Foolish Fire (13 page)

But how
was
one elected to membership of that invisible race? And what constituted membership? One act? Two? How many? Did intentions count? Or whether the intent was deliberate or an innocent mistake? Was it too late to change?

Suddenly I felt as if I’d been infected with a dreadful, contagious virus—as if, unknowingly, I’d wandered into a leper colony and discovered only long afterwards that I’d caught the disease from a brief, accidental brush with an inhabitant. And now the dreaded infection was deep inside me, working its way to my heart, weakening my defenses, corrupting me cell by cell.

But of course it was all a mistake, a terrible misunderstanding. Once I sweated out the attack, weathered the fever, I would be all right. Everything would be as it had been.

All I needed was time. I would be falling in love with girls, having sex with them before long. After all, all the boys did. It happened to everyone. I couldn’t be an exception. I was normal. Perfectly normal.

It was just a phase I was going through, just as the book had said. A lot of boys went through it, and came out sane and happy on the other side:

Most teens soon grow out of it…

during adolescence, a time of change…

not uncommon for a platonic infatuation for a member of…

even to the point of actual…

not to feel guilt over…

irrepressible…

find themselves doing…

with true maturity comes an understanding of…

at very different rates…

on the average of approximately…

a dull, lethargic feeling of listless…

such as sports or other activities…

twentieth century mores…

prohibited…

changes in attitude…

tell your family doctor about any…

understanding parents…

curiosity, which is quite normal…

mixed-up feelings…

quite normal…

most normal teens soon grow out of it…

most normal teens…

most teens…

Once or twice, or perhaps more, but….

I shut my eyes, but the blackness inside me was much darker than the true night. And for some reason the sidewalk beneath my feet seemed to suck at the soles of my shoes, as if I were walking on top of a gigantic piece of sticky candy.

(I Don’t Wanna Be) An “A” Student

The plaza of Sunnyside Mall was crowded, and the soft drink and fast food stands were filled with teenagers. Many of them were sitting around the central fountain under the palm trees.

As I walked up the red brick steps, I could hear music from someone’s portable cassette player floating on the breeze.

I was wearing my short-shorts today because it was so warm. I’d purposely chosen my white pair to better set off my tan. Because they were so short, the irritating rub of the center seam was stimulating, and I walked along with the delicious threat of incipient arousal.

I knew my shorts drew people’s attention to me, and this was exactly what I wanted. I secretly listened for favorable comments made about me behind my back.

Women in their late twenties and thirties weren’t afraid to express their admiration openly, sometimes with whistles. Girls closer to my own age tended to look away quickly whenever I caught their eye, though sometimes they would stare back at me with an almost hurt look in their eyes, as if hopeless of ever winning my interest.

Boys my age, especially the better-looking ones, studiedly ignored me or pretended not to see me, though I knew they did. No doubt they resented any added competition for the girls.

One of the characteristics of beauty is the curious way in which lesser beauty gets “blotted out” by greater, in proportion to the degree of difference between them. I’ve often noticed this. For example, in a room full of boys, my attention is naturally attracted to the best-looking one there. If however, an even better-looking boy walks into the room, the first boy’s beauty actually seems to fade before my eyes, paling in the light of the more attractive one, and my eyes shift to the new boy, forgetting all about the other.

Thus an attractive boy bristles at the approach of another attractive boy, fearing his own beauty will fade. In high school, I had become particularly sensitive to this instinctive competition for looks. Whenever I entered a room, I quickly spotted the handsomest boy there, then made for a seat at the farthest possible point away from him.

In the plaza the sunlight was dazzling. The heat was so intense that I could feel waves of coolness wafting from the fountain. Teenagers in groups of three and four were sitting along its rim eating ice cream cones and drinking cups of ice-cooled orange juice. Seeing no one I knew, I dawdled along in the shade of the store windows peering into the showrooms.

There were many trendy clothes stores at the mall which catered to teenagers and I made a periodic sweep of them in order to keep abreast of current fashions. Now that I was in high school, I knew how important clothes were. They were an intimate part of a boy’s personality, and sometimes made all the difference in how people viewed him. I knew that when someone was confident about his own looks, it was reflected in the way he dressed.

