Goldenrod

by Peter Gault

  “Do you recognize me from the dorm?” said a girl beside me, catching me by surprise.

  “You’re familiar,” I lied. I had never seen her before in my life. My eyes were drawn to the crucifix suspended between two well-propped breasts.

  “You’re an artsie, aren’t you?”

  “How did you guess?” I asked. “Do I look like an artsie?”

  “You came into the cafeteria once, and I overheard some girls talking about you.”

  “What did they say?” I asked, flattered and seeking comfort for my wounded ego.

  “That you’re …”

  “That I’m what?”

  “Forget it,” she said. “You’ll get angry.”

  “No I won’t,” I said, raising my voice angrily. Henry and Chris looked at us. “That I’m what?”

  “That you’re bisexual.”

  Henry laughed. I was the only one of the three who didn’t bend in both directions. I followed cue, slumped one shoulder forward, puckered my lips slightly, and let my wrist go limp. The transformation was made with acute subtlety and finesse. I had an immaculate gay act, assuming the classical gestures of feminine sexuality without overdoing it or making it too obvious. I was so convincing that I almost convinced myself. I would have liked to be gay, free of the need for a woman, but it wouldn’t have worked. My basic metal was formed. I was eternally committed to the opposite sex, loathingly straight.

  “My girlfriend says the best looking guys are gay,” she said, placatingly.

  “I went gay out of revenge against women,” I said.

  The gay act is a liberal method of seduction, a cross betwen the pathetic “Fuck me or I’ll kill myself” and the ruthless “Hump or jump.” The idea is not to plead with or threaten the object of your affection, but to swindle her. You appeal to her womanly ego, present yourself as a challenge, as if few women are capable of turning you on sexually—when in fact you’d fuck anything: bird nests, stuffed animals, vacuum cleaners, rattlesnakes. You have to convince her you’re unattainable. The more unattainable you appear, the more she’ll want you. In order to sustain your reserve, sometimes it’s helpful to skip off to the men’s room, hide in the cubicle, and masturbate—smell or no smell. Once she is teased to the point of no return, you are free to pounce on top of her, without resistance or qualification.

  “Why are you standing on your toes?” asked Henry.

  “Because I feel short,” I answered honestly. Henry accepted this response with a bob. I pursued the gay act with stubborn flamboyance and pronounced loudly to Henry and Chris, “Let’s dance!”

  There wasn’t a free seat in the place, not enough elbow room for an anorexic midget to brush his teeth, but the dance floor was, as usual, like a graveyard. Inhibition lorded over the children of the middle class, a malevolent dictator. We were alone on the dance floor, center stage. Henry was too sleepy-eyed to care; Chris was too gay to care; I loved an audience anytime. I danced with a vengeance, heaving and contorting my body with a snake-like sensuality. Chris did a bizarre, mystical kind of dance with his hands, like he was plucking an imaginary harp. Henry bobbed.

  Three Weirdo Artsies. It was a one-act play. The next song was too slow for anything but hugs and kisses. Henry and Chris left together, and I didn’t see them for the rest of the night. Dancing was a curious phenomenon. It was a prelude to sex, a primitive mating ritual, a mock orgy. There was an empty chair nearby. I picked it up and danced with my arms around it. The owner asked for it back. I returned to the stand-up bar. In Ring Stadium, you can’t even dance with a chair.

  I felt a tug on my belt loop. It was the girl I was talking to earlier. She said, “I’ve got a table with some friends. Come join us.”

  “Are bisexuals allowed?” I asked, following her through the crowd. She held my hand. She had an interesting bum, very small and very interesting.

  “I’m Kim,” she said. She was younger than I.

  “Ken,” I said.

  “You’re a sexy dancer,” she giggled.

  Kim’s table proved to be less than hospitable. Penny was the first person I recognized, and she looked as disappointed to see me as I was to see her. She had a sarcastic smirk on her face. She had sized me up and knew exactly what kind of man I really was. She was wise enough not to trust good-looking men who are sexy dancers. She saw through me and beyond, beyond the superficial and the physical, beyond the comprehension of a golden boy. I was incensed by her patronizing arrogance. There were two other girls at the table, but no one bothered with introductions. Kim did a lot of giggling at nothing.

