by Sam Harris
Opryland USA was a theme park in Nashville devoted to musical shows. There were a few roller coasters and carousels, but it billed itself as “the Home of American Music” and it was a magnet for young talent. At sixteen, I was cast in a show called I Hear America Singing and was finally in a glamorous, hour-long singing-and-dancing extravaganza featuring music from the 1920s to the 1970s, multiple costume changes, and a live, eighteen-piece orchestra.
Jason, who had been my strip-poker buddy when we were both newsboys in the Tulsa Little Theatre production of Gypsy, was cast in another show at the park. We’d kept in touch, and he invited me to share an apartment with him and two other guys from Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, who’d been hired as well: Jay was a bookish prodigy pianist who could turn a simple tune, say “Jingle Bells,” into a lavish concerto. And then there was Scott.
Scott Pierce looked like Cary Grant. He was tall and dark and lean with spellbinding brown eyes framed by thick, broad eyebrows and a permanent five o’clock shadow. I was bewitched. And we were cast in the same show.
The first day of rehearsal was exhilarating and intimidating. The cast assembled in a giant wood-slat-floored dance room with one wall completely mirrored and the opposite wall affixed with ballet barres. Ballet barres! This was a whole ’nother league. And for the first time I was in the company of equally ambitious, dangerously driven performers, each of whom was dedicated to being the best.
We were fed vast amounts of material at breakneck speed—medleys, chorus parts, backup parts. Vocal solos were assigned and we were each taken to a private room to learn them, then immediately deposited back into the main rehearsal room to present them. Once again, I was the youngest, but I’d come to count on my voice as a social entrée. So when I sang “Stormy Weather” for the cast, it was as much an audition for friendships as it was a rehearsal. I belted my guts out, picturing myself in a trench coat and fedora, languidly leaning against a lamppost as if I were waiting for glamour photographer George Hurrell to show up. Ironically, I was told that’s how the number would be costumed and staged. At last, fantasy and reality were becoming one.
Opryland was not unionized and we worked twelve hours a day with breaks spent at costume fittings and coachings. We danced until our feet blistered, and kept dancing when the blisters burst and bled. Every day I had a dancer’s lunch: a cherry ICEE and a Salem Menthol long.
It was all horribly grueling and terribly romantic.
The entire cast was absurdly gifted—except for Scott. He had a pleasant baritone voice and could dance okay, but he was clearly hired for his height and beauty. I didn’t care. As the weeks progressed Scott and I became inseparable. We lived and worked and shopped and cooked and ate together. We laughed together. I got high for the first time with him and we took pictures of our toes surrounding a dill pickle. We were playful and smart, and equally contented in silence. At times I would lose myself, time gone, at the wonder of his plump lower lip, or the tanned nape of his neck, or the angle of his scruffy chin—and my body would startle me with a sudden gasp, reminding me to breathe. This feeling was something new and I could not name it. Some mishmash of peril and promise.
The cast was filled with guys of questionable sexuality, but only one was what you’d call “out.” He was self-deprecating and vulgar in that Boys in the Band way in which gay men used to define themselves. While the entire cast rolled our eyes at his flamboyance, his freedom was admirable, as the rest of us had no sexual identity at all.
Hidden away was a budding romance between Scott and me that inched forward in baby steps, usually after drinking too much or having the occasional joint. Knees would brush. Hands might linger. Eyes would lock. Boundaries were blurred but never crossed, and were always reestablished, industrial strength and infrangible.
After a few weeks, with the show up and going strong, Scott and I and another cast mate named Katie decided to go to nearby Cincinnati’s Kings Island theme park on a rarely scheduled two days off. Katie’s four-foot-eight frame belied a belt that lived somewhere between Ethel Merman and Shirley Bassey. She was sturdy and gutsy and wild. After a full day of singing in the car and careless fun at the park, we got a single motel room and a case of beer.
Katie brought pot and we smoked and drank and crowed with laughter, and before we knew it, she had mischievously initiated a ménage à trois. We piled upon one another, nervously giggling at first, all the attention on Katie, two guys, one girl. My heart raced. If I could not be with Scott, at least I was in the same bed, in the same deed, using the same lips and tongues but absent of contact—like making love through glass.
