Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (6 page)

I don’t understand why I feel this way. I can’t say the amount of tears I cried just because I didn’t know what to do. I fooled around with people but it was damn hard being hetero and a hidden homo all at once. When I got really down, I would just tell myself that I was strong because I had gotten this far and I was OK and well liked.

London made me confident in myself and my sexuality. I’m not ready to go tell the world. And I know that even my closest friends may have qualms, but this is who I am, and I can’t bear to lie to them any longer about something so deeply a part of me.

*   *   *

I’d been back from London a few days when Dave flew to St. Louis as a “welcome back to the US” surprise. He immediately sensed that something was drastically different about me.

“Andy left his soul in London,” he told my mom one day while I was napping. When I woke up, my mother—naturally—reported back to me what he had said. It was the opening I’d been looking for, but I couldn’t do it, not yet. That night I assured Dave that he was being distracted by my fancy new fashion—sport coats with big shoulder pads and Italian pants—and that I was still the same guy.

A few days after Dave left, on an unseasonably warm day, I picked up Jackie. “We’re going to Shaw Park,” I told her. “I need to talk to you.” I was usually the one getting pulled away for a sidebar about someone else’s drama, so this whole notion of taking her somewhere to talk felt very un-me. My palms were sweaty in the car and I couldn’t concentrate on Magic 108 FM. I didn’t expect any kind of bad reaction from her, but I couldn’t be sure. When I was parking the car, I hit a lamppost, denting my mom’s Honda. Awesome.

“What is going on with you?” Jackie implored. At this point she was amused. It was indeed funny, until we sat on top of a picnic table in an empty part of the park and I read her the journal entry that I’d written on the plane home.

My voice shook, and she cried as I read.

“I feel awful,” she sobbed. “I feel like I hurt you when we were growing up.” In the journal, I had mentioned her haunting prophecy, but I reassured her that I didn’t blame her for anything she said. “What about AIDS? How are you going to protect yourself?” She was really worried, and said that was part of the reason she was crying.

“I’m worried, too,” I told her. “But I’ll always be safe. I won’t get it.” I wished I believed it. I didn’t. I thought for sure, one hundred percent, without a doubt I was going to get it, but I didn’t want to let on just how scared I was. I made her promise not to tell anybody. I wanted to be the one who delivered this news, and I was fiercely proprietary about how that happened. She hugged me and gave me every reassurance of support.

A couple days later I typed a letter to Amanda’s boyfriend, Paul, who was still in England, and carelessly left it on the couch in the den. Or was it careless? I knew full well that my mom watched the
CBS Evening News
every night with a scotch, without fail, at 5:30, on the couch in the den. She read the letter, which detailed my confession, Jackie’s response, and, for good measure, my all-consuming horniness.

“You might want to remove your LETTER from the DEN,” she said as nonchalantly (but still loudly) as she could before dinner. I panicked about what the next few hours would bring, but everything was subdued and sedate—very
The Ice Storm
.

Dad came home and we sat down to dinner as usual. I pushed my tuna casserole around my plate like a little kid trying make it look like he’s eating something, then I excused myself and went directly to my room to sit on my bed and wait for something, anything, to happen. Then, my parents did something they had never done before: They went to their room, closed the door, and spoke in hushed voices. Hushed voices were as rare as crucifixes at 7710 West Biltmore Drive. We were Jews who shouted across the dinner table. We didn’t whisper behind closed doors. This was serious.

My father left to play tennis (it was Wednesday, his tennis night—the show must go on), and I called Jackie from my bedroom to tell her that big stuff was about to go down.

Then I sat on my bed and waited some more.

Finally, my mother came in and sat on the rocking chair across from me. The whole situation was so loaded and obvious; we could have been a Semitic version of Tad and Ruth Martin from
All My Children
. “I’m ready to talk if you’re ready for that to happen,” she said.

I looked at her and said that I wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what I had to say. My voice cracked. She quietly stared at me and said, “Say what you need to say. Say the words out loud.”

I sat there staring at her. Finally, “I’m gay.”

She began crying. We both did. We discussed how long I had known, and if I was sure about it. She moved over to my bed, and we hugged and cried. She had been suspecting for several years, she admitted. Well, she had suspected a tiny bit when I was a little boy who liked to go to neighbors’ houses to sweep their floors. As for the pink
I Love Lucy
book? “I wasn’t so much worried that you were GAY, but that you were an AIRHEAD,” she told me. But then she really suspected when she found a
Honcho
magazine under my bed. (Apparently she told her shrink when this happened, and her shrink told her to stay out of my room forever—going under my bed would be like an alcoholic going to a bar.)

We talked about AIDS. We talked about telling other people, about telling Dave. We agreed he wasn’t ready to hear. We talked about how Dad would react, and she told me that even though she’d been saying to him for years: “What are you going do when our son comes home and tells us he’s gay?” and even though they talked about today being that day before he’d left to play tennis, we knew he would still probably somehow repress it.

“I probably would have hated your wife anyway,” she announced. And then we were laughing. Tension broken.

“How will you study when you get back to school?” she implored.

“What do you mean?” I said.

She said, “How will you STUDY, knowing this?”

