Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story

by Paul Monette

  For my part, I had enough of being solo before I was twenty-five to last me my next three lifetimes. If it's true that you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, then I suppose a certain self-regard must've kept me above water during my decade of drowning alone. But I think that in my case it was the other way—that I learned to love myself because someone else finally loved me. Seeing myself whole in another man's eyes, deeper than any mirror, and neither of us looking away because there's so much lost time to make up for.

  If it's romantic mush, so be it. I kept my heart alive in the desert years by turning it into a valentine, holding on to the hope of every romantic cliché like wedding cake under a pillow. If you have to wait as long as I did, you either become an awful sentimentalist or die of disillusion. Somewhere deep inside the closet of lies, I clung to a misty-eyed Hollywood ending: Bette Davis waiting to meet Paul Henreid in Now Voyager. Wearing my picture hat with the veil, holding out for the man who would light his cigarette with mine. Happily I would connect one day, with three men who'd waited as long as I, none of them quite believing it would ever come to pass. There was no way we could have known we'd have to do it in combat gear—loving in the middle of all the dying. But not alone anymore, and none of us having to go to our graves thinking we'd missed the brass ring. Love and fuck in the same breath, even if it's your last.

  So when I go back to being twenty-one, to that lost boy who's just buried his college hero, I beat him up in my head for not chucking it all to search for love. For making the worst kind of second choice by going after being a writer instead. Somehow I have to accept it that I couldn't do both, and forgive Little Paul for perfecting his art rather than his life. Going with the intellect instead of with the body. Hell-bent on cutting a romantic figure, I acted out this pop/tragic idea of the Lonely Poet in love with feeling—and not a glimmer of understanding that the pose was mostly a cover for being so conspicuously single.

  I rented a cottage out by the beach, about twenty minutes from downtown New Haven, thinking I would teach my three classes a week at Yale and otherwise live in rapt seclusion. I don't know which leaked more, the tarpaper cabin by the Sound or my battered red Triumph. My father, who laid out a grand for the car—my graduation present—had pleaded with me to go with something more practical, by which he meant American. Being a fuel dealer himself, he was even more leery of the squat gas heater in the cottage. I was going to freeze my ass, he told me ruefully when the family came down to inspect my boho digs. My mother, aghast that I was living in a shack—how was this possible, and I with a Yale degree—hauled in a truckload of canned goods, as if I was about to be snowbound.

  Who needed heat? All I required was rural quiet and my portable Olympia, for I was ready to work in earnest to finish the great American novel, Wallace Stegner be damned. It took me about two weeks to retype the pages I'd written since Nice. Then, just as the long October drizzle began to glower over Connecticut, I realized I didn't have anything to say. My two characters stubbornly wouldn't fall in love, and without that I had no story. It came to me with sinking dread that I'd made a terrible mistake holing up in a village that closed at dusk.

  But I wouldn't admit it, telling myself the lonely silence was necessary if I really meant to be a writer. Knowing in my gut that if I didn't make it work as an artist, I was in real trouble, for I didn't like teaching at all. My freshmen in English 15 were mostly overgrown high-school jocks who thought literature was sissy stuff. We lurched from Heart of Darkness to Crime and Punishment to Lear, I identifying like mad with every tortured hero as I strained to make them see how profound it all was. To them it was just depressing and weird, and what did they have to know for the final? Only four years older than they and painfully out of my depth, I felt skewered by their boredom as they rolled their eyes at one another, all of us counting the minutes till the bell rang.

  Then I'd drive back to my freezing cottage, never quite sure if the Triumph would make it, a quart of oil a day and great seeping stains wherever I parked. Because I couldn't face the blank page of my novel, stalled on a kiss like its author, I'd stop for a beer in various neighborhood taverns. Straight and sullen places where strangers were not welcome, the local drunks cold-shouldering me while I sat hopelessly waiting. For what? I suppose for someone to pick me up and take me away, though I'd chosen the opposite sort of place. Was I practicing for the night when I'd finally step into a gay bar, or trying to reassure myself that I could still pass for straight? I'm afraid I didn't belong anywhere, and the worst of it was, I accepted it, a fate I had no power to reverse.

