Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  Jump-cut to 1990, two days after Thanksgiving. Still black-and-blue from Stevie dying, hardly back a week from Normandy, I drove up the coast past Zuma, then headed inland up the old Mulholland Highway. The Radical Faeries were having their annual gathering in the coastal mountains, once the sacred ground of the Chumash. So far this patch of hills has escaped the predations of the land eaters, nothing but chaparral on either side of the twisting road. I hooked a right into Camp Shalom, a Jewish summer camp that had gritted its liberal teeth and agreed to let the Faeries rent the place for a week.

  I parked at the edge of a dry stream bed and walked through a grove of sycamore, out to a beaten field where the group was having its circle. I found the man who'd invited me—now my lover—and sat by him, catching the tail end of a legend being told by a figure in the circle's center. When he'd finished, another man came up to take his place, and a talisman necklace was passed to the new speaker. "From the heart," admonished several voices on the perimeter.

  The ritual proceeded deep into the afternoon, drawing the tribe together. Some men were naked, some half-clothed in leather and feathers. Tattoos and piercings decorated several bodies, and here and there a catheter coiled in a patch of gauze on a chest, for the plague has ravaged the tribe. A curious mix of grief and exultation, the atmosphere not sexual, just free. All seven ages of man had come, it seemed, from callow boys in cutoffs to a white-bearded sage in a caftan. Whitman would have been right at home: "A man, yet by these tears a little boy again."

  When the sun had sunk behind the trees, Winston and I went straggling away through the sycamores to find some food.

  In a clearing still pooled with sun stood a small white ranch house with a porch, the camp's administration building. He pointed toward it and said, "That's where they used to shoot Lassie."

  I stood transfixed in a hollow of time, recalling in a cascading rush all I have set down here of High Street and how we played. I'm a child of Hollywood, no doubt about it, full of B-plots and Bette Davis lines, but this was something more. Because it wasn't just the old footage rolling—Mom calling Jeff to supper from the porch—but the world out there beyond the sycamores, rife with open spaces and runaway palominos. Who ever thought about where they filmed it?

  I looked around at the dusty trees, the brush-covered hill and the rocky pass beyond leading out of the canyon along the dry stream bed. And I thought,This is why I came here. Meaning the whole move to California, this rough terrain I couldn't get out of my head since the first day I saw it in '64. Not ever quite understanding that I'd seen it before, how many seasons on CBS, running headlong with Toby a breath behind me.

  I was nine and a half when everything changed. I left behind the boys' stories, because they didn't make sense anymore, and felt no regret except for the loss of the wild country they happened in. The backyards ceased to be badlands, a rattler under every rock, and the woods no longer promised to spirit me away. The town became just a town again, with no escape except to grow up and flee it. And the bleached frontier where boys ran free, circled overhead by wheeling hawks, was shut away in a toy box. Till the Faeries brought me full circle.

  The sea-change came in the shape of a ruffian called Kite. I no longer know what the nickname stood for. He lived on one of those rutted dirt lanes with chickens, his father a red-faced drunk who worked at Tyer Rubber. I knew Kite from the corner of my eye, but only to keep my distance. At nine he was already famous for picking fights and for a mouth like a sewer. All I really remember of what he looked like was the pugnacious jut of his chin. He always seemed to be snarling and showing his crooked teeth. Millworkers' kids didn't get braces.

  It was rumored among us softer types that Kite and his brothers were whipped by their dad with a razor strop whenever he was drunk, which was all the time. If it hurt, you'd never have known by looking at Kite, the most dry-eyed kid in the neighborhood. But what really shocked us was to hear how Kite rode his bike to Pomp's Pond every day in the summer—to swim. This was defiance bordering on madness, for Pomp's was the local Polio Pit. A single wrong swallow in those days, and you'd end up in an iron lung, or so our spooked parents believed. No swimming except in the ocean.