I said, “I’ve known it all my life and studied in the past.” Well, sometimes.

We talked for two hours. Then we heard the garage door opening. My dad was home. By the time Dad walked into the room, we were slaphappy.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I was going to go eat an orange,” he said.

“Go ahead,” I said. “We’ll be right here.”

“SEE?!?” my mom mock-whispered, in full voice. “I TOLD YOU he’d repress it.”

He returned, and I told him to sit down. He said he’d rather stand.

“I’m gay,” I said.

He sat down. And took a deep breath. He muttered “shit” and “Jesus.”

I told him it was no fault of his. He said he knew that. He asked me how long I’d known, who else knew, and if there was one particular guy I was seeing. The conversation then turned—I am not kidding—to a list of hypothetical scenarios in which girlfriends of mine entered the room naked, and whether I would get turned on by them.

“If Jeanne came in naked, would you get turned on by her?”

“Um, well, no,” I said. “But if she rubbed herself all over me, and I closed my eyes, I probably would.”

We both got up, and he walked over to me and said that whatever I decided was fine with him, that he would always be my father, and that he loved me. I told him I loved him, and we hugged, and then Mom and I hugged, and then I went to Jackie’s.

The next day my dad took me to Steak ’n Shake to talk to me about AIDS and condoms. It was as awkward as any conversation about AIDS at Steak ’n Shake could possibly be, but it only made me love him more than I ever thought I could before, and it more than made up for the time he couldn’t get me reinstated on the water polo team.

When I got back to BU, I told a couple more friends. After the hurdle of telling my parents, I wanted to pick off a few easy targets before marshaling my strength to come out to my nearest and dearest. Eight weeks after I’d returned from London, I let myself into Dave’s room, lined up five shot glasses, and filled them all from a brown-bagged bottle of Jack Daniel’s I’d brought. It was February 14.

“What’s this?” he said as he walked in the door wearing a scarlet BU jersey. He didn’t have a girlfriend, nor did he buy into the idea of a Hallmark-made holiday, so the fact that it was Valentine’s Day was thankfully not on his radar. I will go to my grave believing it was a coincidence that I told him on that day of all days, but you are welcome to insert your own Freudian theories right here.

Me and Dave. Do I look straight or what?

“I gotta talk to you,” I said. “Have a shot, or two.” He took a shot. I could tell he thought I was priming him for a typical night of fun and drinking. It took me a few minutes to get up the courage, and I did a shot before launching in.

“I need you to read this.” My hands shook as I handed him an envelope with a letter I’d written to him, which was a more personalized version of what I’d put in my journal.

We were sitting on the edge of the bed as he read the letter. It began with me reminding him how open he was and stating my hope that he could handle something that I needed him to know. I could hear my heart beating as his eyes moved down the page reading the part where I told him that I was exactly the same person he’d known and assured him that I was not physically attracted to him and that our relationship didn’t have to change. He finished the letter and turned to me.

When his eyes met mine, I flinched. I pulled back. I can’t believe it now, but at that moment what I expected was for him to hit me, to beat me up. He looked at my eyes and saw fear. But I just sat there as he came toward me and crushed me with a strong embrace.

“I love you,” Dave said. “I would never hurt you.” The bear hug did kind of hurt, but in the best way possible. Dave was shaken, but supportive. He quickly did two more shots. (I patted myself on the back for having the foresight to bring Jack Daniel’s.) He asked how long I’d known—and, most importantly, why I hadn’t told him sooner. Apparently, his parents had been on him since freshman year about whether I was gay and he’d been denying it to them all along. The longer we talked, the more he began to feel that I’d betrayed him by keeping something so big from him for so long. He wasn’t that upset that I was gay. He was upset that I’d lied. I decided to wait awhile before admitting that, additionally, I didn’t really care as much about Led Zeppelin as I’d led him to believe, either.

I spent the next few months breaking out my journal, reading my coming-out passage to various friends. Overall, the support was overwhelming, although two friends later confessed to barfing hours after our conversations. I’m going to choose to blame that one on processed foods, whether it’s true or not. Dave had a bumpier road to full acceptance, which came to require weekly phone conversations with Evelyn Cohen. I don’t know who helped whom more, but I was grateful they had each other. Even if it is incredibly weird to have your best friend calling your mom to rap about your sexual orientation.

But as for me, the road ahead, for once, seemed open and smooth. I finally felt free.

The Jewfro, brushed out to full effect, always got a laugh.

I DON’T TRANSCRIBE

In the summer of 1989 the terror I had felt about coming out—about ever fitting in—was forgotten the instant I stepped into the massive brick monstrosity on a decidedly ungentrified block of Hell’s Kitchen, a building anyone might have assumed was a rehab center or insurance headquarters if not for the simple and chic little black dress of an awning over the front entrance that read
CBS BROADCAST CENTER
.

I can remember sitting in the den in St. Louis as a thirteen-year-old with my mom and our neighbor, Mrs. Arkin, while they drank their scotch and watched Walter Cronkite hand the
CBS Evening News
over to Dan Rather in 1981. Even as a ’tween, I knew what a huge deal this was. It was an era when anchormen were anchormen—trusted, unbiased, larger-than-life authorities on the news. They were real journalists who mattered.