Then suddenly, slowly, Scott’s hand found mine and we scrutinized every digit, softly, thoroughly, in covert union. My fingers moved up his forearm, tracking a fluttering muscle that led to a sharp collarbone spiking against his taut skin. He found the curve of my back and I moved in closer, my legs still wrapped around Katie’s. She was oblivious to the love story that was playing out over and around her.
When all three of our faces were inches apart, Katie tilted her head back and out of view, and Scott and I let our gaze meet. His dark eyes were full and tender and the air hung still between us. We were alone.
And finally, we kissed.
His mouth was hot and sweet and his taste spread through me like a shot of sloe gin. Though the sexual tension between us had been sizzling anxiously in the wings for weeks, the kiss was unexpectedly gentle. Quiet. Compassionate. Examined. As if we were on a private moonlit beach in Saint-Tropez and not leaning over a naked girl in a cheap motel in Cincinnati.
Until now, our connection had been unable to blossom in even the smallest, most natural way of any other “normal” couple. It was clumsy and inexpert. But in this moment, we were transported to a place immune to judgment or permission or approval. There was only now. I cupped his bristly face in my palm and our gentle kiss erupted as if it were starved. He shifted closer to offer himself and took me in his hot hand. We were alive and charged and the world around us disappeared.
So did Katie.
At first she tried to keep up, insinuating herself into the insuppressible pulse that was steadily mounting. But there was only Scott, and I climbed over her and onto him to eliminate any space or air between us, pressing, strained, drinking him in. I wanted every part of myself to be connected with him. To be of him. Katie eventually gave up and accepted her role as drunken matchmaker. She even laughed and shrugged with a crooked smile. And then she did the damnedest thing. She got up, dressed, and, with a kind of wry grace, said, “Glad I could give you boys a kick start. I’m gonna go out for some smokes.” And she left us alone to consummate the undeniable.
Our sex was, at once, delicate and raw, innocent and eager and sweet and sweaty and thirsty; the joyous deliverance from repression, and a pureness of heart that was surely love as true as any that had come before it.
We returned to Nashville the next day and there was no mention of our liaison—not even between Scott and me. There was no significant difference in our interaction. We didn’t hold hands. We didn’t exchange knowing looks. We didn’t smile confidentially. We were back in the mode. But I was changed. And I knew I could never return to what it was. Not completely. I would play by the rules, but I would test them.
As soon as my three roommates were out of the apartment, I moved Jay’s things out of Scott’s room and moved mine in. I didn’t ask. And once again, it was never mentioned. Apparently the veil worked both ways. Even Jay, whose belongings I had packed and moved and unpacked, walked into his old bedroom, noticed his things were missing, and then walked into the other bedroom and accepted his new digs without question. It was like a universal secret code of protection that couldn’t even be discussed in private.
I knew in my heart that there was no shame in what I was feeling for Scott. It was pure and it was good.
When he discovered I’d switched the rooms, Scott threw his head back and laughed out loud, and when his eyes returned to mine, his s
mile was like the sun. It was the first acknowledgment of what was to be and there was relief in the knowing. Finally, we were able to explore our relationship. We were in love. And like all love affairs mired in taboo—Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere—there were strict mandates if we were to carry on. But as the summer progressed, Scott and I were able to define our separate life together, not only at work but even within the confines of our apartment with two roommates ten feet away. After a night of intimacy we returned to our separate twin beds. Like Ricky and Lucy.
And even if that was the way it was to be forever, it was fine with me.
• • •
The summer ended much too quickly and I returned to Sand Springs a different person. Everything seemed less alive. Less colorful. Less acute. Less. I didn’t know how I would endure without Scott, not to mention the daily validation of performing in the company of the real deal. Long-distance phone calls were costly and forbidden, so communication with Scott was limited to coded letters, like we were espionage agents or thieves. I hoped we would return to Opryland the following summer, but who knew if we’d both be asked back or if Scott would accept. He was in college and had a bigger life than mine.
