Tango (9 page)

Even though Mrs. Swisher's homophobic response was less than helpful, one good thing came out of it. She allowed me to change seats so I didn't have to sit next to Michael Hunter any longer.

 

 

ONE OF THE THREE-DOLLAR SHRINK'S RECOMMENDATIONS was that I get involved in more activities outside of school, so I convinced my parents to allow me to become a candy striper. At this point they were so worried about me and so desperate to get me back on the right track
that it was becoming easier to convince them to let me do things that they normally wouldn't allow. I was the first boy candy striper in the organization! Since this was the mid-1970s, and a time for breaking down barriers between what roles men and women could assume, the candy stripers were delighted and decided that in order to make it more palatable for young men to volunteer they would change the name from candy striper to volunteen. I was perfectly okay with candy striper and was, I'll admit, a little sad that I couldn't wear the signature pink and white apron. Instead, I was forced to wear khakis and a white collared shirt.

I enjoyed being a volunteen though because I was surrounded by nothing but nerdy teenage girls and solicitious older women. They were a bunch of do-gooders from various socioeconomic backgrounds who worked at the hospital to cheer people up during their dark times. I worked at the snack bar and the gift shop and volunteered at the pediatric ward, making children laugh. My parents justified allowing me to do something so associated with girls by convincing themselves
that it would give me experience and job skills for when I began looking for work the summer after I got my driver's license.

I also loved the work because I got to be with so many eccentric old women. My dad's best friend's mother, Ms. Offutt, lived in a dilapidated mansion in his hometown and we would stay with her sometimes when we visited. In her home I was delighted to be surrounded by dusty chandeliers, always aware of the slight smell of a skunk who would occasionally visit the fox that she kept in a cage in her backyard. She was the richest woman in town so she could get away with just about anything. She would sometimes ride a skateboard down the street to go to the store.

She opened my first savings account for me with a five-dollar passbook. My father often complained about headaches. One day she said to me, “I never have headaches. I think your brain has to be full of too many thoughts to have headaches. You probably don't have headaches either.”

I was vaguely insulted but she said it in such
a funny way, I went along with it. She was peroxide blond, and when I was in her presence, so was I.

Another of my favorite kooky old women was Walaka Blumberg, the head of the volunteens. She had been born in Italy and married Mr. Blumberg, a Jew. She had a strong Italian accent and made herself up to look like Gina Lollobrigida, who was known, even then, as the poor man's Sophia Loren. I imagine Wally thought she was giving us Sophia, but we knew better. She was hilarious and taught me how to curse people out in Italian. Working behind the snack bar at the hospital meant dealing with a lot of upset and frustrated people, so we got a kick out of mumbling obscenities in Italian under our breath as we served them their homemade cheese-and-pickle sandwiches on toast, which is different from a toasted cheese sandwich with a pickle. Another funny thing about being one of two boys in the volunteens was that the older women were constantly on guard for any sexual improprieties between us and the other girls. I say “other girls” intentionally to let you know
that any improprieties were unlikely unless the altruistic retirees were on the lookout for hints of lesbianism.

 

 

ONE OF THE FIRST OUTINGS I WENT ON WITH the volunteens was a kind of getting-to-know-you picnic at the city park. I had just seen
Annie Hall
, the Woody Allen film, because the shrink insisted my dad do something with me of my choosing.

My father was a very sensitive man, but he didn't trust his instincts as a parent. He never really had a father of his own because his parents had divorced when he was only three years old. He had made various attempts to teach me things he felt a father should teach his son. When I was a preschooler he bought me boxing gloves. He would get on his knees so we stood about the same height. He taught me how to throw a punch, and I enjoyed it. But one day my four-year-old self gave him an uppercut to the chin and knocked him out cold. I was terrified. I thought I'd killed my daddy. When he came to,
he thought it was very funny, but after that I was afraid to fight.