  I knew how Kite saw me—half awe and half contempt, on account of those endless A's. It was strange and a little dangerous to be talking to him at all, but I couldn't find anyone else that day. The yards were silent, as if a piper had lured the children away. I was standing perplexed in somebody's driveway, feeling deserted, when Kite was suddenly there on his bike, wheeling around me in slow circles. Did I know where everyone was? he asked, taunting me with the secret. I gave him back an imperious shrug, as if I couldn't have cared less.

  "They're in the Thompson barn," he said, veering off in a lazy figure eight and doubling back. "Ruthie showed us between her legs." My face went hot with shame. "There's nothing there."

  I'd never thought about what was there. I stood frozen, straining for nonchalance, even as the circles of his ride seemed to bind me like a spider web. "You wanna go over and see?" he asked.

  "No," I retorted, a little too loud, and turned away. But not before I caught the last twist of a smile on his face, patient and almost bored, so certain was he of his prey. And—what was most disturbing—as if he knew me better than I knew myself.

  How long before it came to a head? Days or weeks, I can't be sure, but I thought about Kite incessantly. Not about Ruthie, or even the naughty spectacle of the neighborhood kids turning the

  Thompson barn into a strip joint. It was all Kite, his unstated dare riddling my mind. So when I trotted through the yards one winter afternoon and came around the side of Naylor's toolshed, what followed was as inevitable as falling out of a tree from climbing too high, drunk on cherries.

  Kite was taking a leak in the bushes. His eyes locked on mine, that superior patient smile again, and I was lost. The stream dribbled to drops, and he shook it, but didn't put it back in his pants. Ducked instead through the broken window of the toolshed. I followed, shedding my A's like a chrysalis. He yanked my pants down, and we rubbed our two hard weenies together. Neither of us any bigger than the first joint of my little finger, hairless and nothing to shoot. But I was hooked on pleasure from that day on.

  And hooked on Kite, more than anything because he was a bad boy. That was the turn-on—the twist of his dirty mouth, the punk veneer, the boot-camp father, like an urchin in Oliver Twist. Next to Kite I was so Protestant upright, insufferably well-mannered and self-effaced. And bodiless for the three years since my brother was born, because the body was too upsetting to think about, let alone play with. Till Kite I was on a neat monastic track, junior division, rising above the flesh. A Puritan choirboy and a prig, already sucking pennies. I honestly can't recall a single thought about sex before Kite. But now that I'd had a taste of sweet damnation, it was hard to think of anything else.

  The guilt may have been there right along, but I was too hungry to notice at first. I don't know how many times it happened between us, maybe only a dozen, but it felt like the main subject of fifth grade, way ahead of long division. Never a planned thing: Kite and I would see each other on the street and go off behind a barn, or up in the attic of our garage. We'd have pissing contests—once in a can of white paint, a kinky thrill afterwards to watch my father brush it onto a fence.

  By June we were sleeping outside in a tent, putting it together like a couple of scouts, though the merit badge we were going for wasn't for camping. Finally we could get naked and really go to town, sticking those little gumdrop members between each other's legs for some simulated fucking, taking turns on top. As for Miss Noyes's class that year, I breezed right through, but distracted and on automatic—like Lady Chatterley pouring tea, squeezing her knees at the memory of the gamekeeper humping her from behind.

  D.H. Lawrence is right on target, because he would've seen—Forster, too—that this first fire in my loins was all about class. Paul is perfect was slumming. Odd, because I never thought of my family a
s being any class at all, certainly not moneyed. In Andover the rich lived elsewhere—up on the hill by Phillips Academy, in country settings out of Currier & Ives, on streets like Crabapple Lane. My turmoil over all that still waited a few bends further ahead, an ambush that would cut my balls off.

  Yet there was something more subtle at work in my family than money; call it an instinct for gentility that was equal parts Episcopal and English. Something to do with upstairs/downstairs too, the butler's self-esteem more highly evolved than a landed duke's, except in our case it was the chauffeur. Not that Nana Lamb and Bob had airs, exactly, but they lived with a certain well-born grace of manners in that bungalow just inside the west gate of the wooded estate.