Worse than not being able to see him was that, back in Sand Springs, it was impossible for me to talk about him, share my happiness or even acknowledge it. If I was misunderstood and burdened with secrets before, the fact that I had tasted truth, only to leave it behind without so much as an acknowledgment, magnified my disparity all the more. I was worse for knowing love. And now the stakes were even higher. My fear of being found out was overshadowed by the fear that, if revealed, my relationship with Scott would be denounced. That we would be rendered nothing.
I nearly told my friend Teri. I nearly told my friend Michelle. It never occurred to me to tell the voiceless clan of suspected brothers who would have been freed by my induction, and who would have freed me in return. In the end, it was not worth the risk, and there was no one.
My summer of Scott became for me a symbol of what never could be. I’d known it would be impossible to have a real life in Oklahoma, but I’d learned that even away, in an environment with others like me, there was still a suffocating shroud of secrecy. It seemed that I would never have an honest life with anyone and my destiny was to be lonely and unfulfilled. Sex would be something that was scored, clandestinely, elusively, illegally, in cryptic places and in camouflage. But a real relationship with someone I loved, with whom I could have a proud and ample future, was unimaginable.
When the school year began, so resumed the anonymous “queer” yelled from across the parking lot and the “faggot” roughly whispered from a crowded classroom doorway, unowned and unacknowledged, like a voice in my head. A photo of me in my Opryland finale costume was published in the school newspaper, in which I wore a white polyester one-piece jumper with a black puffy-sleeved shirt and a matching white bowler with a black sequined band, cocked Fosse-ly style over one eye. It was me at my most showbiz resplendent. But as I walked down the hall to my locker, a group of large, senior football lunks were waiting. “There he is,” I pretended not to hear. “Hey, pretty boy, love the picture!” was harder to ignore. Especially when they mimicked my Chorus Line pose and gave me a girly wink.
“Thanks. It was a great summer,” I said in passing, as I aborted the stop at my locker and made my way down the hall as fast as I could without seeming to run.
The old Sam mask I’d mastered wasn’t sticking. I couldn’t convince or delude myself any longer. I became severely depressed. I only participated in required school activities and took to sitting alone in my bedroom, listening to the 45 single of Anne Murray’s “You Needed Me” over and over and over again. The sad, rich voice of Anne praising the one who saved her from the depths of despair. It was, perhaps, the first time during any event of significance that I was not outside of myself looking in. I was in crisis and I was in crisis. The hopelessness was authentic and the escape tools I’d previously employed were useless. There was no fade-up on me, curled up in my chair. No key light. No crane shot, sweeping in close with the single tear running down my cheek. There was no “remember this feeling so you can use it onstage later.” There was no later.
As the weeks went on, my sadness only deepened, hovering, loitering, spreading, until I had neither the want nor the energy to get out from beneath it; to duct tape myself together another morning in a charade I was no longer able to pull off. The jig was up.
I sought out my friend Craig, a trombone player, and whispered for him to meet me in the back corner of the band room by the instrument storage shelving. Making sure no one was within earshot, I asked if he could get some speed and downers. Craig had been offering to get me speed since the seventh grade and I’d declined, but now I had a different story. I lied to him, saying I’d been speeding all during the summer and I wanted to buy a lot to get a good price. I didn’t tell him I had no use for the amphetamines, but I had to justify the downers as a balance for the uppers in order to score them for another purpose. A couple of days later I got my order—black beauties and Seconals—and I hoped it would be enough.
On a Friday afternoon, I wrote a letter to my parents on a sheet of blue-lined paper from a spiral notebook. I said I loved them but knew they would not want me to be miserable and that this was the best way. For everyone. The only answer. I asked them to forgive me but to be happy that I was out of pain. There were no details and no admissions.
