Colonel Fazio didn’t like repeating anything twice, particularly to a handpicked subordinate. He turned deadly serious and leaned into me. “They do not serve in the U.S. Army, McGowan. We find them, we get rid of them. No questions asked. It’s been happening since the beginning of time.”
“I know the old policy, sir, but I’m aware of the new policy as well, and he never really came forward and said he was . . . gay. So we can’t really do anything. It’s not fair.” I knew I was asking for it big-time.
He lurched forward on the edge of the couch and poked the cigar at me.
“Fair? We are not working in a democracy, Captain. There is no fair here. I do not even want to consider the possibility that you don’t understand your responsibilities here. Now . . . in fairness, I am going to ask you this one last time, is there anything I need to know?”
I dropped my head. I needed to think this out clearly. It was now not only Sergeant Lopez’s career on the line but my own as well. Finally, I looked at him and said, firmly, “Sir, I understand your view. But with all due respect, I have to say I am extremely uncomfortable with what it is you’re asking me to do.”
An eerie calm came over him. He sat back into the couch and relit his cigar. I knew this wasn’t a good sign. It was worse than yelling, this silence, because I knew he’d moved to the next level. The colonel was a brilliant tactician. He didn’t get to wear those oak leaves for nothing. If he wanted, he could have me demoted to base cesspool cleaner for the duration of my career.
There was no getting around it now. Lopez was fucked, and I was fucked for trying to save him.
“Jeff, where do you see yourself going from here?” he said, refusing to look at me, looking down the ash of the cigar instead. “Increased responsibility requires a broad understanding of army values and an ability to protect the institution.” He stood up slowly.
I started to rise, but he pushed the palm of his hand at me. “Remain seated,” he said, and walked briskly out of my office.
I just stood there, staring at the closed door, feeling numb at first, then frightened, then very, very angry, and then finally just terribly sad. Most of all I was disappointed in Colonel Fazio. We had talked at great length about his pride in the army’s diversity. We had talked about his children at barbecues. He was a terrific husband and father, and not only did I enjoy his company, I liked his family as well.
The truth was I was taking this very personally. It felt as if all the things he’d said about Lopez were aimed at me, too, and that hurt like hell.
Now, I had been on the wrong end of his anger before. And I’d learned that if it turned out he was wrong he’d usually come around and try to make good. This time, though, I didn’t care whether or not he came around.
Don’t get me wrong. I was as much a careerist in the army as he was. And I knew he could squeeze me out as easily as he intended to squeeze out Sergeant Lopez. What bothered me the most wasn’t his hatred (or fear, or both, depending on your point of view) of homosexuals. He was a product of his environment, after all. He’d been in the army his entire adult life, and the army provides little incentive (you could probably argue it provides disincentives) to develop your own thoughts on the issue of gays in the military. Why distinguish yourself from everyone else? What would he have to gain? I can’t pretend that I was shocked by his intolerance.
No, what bothered me more than anything was just how personally he’d taken the whole thing, as if Lopez’s mere existence (and mine, by extension) in his unit was a personal affront to his character and command. In fact, it had nothing at all to do with him personally. But, of course, he couldn’t see that, at least not right away. I spent the next few days expecting a phone call informing me that I was being relieved of my command, but the call never came. When the weekend finally arrived, I tried to relax and put the whole thing out of my mind. On Friday night there was a “hail and farewell,” a function we had regularly to welcome new officers to the base and say good-bye to those who were leaving. I sat gloomily at the bar, convinced that any “greeting” on my part would be a waste of time since my days were numbered. Just when I thought I’d head home, I was approached by one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known. It was Maggie Fazio, the colonel’s wife. She was from Mississippi, a real southern belle. Her father was a retired lieutenant general who’d served stateside for most of his career. Maggie was one of those women who are so stunning and self-possessed that a room changes when they enter it. She had class, and a tremendous sense of self-worth and character. And also a wicked sense of humor. She was a tall woman, with long blond hair, a long, perfect nose, and full lips. We got on together like a house on fire. She was clever and funny and beautiful, and she had impeccable timing. She smiled as she sat next to me at the bar.
