by Larry Kramer
However he knows it, he does.
He smacks me hard. He slaps me over and over. It hurts more each time. He doesn’t stop until I somehow get past him and run into my bedroom. I expect him to come after me, but he doesn’t.
* * *
My body is sprouting chest hair, rivulets heading north and south from my navel, black whispers on my nipples, all still subtle with innuendo but filled with a foresty foreboding. I find what’s happening to my body terrifying. I liked myself before, or so I tell myself; I don’t like myself now, that I know for a fact. I have no idea why being hairy should produce such self-hate and discomfort, but it does. Stephen is very hairy, and there’s something about Stephen that troubles me. I’m never completely comfortable with him. Philip is hairless except on his chest. His pale unclothed body is not a pretty sight. Lucas is sort of in between, a nice balance of hairy and hairless. Lucas is nice to look at any which way. With my little clumps of dense black scruff, I’m beginning to look like a spotted cow. A big Dalmatian. An ape. I don’t want to look like an ape. I want to look like Lucas! I want to look like Lucas and I’m going to look like Stephen. Mostly, I’m just afraid. My body is trying to tell me something.
I loathe my body hair and violently wish it away.
Ponzo Lombardo! What a tuft of pubic hair he has! He eyes mine in gym class and confides to me, with pride, “We’re the only ones growing into men!” Why don’t I accept Ponzo’s invitation to grow up? “Come on in the shower and let’s show off!”
Dickie and Jimmy and James and Billy and Orvid and Arnold and Dodo and Patrick and … all the other boys—not a hint of hair! All possessed of the unsullied marmoreal smoothness I’ll always associate with gentile-ity. The state of being Other than I. No brushy black Brillo for them. I look at Ponzo’s equipment, already fully embraced by a muff of celebrity, and I look down upon mine, smaller but haloed by fibrous fluff, and I realize in despair that I’m on my way to joining Ponzo and I can no longer hope to be like Dickie or Jimmy or James or Billy or … Mordy.
Of course. That’s it. Mordy is as hairless as a Greek statue.
I want to be like Mordy. I want Mordy to like me.
So I sashay away from Ponzo, my towel my armor as I sneak my underpants on, vowing never again to shower in school. But I can’t help casting my eyes down at Ponzo’s huge hairy thing. Yikes, am I going to be as big? I’d like to be a good size, but I don’t want to be like Ponzo or Tibby Chesterfield. Get dressed! Slam that locker door closed!
Why has no one said a word to me by way of preparation? Do I want to be a Peter Pan all my life? How else to get out of Masturbov Gardens if not by growing up? Isn’t my constant wish, the one I make on birthday candles and lucky pennies, Please get me out of Masturbov Gardens?
I don’t know why Ponzo, whose three-piece suite in a few years’ time I would be more than happy to accommodate in my bedroom, is the object of my disdain. Daniel, the guy’s cock is huge! And gorgeous! Can’t you see?
So many confusions!
Why do I have so many “erections” of “engorged blood” without warning? I find these terms in my own first dirty book, which I’ve bought for one whole dollar off of fat Grace my once babysitter, and which is forthrightly called Learning to Live with Sex. Looking at Ponzo. Thinking of Lucas. Dreaming of Mordy. No one has told me anything. When the shadows first appear, then the fuzz, then the actual tentacles sprouting around my thing, I think I’m coming down with a case of what happened to Mr. Hyde. When the incessant, uncontrollable throbbing of my “member” first starts, I think I’m plagued by some incurable illness that must be bathed with the compresses I’ll note in a few years’ time are used by Nurse Rosalind Russell on kids with polio in Sister Kenney. I might just as well have polio. Nurse, it won’t go away; it just stays hard, no matter where I am. I’ll be walking down the street and then—my crotch breaks out! Lest I be seen, I have to resort to some protective shield—a jacket, a schoolbook carried jauntily, a sweater tied around my waist. Imagine comparing it all with polio. When will I pause to make note of how … disorienting all this stuff with boys is becoming?