  “Have you been creating art lately?” asked Penny.

  “I’ve matured. I don’t wet the bed or create anything.”

  There was a plump girl across from me. “Haven’t we met before?” I asked.

  “You ran into me under the clock tower last semester,” she said. “Almost broke my ribs.”

  “Sorry about that,” I said, apologizing, apologizing, apoligizing.

  “I hear you were dancing with a chair,” said the third girl. She had no personal grudge against me, but was eager to participate in the crucifixion.

  “Fuck this silly shit,” I said, standing up and facing Penny. I was enraged. When a golden boy is enraged at a woman, he doesn’t hit her or make a big scene; he does something worse. He walks away, depriving her of his sparkling company—a far crueler blow. “Listen, Scuzface,” I said to Penny. “I don’t know what you have against me. Maybe I represent something you can’t have, but I haven’t got time for your verbal war games.”

  I did the famous golden boy walk, out the back door and home for a good night’s sleep. I masturbated to the image of Kim’s crucifix and her interesting little bum.

  I didn’t stop off at my place when I arrived in Chicago, but headed directly to Elizabeth’s house. I had a pillowcase thrown over my shoulder stuffed with underwear, a pair of jeans, a couple of books. I used a pillowcase because a suitcase was too awkward to carry. There was a strange bounce in my step, as if my boots had springs in the soles, as if I was walking on a trampoline. I started skipping. I was aware of how ridiculous I looked skipping down the street with a pillowcase over my shoulder, like a satire of Santa Claus in drag, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t control my feet. My feet, hands, and sex organs had a mind of their own.

  It was dark and I was about three blocks from Elizabeth’s when there was a piercing eruption inside me, somewhere around the solar plexus area. It was like I had pulled the pin and swallowed a grenade. It was an internal explosion. I needed Elizabeth to save my life. Everything looked like Elizabeth, tasted like Elizabeth, smelt like Elizabeth. The skip shifted into a full sprint. I barreled through back yards, slid around corners, hopped fences. I kicked up enough snow to look like a sandstorm in a desert.

  I was driven by a supernatural force, something larger than the human race, deeper than the Atlantic Ocean, more awesome than the atom bomb. A dog chased me for a short distance, barking, but was too slow and soon gave up. The years I spent as a hockey player and athlete culminated in that sprint. It was the consummate achievement of my youth.

  Elizabeth anticipated my arrival, throwing open the door as I charged up the driveway. I dropped my pillowcase as we collided into each other’s arms and fell to the floor. We scrambled along the floor to the front vestibule, tearing off my coat, her blouse, opening my pants, pulling up her dress, crying and panting and laughing and whimpering. We croaked out our love in panicked tones, desperate confessions of loneliness, hushed pledges of everlasting devotion. I had the end of my penis inside her.

  “Are your parents home?” I asked.

  “No,” said Elizabeth, crying and laughing. “I thought we weren’t supposed to have sex.”

  “I held off as long as I could,” I said, pulling out. I had one boot on and one boot off. “Let’s go to bed and feel it, save the discussion for later.”

  Elizabeth was radiant, a tower of jewels, a fountain of eternal youth. She was perfection.
Her ravishing mane of hair was teased into cascading curls. Her little breasts were topped with beautiful big brown nipples. Her body was supple, curved, and petite, without an ounce of fat. There was too much for my senses to take in at once, too much to see and smell and touch. It felt so good it hurt. It felt so good I needed to pull away briefly. I needed a second to salvage my sanity.

  Elizabeth hurriedly did up her clothes and hurried down the hall into her bedroom. I hurried after her. We dove into bed and started over again. Clothes sailed into the air, settled gently on the dressing table, the back of a chair, and dropped to the floor. Elizabeth’s panties ricocheted off the mirror and landed on her nail polish collection, causing a few bottles to fall behind the desk. We were children playing leapfrog in bed, hopping up and down on a flannelette lily pad. The mattress bounced off the boxspring, landing on the floor. We tumbled against the closet door, but managed to remain attached at the crotch. I accidentally kicked the chair which flew against the desk, knocking over a vase and more bottles of nail polish. Elizabeth’s pretty little arm swung out and hit a plant stand, sending a philodendron crashing against the wall.