“You on the lam from the New York authorities, old boy?”
I smiled. “Apparently I’m wanted in all fifty, I’m told.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, Jeff. . . . Things have a way of coming round.” Her presence was always like a gift. I breathed easy for the first time in days. Maybe the death blow was not so close after all. “Has he told you anything, Maggie?”
“Oh, hells bells, Jeff, you know how he is. When someone is twisting them on him, all he does is talk about them but not really about the issue at hand. You, of course, have been the topic of conversation for a number of dinners and breakfasts. I have never seen the man quite so angry; now why not tell me your side of the story?”
I told Maggie Fazio the whole story. She was an intense listener, periodically nodding her head, putting me at ease with an occasional “uh-huh” or “ah” or “I see.” It felt good to get it all out and to have such a sympathetic ear. I ended up with this:
“To go after this man was no different than going after someone because they’re black or a woman. I believe in fairness. Soldiers have to know that if they follow the rules they will be treated fairly. Lopez did nothing wrong. It was a witch hunt at best, and as much as I like your husband—you know how much I like the colonel, right? [Maggie Fazio nodded her head]—I just couldn’t let myself be a part of it. Whether he was gay or not never really entered into the grand scope of things. If he was, the policy states that we shouldn’t ask, so technically he deserved a reprieve. But they still want him out—by any means available. It just isn’t right.”
I finished off my third whiskey and was about to say good-bye to her when she tilted her head at me and smiled.
“He is a handful, Jeff, isn’t he?” she asked, rolling her eyes and laughing softly. “You can’t blame him for doing something he thought was right by the old guard, yes?”
I nodded. And I couldn’t blame him, really.
“But, Jeff, I get it. I get it,” she repeated, patting my hand, “and I know for a fact that eventually he’ll get it, too.”
With that she stood up, gently kissed my cheek, and disappeared into the crowd, leaving behind a trail of Opium perfume. I didn’t know what to feel now. Maybe she was right. Maybe the colonel would come around. But even if he did, it wouldn’t be soon enough to save me. I was doomed. I hunkered down and ordered another whiskey.
That Monday I went into the office earlier than usual. I’d planned actually to start going through my desk, so convinced I was that Colonel Fazio was going to give me the ax. When I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed was an envelope lying on the floor, a few feet from the door, as if someone had slipped it underneath. I opened it. Inside was a card with a picture of a gorilla on it. The card read, “It takes a big man to know he was wrong.” Below that, in the undeniably strong handwriting I’d come to recognize instantly, was the signature, Colonel Joseph Fazio.
Sergeant Lopez survived without any adverse action taken against him, but when it came time to reenlist he refused to consider the possibility. He could read the writing on the wall: there was no future for him in the military.
It was really the final nail in the coffin for me, I knew that I was no different from Lopez, a
nd I was smart enough to know that I might not have a godfather to save me in a similar situation. I knew that when my command ended, I would leave the army. It was a bitter-sweet decision, but I had achieved many of the goals that I had dreamed of as a boy, and I felt that I wanted to live a complete life without the artificial restraints of this hermetically sealed culture.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Driving North, Home
It was a dull, gray morning in March 1998 when I set out to make the long drive from Fort Bragg in North Carolina to New York. The trip is roughly fourteen hours and I-95 gets dull quick, so I stopped in Raleigh first to get some books on tape—the newest Clancy and a Michael Crichton and a Grisham. I wanted to keep my mind occupied, to escape into stories of the lives of others in order to forget about my own for a while.
I left Fort Bragg knowing that I was going to leave the army. But even though my mind was made up, every time one of the tapes would run out and I’d find myself alone in the silence, searching for the next tape, I had trouble believing it was really happening. I’d spent my entire adult life serving my country, and now, just when I’d gotten word that I’d been promoted to major, I was walking away.