He took me fishing and hunting but I absolutely refused to kill anything. When we were fishing he said I couldn't talk or I would scare away the fish; I was definitely not interested in anything that required me to be silent. Sometimes he would come up with good ideas. One day he decided we were going to bake a cake from scratch, which turned out to be delicious.

By the time I entered high school my father and I had a big gulf between us. I think he felt it was his responsibility to turn me into a man and after his failed attempts to teach me baseball, to force me to become a champion swimmer, and many other clashes of wills, a simmering resentment had developed. In order to bridge that divide, the three-dollar psychologist suggested my father spend an evening with me doing something I wanted to do. I chose for us to go to dinner at a restaurant we had been to once before at Coolfont, a resort hotel near Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. The restaurant was in a round building surrounded by trees. It was like eating
in a mid-century modern tree house. Since this was a special occasion and I got to do whatever I wanted, I ordered Crab Imperial, a popular dish in Maryland in the '70s made out of crabmeat, mayonnaise, and Old Bay Seasoning, and traditionally baked in a blue crab or scallop shell. I was, and still am, crazy about Old Bay Seasoning, which back then was still manufactured at the harbor in Baltimore. Crab Imperial was something I could only order on very special occasions and generally only at restaurants that specialized in seafood. My father was very particular about where we ate and what we ordered because he worked for the health department and knew which restaurants were clean and which weren't fit to eat in. We couldn't, for instance, eat at the Burger King in the Zayre's Shopping Center on the dual highway because it was filthy. All Chinese restaurants were strictly off limits so as a result I never tasted anything even remotely Chinese until I was in college. Dad was also, being a Marylander, very particular about crab dishes. If he ordered a crab cake you could be guaranteed that the verdict would be in after just
one bite: “This has too much filler, it's nothing but bread and celery. They think by adding Old Bay people are going to think it tastes like crab. They're skimpin' on meat trying to save money.” My first experience with crab was when I was six years old and Dad and I went to Ocean City for the weekend. He had a friend who had a trailer parked in a campground near the beach, and we went over for a picnic dinner. In those days roadside crab shanties were a dime a dozen and you could get a bushel of blue crabs for less than thirty dollars. Dad taught me how to crack the crabs with a wooden mallet, careful not to smash the shell into the meat, and how to extract the meat from the shell without ripping it apart. The goal was to tear the meat as little as possible so you could get a nice big chunk and dip it in butter before sliding it into your mouth. The crabmeat was sweet and delicious, and the mixture of Old Bay, crabs, cheap beer, and salty sea air remains one of the most intoxicating smells I can think of.

As the adults drank their Pabst Blue Ribbon and ate their crabs, a chubby tan girl who was a
little older than me decided I was her doll, a role I was more than happy to play. She ran around in her little blue bikini collecting crab claws and hooking them together to make me a crab-claw necklace. Even though it was made out of brinysmelling crab claws it was nice to be wearing a necklace when no one seemed to mind. I felt glamorous.

After we finished dinner we left Coolfont and headed to the Leitersburg Pike Cinemas to see
Annie Hall
, which had just opened that week. I thought
Annie Hall
was one of the funniest movies I had ever seen. It was my first Woody Allen movie, and I was beguiled by how Diane Keaton managed to exhibit a flighty charm and quirky vulnerability all the while being a total femme top who exerted a tremendous amount of sexual power. Dad said he didn't get it. He didn't like movies made in the '70s. His favorite movie was the 1952 film
Moulin Rouge
in which José Ferrer played Toulouse-Lautrec, an artist whose growth was stunted by a childhood accident and who went on to become a great painter of the underground misfits of fin de siècle Paris. My father
was quite fond of oddballs and eccentrics, but he wasn't so sure how to handle having one for a son.

On the day of the volunteens picnic I assumed some of Woody Allen's fatalistic, self-deprecating humor. I was a great mimic, and I was feeling very full of myself. I got the girls laughing hysterically over some monologue or story I was telling them. There was one particular girl named Mary Bowan who really seemed to get my new sense of humor. All of a sudden it occurred to me that I had a terrible crush on her, and I asked her out on a date for the following Saturday.

