As Terry and I walked hand in hand into the club, publicly acknowledging our relationship in a way we could not have less than a year earlier, I felt as if I was soaring.
BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD, BABY, THERE GO I
Kevin Killian
Dear Jeremy,
When I was your age I lived in the East Village in a rundown old flat. I even had a girlfriend who lived with me, Jolene Turner. She was an artist, and her attitude toward Mark was a quizzical one. Whenever Jolene bothered to consider Mark McAndrew, she thought of him as cheap. Every time she saw him, he was complaining that he had no money. And she knew he had some. But Mark was a professional sponger.
Mark was nearly seventeen and lived out on Long Island, in a little town called Smithtown, with his mom and dad. “They’re not my real parents, though,” he always said. As though that made it any less shame-making, any less square. He didn’t exactly act ashamed of his situation, but he preferred that you didn’t bring it up. Mark still went to high school and was usually only in her face on weekends, sometimes not even then. Some weekends he stayed in his little town turning everyone on and attending school functions. “Such as?” Jolene inquired. “Such as…pep rallies, football games, dances, things no one ever asked you to go to.” He had any number of girlfriends and sometimes he’d bring one of them into the city. Jolene never had the chance to really warm up to any of these girls because they changed all the time. “He changes girlfriends like, one, two, three,” she said to me once.
“That’s how it should be,” I said lazily. “You get in a rut when you’re with the same chick.”
“We’re not in a rut,” she said with spirit.
“Oh no?”
“You think we are?”
I kind of mumbled no.
“Well, what d’you mean then?”
“Nothing.”
And she couldn’t get any more out of me than that. She didn’t want to press the issue. What if I wound up booting her out? Where would she go? It was I who had all the bread. Jolene had her art work and all that, but her painting brought in very little bread. No gallery, no one, seemed interested. It was I who was the breadwinner, I and my three trust funds. If I kicked her out, she didn’t know what she’d do or where she’d go. One thing to her advantage was that, so far as she knew, I wasn’t interested in any other chick. Another, the one that really held us together, was that without her, no one would do my laundry or cook my meals. But she might be so easily replaced that it scared her.
There was nothing about her that made her inexpendable. She had faced that fact squarely and now it only scared her a little. I was twenty and she was twenty-six. I don’t remember how we met now.
Mark and I had known each other for years. My father was Ralph Isham, the writer, and he used to live in a place near Smithtown and I had actually been sent to school out there for a little while. No more than a few months, Jolene gathered, although Mark and I were very vague about this. Mark was naturally vague about it, since he wanted no reminders from her questioning or from anything else that he still lived in Smith-town, in his parents’ house. Though, again, they weren’t really his parents, or so he said. Certainly he acted as though they were some breed of servants or people he’d rented.
So whenever Mark came to New York, I was always waiting for him and greeted him warmly. If Mark had been a chick, Jolene would have been jealous, but he wasn’t. She knew that from personal experience of the carnal knowledge kind.
One night she’d been lying there in bed with the mosquito netting lying over her. A summer night. In the summer she slept with mosquito netting because the nights were so hot as to preclude blankets or even sheets. Even the thinnest of the tiedyed linen sheets seemed too thick. Yet to be able to sleep, she had to feel all tucked in, so she used mosquito netting. On this particular night she’d been all but asleep and before she knew what was happening Mark’s thing, his penis, was in her hand and hot, even hotter than the summer night. It felt clammy and alive, rather like a bat, a vampire bat.
“Mark…!”