I was afraid, unsure about the future, unsure about almost everything. The only thing I was certain of was that I couldn’t serve in the U.S. Army anymore. The actors’ voices on the books on tape gave me solace. Nothing had to be decided today. I was taking a thirty-day leave, so I would have plenty of time to think things through. I’d held on to the apartment in Jackson Heights after my grandmother’s death, and now I was going back there to find my footing for a new life. I would base there as I looked for a place to live in Kingston, New York, where I’d been assigned as an adviser to the National Guard, and where I would finally submit my resignation.
I had no idea what the future held or even where to begin. I was now confronting a possibility that had never before occurred to me: civilian life. I did know, however, that I wanted to confront this new life on my home turf, New York. The army had sent me all over the world, but when the choice was finally up to me, there was no doubt in my mind that New York was the place I wanted to be. I was coming home.
It was dark by the time I approached the Holland Tunnel on the Jersey Turnpike and the Manhattan skyline came into view. The mere sight of it was invigorating. All my worries and fears slipped away as the energy from the great sparkling city reinvigorated me. All at once I knew everything was going to work out fine. I would find a job. I would create a new life for myself. My old self-confidence returned anew. So much possibility now. So much hope. Everything was up!
I would be living with almost nothing for the next thirty days since I couldn’t have my things shipped up until I’d found a permanent place to live in Kingston. At the end of my leave, I would figure out what to do. The assignment I had was pretty laid-back. I would have plenty of time to make decisions and get a plan together.
Living without my stuff was somewhat liberating, and I was able to relax and enjoy my time off. I reacquainted myself with the city, caught up with all my neighborhood friends, went out a lot at night. I also got to spend time with my great-aunt Mary, aka Maude, my grandmother’s sister. I’d made a special effort to keep in touch with her after my grandmother’s death since she was confined to her apartment nearby in Elmhurst and her only company was often just the home health aid who came regularly to care for her. Having a relative close by again in Jackson Heights was a blessing. She was eighty-nine years old and seemed to cherish the opportunity to share memories with a beloved grandnephew. I spent hours listening to her tell stories about my grandparents and my mother and father, helping me fit together pieces of a puzzle that had for so long remained stubbornly resistant to understanding and leading me toward a newfound appreciation of my family. Hearing her stories, I was amazed at the accumulated wisdom that can be found in a single life.
One day when I was sitting in her kitchen drinking a cup of coffee, she looked at me and said, “You know, Maxine was right.”
“What?” I said.
“She was right,” she said, shaking her head and looking off into the distance, a faint smile rising into her face.
“Right about what?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t have plastered Scotty Gallagher’s house with mud. It was very unladylike. . . . I should have thrown a rock instead. Maude the mule, indeed!”
That night my great-aunt Mary passed away quietly in her sleep.
And so I set about arranging her affairs and preparing for the funeral. Since all of my possessions were in storage, I had to buy something to wear for the funeral Mass at the Church of St. Agnes near Grand Central Terminal. I decided to go to Brooks Brothers and Barneys.
As I walked up Madison Avenue, I was a little bit awestruck by the displays in the shop windows and by how stylish everyone was dressed. And they all seemed to be in such a hurry, fueled by the sheer energy of life in the great metropolis. I’d grown so accustomed to the dreary conformity of military life that I’d forgotten how exciting civilian life could be. This was definitely not the PX!
As I passed the Calvin Klein window on Sixtieth Street, I noticed a tall man with wild curly hair walking toward me down the avenue, a little black pug at his heels. He had on a trench coat, with a blue blazer and a pair of khaki pants underneath. The words “Park Avenue” popped into my head. He was strikingly good-looking, with a wide, sensual mouth, a fine, prominent nose, and a deep tan that set off his blue eyes nicely. With an athletic build and a firm stride, there was something about him that just seemed to exude fine, healthy living. The little black pug was very well behaved and seemed as smart and interesting as his owner.