  I'd still never talked to an openly gay person about what it all meant beyond sex. I still thought of "them" as a dispersed race of exiles, all as scared of their shadows as I was. None of them ever connecting up except for a glancing encounter, hardly worth the attendant guilt or the endless troughs of nothing in between. I couldn't even conceptualize queers being friends, because queer only meant impossible sex. It would be another year before I went alone to an afternoon screening of Boys in the Band—one of six people in the theater, the others as furtive as I—before I had my first sight of homosexuals together. Which sent me reeling out in despair, frightened of all that bitter wit and self-flagellation. Today I understand that it told a savage truth about survival, but for me at twenty-two it confirmed my outsider status more corrosively than all the edicts of all the churches. Exiled by my own homophobia, I preferred a life of isolation to being one of "them."

  But I also knew, instinctively, that I couldn't change. Unschooled in psychology—stubbornly bearing my pain without illumination because to speak it would have been so much worse—I didn't know any of the theories. Thus in my own crippled way I had no choice but to keep on looking in the wrong places for the thing I'd never even seen: two men in love and laughing. For that was the image in my head, though I'd never read it in any book or seen it in any movie. I'd fashioned it out of bits of dreams and the hurt that went with pining after straight men. Everything told me it couldn't exist, especially the media code of invisibility, where queers were spoken of only in the context of molesting Boy Scouts. Yet the vision of the laughing men dogged me and wouldn't be shaken, more insistent with every lonely month, every encounter that didn't quite happen. The searching became as compulsive as any insatiable need, till I sometimes thought I'd lost my mind—but I also think it kept me alive.

  One day at sunset, I was walking on the fetid shore below the cottage, skipping stones. December, I guess, since there was an old couple stringing lights on their front porch facing the Sound. I looked up to see a man in a parka walking his dog in my direction. And as he came abreast of me, he cruised me—the sort of naked look, two parts dare to one part irony, that heretofore had forced my own eyes to the ground. But I gave him as good as he'd given, or thought I did, and looked away only to make sure no one was watching. Just the old folks doddering with the lights. When I looked back, the guy was half-running away, dragged by his panting retriever up the shingle to his car.

  I was too shy to call out—standing frozen in my fireman's boots, thumbs hooked in my belt, trying to affect a swagger that would bring him back. As he bundled the dog in the car, he turned and gave me a smiling nod, then slung himself in and took off. By which time I'd dropped my cool and was running, stumbling up to the road and waving at his disappearing taillights, shouting "Wait!" But he was gone, the seniors on the porch staring at me, appalled by such a ruckus.

  I came back every day at the same time for I don't know how long. Weeks anyway, till the January blast was so cold off the water, I had to huddle behind a rock. He never returned, and I'm not sure I could've said even then what he looked like. All that mattered was his carnal stare and my readiness to pick up on it. My useless waiting in the freezing cold will stand in nicely for a hundred other blind alleys I spent those next years lurking in. I frankly haven't the stomach to recall the rest; they're all the same anyway. Waiting numbly for a train in a place where there are no tracks.


  Then back to that icehouse of a cabin, to heat up a tin for dinner. After which I'd deal out my cache of dirty pictures on the bedspread and give it a wank. Those washed-out shots of barely naked men, never in pairs and their dicks never hard, were state-of-the-art for New Haven. Acquired—with what an agony of stammering shame—from a rat-turd news and candy store out Whalley Avenue, whose Zorba-the-geek proprietor relished every second of my discomfort. I'd grab up Time and Newsweek, then ask him casually, oh-by-the-way: "Could I see what you've got behind the counter?" And he'd reach down and bring up the stack of manporn, such as it was, nudes without sex. I'd quick-flip through the pile, terrified someone from Yale would walk in. Never buying more than one stroke mag at a time so I wouldn't look too hungry.

