This was 1991; it’s important to note that. This was before email, before Ellen, before you could turn on your computer and see the world. This was before I knew I was gay, before I knew that kissing boys wasn’t just something that happened, but was something I wanted to do. This was before I felt I could call myself a writer, before I had really written anything truly good.
Our class met in the library, which would have been romantic if it hadn’t been one of those modern libraries where all you feel is the concrete, not the books. Our instructor was an MFA student who later went on to publish nothing whatsoever that I can find. Her teaching methodology seemed to be: If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all. Which left her largely silent as we all tore each other apart.
In the absence of an instructor’s heavy hand, a creative writing seminar becomes a cauldron of hurt feelings, cutthroat ambition, unbridled defensiveness, and tenuous alliances that would make any third-rate parliament proud. From the very first day, you try to find your allies, and then as the critiques come in, you reassess your allegiances. I don’t remember a lot about the other people who were in our class—there was a science fiction writer who confounded us with his syntax and the way the letter z could crop up in each and every one of his characters’ names. And then there was the girl who’d written a piece about a bad breakup, and then burst into tears when I pointed out that the main character wasn’t very sympathetic. (I learned a very valuable lesson then: Treat all breakup stories as autobiography, just in case.) And there was one guy who spent at least five minutes harping on the fact that a character in one of my stories had tried to spot a Volkswagen as he drove a long road in Michigan. “Why a Volkswagen?” he kept asking. I tried to tell him there was no deeper meaning to it, but he didn’t believe me.
I can’t remember what that guy looked like, but I can remember that as the weather got warmer and spring came, Jamie Walker wore V-neck T-shirts. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone wear an undershirt as a shirt before, especially a V-neck. If I hadn’t already had a crush on him, the V-neck would have sent me spiraling. I, who never looked at necks, found myself studying his neck. I, who was never distracted by the space below the neck, was suddenly drawn there. My own chest was already hairy—a fact I had no desire to share with the world. But there were some stray hairs in the deeper part of his V, an echo of the occasional stubble on his chin. What I felt was a charged curiosity, but it was a confused curiosity. Did I want to touch that space, trace that trail, or did I simply want to be that body myself? Did I find him attractive, or did I wish to be that attractive? It was the openness that was sexy, and it was the openness that I lacked.
We liked each other’s writing. That was clear early on. When all the critiques of my pages were passed back to me, his handwriting was the first I sought out. We often sat next to or near each other, and would talk on the way out of class. But we’d always go our separate ways once we reached the bottom of the library steps.
I might have forgotten about him. (A catalog of crushes is an extremely finite thing.) But our instructor surprised us one day with an assignment: We were to swap stories with another person in class, and deconstruct one another’s writing. Poems could be turned into stories; stories could be turned into poems. We could choose our partners. And Jamie chose me.
The next week, we swapped stories. Not just on paper but electronically—which meant, at the time, on a disk. I waited until I was back in my room to read his. I was alone—I can remember this. My roommate was gone. I was nervous and excited—the two most applicable adjectives for a crush. I had given Jamie a story about a family whose grandfather is a tyrant, and the grandson, tired of trying to live up to him, shoots him in a hunting accident. I was proud of this story, even if it was, as most of my fiction was, entirely fictional, without many details of my own life scattered around. Jamie’s stories, from what I can recall, were usually about college students doing foolish things, in friendship or romance or some tangle of both. I expected more of the same, and loved the fact that he had written it knowing that I would be its first reader.
His story started plainly enough, with two high school boys watching L.A. Law. One of the most popular shows on TV at the time, L.A. Law was about…well, a group of lawyers in L.A. They were vain, troubled, and comic, and they usually won their cases. The men were sexy in that corny 1980s way—hair a-poof, muscles worked out, abs not yet an indicator for beauty. Not my type. I was holding out for River Phoenix. Or, if I had to settle, Keanu Reeves.
In the story, there’s a tension between the boys as they watch L.A. Law—romantic tension. Relationship tension. And then the scene shifts, and you’re in the L.A. Law episode. Two of the male characters are arguing. But there’s also romantic tension between them. And then, right when you think it’s going to erupt into a fight, they start making out. Jimmy Smits and Corbin Bernsen. Or maybe Jimmy Smits and Blair Underwood. I can’t remember which. But suddenly the clothes are coming off. The need is overpowering. Belts are undone, pants are shed. And the kisses are real. These are two men who are in love with each other, and their kisses are real.
