Tango (10 page)

My fear of and desire for Michael Hunter had begun to wane. His words of contempt, which
were coming much more frequently and furiously in the classrooms and hallways, were having much less of an effect on me. I was feeling more secure and self-confident. I don't think it was because I had blossomed exactly. I was a gangly sixteen-year-old who stood 5'11” and weighed 125 pounds. Sometimes when I was behind the snack bar at the hospital, the kids who came in for a soda would laugh at me and call me pencil neck. But I knew I had talent as a painter, and I spent a lot of time with the crazy pot-smoking actors in the Potomac Playmakers, who were all older than me and didn't care what I did as long as I made them laugh—something I was very good at.

 

 

LESLEY FINALLY GOT BACK FROM OHIO. INSTEAD of going to the high school that I went to, her parents sent her to St. Maria Goretti, the same private Catholic school Mary Bowan attended, so she and Mary got to know each other.

I had always enjoyed the fact that Lesley was taller than me. I had walked around as her sidekick with my elbow propped on her shoulder;
next to her I had always felt safe. After she got back, I discovered that I had grown taller than her, which was a very jarring and unwelcome rite of passage. I began to realize that Lesley was the vulnerable one.

She hadn't tried to kill herself again, but it was very difficult for her to remain in her home. It was decided that she would be institutionalized. She went to Brook Lane Psychiatric Hospital, which fortunately was close to where we lived. Now that I could drive my parents' car I could go visit her.

Brook Lane seemed to me to be a very glamorous place full of troubled teens and crazy grownups. It was in the country and had a stream going through it. Built in the '60s it looked like it could have been the setting for any movie of the week featuring a soon-to-be has-been teenage star like Mackenzie Phillips, Linda Purl, or Kristy McNichol. The jukebox in the game room was constantly blaring the most depressing songs. I remember standing by the ping-pong table with Lesley one day when “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas came on.

We both started laughing hysterically. “It's just too much,” I said. We laughed until we cried, then went for a walk.

Another time I went to visit Lesley with her parents. We walked into her room and found her smoking. Her father went ape-shit. It was one of the few times that I saw him really go after her. He threw her on the bed, screaming at her, “I hope you die of cancer you stupid bitch!” He screamed at her until he was asked to leave.

She said, “You won't let me kill myself quickly, so I'm doing it the only way I can.”

After her parents left and we calmed down, we laughed about that too. It was all so absurd.

One of the girls Lesley and I befriended at Brook Lane was an Indian girl, Sue Suvramanian. We went for a walk by the stream, and
as we walked Sue Suvramanian told us about her mother, who she claimed was a very famous psychiatrist and who, according to Sue, was well traveled and had actually been on the airplane during the raid on Entebbe, a hostage rescue mission conducted by the Israeli army in Uganda in 1976, but more importantly, a made-for-TV movie that had been a big ratings hit just a few weeks before. As I said, we were all creating our own narratives, and I was delighted by Sue's and fully accepted her story.

It became clear to me that Sue Suvramanian had taken a shine to me when I met her and Lesley at the Valley Mall on Wednesday night. Every week as a special treat the folks at Brook Lane loaded everyone in a van and took them to the mall for supervised shopping trips. Sue Suvramanian bought me a copy of a Beaux Arts poster at the head shop, which I hung in my room next to a needlepoint of a hummingbird on a gold lurex background with cherry blossoms that Lesley had made for me during her summer at her uncle's house in Ohio. I looked forward to our visits at the psychiatric hospital, and there was
something about driving away at the end of each visit that gave me the feeling that I was finally gaining some control over my own life. I had more things to think about than some homophobic dumbass who wanted me to suck his cock a couple times a week and who looked like he was coming apart at the seams.