  Why didn't I go to New York and find me a proper porn shop where the real dirt was, pictures that would've bugged my eyes out? The question has no meaning. Might as well ask why I didn't go out and find myself a laughing man. Shame had so overtaken me that I searched out the least arousing images, not even capable of getting my dirt dirty. Whatever the self-punishing mechanism was, it insured defeat at every turn. When I looked in the mirror, I couldn't quite meet my own eyes, hating my looks the way I did. I spent hours wishing away my big French nose, as if all I wanted was to be even more invisible and anonymous.

  My fantasies, even, were stunted. At the pitch of my nightly jerkoff, eyes locked on the centerfold muscleboy, I still hadn't any idea what I wanted to do with him. If I started thinking about exploring his body with my tongue, eating the sweat off, I'd block it fast. Judging myself with every stroke—not nice, not right, not healthy—as if each carnal image were being submitted to my personal Legion of Decency, more rabid than the Catholic. And if I started to play with a perv thought—order the kid around, maybe, and get his butt red—the censor in my head would order a total blackout. I'd leave the stash under the bed for a night or two, fearful that sex was getting out of hand. Sometimes, in a spasm of postcoital self-disgust, I'd throw out the whole pile, only to slink into Zorba's shop a few days later and start all over.

  What must a self-respecting queer in 1992 make of such a hobbled life? I sound so thwarted and broken, it's a wonder I showed up at all to teach those freshmen, When we got to Kafka's Metamorphosis and they couldn't make head or tail of it, I remember thinking that all they had to do was look at me. I was as much of a cockroach as Gregor Samsa, only no one could see it. But that is part of the narcissism of self-hatred, the curious twisted pride that no one's managed to figure you out. Then the contempt for them, who can't see through your charm and your easy patter.

  I expect the people whose paths I crossed on campus found me as witty and self-assured as ever, a courtier on automatic pilot. By midwinter I'd begun to avoid going home to the beach house, any excuse to keep me in town—roads too icy, too late to drive back. Several nights a week I'd crash at Elihu, insinuating myself among the new crop of seniors, playing the anarchist poet. I was neither a student nor really a teacher, only a hanger-on, so I had to sing for my supper. Most of the late-night bull sessions were stridently antiwar and anti-LBJ. Though I was still a political virgin, I made up in rhetoric for what I lacked in belief. Railing against the war became a kind of camouflage, a mask of noise that covered the speechless impotence of my stalled life.

  Otherwise the 60's counter-culture had barely arrived at Yale, and only then with a few stragglers. In 1968 it still wore its J. Press tweeds, drooling around the silver spoon in its mouth; no long hair and no love beads. If you wanted to play The Doors, you'd better put on earphones. I fought the claustrophobia and the starchiness mostly by smoking dope late at night while the stereo rocked the beach house, but it wasn't the same as finding a comrade, let alone one with a dick. I'd even begun to mouth off about Yale's oppressive whiteness and ridiculous male prerogatives, but mostly as an act of solidarity with the seething ghetto that ringed that ivory tower, and with the mounting cry for coeducation. It never crossed my mind that Yale—or the world—was oppressively straight, or that discrimination had anything to do with my being nowhere.

  I don't recall how I got involved, but I agreed to do some tutoring for one of the campus do-good groups, a program designed to help inner-city kids get into college. All that winter we met in the basement of a church, three black girls and a Cuban boy, the only writing workshop I ever led. They were shy with me and terribly self-critical, but I found their stories and sketches amazingly rich. It may have been an excess of liberal guilt that made me so encouraging, yet these slices of poverty and strangled rage seemed truer to me by a long shot than the phony heterosexual novel lying stillborn in my typewriter.

  Especially this one girl Emrald, whom I bit my white tongue not to tell that she was misspelling her name. Of all of them, she was the one who wanted to be a poet. The others were clear enough about why they were there—to get a recommendation on Yale stationery to slip in their college file. They teased me slyly about my overbred diction and fancy grammar. Not Emrald: she thought I hung the moon, and asked if we could keep meeting into the spring for a private tutorial in poetry.