I had read hundreds of books up to that point. I had read hundreds of stories. I had copies of Jackie Collins and Nancy Friday and Ken Follett that opened up on their own to the sex scenes because I had consulted them so often. But nothing I had read had prepared me for this. I had never known that reading words on a page could give you the same sensation as someone breathing on your neck, running his hand over your arm, undoing the top button of your pants. I had never known that a story could convey the feeling of a hard kiss, a warm body, fingers under elastic. I had known words could capture the mechanics, but not the intensity. But here were these characters—grasping, longing, battling, letting go. I believed them. And, somewhere unacknowledged but getting louder, I knew I wanted to be them. I wanted to be like that.
I was going to fail the assignment, because I didn’t want to change a thing. Sure, a word or two, here or there. I was fine editing it. But I couldn’t deconstruct it. I couldn’t rearrange it, alter it, make it into something else. I tried. I tried playing it backwards. I tried inverting the frame. But ultimately I couldn’t change it. It had to be what it was.
Jamie, if you’re out there, why did you give me this story? Did you know what I was, and know that I didn’t really know it yet? Was it a flirtation, or even something more than that? Or did this just happen to be the story that was on your computer on the day the assignment was given? Did you just happen to turn on L.A. Law that night and decide to play with it a little, not really giving any thought as to who its first reader would be? Did you mean to tell me something, or did you simply tell me something anyway?
In the story I want to tell, I wrote a little note at the bottom of what he wrote. When he saw it, he smiled and told me we should talk about it after class. For an hour, we sat there as girls read their blood poetry and the science fiction boy told us about the time Zaffir and Zazzlow traversed the space-time continuum in order to fetch the dread mineral Zylon out of the grasp of the cruel overlord Zartra. Our expectation bloomed into something more certain than expectation, and our nervousness solidified into something closer to intent. When the class ended, we wordlessly led each other to the back of the library, to a carrel far from any other students, and that was where he kissed me, that was where I finally got to touch that neck, that chest, that was where my hand pressed against that V and his hand lowered down my back, and that was where I cried because I had gotten what I wanted, that was when the joy of it was so much that I actually cried, because I had found what I was looking for, and it wasn’t just him, it was everything, and when he saw I was crying, his kisses changed into something more comforting, something that understood, and he whispered shh shh, then made a joke that made it all okay, that made me kiss him again, that made me lead him back out, holding his hand, to get some dinner, to walk through the night, to stay up with each ot
her, then sleep with each other, then greet the next morning as if it were ours together.
But I didn’t write a note at the bottom of what he wrote—at least, not that note. I don’t even know if I told him how much I liked the story; I might have just said how hard it was to cut down. He had taken my short story and turned it from fifteen pages to something like three, jutting phrases against each other to create a prose poem of indeterminate meaning. I think later on he told me he’d liked some of my edits on his story, but that was it.
I never ended up seeing him out of class. Toward the end of the year, the newspaper I was working at ran a two-page spread of photos from our university’s LGBA Ball. There were a few photos of him there, dressed (if I am remembering correctly) in a sleeveless number that would have made Audrey Hepburn proud. I was no doubt hanging out with my dorm friends that night, swathed in flannel, watching Twin Peaks, enjoying myself in a different way.
I never took another writing class. But gay characters started appearing in my fiction. Sometimes they knew they were gay. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I knew they were gay. Sometimes I didn’t. Not until later.
The difference between a crush and a love is its viability. I could try to revise the past into a world where Jamie and I could have been together. But that wasn’t the world my head was living in at the time.
It is often the case that at the end of the crush, the only thing you’ve learned is how to better deal with the next crush that comes along. In this case, I got a little more. Whether or not he meant to—and I strongly suspect he didn’t—Jamie Walker made me a better writer. Or at least he opened up something in that part of me. The rest, in time, would follow.
TRACK NINE
8-Song Memoir
What I remember most is lunging across the apartment, trying to get there before the end of the song.
This is not, admittedly, the part of making a mixtape that glows with nostalgia. This is not the creation of the cover (collage? watercolor? Sharpie?) or the intimacy of song selection. But I guess I’m nostalgic for it, after all: —I know that I have four minutes and twelve seconds to do something else while Tori Amos sings about being silent all these years. I start to write a letter as her voice lifts from the double-cassette recorder in the kitchen. I stop to look up when she sings, Don’t look up—the sky is falling, because I always look up when she sings those words. I am paying attention. I am listening to this song that I will soon be giving to someone else.
Only…
There’s a hiccup in my attention span.
The song is suddenly about to end and I am at the other end of the apartment.
