attorneys. Or Wall Street financiers. I obviously can’t name names here, although it is curious that you can’t be sued for calling a heterosexual a heterosexual or a black a black or a diabetic a diabetic. (As for the accuracy of my list, however, let me assure you that I have had the opportunity to do some “spot checking.”)

  Anyway, after adding a few fresh faces to Goliath’s stereotyped crowd of hairdressers, interior designers, and sadistic concentration camp managers, I moved on to the more practical aspects of the way homosexuality would affect me.

  I explained that without a family to support I could work half as hard or half as long to live just as well; or work just as hard and live twice as well. Or I could choose the kind of job I could otherwise not afford to take, but which offered some special nonmonetary rewards and satisfactions.

  Of course, the price for this flexibility, independence, free time, and high living would be not having a wife and kids. I might have a lover, but I would certainly not have the joy of the model traditional family, like the one I grew up in.

  But how many families are like the one I grew up in? What are the chances that a straight first marriage would end in a quick divorce, that a second would be to a girl I quickly tired of but tolerated for the sake of the children? It’s no cinch being happy if you’re straight either.

  At this point in my pitch Goliath came in on cue and asked me about loneliness and about my later years. Who can argue with that? I learned aged twelve to twenty-three what it was like to be lonely, and I doubt I will ever be that lonely again—well, Christ, Goliath, don’t you see that’s one of the reasons I’m telling you all this and telling my straight friends? When I’m older, even if I haven’t been able to find a guy to live my whole life with, which is not out of the question, I expect to have a number of truly close friends I know I can count on. Chris. Golden Boy. Hank. Brook. And others. Look, even if my straight friends got so wrapped up in their own families that they had no time or emotion to spare for me—which I don’t think for a minute would be the case—I will have a circle of gay friends I can count on. They’re in this, too, after all, and they will want to be able to count on me just as much as I will want to count on them. I may not be able to share the same toothbrush with Chris and spend every day with him, but (and now I’m jumping ahead of the story) he knows that there is nothing I wouldn’t do for him and that he can count on me for the rest of my life. In return, I plan to count on him.

  It won’t be a family in the traditional sense, but I think I will have my own family of sorts. I won’t have as much invested in any one person as I would with a traditional family, but I will have the benefits of diversification. I won’t have kids to support me in my dotage—but it’s easy enough to set yourself up for retirement. IBM and I have that well in hand.

  Who will comfort me in the hospital bed when I am on the way out? Well, now you have asked a question to which I can’t give a pat cheerful answer, and I admit it. Like you, I don’t want to get old, and I very much don’t want to die, and I will be one miserable old man lying in that bed if they haven’t wised up to euthanasia by then. I have no answer to death, and let’s change the subject.

  Goliath and I went around and around for some time, but try as I might, I could not sell him on seeing a shrink to bring out whatever latent homosexuality he might have, hidden like a pearl within an oyster, in his head. But I did convince him over time that it would be equally foolish for me to go to a shrink to try to be “straightened out.”

  Before we drop this subject, I do think it is interesting to consider the question of Goliath’s latent homosexuality. Rather, his apparent lack of any. How come? Not only did he come from the same family, he was the firstborn and as a result, one would assume, the more gingerly handled. By the time I came along my parents were probably less afraid of dropping me, less afraid that I would stick my tongue in the electric socket—and hell, if I did, at least they would still have Goliath. What’s more, there was Goliath to terrorize me and to rough me up a little. Wouldn’t this tend to have made my childhood less sheltered than his? Or was it that my parents tended to overprotect me from Goliath? And then there is the curious fact that in Goliath’s crucial years, my father was off bombing Dresden, and Goliath was brought up with very little knowledge of his daddy. By the time I came along Daddy was back. Isn’t it the kid without the daddy who is supposed to turn out gay?

  Goliath and I went to the same schools, had many of the same teachers, went to the same camp—so what was the difference? Is homosexuality doled out at random? Was I just lucky? Or was it the fact that I was less hardy as a child—I did have a rough time with earaches when I was three or four—that led me to be more carefully protected? Or was it that my parents had decided to try out a different school of child psychology on me from the one they had used with Goliath, a psychology that somehow intensified my need for their love and attention, which thereby intensified my own desire to do only “good” things—and which made me feel guilty at the drop of a paint splotch? Or was I simply competing with Goliath for their attention in my most formative years, whereas Goliath had not had to compete in his own formative years—and was it this competition that made me determined to be the best little boy in the world?

  Perhaps that last was it. More likely it was the sum of hundreds of different factors, all interrelated. I doubt that there is anything random about it. I know quite a few sets of gay brothers. I know one family of three gay brothers. That suggests that people do not become gay at random. Homosexuality is an effect of causes, just like everything else in the world, even though the causes may be too legion or abstruse for us to fathom. And like all good effects, homosexuality is also a cause. A boy might develop homosexually because he was a meek child, while another might develop a meek personality once he realizes that he is a homosexual and therefore, according to society, inferior.