  Two afternoons a week, sitting cross-legged on the lawn in front of the library. She had more fire and grit than all my English 15 students put together, and her gaudy extravagant poems were a joy to listen to. I wooed her with my enthusiasm, so carried away I swore to Emrald she had a great future ahead of her. In part I was goading myself as much as her, since I'd started writing poems of my own again—still the perfect form for being vague about my closeted despair. And I needed Emrald's hero-worship, played to it shamelessly: a free spirit drunk on words, assuring her that poetry would save her life.

  Till one day she awkwardly announced that she wouldn't be going to UConn next year after all. Not enough of a scholarship, and her mother was sick, three other kids to take care of—so Emrald was going to have to go to work for a while. I understood "for a while" meant forever, and I cringed at how ashamed she seemed, as if she'd let me down. She said she'd keep writing poems, though, "just for myself." And I felt like an ass for so glibly having promised her the moon, all because she'd flattered me. Poetry wasn't going to save Emrald's life at all. She was exactly who Virginia Woolf was talking about in A Room of One's Own: Shakespeare's sister, doomed to anonymity and silence. In Emrald's case, because poetry didn't get you out of the projects.

  Somewhere in there, Martin Luther King got shot, and my own political education deepened into rage. If Emrald was my insight into the fate of the disenfranchised, she also showed me more than I wanted to know about my own place among the oppressor class, I and my fussy spelling. I took the easy way out: never taught writing again, so I wouldn't have to face giving any more false encouragement.

  LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT had already started cropping up on redneck bumpers. When I went home to Andover, I spilled my vitriol about the dead soul of America and threatened to go to Canada if they drafted me into this fucking war. My father and uncles trumpeted at me for being unpatriotic, but my mother wasn't buying the political angle for a minute. Why was I so unhappy, she asked me over and over, infuriating me to apoplexy. What were you doing with Kite? was all I could hear in the question, which shows how that ancient guilt still clung to me like a Sphinx's curse. She felt helpless, I realize, was flailing to save her drowning son, but to me it was the razor edge of castration whenever she zeroed in. I'd be fulminating at the dinner table, battering them with images of napalmed children, and Jackie would wait till I stopped to take a breath. Then she'd ask, innocent as a child picking at a scab: What girls was I dating at Yale, and when was she going to meet Star?

  My mother's subtext had to do with shaming me back to the straight and narrow by letting me know she had my number. Her dread at having produced a homo son was shaped by her own wounded narcissism: How could I do this to her, she always seemed to be saying.

  I took defiant refuge in my sexlessness—"I'm not seeing anyone!"—flinging it into her face like a glove of honor. Oh, we wer
e equally matched, neurosis-wise. I see now we shared some secret guilt about my brother, vying as to which of us didn't deserve to be walking if he couldn't. Shame was second nature to us both. Somehow we made a deal that avoiding the truth would make it go away. But the lie kept us from loving each other right, and the gulf would only widen, till I would feel my life was my mother's fault. Nothing could even begin to turn it around until I came out. And thus I wonder about so many gay men I've met since, pillars of the community, out to everyone else but Mom, who still refer to their lovers as something between a roommate and a valet. Just who is being protected here, and who thinks queer is wrong?

  As for my relationship with Star, it was none of anyone's business, and no one would understand—any more than she and I did. She'd come back from Bangkok for her senior year at Wellesley, only to discover that the last thing a Wellesley senior was allowed to be was a widow. Still in shock from Bill's death, no one to talk to about it, she came down and stayed in the beach house with me, a weekend every month or so. To her I represented some kind of continuity with Bill, the non-jock side of him. For me, she was something else, the unattainable other, whose grief had brought her down into the kind of darkness I could see in.

  We constituted no threat to each other, the physical not so much off-bounds as safely out of play. Star's body had shut down; mine had never started. Otherwise there were no restraints, no reason to fear each other's intensity. Before the year was over, we'd read every poem in English worth its salt, anything that put love and death in the same stanza. Yet it wasn't all gloom either, for that would've been to waste the only time either of us felt real, as opposed to the alienation and misery of the months between our visits. I think we both understood we diverted each other from pain, and that was enough. The gift of being able to ease pain for someone else—it proved to me that I was human, the first glimmer of self-worth I can recall.