  Most Friday nights, I'd stay over with them, and be served my egg in a Spode eggcup, the salt in a dish with a tiny silver spoon, good ironed linen napkins. For my mother's people the move from Lawrence to Andover was a move up, and quickly led to a transfer of allegiance from Methodist to Episcopal—a difference of intangibles. More high-toned, somehow. They were definitely out to better themselves, staunch Republicans, with always a special loathing for Roosevelt. Poor Republican seemed like an oxymoron to me, once I'd got the parties straight, but my parents clearly believed they'd cast their lot with a better class.

  I don't know what filtered down to me, beyond the oft-repeated notion that education led only one way—up—and thus I had an ace in the hole. I certainly understood I was meant to end up somewhere else than High Street. An uncle used to ask me, "Are you going to be a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist?" No other choice, it seemed.

  Maybe Kite was a way of getting out from under the weight of gentility. I've always had a thing for men from unpaved places, not too polished, definitely not English. Lust and the English make no sense to me, Constance Chatterley's lover notwithstanding. In that Lawrentian phoenix-fire of me and Kite, the boundaries of my good boy's life were all erased. I had no notion it couldn't last, even though it made me more secretive than ever. No guilt or shame as yet, but a sense of having a life to hide, which only made it more exciting.

  I don't believe I'd ever heard of "queers" or "homos"—the scorch of that disdain waited over the border of adolescence. Thus the illicit play with Kite was no more wrong or out of place than any other kind of sex, the whole subject of which was ungenteel. And I never thought I loved him, exactly, or ever wanted to kiss him. It was all penis to penis. But that is not to belittle it, or dismiss it as boys being boys, something to be grown out of. That's how straight men shrug off the brief encounters of their youth, the excess of hormones forcing them to make do with each other until they can nail a woman. For all I know, it's how Kate himself put the whole thing out of his head, assuming he ended up straight.

  I took it all in deadly earnest, and even began to see beyond Kite, dimly perceiving the future as a meeting-ground for boys like us. Nine is not too young to feel the tribal call. Stevie used to say he'd go to confession at nine or ten, good Irish Catholic stock, and mumble that he'd been impure "in thought, word, and deed." By which prissy circumlocution he meant he was dragging half the neighborhood boys and various cousins besides into the brambles of West Hartford. But even as the punishment purred through the grille—fifty Hail Marys, a thousand—Stevie could smell the garlic stink of hypocrisy. Because what the priest was slapping his hand for was going to be Stevie's life, no matter how much it was called a sin. And with a radar honed by all those violations in the brambles, he also knew the priest was hungry for him.

  Nine and a half is old enough. For me at least, it was a victory of innocence over a world of oppression I didn't even know was out there. Not that such a pitch of wildness didn't have its costs. After Kite in the toolshed, things were never the same with Toby—never the same unbounded best-friend status. Because if a boy was going to be my fuck buddy, then where did that leave die boy who was just my friend? Without any role models out there, in the utter silence that surrounded being queer, how would I ever figure out that there was a way to put Kite and Toby together? That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse. The process by which we become our own jailers, swallowing the key.

  The project of our enemies is to keep us from falling in love. It has always been thus, the history writ by straight boys who render us invisible, as if we were never there. Left and right, fascists and communists, they loathe us in equal measure. Then t he Holy Fathers of every religion, their sick equation of pleasure and sin. If you isolate us long enough and keep us ignorant of each other, the solitary confinement will extinguish any hope we have of finding our other half. But for once, it turns out, history was on our side. We know now that World War II mobilized so many men and women, the queer ones finally met one another—below deck, in barracks, in off-base bars.[2] And when you are no longer the only one, the tide of history turns.

  So in 1954, while I was rutting with Kite in the barns of High Street, the first groping organizations of us "invisibles" began to take shape: Harry Hay and the Mattachine Society in California being the most intrepid. The ravings of Joe McCarthy were finally coming to naught, but only after leaving a twister's path of wreckage, where "homosexual" and "Red" were virtual synonyms. I remember watching the Army-McCarthy trials in the TV room on High Street, understanding nothing but the gravity. In any case, to a budding queer the neutralizing of McCarthy was a small triumph, given that Hoover's FBI and Spellman's castrating dogma were alive and well, dancing the pro-America goose-step. It would be twenty years before the inevitability of history caught up with Little Paul. Till then, all I would have to go on was my dick.