  To me the case of Goliath and me suggests: First, if one or two of the sons turn out gay, that’s neither good nor bad. It’s the way it is. I am as happy as Goliath and as productive to society—and what else matters? Second, parents may as well give up on trying to keep their kids from growing up gay. A child’s sexuality is too complicated to engineer.

  Goliath and I went back into the house to check out the strings of Christmas tree lights we have been using for the past twenty-odd years. Tradition runs strong in our family. Every year we go to the same nursery to buy a tree a few days before Christmas. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Goliath and I try in vain to mount the tree on its stand, until finally our father is prevailed upon to level the tree’s bottom through some miraculous gift he has (he is also one of those fathers who can put together Heathkit radios and get them to work) and set it up properly on the stand. We then bring the tree into the h
ouse, to the same spot in the living room each year, and our mother comes in to help us decide which side of the tree should be facing the wall and which facing out. Trees are deceptive that way. You keep turning them little by little, but the part that shows always seems to be less full of branches than it was a few seconds ago when it was facing the wall. Then we check the lights, just in time to run into town before the store closes if we need to replace some bulbs, and then, if the TV networks are willing, we settle down to A Christmas Carol, which is over just in time to rush out to the traditional Christmas Eve restaurant. When Goliath and I were young, that was often the only totally peaceful, harmonious meal of the year. Then we drive back home, always by nine-thirty, no fighting in the car, and my mother always says that we have never gotten home so late before and that she doesn’t see how we can possibly get everything done before midnight. I needn’t explain the importance of getting everything done before midnight, need I? So she starts decorating the dining-room table with little men in sleighs while Goliath and I start wiring up the tree. Dad fiddles with the FM tuner he constructed long ago, trying to find the perfect station for an evening like this. Eventually, he sits down in his chair, feet stretched comfortably over the ottoman that was once the scene of my paint-splotches-on-the-lawn spanking, and like Walter Cronkite in the command post, oversees the preparation of Apollo 14, or, in this case, the tree. When the electrical work is done, Mom appears to express her amazement at the way we have managed to arrange the lights so beautifully and to help with the hundreds of snowballs and glittering pine cones and delicate tinsel balls that we have come to know so well. Inevitably, Goliath drops an ornament whose delicate spire breaks off—but the feeling is too good on this night for any recrimination. Dad moves from his command post to take the ornament down to the basement for some glue and hidden supports, and half an hour later, back on the tree it goes. My mother is sure this is the best-looking tree we have ever done. But it is now nearly eleven, for crying out loud, and we still have to wrap the presents and write the poems! The poems, excepting the occasional fluke, are terrible. The meter is off, the puns are awful, but they will be received with delight in the morning when it is finally time to come downstairs and open the presents.

  I find myself tempted to describe our Christmas Eve ritual in the past tense, because it is filed in my childhood memories. Yet there is really no reason for that, because next Christmas Eve will be exactly as I have described past ones. If anyone should appreciate the joys of a nearly perfect family, it is me. I know only a handful of friends whose parents have had such storybook marriages and whose families have been so close. Well, I suppose we are the best little family in the world. Yet I doubt that I will envy Hank’s beautiful family, when he has one, any more than he will envy my independent and fulfilling life-style.

  I left Brewster to go back to work. Chris had said he would be coming back in time for New Year’s.

  For Christmas I had sent him two of my favorite albums: Peter, Paul and Mary’s Album 700, which I had first heard with Hank at Yale, and Tom Rush’s Circle Game, with Brook. Back in Boston I found that Chris had sent me The Guinness Book of World Records—perhaps so the best little boy in the world would know what his competition was. Did you know, for example, that “The duration record for lying on a bed of nails (needle-sharp 6-inch 2 inches apart) is 25 hours 9 minutes”?

  One of my project workers at the office, with whom I had become quite close, gave me a Playboy Club Key for Christmas. I couldn’t resist taking him there for dinner to tell him about his boss’s sexual preferences. I had passed the stage of “Sit down, Sam, there’s something I want to tell you.” That was too melodramatic and serious and self-important. I would simply answer questions honestly if they happened to come up. So, when my Playboy friend asked me who I was sleeping with these days, I said, “Chris.” Then I answered the questions that followed. I liked this approach because it put being gay in the proper light: not something dreadful to be ashamed of and whispered about; just something to be good-naturedly discussed.

  CHAPTER 13

  I had developed ugly, but uncontrollable, reflexes to inconsequential things Chris did. He had a way of clearing his throat that was like the toast-scraping cliché. It annoyed me. Of course, the annoyance was only a manifestation of some greater annoyance with our relationship. Perhaps what annoyed me most was that the BLBITW had the capacity to be so selfish, so impatient, so ugly.

