Mike was appalled – it was so different from what he had imagined, from the way he wanted things to be.
‘Look,’ he said nervously, ‘I’m not sure this is—’
‘Kid, kid, no worries. This guy knows what he’s doing, trust me.’ Ruggiero was taking Mike’s arm, shepherding him through another doorway beside the smaller bar, into a dingy corridor.
This isn’t right, a voice was saying in Mike’s brain. This isn’t how it’s meant to be.
But Ruggiero and the hustler were leading him on and now he was alone with the blond in a cramped, dimly lit room with tattered blinds and an old stained couch in one corner. The blond had grasped him tightly from behind and was licking his neck. Then suddenly they were on the couch and the blond’s tongue was in his mouth and Mike felt his inhibitions, his guilt, his shame drift away through the shredded blinds into the darkness outside.
He missed his pre-law seminar with a headache that just wouldn’t let up. He had come home from Chicago in the early hours and gone straight to bed, where he lay sleepless and racked by drink-dulled memories. The camp affectations of the hustler, the offhand mocking treatment of their transaction, the sleazy pimp, the sordid setting of his first sexual encounter had left him shivering with revulsion and self-disgust.
He lay in his room with the blinds pulled, his head pounding in the darkness. But as his shaken emotions settled, something unexpected took hold of him, something he tried at first to ignore but that nagged at him: the more he thought about the encounter in the bar, and the more he dwelled on the shame and humiliation, the more he felt himself aroused by it.
Alone in bed he relived the excitement of the contact, the touch of the man’s body, and each memory afforded him mounting gratification. The experience was far from the beauty and spiritual love he had dreamt of, but he felt its attraction with a power that frightened him. He had tasted the addictive charm of casual, irresponsible sensuality.
THREE
1973
Mike knew he should confess to Father Adrian, but he didn’t. In the weeks that followed he returned to Rush Street as often as his time and funds would allow. He got to know the safe bars and learned how to avoid the confidence tricksters and clip joints. After a while he was able to distinguish between the different hustlers and pick ‘his type’, as he laughingly called them. He shunned the drag artists and effeminate queens who lisped and referred to each other as ‘she’, and sought out the smart preppy types who looked and dressed so straight they could be taken for happily married heteros. The more he experienced the exhilaration of the illicit transactions, the more he craved and needed them. He thought about them in class, fantasized about them as he listened to the priest in Sunday Mass and watched the hands of the clock in anticipation of the evening trip into town. After years of self-denial, the thrill of anonymous sex took a powerful hold on him.
Over the course of the semester he realized that the restraints on his behaviour were no longer ethical, but practical. He gradually stopped agonizing about what he was doing and no longer went to confession, but the ride into Chicago took almost two hours and the cost of his evening trips was draining his bank account. There were gay bars closer to home in South Bend – one on South Main Street and another on Lincoln Way – but the fear of exposure was high and Mike hadn’t the courage to visit them. Once or twice he had hung around the toilets at the train station on Washington Avenue and picked up some tough-looking guys who’d made him do things he hadn’t enjoyed but felt too scared to refuse. He’d found the experiences terrifying while they lasted and immensely exciting in retrospect.
The sudden outpouring of Mike’s sexuality, so long repressed and now so intense, brought him new knowledge not only of himself but increasingly of others. Now he could spot the signs in other men, the signals of another gay guy who wanted to be recognized and the mannerisms of those who did not. He was certain, for instance, that Father Adrian was himself gay and that his moral outrage masked his own desires. When their paths crossed on the Notre Dame lawns, they avoided each other’s gaze.
Mike had come to a kind of private concordat between himself and the Church – he had carried on going to Mass and Communion, but told the monsignor he would have to stop serving as a eucharist assistant, saying his final examinations were approaching and he wanted to ensure he got the grades he needed for law school. He also had noticed, with vague concern, that he was drinking more frequently and in greater quantities. He had always enjoyed a drink, but some nights when he was DJ’ing on campus or in town he would down so many bottles he could hardly get back to Fisher Hall. He had a strong constitution and rarely suffered the morning after, but the drinking was becoming a habit and he suspected grimly that it was getting the better of him. By the end of the school year he was drinking beer with whisky chasers every single night and when he worked as a DJ – or when he stayed up late revising for class – he took the readily available amphetamine pills that were many students’ essential accessory.