Soon I learn in Learning to Live with Sex about “nocturnal self-mutilation”; this is a nighttime lesson, taught to me in my own bed by my wet sheets; the two plus two of it all scares me no end, not only that something so … personal could transpire while I’m asleep, but also that Rivka will notice my dirty deeds. I rush to purchase multiple sets of underpants to sleep in, one for each encounter with the Unknown Night, and then I dispose of them the next day in the garbage room, via the long, dark, winding underground tunnel I know too well. When it becomes apparent that I’ll go broke buying new ones (even combining my own babysitting money and Philips’s allowance), I take to washing them myself and hanging them in the back of my closet to dry. Stephen discovers them while searching for an old tennis racket and gives me a look. Life gets more complicated by the minute.
How do I free myself of these new torments? I have no idea. What would Claudia say? She’d make fun of me. Can I bring a touch of levity to the situation by myself? Apparently not, because as I stare down at Ponzo’s effluvial and effervescent penis in its copious black nest, bigger and bolder and longer and thicker and wider than any I’ve ever seen, in or out of Uncle Hyman’s suitcase, I realize I want it in my mouth! I want it! And I don’t even love him. Mordy at least I love. Further complications abound, and it was complicated enough already.
And Mordy hasn’t even called me. Why hasn’t Mordy called me?
And how can one mouth want the penises of two such different boys? Well, why not? Every leading man in every movie musical has a batch of girls. Ah, but what I want is not exactly girls.
No, I decide I want only Mordy. Ponzo is just a wicked temptation, Linda Darnell when what I want is Katharine Hepburn. And in no way can I jeopardize my precarious social standing with the hairless. Dickie and James and Mordy are the elite, not Ponzo. Will their Grand Hairlessnesses shun my emerging animal self when they see it? As I do so often these days, I flagellate myself almost to the point of enfeeblement.
I’ve been thinking about my missing twin. Mordy has opened this particular well of loneliness. I write David a letter. I figure he must be going through all this too. Lucas comes and sits on my bed one night. “Why are you crying?” “I’m not crying.” “You are so crying. Tell me why.” “If I tell you, will you tell me why you’re so strange?” “I’m not strange. Strange how?” “You don’t talk to me anymore.” “You’re strange too. You don’t smile anymore.” “Then why are we both strange at the same time?” “You first,” he says. Where to start? “I want my brother,” I hear myself say. A long pause. “I am your brother. You mean David?” I nod. I hope I haven’t hurt his feelings. Another long pause. I guess I have. “I can’t help you there,” he says. Yes, I’ve hurt his feelings. My only friend in this household. I learned only later that he’d been so sour because he’d found out where David was. Rivka had “confided” in him.
I ask Rivka for David’s address. “He’s away this month.” “He must be somewhere I can write him.” “He’s traveling. He’s on the road.” I guess I sound like a fool, letting her get away with this, not once but a number of times. I’m such a nosy person in all other respects, why do I let myself be hoodwinked about my own twin brother? I can only say in my defense that from their moods and tones and the glances Rivka exchanges with Philip every time David’s name comes up, I know instinctively something awful’s going on that no one’s going to talk about. It’s been this way for a long time now and still no one ever talks about it. I try to shake my head back and forth to make some sense of this.
Finally Mordy calls me. He’s never called our house before. Rivka is impressed. “The landlord’s son is calling my son.” “The landlord is my cousin,” I say. “You hardly know each other,” she says. “It’s another branch of the family.” Mordy’s voice is matter-of-fact. “Wanna go for a walk?” My heart begins pounding. He wants to do it again!
We walk and walk. We walk to the exact same spot under the exact same dark night’s summer sky. Silently. He doesn’t speak and I don’t know what to say. We sit down in the weeds. He lies back. I watch him unbutton his fly and pull himself out and start to masturbate. It’s a thrilling sight. I watch him, hoping he’ll look into my eyes and give me permission to adore him. But his eyes are closed, tighter as he increases his speed, pausing every so often to spit on his hand. Again the act looks like an awful lot of effort. “You don’t seem to be enjoying it much,” I hear myself say, wondering what on earth prompts me to intrude with such a harsh observation. How can I help him? Well, I can help by sticking my face in his crotch and putting him in my mouth.
The minute my lips touch him he grunts and jiggles himself over a few inches to continue his work alone. His face is covered with sweat.