  I went to the airport to pick up Chris, hoping our two-week Christmas separation would somehow have given me the breather I needed. I wanted to be able to enjoy his needing me, not resent it. I wanted to want to be with him.

  Though two weeks had passed, I found myself feeling even more hyper than usual as I sat waiting for his delayed flight. I just don’t have time for this! I have important work at the office, two proposals that will knock their eyes out if I ever get time to finish writing them. I haven’t even had time to fill out my expense voucher for last month, and here I am on a plastic chair in the Eastern Airlines terminal accomplishing zilch and waiting for god-damned Christopher and the god-damned way he has of clearing his god-damned throat. What am I doing here? You’re slowing me down, Chris. You’re holding me back.

  Was it Chris, or would any mortal affect me the same way? Did this experience mean that I would never be able to have more than a few weeks’ fling with anyone? That question was the crux of it, and it was not fun to think about.

  The next four months went well enough, more or less on my terms. We talked on the phone every day but only got together a couple of times a week and went out on our own a lot. As far as I was concerned, Chris was a good friend. As far as he was concerned, I was his lover. We blamed the infrequency with which we got together on our respective work loads: his three business school cases a night, my projects at IBM. That was less painful than trying to explain it in terms of what was really happening.

  I was happy. I had the advantages of the relationship without the claustrophobia. I made friends with a lot of other people. I thought we would just drift apart. Surely by June, when Chris went down South for his summer job, things would just naturally come to an end. I knew Chris too well to think he could spend a whole summer without finding lots of other people to replace me. When he returned in the fall, we would be good friends—I did want that—but we would be free of each other.

  In fact, the end came even before the summer, late in April. But first I should introduce some of the people I met in the months before that disastrous April.

  Some of them, like Rick Swidler from IBM, were faces from the past. I ran into two of my old high school classmates, both of whom had apparently been active even back then. One described the affair he had had with our music teacher, aged fourteen and thirty-two respectively. The other claimed to have been “experimenting” with some of the stars of the class, many of the ones I had been dying to befriend, though not with Brian.

  Where was Brian? Neither of my two fellow alumni knew. The last I knew of Brian was that he had been expelled two days before our graduation. He had been sitting in the back of a large lecture room. One of our more conservative teachers, who used to sprinkle his patriotic lectures with long pauses, placed at random to emphasize his failing mind, was giving one of the final sermons of the year in our American history class. People were fidgeting and rustling and snapping and clicking and whispering, bored to tears, thinking of the GTO’s they had been promised for graduation, but our mentor pressed on. He was saying that teachers should be investigated by the FBI before they were allowed near the pliable young minds of our great nation. “Such a system would”—pause—“be worth the inconvenience it”—pause—“would cause and the”—pause—“indignation it would no doubt arouse among some of”—pause—“the fanatics we have teaching”—pause—“today. But it would eliminate unsavory”—pause—“and subversive people like—”

  “You!” Brian stage-whispered to his friends in the back of the room. Unfortunately, at that momen
t there was a lull in the shuffling and rustling, and Brian was expelled two days before graduation. You won’t believe this next part, but no matter: His father sent him off to a school for rich dumb kids in need of high school diplomas—in Wyoming. I have heard nothing of him since.

  I was in Sporters one night and saw a former acquaintance from Yale walk in with a girl. I thought they might have walked in by mistake, or to use the phone, or that they both might have been gay. When they didn’t go running back out, but ordered drinks, I walked over to Bill and said hi. He was wearing jeans and a blue Chemise Laceste shirt, just like the one I had on. He looked a little embarrassed and explained that he and his girl had been out drinking and thought they would come in here to see what a queer bar was like. This is what it’s like, I told him, describing some of the other kinds of bars and ordering a drink myself. He was with one of the Boston banks, he said; I was at IBM. I could see he couldn’t quite believe he was having a conversation like this with me in a gay bar—why wasn’t I begging him not to tell anyone he saw me and all that?—and he was embarrassed that it might look as though he thought of all this as a freak show he had come to watch. “We didn’t come in to sneer, just out of curiosity,” he reassured me several times, sounding very much the budding Boston Brahmin, even if slurring some of his words. His date was silent. Bill didn’t want to offend me, so he kept saying how surprised he was that this was what the bar was like, how impressed he was. What did he mean, I wanted to know. “Well, everyone is so well behaved,” he said. He kept repeating that.

  “We must have lunch sometime,” Bill said in parting, but he never called me, and I spared him. What would his fellow bankers think if he were having lunch with me right in the middle of Locke-Ober’s and all of a sudden I forgot myself and did something perverted?