 

 

IN A WAY I WAS LUCKY BECAUSE MY FEARS about my sexuality were less intense than my need to express myself. Somehow I found ways to free myself, if only in my mind, by drawing, writing, making people laugh, and socializing. More and more I was able to leave my parents' world where everything was described as overemotional, where most of my feelings and actions were invalidated, to places where the very things that my parents held against me were celebrated. I don't think Michael had that. He wanted more than anything to be popular, but the way he learned to get attention was through verbal assaults and an ungrounded bravado. People grew weary of him. I know I did.

Things were changing quickly. We both had access to cars, and I found myself making out with him, sitting in the parking lot at the school down the road from our house, which I thought was very dangerous because the last thing I wanted was for anyone to see us together. His brazenness started to border on recklessness. Not only was he being much more vociferous at school and more indiscreet—evidenced by the note in Mrs. Swisher's class—he seemed to be almost desperate.

He would drive by my house, gun his engine, or lay down rubber. Sometimes he would set off firecrackers in his yard. Anything to get my attention. I tried my best to ignore him. Occasionally I would break down and see him, but by now it wasn't desire that was driving me to get together with him; I felt like I had to calm him down like one would when feeding an insistent cat, or taking a dog for a walk. I think in a way I was weaning him and myself from what had become, in my mind, simply a bad habit.

When I was with Mary, although I was playing the role of a boy, I felt more comfortable
sexually and more feminine than I ever did with Michael, with whom I actually sometimes played the role of a woman. Being with Mary showed me that there is a big difference between acting like a woman and feeling like one. At the time, all of this was so confusing. I could tell Mary wanted to make love to me, and I knew that I wasn't ready.

 

 

ONE THING I WAS CERTAIN OF WAS THAT I HAD to end it with Michael Hunter once and for all. But he was persistent. We met each other a few more times—in the tree house, his car, various places—until finally one day, we were in the school yard. We climbed up a tree and, as he stood on a branch several branches below me and gave me a blow job, I realized that I couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't turned on and I'd had enough.

We climbed down out of the tree, got on our bikes, and before we went our separate ways I let him have it. “Michael, I'm sick of you running around telling everyone that I'm a faggot, that
I'm gay, that I'm some sort of a freak. Meanwhile you go around saying things to girls as if you're some sort of straight guy. You're not. I told you I wanted to stop doing this and yet you keep bothering me, and why is that? Because, like it or not, you are a faggot, and you can't do anything about it. I don't know if you've noticed, but over the last few months I haven't come because I'm not into it anymore. I've grown out of it and there is nothing you can do about it. I'm just not into it anymore.

“I don't want you to ever say anything bad about me again or call me gay or I will tell everyone the truth about you—you are a cock-sucking faggot! You love it! You can't live without it! All this time you've been pestering me and I've had sex with you to shut you up so you'd leave me alone, but I'm not going to do it anymore. You, you are a faggot, not me. And if you don't leave me alone I'm going to tell the world. I'm going to tell the whole world about it so everyone will know Michael Hunter is a FAGGOT.”

Michael protested, shouting, “No I'm not. I'm not a faggot!”

“Yes, you are!”

I could see it dawning on him that maybe he was one, and that no one had ever told him before that yes, he was a faggot. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to make him feel all the pain and confusion that I'd felt for the last few years. I wanted to make sure that he hated himself as much as I hated him, as much as I hated that part of myself. I wanted to take out all the anger and frustration that I'd felt, so I started screaming at the top of my lungs, “Michael Hunter is a faggot! I'm going to tell the world that you're a faggot, you faggot!”

I got on my bike and rode away, screaming at the top of my lungs, and left Michael sobbing in the schoolyard, his figure getting smaller and smaller in the distance as I rode away. I'd never felt such a sense of relief in my life. Nor had I felt as much power. Because even though I wasn't sure whether I was gay or not, I knew that I had hurt him as much as he'd hurt me and I felt completely justified. And I knew I would never be afraid of him again or of what he might say about me.