It was too hot to sit up in bed, so she just lay there instead, but she did feel awfully weird. And it was too hot to unclench her hand from around Mark’s thing so she just held on to it as though it were a subway strap or rolling pin. Once he saw she was awake, he began whispering to her. He rolled away a few yards of the netting and squeezed into her bed beside her. She didn’t know what to say because he was such a familiar face and he was my best friend so she was used to him, yet she had only rarely considered what it would be like to have sex with him. Then she let go of his thing and put her arms around him and thought, with a shiver of grief and guilt, that he was the hottest thing she’d ever felt yet instead of wanting him to roll away she wanted him nearer her; she wanted him to smother her with heat. His head, his hair and his face, however, were relatively cool. It was the rest of his body, below his chin, that was hotter. They wound up kissing. At first, because she’d woken holding his thing she’d thought he was naked but he wasn’t, he was wearing an old pair of my pajama pants, white cotton, with old elastic holding them up at the waist, with a vent or flap in front out of which his thing emerged, sometimes hard, sometimes soft, hot throughout. The walls of her bedroom were rose colored, purple colored. She had painted them herself, thinking that their colors would give her the illusion of feeling that she lived inside a delicate coral seashell. But that night, she forgot about that part of it and saw only the resemblance between them and Mark’s suffused thing. It too was rose and purple. Jolene was quite interested in it that night and played with it for quite a while. All the time Mark was kissing her on the neck or lips with his cool face.
Afterward she felt or thought that she had not known how, mmm, phallically oriented she was. “If that’s the word.”
Eventually the two of them fell asleep again and when the morning came, she heard a knock, and the door opened, and I stood there with all my clothes on, even a coat and hat.
Jolene gasped.
But I didn’t mind. I only laughed. “We’re all even better friends now,” I said. I got into bed with them. Mark was still asleep. Jolene lay stiffly between me and Mark and tried to explain. She was wearing a nightgown and Mark still wore the pajama pants, but I wasn’t fooled; I had immediately guessed that she and Mark had gotten it on. She tried to say that it wasn’t her fault but I put my hand over her mouth, saying, “I don’t mind. I think it’s super cool. I wondered when something like this would happen, and I think it’ll bring all three of us closer together.”
“I feel like such a fool,” she said. “Also to tell the truth I feel very uncomfortable right now, with both of you in my bed like this.”
“You’ll get over that feeling.”
“Some things you never get over, Danny Isham,” she said. Then I asked her a hundred embarrassing questions. To ease her embarrassment I tickled her ribs while asking. All the questions were about Mark McAndrew and what he was like in bed. Waves and waves of shame and of laughter contorted her body. Finally all of our noise woke Mark and he looked awful, just awful. What a mess. Which was funny because normally Mark was a very cute, good-looking kid. But yuck, he had bad breath and everything. I on the other hand looked clean and good enough to eat. My breath was fresh and felt like a breath of fresh air.
“What’s happening?” Mark asked fuzzily. A long string of hair was stuck in his mouth, which also, along its creases, was dusted with this horrible sleep-dust or yellow crust.
Jolene rose and climbed over Mark and went into the bathroom to look in the mirror to see if she looked as scuzzy as Mark. But she didn’t, she looked like her normal self. Nobody had ever given her any beauty prizes and no one ever would, but at least when she woke up she looked like a normal woman and not like a bat out of hell like Mark had when he woke up. She rinsed out her mouth with salt and water, washed her face.
It was funny when she went back to her bedroom though, because now Mark looked fine. He looked like a different boy
than the one she’d climbed over not five minutes earlier. The morning was cool and clear. There was even a breeze blowing through the open window. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day and, as it turned out, it was. Except emotionally—for her. All day she walked around wondering what had gotten into her and if I, while pretending to be cool, was actually pissed off at her for going to bed with Mark who was my best friend. Maybe he was. She herself felt stupid for doing what she had, and pissed off at Mark for starting the situation in the first place. The whole setup reminded her of Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim which she’d seen at the Thalia. Jolene Turner, I’m surprised at you, she said to herself. Why did you let Mark come into your bed? You don’t even like him and you’re certainly not in love with him. She determined that if Mark ever tried to ball her again she would scream or throw hot water on him or kick him in the balls. Or something.