My parents had plans that night. Memo was staying with us, which I thought would be good for my mother after I was gone. At about eight thirty, my eleven-year-old brother, Matt, and my grandmother were downstairs watching TV and I told them I was going to hit the hay early. I went upstairs and gently tore the letter from the notebook, carefully removing the frayed edges so that it was clean. I folded it neatly, put it in an unmarked envelope, and placed it on my bedroom desk. I pulled the sandwich baggie of Seconals out from under the carpet slit where I’d hidden cigarettes and a magazine photo of a bronzed man in a loincloth, and walked to my parents’ bathroom and stared at myself in their mirror.
I was hollow but calm, decided. I took all of the Seconals with a giant glass of water and stared some more. I don’t know why I went to my parents’ bathroom to commit the act. There was no malice in my action or need to punish them. More than anything there was a sense of solution. A sense of relief. And there was something in me that wanted a connection to my mother and father, or perhaps not to feel alone, as I made the most important and last decision of my life.
I walked to my bedroom and removed my clothes, replacing them with a long white T-shirt and fresh white underwear. I carefully pulled back the covers with silent procession, in an ordered ritual of self-respect. I lay down, not in my regular side-stomach-one-foot-over-the-edge position but on my back, with my hands on my chest, like the pictures of Lenin lying in state I’d seen in the history books.
It was how I would be found. Not messy and disheveled, among rumpled sheets and doubts, but in purposeful and contemplative peace.
I waited for the pills to take effect. Was it three minutes? Five? Thirty? I was growing groggy. Suddenly, a bloodcurdling scream ripped through my silence. It was Matt, and something horrible had happened. I vaulted from my bed and ran downstairs as quickly as I could. Memo was holding my brother in her arms and there was blood all over the carpet. He had stepped on her darning needle and it had broken off in his foot. Memo, typically strong and in charge, seemed useless. Not knowing if I should call an ambulance, I first phoned Sandra Hanner, our best family friend, and she said she would be over in five minutes.
I held my brother and rocked him back and forth, calming him and wiping away his tears. The stub of the needle was barely visible. I promised him everything would be all right. Suddenly, I felt a little woozy and remembered that I had taken thirty Seconals. Shit. My brother needed help. It wasn’t my night. I handed him over to my grandmother and raced upstairs to the bat
hroom and stuck my index finger down my throat and threw up the gelatinous capsules that were dissolving in my stomach by the minute, desperately trying to squelch any gagging noises that would reveal me. I ran to the refrigerator and sloppily downed milk from the container so that I could throw up again and again to rid myself of any remains.
Moments later, Sandra rang the doorbell and I swished and spit mouthwash before running to the door to meet her. She examined my brother’s foot and cautiously plucked the darning needle out with pliers and then sanitized and bandaged the wound. My brother was calmer now and Sandra looked at me oddly and asked if I was okay. She said I seemed a little wobbly. I told her I was fine, just shaken. Sandra left us and I put my brother to bed, with my grandmother following soon after.
I sat alone in the crowded space of my thoughts. My brother’s blood stained my white T-shirt like a Rorschach. I was afraid to sleep. I made coffee and stayed up for my parents’ return to tell them what had happened to my brother. But I knew I wouldn’t tell them what had happened to me. That I’d tried to commit suicide and that a darning needle mishap had saved my life.
That holding my brother and promising him that everything would be all right, in the way I was so desperate to be comforted, gave me enough sense of value to keep me holding on a little longer.
• • •
Wayne McDowell was my high school psychology teacher. He was highly intelligent and clever and challenged his students to explore concepts beyond what we knew—or thought we knew. His class was the one hour of the day that provided a respite from my gloom and self-obsession.
McDowell encouraged and inspired us to dig for answers and, being a research freak, I decided to investigate my malady on my own, in secret. I went to the Sand Springs Public Library and scoured the small psychology section. There were no books expressly about homosexuality, and I would not have checked them out had there been. A record of my interest would surely have given me away as soon as the librarian stamped the checkout card inside their covers. Alarms might sound. Steel doors might slam down. Baptists in robes might appear through secret panels behind bookcases and carry me off to a pot of boiling red-eye gravy. I stuck to books that dabbled in homosexuality but weren’t devoted to it. A bit like myself. My criteria for checking out a book was simple: I flipped to the index of likely candidates and if the word “homosexuality” was listed, it was mine.