Alcohol gave him courage and the uppers gave him energy. At the end of May, when he had finished the bulk of his examinations, he got drunk in a downtown bar and fell into conversation with a group of men who invited him back for more drinks at their place. Outside the bar they beat him up, took his wallet and wristwatch and left him lying on the sidewalk with a broken finger and blood streaming from his nose.
In spite of the commotion in his life, Mike’s grades had remained outstanding – so good that he was way ahead of his course and his supervisor recommended he be allowed to graduate ahead of schedule in December.
In the summer vacation of 1973 Mike flew to Florida to stay with Doc and Marge at the house in St Petersburg Beach. They were delighted by his academic success and the first weeks of the summer were among the happiest they had spent together. Marge seemed to have rallied: she had gained some weight back and the southern sunshine had revived her spirits. The house itself was delightful, set on the ocean front with a swimming pool and diving board in the backyard. Doc and Marge had a couple of schnauzers – good German hounds, Doc said – and Mike spent the sun-filled days walking them on the beach or swimming in the pool.
One day while Doc and Marge were out visiting (long afternoons and evenings playing canasta with other retirees) Mike pulled out a box of family movies that been in storage since the move from Rockford and threaded them into the Eumig Super-8 projector he’d found on the shelf in the garage. In the darkened family room he watched ghostly images of a young Doc and a tall, elegant Marge race across the walls, lips silently moving, waving to the camera, picking up the three boys and making them wave too. A series of 4th of July parades from someplace in Iowa gave way to scenes of holidays in Mexico and Cuba, with US flags and incongruous American tourists in downtown Havana, and then recurring annual footage from the summer cottage in Minnesota, where Doc and the boys swam in the same lake and fished the same walleyes from the same jetty, growing a year older every time one spool replaced another.
Mike watched the images for an hour or more and thought how strange that the colours of twenty years ago should come down so well preserved, so sharp and bright. He was packing up to go walk the dogs when he spotted a couple of reels in the very bottom of the box. The sun outside was still hot and the spools were unlabelled and intriguing, so he threaded one of them onto the projector. Heat-melted celluloid sent bubbles up and down the wall and then settled into jumpy images of rolling fields and a grey donkey cart winding down a dusty country lane. The remains of an old stone chapel appeared, just three ruined walls covered in ivy with an oak tree growing within them. Then Uncle Loras came into shot, wearing his cassock and a white straw panama that made him look like Alec Guinness as the vicar in Kind Hearts and Coronets. He was walking through a small graveyard containing a handful of black-painted crosses, then past a dark building, all squares and rectangles in plain grey concrete. It looked like a hot day wherever it was, and Loras was the only moving figure in a deserted landscape. A white may
pole on a patch of bright green grass in front of a tall alabaster angel had long white ribbons trailing from it, awaiting dancing children who had vanished from the earth.
With the sudden shock that old movies produce, the frame jumped and a little girl appeared on the wall.
She looked about two and was wearing a woollen overcoat with a pink beret and little white socks inside red patent shoes. The background was dark – Mike could make out little except vague, grainy shapes – but the girl herself was in bright sunlight and her auburn hair shone brilliantly. Her head was turned away, but an unheard voice called her to look at the camera, and as she swivelled towards him Mike felt his breath catch in his throat: staring from the long shadows of departed time was the sad, lost face of the girl who was now his sister, fixed forever with her lips turned down in an anxious pucker that spoke of impending tears.
Roscrea, thought Mike with a sudden surge of emotion. The day they came to choose us.