Something about the night’s heat had betrayed her, she decided. There had been a pearly shine on Mark’s body that had made her feel, for one hot night, that everything was worth losing if she could hold on to it.
But that wasn’t the real Jolene at all. She knew that. That had been someone else—at best, a dark side of her personality.
The thing was—or what made her feel guilty was—that she had been so turned on. I, despite my many winning ways and funny little tricks in bed she’d learned to like, wasn’t really that good as a lover. Not like pal Mark, she thought. I mean, Danny’s okay but he’s not very exciting. Like he always comes so fast like he’s in a race or something. Her aunt always said some men are built for speed, some for endurance. There were other things that disappointed her about me in bed but that was the main one. And really that wasn’t such a problem because most of the time she just wanted the whole thing over and done with anyhow. It bored her is what it did. Some people just aren’t very highly sexed and she was one, she thought, supposing further that I was another. So we were well matched. And when she pored over it further, she didn’t suppose that Mark McAndrew was always so good in bed either. His energy and allure last night probably stemmed from the thrill he was getting by making love to the forbidden, or what might ordinarily have been thought of as the forbidden, his best friend’s girlfriend. Luckily for Mark, I was accepting and agreeable. There wasn’t, she thought guiltily, a mean bone in my body. Whereas Mark’s mean streak ran all through him. On the whole she was glad that Mark didn’t live in the apartment and visited only on the weekend and not even, thank god, every weekend, because he was so mean and also so cheap. Oh, Mark was okay but she didn’t think she could handle having a roommate who was not only mean but cheap into the bargain. So all in all, she preferred me on the whole, even if she had never been very turned on by me or by my lovemaking or my body or my lazy lackadaisical rich-boy ways.
Despite being opposites in many ways, one thing held Mark and me together. It was something Jolene didn’t know about, and funnily enough, neither did Mark or I. The thing was that Mark and I were secretly attracted to each other and were both afraid that we were queers.
I had never been to bed with another man and wouldn’t even know what to do once I got there. Mark had been to bed with dozens of men but most of them were strangers, just pickups, and he was scared stiff someone he knew would find out he was a queer. He and I were very awkward with each other and rather frightened of each other’s power over himself, but each figured that in time all would work itself out, although who knew in what strange or disappointing direction? We had sex on the mind continually. We wanted to go to bed with each other but neither of us knew how. Mark thought, If I say anything or try anything or start anything, Danny will be repulsed, he’ll drop me, he’ll hate me, he’ll think I’m a queer and I’m not. It’s just that I love him so much I want to express my love in a more physical way. I’d like to sit on his face. I thought much the same thing about Mark, except I had an extra burden, or so I thought: my fear of corrupting Mark, who was several years my junior. Also, my desires were less localized than Mark’s. I didn’t know what I wanted. As I said, I wouldn’t know what to do with Mark in bed if I had him there. I’d be nervous, blow the whole thing; I certainly never thought of sitting on anyone’s face. The whole thing was beyond me. Sometimes I despaired, thought of killing myself, but then what good would that do? So he and I were in a strange predicament and overcompensated in many ways for our perverse feelings by being rather cavalier and sleeping around a lot.
Of course in New York’s East Village there were plenty of real queers you could spot a mile away and when Mark and I went for a walk we’d see them running all over town like they owned the place and we’d say, “Wow, look at those queers.” “Someone should clean the place up.” “They’re sick.” “I mean, talk about obvious.”
My father was queer too. In midlife he’d turned and divorced my mother and moved in with another man. I thought that it might be inherited or passed down from father to son. I wasn’t sure what the story was with lesbians but I imagined it was the same kind of thing—only sexes reversed. So, I didn’t like to talk about my father and in fact hadn’t spoken to him for years and years: I was ashamed of him.
And I thought, Well, Mark’s father isn’t a queer so I guess Mark isn’t either. Then again, Mark always says that those aren’t his real parents and maybe his real father is queer and so, maybe, he’s queer too.