“Let me see you! Let me see you!” he orders.
My master has spoken! I yank my own out—of course it’s as hard as a rock—and get to work on it. I come way before he does. It’s not very exciting or much of a release. Suddenly Mordy’s hand grabs hold of my depleted penis, grabs as much of my semen off me as he can, and uses it as lubricant on himself. How resourceful. Where did he learn that?
“Hold me! Hold me!” he cries out.
I hold him. He’s sweating bullets and pumping himself so energetically that I ache in sympathy. I keep waiting for his orgasm. So does he, I guess. Time and again it seems to be almost arriving, any second now. When I kiss his cheek for encouragement, he heaves out the words “Don’t do that!” as he carries on with his manual labor. Is there something wrong with him, or with his penis, or with his plumbing? Or with his liking me? Could it all be my fault?
Finally—finally—it’s over. He cries out in a gasp that’s certainly more relief than grand finale. Some modestly gurgling liquid caps his penis’s head, like water from the spout of a fountain with exceptionally low pressure. He’s angry with himself. His fists pound the ground. “What’s wrong?” I dare to ask. He turns his fists on me. My chest hurts but I let him carry on. Then I grab his fists, prying open the fingers to make them into hands I can hold. He falls back again, heaving huge sobs. “I don’t know what’s wrong!” “Let me look,” I say, trying to inspect him. “NO!” And he jumps up, and again we walk back home in silence. I want to put my arm around his shoulders as if we’re buddies in one of those war movies we all now constantly watch.
* * *
Mordy and I are sunning ourselves in the protected courtyard behind the building where I live. It’s sort of weird every time I realize his father owns where I live and weirder because his son, on whose penis I’ve been concentrating so much, will one day own it too. Will his father evict my family if he finds out what I’ve done? How do I know that I’ve done anything wrong? I just know. It’s in the air of life.
His father’s buildings form a rectangle all around us. In the winter, tenants can look out their windows and see everything; but it’s summer and the Carolina willows are full, and protecting us as we lie on a blanket in shorts and jerseys, ostensibly to do our summer reading for school. We’ve now made that long trek out to those lonely weedy fields six or seven or eight times for a repeat of what I’ve already described. By now I feel paternal toward him. He’s talking less and less. He must be struggling with it more than I am.
Ever since I saw Ponzo, I study myself carefully down there on a daily basis. It’s now impossible to overlook the evidence that if things keep up at their current pace I’m on my way to becoming a hairy freak just short of a baboon. What to do? My body’s doing something I don’t want it to do!
Late last night, with moonlight flooding our bedroom, I made myself look at Lucas as he undressed, thinking I was asleep. My heart almost stopped. His body is so handsome. He stood in front of the mirror inside the door and studied himself, posing shyly like a body builder, flexing his arms and puffing out his chest.
I don’t think I’m going to look like he looks.
I’m staring at Mordy’s legs and noting yet again that they’re smooth and unshadowed. No darkening ode. We did it yesterday. Usually it takes him a few days to cheer himself back up again. He needs longer than I do for the hunger to renew itself. I masturbated thinking about him this morning, on the toilet. I masturbate a lot now. It isn’t nearly as interesting alone, but it’s better than nothing, and I don’t feel as unsatisfied as Mordy makes me feel when we’re finished. Each time we part I’m convinced he doesn’t want to see me ever again, that what’s happened is my fault and he’s holding it against me.
“Your legs are getting hairy,” he says. We’re pretending to read. At least I’m pretending. Maybe he’s doing it for real.
“No, they’re not. They’ve always been this way.”
“You’re going through puberty.”
“What’s puberty?”
I know fucking well what puberty is. I’ve scared myself shitless any number of times covertly reading volumes in Uncle Hyman’s bookstores, just happening to be in their neighborhood, pretending to be a customer, “just looking, thank you.” Psychopathia Sexualis, Sex in Marriage, The Sexual Manual for Today’s Married Couples, Learning to Live with Sex—they are all terrifying. They are books written by nasty doctors to scare people to death. Puberty leads to girls. Girls lead to babies. The cause and effect of body hair is marriage!