All attractive boys became trend-setters to some extent, whether they wanted to or not. Since they were used to drawing people’s eyes, they generally chose their clothes with care, either to bring out their attributes or cover up their drawbacks. Perhaps they even began to feel a certain responsibility to please the watching eyes, to present themselves before the world in the most flattering clothes and hairstyles. The bolder ones among them were usually the first to try something new and daring, and they became the fashion leaders of the school.

These trend-setters knew instinctively who they were; they felt they were born to fulfill this role, as if it were their natural function. Each of them knew he had “fans” among the student body. A week, maybe two, after he’d started something new, he would find (like a treacherous mirage or double vision) pale imitations of his creations cropping up, reflecting back something he’d once worn, a certain way he’d had of wearing his clothes: leaving several top buttons of his shirt undone; letting a handkerchief hang long and negligently out of a back pocket; wearing old, worn-out belts his father had once worn, leaving the extra length dangling provocatively; wearing a clean length of nautical rope in place of a belt.

To my surprise, I’d discovered that a boy needn’t be all that attractive to be a trend-setter. If he possessed a good sense of fashion and dressed with a certain authoritative flair and bravado, he would find the younger boys copying him. Certainly a boy like that was much more desirable than those others who were more attractive by nature, but who dressed like slobs in order to express their so-called rebellion.

I stepped into Blue Genes, which specialized in casual wear. The clerk looked up at my entrance and gave me a nod of recognition.

I went to the racks where the corduroy slacks were, in the hip-hugging style which the television commercials claimed were so sexy. Flipping through them, I picked out a color I liked and made my way to the changing rooms at the back of the store. Even when I didn’t have the money to buy anything, I liked to try on new clothes.

There was nothing quite like the delicious private-public feel of slipping into a curtained changing room and stripping off my clothes, with nothing but a single sheet of cloth screening me from the outside world. I liked to get completely nude before the opposing mirrors which duplicated my reflection out into infinity. The sight of so much naked flesh front and back excited me; I loved to savor my own nudity while listening to people chatting just outside the changing room, the clerk talking with another customer, and the announcements being made over the mall’s PA system.

I put my shirt on again and tried on the slacks. After appraising them for a while, I stepped outside for the clerk’s opinion. This was another pleasure: modeling brand new clothes before someone else’s admiring looks.

I suspected this clerk was gay; he liked to tug and pat my clothes into place as he voiced his opinions. Playing innocent, I kept plying him with questions as I felt his hands wander down the backs of my thighs, along my hips, barely listening to his words.

“You look great in them.”

“Thanks. But I think I’ll look around some more.”

“Sure. Take your time.” He smiled.

I hurried back to the changing room because I knew he wanted to prolong the conversation. As I slipped out of the slacks, I saw that I was getting aroused.

When I stepped out again, I spotted a teenage boy coming into the shop.

It was Mark Warren.

He was one of those whose clothes I admired, and perhaps because of this, we’d recently begun to rebuild the tentative friendship broken off so disastrously in junior high school. Mark had made the first overtures in our freshman year of high school, and I’d gradually responded, wondering if he’d forgotten all about the beating Jack and I had given him. For he acted as if it hadn’t happened at all. At Freedom High, he was one of the more popular boys, despite the fact that he was something of an outsider.

His reputation, indeed, was a mystery to me. I was almost sure he was homosexual, and most of the people who whispered about him said the same thing. But he had many friends who defended him against this charge, boys as well as girls. My own image of him was permanently associated with the rumor I’d heard about his being gang-banged at Boy Scout camp. This incident had never actually been verified, and was part of the mystery surrounding him. For me, he was cloaked in the enticing garb of depravity reserved for sexual victims; that imagined scene in the abandoned grove was a recurring fantasy for me, with Mark as the helpless object of my brutal lusts. I couldn’t help wondering what might have been going through his mind as boy after boy callously assaulted him.

“Hey, Mark,” I said cheerfully, “Where have you been hiding yourself lately?”

“It’s you who’s hiding from me. What are you doing today?”

“Nothing. Just hanging around.”

In the light of day, that rumor about his rape seemed nothing more than someone’s dirty-minded fabrication.

“I’m bored as hell. Listen, would you like to go for a drive?”

I hesitated. “Now?”

“Sure. Unless you don’t want to.”

I thought of his beautiful red MG convertible, the envy of all the boys at school. I nodded yes.