So I do what instinct tells me to do—I careen into the kitchen and throw myself at the pause button, trying to hit it before the next song begins. (If I fail? The price is the sloppy sound of a click, betraying the fact that I had to hit stop, not pause. I’ve rewound to leave a record of my mistake.)
Some of you know exactly what I mean. Many of you don’t. And I guess that, more than anything else, is what makes me nostalgic.
* * *
—
I used my Walkman long after most people had switched over to Discmen. (iPods weren’t even gleams in our eyes. They were science fiction.)
At work, we had the Tape Graveyard, the place where cassettes would go after they’d been replaced by CDs. Or sometimes they were cassettes we’d never wanted in the first place, sent to us by Columbia House. (We were too lazy to respond to the monthly missives, and then too lazy to mail back the automatic shipments.)
I loved the Tape Graveyard: It was one of the only places where Wilson Phillips could hang out with R.E.M. and Talking Heads without judgment, where Thompson Twins and ’Til Tuesday could compare haircuts, where my boss kept the Reggae Christmas Tape we always played for Holiday Card Signing. After that boss left, I inherited the Tape Graveyard, and it remained intact until a few months ago, when my office made a move to a space that is deeply unfriendly to filing cabinets. Many of the tapes got lost in the whittling, but I did insist on keeping some of them, even if there’s no cassette player in sight, because there is something intrinsically valuable, at least in terms of my soul, to be found in a K-tel collection of hits from 1987.
There weren’t supposed to be mixes in the Tape Graveyard. But as I was clearing things out, I found one. Its label was in my handwriting, and its name made me laugh out loud:
There is something so amazingly adolescent about that, so touching in its sincerity. (In college, I put most of my favorite songs on a mix entitled Beautiful Desolation. This mix, Dread and Yearning, sounded like a follow-up.)
I have no true recollection of making this mix. The second side isn’t labeled, so at first I don’t even know how many songs are on it. But now, on a rainy Sunday night with Valentine’s Day approaching, I think it’s time to see what magnetized message sits inside the plastic case.
I track down some AA batteries.
I put them in my Walkman.
I don’t have my fuzzy-circle headphones anymore (I broke them; I always broke them), so earbuds will have to do.
I press play.
* * *
—
The mix, I discover, is unfinished. There are only eight songs that the whirling of the Walkman brings back to life.
Track One: Horses in the Room by Everything But The Girl
I do not believe that you need one specific person
to make your life whole,
but I do believe that at any given moment,
someone could appear at your door
who will change your life.
What I’ve discovered over the years,
which was never a foregone conclusion, is this:
I don’t want to be the person who opens the door.
I want to be the person at the door.
Come in, come in, whoever you are,
Tracey Thorn sings.
(I love Tracey Thorn, because if she were a character,
I would have to name her Tracey Thorn.)
Whenever I put this song at the start of a mix—
and I still do—
It is a welcome to someone I’ve already welcomed.
It is the warmth of the room when you step in from the door.
It is certain in its hope and uncertain in everything else
which is often how I find love.
Track Two: Fields of Gold by Sting
How can I love this song when
I want to laugh
every time he sings barley?
I cannot find anything romantic
about barley.
Or walking in fields of gold,
for that matter.
Trampling over barley,
barley stalks hitting you when the wind blows,
barley scratching at your skin,
barley getting caught in the bottom of your shoe.
No, thank you.
When it comes to love,
we remember the light,
not the crops.
I remember what it was like
to walk next to you as the day melted itself
into twilight.
We could have been walking through corn,
or wheat, or Park Avenue.
I only recall snippets of what we said,
but I remember clearly saying something to you,
and you saying something back to me.
Track Three: Love Song for a Vampire by Annie Lennox
Most of my favorite singers choose to present love
as a tug-of-war between bliss and derangement.
Robyn dancing on her own,
Björk and her army of me, Sia swinging on her
(I don’t need to say it), o
r Lorde undercutting
her own swagger with the cold light of day.
It is possible that Annie Lennox is the mother
of all these singers and songs, at least
in the lineage of my listening.
This song is from Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
dating from the brief moment in cinematic history
when Hollywood thought it was a good idea
to trap Winona Ryder in the nineteenth century.
Her breathy heaving is the only thing I remember
about the movie, so it’s easy to separate the song,
and take the vampire metaphorically.
Annie Lennox is torn apart and so in love.
Still falls the rain, she sings, letting the listener know
that it’s not so much a question of here it comes again
as it is a question of learning to love
even when it’s raining.
Track Four: Lead a Normal Life by Peter Gabriel
My first concert that wasn’t Billy Joel
was Peter Gabriel at Great Woods in July of ’87.
I was at Wellesley for its summer program and
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