We made eye contact as we passed, and he smiled. I was intrigued. When I reached the first Barneys window, I stopped and looked back to find that he’d stopped and was standing in front of the Calvin Klein window. I stared at the handsome mannequins, trying to appear nonchalant. Every time I’d look over, he’d turn his head back to the window, the pug sitting obediently at his feet. We went back and forth like this for a few minutes until finally he came over and introduced himself.
“Hi . . . my name is Billiam. I am very bad at this,” he said, laughing a little at himself, though clearly sizing me up. Later on he’d tell me he was trying to figure out if I was gay or straight, single or married, by “reading” the way I was dressed and the shopping bags I was carrying. Eventually we’d come to affectionately label this process “doing a Willa,” in honor of his niece Wilhemina, who has the uncanny ability to make deadly accurate character assessments based solely on a person’s shoes and how well he or she accessorizes. It seems to be a genetic gift of the van Roestenberg family that kicks in at a very young age.
Apparently he liked what he read. “Would you,” he said, “um . . . like to go for a beer . . . or a cappuccino?”
“Both.” I said, smiling now.
From that moment on we were virtually inseparable. We spent the next several hours getting to know each other at Nello’s, an upscale trattoria on Madison Avenue in the sixties. Time flew by so quickly. Amazingly, there were no gaps in the conversation, no uncomfortable stretches of silence; the whole thing felt as if it was meant to be. After a few hours we exchanged numbers and split up, agreeing to see each other not the following day but on the day after that.
I could’ve just gotten the E or R train not far south of Nello’s but I was so excited at having met Billy and at being back in the city again that I decided to walk awhile. The renovation of Grand Central was nearly finished, and I’d not yet seen it, so I figured I’d walk the roughly twenty blocks south to Forty-second Street, check out the terminal, and catch the 7 train back home to Eighty-second Street in Jackson Heights. Making my way down Madison Avenue I reviewed the afternoon with Billiam, hearing his words over and over again, seeing his face, hoping I hadn’t said anything too stupid. Thinking about it filled me with a kind of hope, a sense of possibility, that I’d never experienced before.
There was no way of knowing, of course, how things would turn out with Billy, yet I sensed right away that something very, very special was happening, and I felt determined to get it right. I was a walking cliché now, heading south on Madison Avenue, a young man in the city whose step had suddenly been lightened by the prospect of love.
I cut over to Park Avenue and rushed through the Helmsely walkway and then entered the Pan Am Building (it’s the Met Life Building now, and it was that day, too, but for some of us it will always be the Pan Am Building) and made my way through the lobby and to the escalators that would take me down into the great vaulted concourse of the newly renovated Grand Central Terminal. As the sleek escalator dropped me slowly down into the main room, I was stunned by the transformation. The big Kodak sign was gone, allowing a full view of the giant windows up on the east side. The old ticket windows were gleaming with freshly cleaned brass, and none of them housed Off Track Betting. The air was smoke-free, and that fact seemed to make the ceiling all the more impressive. The great mural of constellations covering the ceiling had been deeply obscured when I’d last been here in the 1980s. Now it sparkled as clear as a night sky in upstate New York. Later on I couldn’t help seeing this as a kind of sign of my own newfound clarity regarding my sexuality and my whole life. That all the smoke and grime that had rendered the great muraled ceiling nearly invisible in the eighties was just like all the ambivalence, all the indecisiveness, all the pain of denial I’d put myself through during that time. And now all the smoke and grime was gone. I could finally see, and having met Billy, the clarity seemed to become even more profound, the ceiling seemed to reveal a universe that had been, a mere decade before, inconceivable to me, unimaginable, unreachable. Now here it was, looming so grandly over the freshly scrubbed train station, and seeming so close I felt, as the escalator gently deposited me onto the soft marble floor, almost as if I could reach out and grab a handful of stars and rearrange the Milky Way.
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