Mark had changed a lot since junior high. He’d always been different from most of the other boys, of course, being something of a sissy. In high school he still was, though it didn’t affect his reputation as much. There were many people who were drawn to him by his resolute individualism.

For many, though, he was still a little difficult to approach. I think they were afraid of his sarcastic wit. His jokes tended to be at the expense of other people. He had the reputation of being just a little bit crazy, the outsider who thumbed his nose at all authority. He frankly said that school was a bore, and despised all the teachers without exception.

His looks and mannerisms were still the kind which outraged most boys our age; the prissy way he walked, the way he waved and fluttered his hands about as he talked. On top of that, he had a habit of carrying around a notebook filled with fashion drawings of dresses and gowns for ladies—fashions of his own design. And the gossip which seemed to flower all around his name only served to add to his mystery—he never confirmed or denied any of it. He knew it made him a sort of legend at school.

His intelligence was also phenomenal, though he was anything but a grind. Without seeming to try at all, he held the highest grade point average in our class. And though most of his friends were girls, there were plenty of boys who sought out his company. Many of them no doubt cultivated his friendship just to get close to the girls who were always around him. Also, his family was somewhat wealthy, and people always enjoyed the parties he gave at his house.

I, too, was making tentative feelers and initiating a cautious friendship. Whenever we ran into each other in the study hall or the student lounge, I stopped to chat with him.

But because to all appearances, he was such an “obvious” fag, I always made sure when talking to him that my own heterosexuality was never in question. I found myself adopting a faintly mocking, ironic attitude toward him, and making sure we talked only about innocuous things—art or photography—never touching on the topic I most wanted to discuss.

He, too, wanted me to think he was straight, spicing up his conversations with bawdy comments on some of the girls who were his friends. But recently, he was making less and less a pretense of heterosexuality. Though he never came right out and owned up to being gay, he dropped tantalizing hints which teased me and allowed for ambiguous interpretation. It was this tightrope balancing act which made him so interesting.

*

I spotted his car in the parking lot immediately. Its canvas top (folded down now) had holes in a couple of places, but in my eyes that only added to its glamour: I loved it. It had a distinctive personality which made it stand out from its drab domestic neighbors.

Mark got into the driver’s seat and started up the engine. I vaulted over the passenger door without bothering to open it; the car took off even before I landed, the seat slamming into my back, jolting the breath out of me.

We headed down Fulton Street and turned off onto the curve leading to the interstate. The wind swirling through the open cab made conversation all but impossible except in brief shouts. All I could hear was a hollow roaring in my ears and the throbbing vibrations of the motor. Still, it felt wonderful to cruise like this under the warm sun.

We got on the freeway where the wind made my hair fly around so much I couldn’t concentrate on the scenery. Mark pulled straight into the fast lane and put his foot firmly down on the accelerator. We picked up speed.

His driving seemed to reflect some inner compulsion to push himself to the limits. There was indeed something a bit reckless and high voltage in Mark’s character, something which skirted the borderline of madness, as if he were deliberately performing a tight-wire act before a crowd which was hoping he would slip and fall.

Yet, strangely enough, I didn’t feel afraid about his driving. I almost wouldn’t have minded dying on the highway in a splendid, flaming car wreck. A shiver ran down my spine as we shot past slower cars. I felt giddy with the drunken exhilaration which comes with high speed.

Mark pointed to the car next to us and shouted something which was lost in the roar of wind. I glanced right and saw nothing unusual, only a middle-aged couple in a late-model family car, the woman staring at us in disbelief. She looked angry and baffled by the sight of us. I nodded back at Mark as if understanding.

He raced the car ahead. The mountains far off to the south looked like woolen blankets thrown casually over a steer’s corpse. I turned to look at Mark and saw him squinting against the glare of the sun.

“I gotta put some gas into this thing,” he said. “Let’s get off the damn freeway.”

“Sure.”

He pulled over into the slow lane and hit the blinker for the next turn-off.

As we came off the ramp, he down-shifted the engine so suddenly that I was thrown against the dashboard. The smell of exhaust and gasoline accompanied the engine’s decrescendo.

At a much slower speed, we drove along McKearny Street, the main thoroughfare of the downtown area. As we approached the large parking lot in front of the bus terminal, I noticed a man standing beside a sheltered bench. He looked at me as we drove by, his head turning to follow our progress.