The scene on the wall shifted to a patch of dappled grass where the August sunshine of 1955 was filtering through a glade of trees and tiny figures trotted slowly into the frame. Little Mary was there again, but this time without the overcoat, in a pink and white cotton dress with a checked bow in her hair and a yellow fluffy toy snuggled to her face. Now she was holding someone’s hand and the two of them were advancing towards the camera. She was clinging to the hand of a little boy, his face obscured by the camera strap that had fallen over the lens but wearing grey pants and a blue knitted jumper with white shamrocks. He was holding his other hand uncertainly to his chin, and when the obstruction on the lens fell away Mike came face to face with the boy he knew and didn’t know, in a place he knew and didn’t know and had wanted so much and for so long to rediscover.
FOUR
1973
Mike stayed in Florida for his twenty-first birthday and Doc and Marge invited a few neighbours over for drinks around the pool. As the sunshine and tequila relaxed the guests and loosened tongues, Mike played with his baby nephew. He tickled the little fellow and laughed as Nathan wriggled and chortled in his arms. He imagined the love a parent must feel for his child.
As the sun set, Doc rapped a knife on the side of his glass and called for silence. Mike and Mary looked at each other. For years they had bitten their lips when Doc insisted on entertaining dinner parties with his jokes – his gags were racist, misogynist and homophobic, but that was the tenor of the times and they had shrugged and let it go.
‘Well, now, everybody,’ Doc was saying, tapping his glass a couple more times. ‘We’re here today for one reason and one reason only – to toast the success of my fourth son Mike, the only son we got imported.’
His audience rippled uneasily as Doc told the story of Mike’s Irish origins then launched into an anecdote about Irish drinking habits and stage-Irish simpletons before leading inexorably on to his repertoire of contemptuous, patronizing negro stories.
Sitting in the corner of the poolside patio, Mike was seething and embarrassed. If it wasn’t his own birthday, it might have been different, but he felt Doc’s speech reflected on him, and he could see from other people’s expressions that he wasn’t the only one finding the anecdotes discomfiting.
‘Uh, Doc?’ he called, in as polite a voice as he could muster. ‘I’m sorry, I just . . . don’t think this is the time for that kind of thing.’
There was silence. Mary held her breath and Marge peered anxiously at Doc. But Doc just smiled a little coldly and raised his glass.
‘Well, as I said, we’re here to toast my son, Mike. So here’s to you, Mike.’
Everyone raised their glasses and Mike smiled, but as the party was wrapping up and people were saying their goodbyes, Doc sidled up to him and leaned in so his lips were almost touching Mike’s ear.
‘Now I’m only going to say this once, so listen good: this is my house and those people are my guests. So when I want to make a speech, I’ll make a speech, and when I want to tell some jokes, I’ll tell some goddam jokes.’
Alert to the hardness in Doc’s voice, Mike turned and walked away. His heart was hammering with stifled rage.
The following day he stayed in his room feeling raw and irritable. It seemed like he had spent his whole life making allowances for Doc, letting him get away with his offensive remarks and authoritarian views, and now he felt like a coward for doing so.
But there was something more. This was the first time he had been with his family since he had given in to the demands of his sexuality and he had the uncanny feeling that he was made of glass. Images of the dark things he had done and the dark places he had been burned constant and vivid in his mind, so vivid that he felt the others must read them in his face. In the staid, domestic setting of his parents’ house the memories of his sexual encounters took on a debauched quality which unsettled him.
Mike was sullen at dinner. He tried to be gracious and helpful towards Marge but the argument with Doc still hung in the air. Both of them had things they still wanted to say; each felt the other had gotten away with something. Doc was reading out loud from the Miami Herald, holding forth about the price of gasoline and ‘goddam Ay-rabs’ and how Nixon should ‘go teach them a lesson’. Mike had always resented Doc’s right-wing Republican views and now he was feeling vulnerable and combative, convinced everything was aimed at him, seeing hidden reproaches in everything that was said. He’s doing this on purpose – he’s taunting me, Mike fumed, but he kept his mouth shut and stared at his dinner in silence.