  As for the call of wildness, I have one gaudy memory of the world catching up with me and Kite, the equal of any wind and rain that ever beat down on Lawrence's lovers. In September of '55 we were swamped by a pair of hurricanes, back to back—Carol and Edna, I think they were called. I remember the literal eye of the first, crouched behind the green sofa with Bobby, the sudden eerie silence. Half the trees on High Street were downed, roofs blown off and torrents of water flooding the cellars. We had no lights for a week after, and a block of ice in the gray tin sink was all our refrigeration.

  The kids loved it—no school for a week—and our hearts quickened with excitement, or mine did, anyway, when the doom warnings began to sound that a second storm was coming. As the wind picked up and the sky moiled with pewter and yellow clouds, I slipped out of the house and made my way across the wrack-strewn yards, loving the feel of apocalypse. Circling around as the rain began to pelt, I was coming through Joyce's back field when I saw Kite. He was standing in the doorway of Joyce's tree house, a place so jerry-built and fall of holes, it had somehow ridden out the first storm, bending like a reed.

  I called Kite's name and ran to shinny up the apple tree, ravenous. We stripped naked and wrestled on the plank floor, rain coming in on us, roof tarpaper flapping above us like a sail. I think that was the day we discovered sixty-nine, though here I am probably editing memory shamelessly. Surely we'd contorted ourselves to double-suck before, in the pup tents of summer or somebody's barn. Yet here in the tree, in our animal coupling, it was the two of us who seemed to generate the rising wind and rain. Or maybe everything up to meeting Kite had been the opposite of a storm—all eye—and now that its force had been unleashed, it would shake our tidy neighborhood to bits.

  Eventually we stopped—still too young to come, even in the whirlwind. Racing home through puddles, I managed to slip I nick into the house unmissed. I got away with certain things in those days because I'd built up such a fund of acting sensibly, mature beyond my years. My parents wouldn't have dreamed I could walk out into a hurricane, or have one in my head. I stowed my soaking clothes in a ball in the closet and got into my Hop-along Cassidy pajamas. I wanted that storm to go on forever, wreaking havoc and keeping the timid indoors.

  I thought one could live on wildness. More and more I couldn't wait to grow up and be rid of ch
ildhood, and not so I could start filling cavities. But how could I have overlooked that Kite and I were headed for a showdown with the world? We took no special precautions not to be caught. And if Kite could so casually spread the story of Ruthie's show in the Thompson barn, then what did he say about me? We were hardly playmates otherwise, and he hated school. We'd pass each other in the hallways, barely nodding. There was nowhere else to go. How long can you count on hurricanes?

  Bob Lamb died that fall, just before Christmas, leaving Nana widowed a second time—something I share with her now. At the time I noticed how much she didn't cry, which the family probably chalked up to Yankee backbone and a Brit upper lip. Thirty-five years later, I understand that a second grief is marked by deafening silence rather than keening, the ashy taste of anticlimax.

  Which finally throws some light on the other mute grief I witnessed that winter. Toby's mother, killed in a freak accident in Boston traffic, a heart attack that slammed her foot on the gas pedal and sent her careening into a truck. My mother cried out in horror as my father read the details from the Eagle-Tribune. I went right down to Toby's house—maybe my parents sent me—to say I was sorry. I remember he opened the door but didn't come out, the screen door latched between us. I blurted out some dumb condolence, and Toby shrugged. At the time I felt his numbness as rejection, repaying me in kind for withdrawing the best-friend bond we'd had. Too late to apologize for that, and within a few weeks he and his brothers had gone away to live with distant family, no goodbye for me. Somehow I'd failed him, trading him off for my secret life with Kite.