That week I was so anxious and excited about our date that I lost five pounds, which was a lot for me. Neither of us had our driver's license yet so my mom had to drop me off at her house, and we walked to the movies. Fortunately Mary was a little more aggressive than I. She took my hand and held it through the entire film. I thought she was so beautiful. I can still remember the way she smelled, which got me very very excited. For several weeks we talked to each other on the phone three to five hours a night, driving our
parents crazy tying up the phone line, reading our poetry to each other, playing music. I was convinced I was in love.

One day I called into the local radio station and won a free record. I went down to the station to pick up my prize and was given a choice between a recording of a band I'd never heard of or one with a photograph of a beautiful girl with long brown hair, red leg warmers, and jeans. Her name was Kate Bush. When I got home I played the record and it was like nothing I had ever heard before. She was singing about Heathcliff and Kathy from
Wuthering Heights
, a novel by Emily Brontë which I had recently read. I got on the phone that night and played the entire thing for Mary Bowan and we absolutely loved it because she sounded like a witch and we were both fairly sure we were witches, too.

Mary went to St. Maria Goretti, a private Catholic high school. I had tried to convince my parents to send me to Goretti but we couldn't afford it. Mary's parents didn't seem to have any more money than mine did but they were Catholic so I guess they were ready to make that commitment.
I was raised to believe that Catholics were going to burn in hell because they worshipped a false idol, namely the pope, who they sometimes made the mistake of placing before God, or on a higher level than Jesus. They were idol worshippers. We were taught that our relationship with Jesus was personal and we didn't need any pope between our mouths and the Lord's ears. Anyway, I thought it was exotic that she was a Catholic heathen. I enjoyed the stories she would tell me about her younger sister, who was evidently quite a slut and liked to make out with everyone. On more than one occasion when I called, there would be reports that her mother was in the attic again. Mrs. Bowan had a setting on her vacuum cleaner which allowed it to blow air out instead of sucking it in. She would fill the cleaner bag with mothballs in order to shoot at squirrels, which climbed up the trees and made their way into the attic. It made me feel like a character out of a J. D. Salinger novel, dating a girl with a crazy mother in a housedress shooting squirrels with mothballs up in the attic window. Her father, on the other hand, was a little
more intimidating. He had been a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. It seemed the whole family was afraid of him, including her older brother who was gay and wasn't allowed in their home.

By this time, I was thinking that maybe the psychologist was right, maybe my being gay had been a phase. Time had passed and now I had my driver's license. I could borrow my parents' car and pick Mary up and take her out on dates. I enjoyed making out with her, steaming up the car windows in front of her parents' house late at night. My friend Carrie from the Playmakers had taught me the right moves, so I knew how to bring a girl to orgasm with just my hand, and I was feeling confident and turned on. I felt that maybe my problems were over. I had no desire to be normal, but meeting this eccentric girl who loved poetry and the same music I did, and who clearly enjoyed me physically as I enjoyed her, seemed to herald a new life for me. She was hot. One night she came over to watch TV with me and my family. Mary and I were sitting on the couch covered by an old afghan my grandmother had crocheted, watching TV in the basement. We
were in the back of the room, seemingly perfectly still, while my parents and sister were sitting in front of us. Unbeknownst to them she was giving me a hand job underneath the blanket. I came and quickly ran out of the room. She didn't give a shit. I loved her for that.

 

 

THE NOTE I GAVE TO MRS. SWISHER WAS MY last attempt to reach out to the adult world for help. I realized I was on my own when it came to dealing with my sexuality. My mom's response had been one of pure hysteria, my psychologist had been passive, and Mrs. Swisher had exhibited borderline contempt. The only thing I could do was to try and control it myself. Mary was a godsend to me. I hate to use that expression now, but at the time I still believed in heaven and hell, and that somehow my actions would lead me to one or the other. If nothing else, our relationship provided an outlet for so many pent-up feelings, creatively, aesthetically, and romantically.