Mark knew all about my father because my father was a famous poet and involved in the peace movement and you always read about him all the time or saw him on TV. But Mark had different ideas about genetic inheritance. He thought, Wow, it would be too much of a coincidence if Danny was a queer too because the whole world knows about his father and being a queer isn’t inherited, you get it from somewhere else, from out of the air, from out of a particular poisoned patch of air, so Danny can’t be one because it would be too much of a coincidence. Lightning doesn’t strike the same family tree twice.
But, although Mark didn’t know it, lightning had struck twice, and so years later the two of us still pondered the question: which of our theories was more correct, assuming for the moment that there was an element of the correct in either of them. We each thought our own theory correct, but it was something we could never discuss with each other.
I would never admit it, but many times when I masturbated I was thinking in some dreamy unfocused way about Mark.
Mark never masturbated but what he would do was let somebody jerk him off and at those times he would think of, sometimes screaming into the night and into the stranger’s surprised face, fucking me. When Mark said to himself, It’s just that I love him so much I want to express my love in a more physical way, he wasn’t even being honest with himself, because what love he had he’d given away long ago to another man; all he felt for me was a reflex physical passion. And so when being jerked off by his real lover, Mark never screamed out my name for fear of hurting Carey’s feelings, but it’s true he sometimes thought of me and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or merely come.
The whole setup was a vicious circle and resulted in the two of us playing a lot of games with each other and trying to prove to each other and to ourselves that neither of us was a queer. We still had a lot of fun nevertheless, and we enjoyed each other’s company immensely, despite there being many differences between us, and despite the secret tension we each felt in the company of the other.
But that was why, for example, I was so pleased when I found Mark in Jolene’s bed even though she was supposed to be my girlfriend. This way I got the chance to, as I put it, check Mark out. Plus to feel, or have the option to feel, very self-righteous about it if I wanted to. And I did—want to. Oh very much so!
That, then, was me all over. Rich kid trying to act poor and punk.
But in a way I couldn’t help it.
Anyway, the thing is—what I meant to say is that when Mark and I went for a walk we’d see these real queers running all over town like they owned the place and either Mark or I would say, “There but
for the grace of God go I.” Saying it one way but in our hearts thinking the same thing in another way. “But for the grace of God, baby, there go I.”
This is all a long time ago, Jeremy, but God still works in those mysterious ways and when you come back from your meeting, and you’re standing at home, bent at some comfortable angle, leaning on your dresser perhaps, with your pants down at your feet, in front of your full-length mirror, writing down for me every detail of what your ass looks like close up, I know you’ll feel His grace too. He’s there for everybody the way I’m there for you.
With much warmth,
Daniel
CORYDON 13
Thom Nickels
There are a lot of homosexuals in Boston…
Harvard Square in the late sixties was as good a place to live as Paris or Berkeley. I know, because when I walked out of the Harvard Square subway station from Boston for the first time in September of 1969, I was hit with a barrage of images, the most striking being a professor in a beret riding a bicycle. He was even wearing tiny oval eyeglasses that put me in mind of Jean-Paul Sartre.
I had come to the Boston-Cambridge area to do civilian work as a conscientious objector in lieu of military service. I’d chosen this area because it was similar in some ways to my hometown of Philadelphia, and because it was near the sea. I left Philadelphia without knowing where I was going to live or work, but that quickly changed once I arrived in the city via Greyhound bus. I found a room in a Harvard Square rooming house. Although I signed a year’s lease that very day, I still had to find a menial job in a hospital. That would come two days later, when I was hired as an operating room orderly at Tufts-New England Medical Center.
After settling in, I wondered who would become my first Boston friend. I knew it wouldn’t be Albert, the Kirkland Street Mormon landlord who had a wife and family. It would also certainly not be the very cosmopolitan Dr. Stein, who gave me my employee physical.
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