‘Oh, Doc, I wanted to ask you: could you give Mary and me a ride to the baby clinic in the morning?’ Marge asked, helping Doc to seconds. ‘It’ll be some time around ten I should think – I’m going to call her after dinner and make sure.’
‘Oh, that darn girl and her baby – you’re always fussing around her,’ Doc grumbled, and was surprised to see Mike jump up and thump the table.
‘Yo u’re the baby, Doc! Christ, look at you. You get fussed over more than anyone and you’re a grown man! So don’t call my sister “that darn girl” and don’t bitch at Mom just for loving her and wanting to take care of her! You need to start treating people with more respect!’
Doc looked stunned – he had not intended to offend anyone; it was just his way of talking – but he too had resentments he wanted to put on the table.
‘Well, I’m not sure you’re qualified to teach me lessons, young man. I don’t see you volunteering to help out your family. In fact, we never see you nowadays. You just go your own way and think about yourself, and now you’re at college you think you’re too good for us, is that it?’
‘Hah!’ Mike retorted. ‘It’s you who never thinks about other people! You’re so caught up in your little universe of prostate conditions and bigotry and crooked presidents, you never stop to think how the rest of us are feeling. You treat Mom like a slave; you order everyone around; you behave like some Nazi dictator; and – and the saddest thing is, you’ve made it quite clear you never wanted me and Mary in the first place.’
Marge let out a sob and Mike immediately regretted his outburst. Even as he spoke, he realized he was saying things that could not be unsaid. Doc was yelling now, something about ungrateful children and a lack of respect, but Mike had already plunged into a much deeper panic, frantically trying to assess the damage he had done and terrifyingly aware of the convoluted impulses that had pushed him into it. Marge was blowing her nose, her body trembling, and Mike hated himself for the trouble he had caused.
‘Wait, Doc.’ Mike placed a hand on Doc’s arm. ‘I’m sorry. I was in the wrong. I’m really sorry. It’s all my fault.’ And he ran out of the house.
In the cab down to the Don Cesar he reflected on the events that had led to the fight. He sensed his row with Doc had something to do with attack as the best form of defence – the feeling that he was in the wrong had made him lash out. But how exactly was he in the wrong?
The houses on Gulf Boulevard were flashing by, lighted windows and cosy front rooms
proclaiming happy families from which he, Michael Hess, would be forever excluded. He was adrift, struggling to fit his new, sexual self into this old, inhibited world. His secret life disadvantaged him here, made him feel at fault, like the child whose greatest fear was disappointing his parents. He felt guilty before Doc and he hated himself for feeling guilty.
The cab arrived at the Pink Palace and Mike got out, unsure why he had come here except that it was an escape from the tensions of the house. The Don was the oldest hotel in St Pete and its pink walls exuded stability and reassurance – everything Mike craved. Belonging was important, he thought as he trod the marble floors of the lobby, belonging to something established and solid. The orphan’s sense of exclusion was redoubled in the gay man and Mike was only just coming to terms with it. Maybe that was why he resented Doc with his Republican views, his petty, bourgeois certainties, his effortless, self-satisfied masculinity – poor, bigoted, ignorant Doc, who stood for everything that Mike was not.
The self-loathing was all too familiar, and suddenly seemed trivial and irritating. He made his way to the bar and ordered a whisky. The room was practically empty, but it opened onto a pool area which was enclosed and dimly lit. Mike took a deep breath in the evening air. I’m OK, he told himself.
There were a few guys hanging around on the poolside loungers dressed in shorts and polo shirts, and Mike, adept at reading the signs, smiled at one of them and asked if he could sit down.
‘Sure can,’ the man answered, grinning. They chatted for a few minutes and Mike let his eyes wander up and down the guy’s body. He was tanned and slightly balding, with chest hair that spilled over the collar of his shirt; his torso was not muscular, but neither was it flabby, and his hands looked well groomed.
‘So . . . do you have any plans for the evening?’ Mike asked.
The man cocked his head.
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 19