I fucking well know what puberty is and I fucking well know that I’m “a homosexual,” a.k.a. “an invert,” i.e., “sick.” Dr. Krafft-Ebing in his book, which has the lengthiest descriptions, incarcerates people like me in sanatoriums and prisons. But that apparently doesn’t stop people like me. People like me ejaculate just from descriptions of ejaculations. On the day I discovered the name for the sprouting of my body hair and it’s called puberty, and that when you reach it you have orgasms, which are uncontrollable emissions of white fluid, I ejaculated just standing in an alcove in some ratty bookstore reading the goddamn book, and it ran all down my leg. The printed word is certainly powerful.
“Puberty is when you get hair everywhere,” Mordy says, sighing. I’m getting wet inside my Fruit of the Looms.
Mordecai Masturbov begins to cry. And this time we aren’t even having sex.
“I don’t have any.”
“What?” I ask.
He hoarsely whispers a word: “Hair.”
He’s crying and his eyes are cast down. I want to comfort him, but I can’t put my arms around him out here in the middle of his courtyard, even with the willows.
I hear myself say, “I don’t have any either.”
What a strange young man I’m growing up to be.
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I’ve felt it in the dark. Don’t lie. My father told me to expect it, and that was a year ago. We went to France so he could take me to a famous doctor. In Switzerland. Oh, please don’t lie.”
“I’m not lying. Wait right here and I’ll prove it to you.”
I rush upstairs. I grab Rivka’s sewing scissors. I step out of my shorts and brutally hack off my pubic growth, snipping and chopping and trimming the black explosion, surveying the results in that full-length closet mirror. Stubble, black and ugly, is still too evident. Shaving cream! Philip’s razor! Some fast alcohol and Johnson’s baby powder to disguise my clumsy nicks! The final statement is cleaner. I’m a virgin again. I carefully preserve the black puffs of hairy evidence in a Kleenex, tucking it into the back corner of my bottom bureau drawer. I put my shorts back on. I go downstairs to show Mordy we’re both alike.
He isn’t there.
The next day our gang is playing in what will be a huge basement of already poured concrete when Mordy joins us. He comes over to me and says, quietly, lest he be overheard by Arnold Botts, he who is everywhere, “I have a confession to make. I really don’t like doing what we do. I wanted to try it. I believe in trying everything at least once, but now I’ve tried it enough. And I know you like it more than I
do. Thanks for trying to make me feel better by saying you don’t have any pubic hair. That was very nice of you. I always want you and me to be friends. I’ll see to it that we are if you will too. Will you?”
“Yes.” My heart is broken on the spot. My crotch hurts where I cut myself shaving.
“Guess what?”
“What?” I can hardly utter the word.
“When I went home, I got a magnifying glass and I looked and it’s coming! I found my first hair!” And he hoists me up on his back and gleefully runs around this new excavation of his father’s. Arnold, for once, looks startled: something’s going on that he doesn’t know about. Mordy and I have a secret.
So Mordy doesn’t want to do it anymore. Because he doesn’t like it. I want to do it forever and ever. So what am I going to do?
* * *
I enter the world of service. Rivka finally lets me volunteer for the bloodmobile. “We’re at war and everyone must do his bit.” Since everyone now wants to do his bit, our bloodmobile trailer’s always a madhouse, and it’s fun. My fellow workers include wisecracking nurses like Eve Arden and Joan Blondell. Each Saturday we try to beat last Saturday’s record. That a youngster like me should be a helper impresses every donor. I give them cups of orange juice and I collect the used syringes for boiling and I alphabetize the completed paperwork into an accordion file. Little Mister Helpful. What with two or three bodies always being drained, and the snappy ladies, and the driver (somebody’s husband who’s retired or with the day off) doubling as “our big strong man” carting the iced containers that hold the blood, plus little Daniel exuding so much sanctimonious enthusiasm that you want to slug him, it’s a busy little space. No one says boo about my age.
This is before the days of strict sanitary precautions. Donors bring dogs and donors get sick and there are bloodstains from occasional spurts. The trailer’s scrubbed down each night, but we’re always far too busy for anyone to be a constant cleaner-upper.