  “You’re my ideal of a woman, Elizabeth,” I said passionately.

  We climaxed simultaneously, squawking and scratching like angry cats. The bedroom was magnificent, chaotic, the crumbling remains of an ancient temple. We crawled through the rubble and onto the dismantled mattress, the sacrificial altar, pulled the thick white comforter over us, like a blanket of snow, entwined our limbs and bodies, and slept. I awoke frequently in the night, felt rushes of love through my body. I squeezed her and she squeezed me. The electricity flowed through both of us.

  When morning came, I was physically sick to my stomach. I went to the bathroom, vomited, brushed my teeth, and went back to bed. I had gorged myself at the feast of love, drunk too deeply from the cup of desire. I was no longer a rock of independence. I needed Elizabeth, if not to survive, to flourish. I lived with a fantasy inside my head of a woman, of a poetic kind of love, of a courageous and passionate relationship between a man and a woman. I didn’t want to exist on the lifeless plane of a suburban couple where you eat together and sleep together, but never really talk to each other, never see the woman you love for who she really is. I wanted to be alive, aware, one hundred percent.

  “I hear voices inside my head,” I said. “They tell me things.”

  “That’s the first sign of going crazy,” said Elizabeth, and she left it at that. She lay on my arm complacently, but it wasn’t important who owned the arm. It could have been Phil’s arm or anyone who happened to be playing the role of boyfriend. An arm is an arm and a boyfriend is a boyfriend. I resented her lack of curiosity.

  “Aren’t you interested in what those voices tell me, for fuck sakes?” I said. My blood boiled.

  “Yes! What?” she said, responding to my anger.

  I was silent. I wouldn’t share my visions, not now. You shouldn’t have to ask for someone’s curiosity, any more than you should ask for a compliment.

  “It used to bother me that we’re not close,” I said, testingly, probingly. “Or do you prefer it the way it was?”

  “I like it the way it was,” she said with a naive honesty. “At least until you marry me.”

  “What the fuck has marriage got to do with anything?”

  I wanted to discuss pure love, Mount Olympus, immortality, and she was only interested in an institution. She wanted the institution more than she wanted to be close to a man. What did she think an institution could possibly give her? As if an institution could be a safeguard against loneliness; as if anything but courage and honesty and a lot of talking and listening could dispel loneliness; as if an institution could protect her from any of the real threats. It was a childish attachment, an attachment to the idea of playing house permanently, suntanning in the backyard, buying curtains and maternity clothes, asking for her Husband at the reservation desk of a posh restaurant.

  I was a young man, at an age when callow, delusive attitudes on life enraged me, instead of simply making me sad. I vaguely remember shouting, shouting incoherently and dressing incoherendy, pulling on my pants, hopping on one foot to regain my balance. I put my shirt on inside out, took it off, put it on again the right way, ripping it in the act. I couldn’t understand what was happening inside me, my violent swings of emotion like a giant pendulum. Passion is a double-edged sword. Rage flowed out of me with a force of its own. Elizabeth’s mouth was open. She had never seen me angry before.

  I left in the same flurry that I had arrived.

  10. Up the Bum

  Loneliness was the theme of the summer semester. The normal cycle of night and day didn’t exist. The summer was one long uninterrupted, very humid day, so humid my sticky-clothing and bed sheets clung to my body like a straitjacket and the air was oppressively thick, like breathing through a pillow. Loneliness is the most debilitating torture that God, in all his vengeful glory, inflicted on the human race. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate on school work. I couldn’t hoist my spirits up high enough to enjoy a party. My confidence was eroded to a molehill. I couldn’t talk in class without shaking and trembling with nervousness. I drifted in limbo and stared at nothing, frightened that I might never wake up.