UP UNTIL THAT POINT MICHAEL HAD MAINTAINED a certain level of popularity with French club, junior varsity football, all kinds of student activities. The following year, he dropped out of everything. He lost all of his confidence while I flourished. I never had sex with Michael Hunter again.

Three months later I broke up with Mary Bowan. It was very strange after five years of sexual satisfaction to go without, but one thing I was sure of was that after Michael Hunter I would never have sex with anyone who didn't love me, which limited my field of sexual partners tremendously. It wasn't until years later that I came to terms with my sexuality, and by then the AIDS crisis was in full swing. So in a way, I sometimes think that if it hadn't been for that relationship, I might have been more promiscuous at a time when it would have been much more dangerous for me. While most of the gay boys in my college class were experimenting sexually I was trying to find love. Most of those boys are dead now.

A
ccording to the local newspaper, Michael was arrested out on Highway 81 for impersonating a drug enforcement agent. He was found wearing a bulletproof vest with guns in his car and a card he had made saying he worked for the government. His code name was “Tango.” He was arrested and released on $2,500 bail.

The next morning he was discovered doing the same thing again but this time he was charged and held on $35,000 bail. The newspaper said he had been diagnosed with mental illness and bipolar disorder. While on bail he left the country and took a cruise to Bermuda. Upon returning to the States he was put in jail, where
he remained through Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's. In January he was tried and remanded to Brook Lane Psychiatric Hospital, the same psychiatric hospital where I had visited Lesley so many times. Hopefully he is getting the help he needs.

Other than his mug shot in the newspaper, I have only seen him once since we left high school.

In the late '90s he was mowing Lesley's mother's lawn for extra cash. I heard through Lesley that after high school he enlisted in the army and was discharged. For a while he lived in his car. There was a certain period where he was going to community churches, preaching, trying to be a minister. During a previous incarceration he'd ended up in the hospital with a broken jaw. Michael has had a rough life. When I read about his latest disaster in the
Herald Mail
, I thought back to the first day we met, when he was telling us all about how his father had provided all the glass for the UN building and trying so hard to make himself sound special. In those days disorders weren't diagnosed in children like they are
today. And I realized I could probably see the beginnings of his bipolar disorder. Who could have known back then that his delusions of grandeur would one day lead him to call himself Tango while doing his “heroic work” stopping the drug trade on the highway outside of town?

 

 

IN MY MID-FORTIES NOW, AND GRATEFULLY childless, I don't know with any amount of certainty what it's like to grow up in these times. But looking back I realize the amount of pressure that we were under then, and what little resources there were for the issues we were dealing with, made things pretty tough.

Our parents were aspiring toward safe, secure, middle-class normality, which was forged through hard work, steely determination, a tremendous amount of voluntary blindness, and a certain hardness that could be crushing to those of us who were unable to fit into their ideal.

As much as I despised Michael at the time and as difficult as it was for me then, I realize now that because he and I were so different from
what our parents had hoped for and what society had expected, we became targets, lightning rods for the dissatisfactions of those around us. We were the victims of people who felt the shifting sands of identity and sexuality, and who were sure that they could manipulate, cajole, and torture their children into being what they thought was necessary for the survival of some kind of misguided social contract that we are all supposed to sign on to.

I still haven't figured out what that social contract was, but not long ago I had a dream and in that dream I was at the same family picnic during which Michael Hunter had set off fireworks and later painted
Z
's on all the trees. Instead of being in his yard, full of rage and desperate for attention, he was sitting next to me on a blanket, just as any teenage boy would do when sitting next to the person he was in love with. My hair was long; I was still a boy, but I was expressing a femininity that was forbidden to me in my youth. No one was paying us any attention because we were just stupid teenagers. No more, no less interesting than anyone else. No more
exciting or exotic than any other healthy high school kids. My parents weren't thinking about what was wrong with or right with me. I was just their child. And in that dream it was the first time I'd ever even begun to imagine what my life could have been like if I'd never experienced trans- or homophobia. It was pretty amazing.