  It was difficult to believe that someone with my obvious physical advantages would have any experience with loneliness. You didn’t expect a sex symbol like myself to be lonely. You expected to find me at the hub of a party, exchanging witty observations of humanity with vampish female guests, or at the nucleus of an orgy, at the bottom of the pile, a panting heap of insatiable women fighting over my undying erection. I was in foreign territory, voyaging into a different time zone. I had one prop to lean on, a solitary buoy floating in a desolate sea: Barb. When I talked to Barb, I felt like Ken Harrison again.

  I did my best to talk to Kim—the girl with the interesting bum who thought I was bisexual—but the conversation couldn’t get off the ground. She lived on the floor above me in the dorm and approached me at every opportunity: when my door was open, when I was eating alone in the cafeteria, when I was jerking off under my desk in the library. She had this distracting habit of giggling. Every time I talked to her or asked her a question, she giggled. I said, “How are you, Kim?” and she giggled. I said, “Got any classes today?” and she giggled. “What’s on special for lunch?” Giggle giggle. If she was with a friend, she’d keep looking away and giggling with her friend. It got to the point that I started giggling with them. Kim and her friend would stop me in the hall, and the three of us would giggle together for five minutes before walking on. I didn’t know at the time that when a young girl is constantly giggling around you, it means she wants to have sex.

  Kim had unintentionally propagated the myth that I was bisexual. I was flattered that rumors of my sexual activities generated such interest in the dorm. Every male, from the macho football player to the wimpy bookworm, literally ran from my company. The reaction didn’t bother me. It made me feel powerful, frightening away fully grown adults like cockroaches scrambling across a cupboard shelf. I carried myself with an air of superiority and detachment.

  In order to clear my name, all I had to do was make an overt display of masculinity, kick over garbage cans, spit on the sidewalk, shout “fag” at passing strangers. I preferred to wallow in isolation. I preferred the role of the misunderstood poet; Byronic and melancholy with solitary walks late at night. I maintained a defiant pride in the face of ostracism. “Fuck ’em all,” I decided, with an uncompromising vehemence which was strikingly reminiscent of my mother. I had taken to slipping on women’s clothing, high heels and a pair of frilly panties and skipping across the hall to the bathroom. I made sure someone caught a glimpse of me. There was only one exterior link between me and the man I once was: the bench press. I began a moderate weight-lifting schedule for the chief purpose of humiliating my narrow-minded neighbors. They disliked being outdone on the bench press by a fag.

  Barb and
I went for a marathon jog at dusk every day. We ran lazily into the night for two whole hours, although we moved so slowly it was more like a fast walk. Barb usually quit before me and I topped off the jog with a climactic sprint. The emphasis was on conversation, not physical drudgery. Tired limbs and gasping lungs didn’t interfere with the two-way chatter.

  “I heard somewhere that if you put sperm on your scalp once a day, it’ll stop hair loss,” I said. “I doubt that I could consistently ejaculate that high, but I could masturbate into a jar and use it as shampoo.”

  “Every day!” exclaimed Barb. “That’s a lot of sperm. You couldn’t do it without help. You’d need a girlfriend, unless you put an ad in the university paper and collected other people’s sperm.”

  “That’s disgusting! I’d never use someone else’s sperm.”

  “It’d smell horrible after a while,” concluded Barb. “Are you really worried about losing your hair?”

  “I’ve considered suicide.”

  “Vanity, thy name is Ken Harrison,” laughed Barb good naturedly.

  “Wouldn’t you be worried about it?” I said. “Can’t men be vain too?”

  “You still have lots left,” reassured Barb sweetly.

  We skirted a farmer’s field and turned onto a dark path that cut under a clump of trees. I was wearing my famous white shorts, running shoes, and bandanna, no shirt. Barb wore a pair of shorts pulled over a purple leotard. The humid air loosened my muscles and provoked a bathing flood of perspiration, an ideal physiological state for exercise. Insects collided with my torso and drowned in the moisture. The odd bug flew into my open mouth, and I swallowed it. My background as an all-star jock athlete gave me an appetite for physical labor, a perverse desire to inflict pain on my own body. Barb’s presence prevented me from running myself into the ground.