Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (12 page)

“From the moment I first took notice of Andrew, that day in chemistry, I felt that riveting desire for him. Something about his presence was a potent stimulant. I was drawn by the dark hair, the olive complexion, his casual masculine build…I don’t remember exactly what brought him to my attention, just that while watching his flamboyant actions, his intensely charming style, I was struck by a single thought that I recall very clearly as being the simple, unspoken statement: ‘My God, this boy is gay.’”

Except he wasn’t.

Andrew was just a hippie in yuppie’s clothing, a fun guy with a big ego that was probably stroked by the fact that his three best male friends (of which I would eventually become one) all wanted to sleep with him. Spoiler alert: All of the best friends slept with each other in lieu of bagging Andrew.

I filled my journal with every detail of Andrew’s life I could glean, with every observation of his words and actions. Even a convicted stalker would read this shit and be like, “Whoa, dude,” but I thought of it as true love on a Shakespearean level. He was dating off-and-on a radiant girl named Laura who I liked a lot, but from whom I plotted to man-poach on a daily basis. That Andrew probably wasn’t gay was no matter. Even though my own sexual identity had dawned on me organically and over a very long period of time, coming to a head at Christian summer camp at age 11 when I made sure I was in the cabin at the time my bunkmate would get naked because I really just needed to see his penis, I convinced myself that maybe Andrew was in need of a more formal sexual-orientation orientation, and that I would be a good guide.

I decided, with an alarming degree of deliberateness, that I needed to befriend Andrew, tell him I was gay, make it clear I wanted to be his boyfriend, and then do the deed with him. Because as a teenage boy, sex was love and love was sex. “Love is sex and sex is heaven, we’re the class of ’87.”

I started by chatting Andrew up. He was a Beatles fan, I was Mr. Madonna—and we sparred over that enough that I thought I might never break through to him. He did like my intellectual spunk, though, and also didn’t mind how nakedly I fanboyed him. I saw all of his plays and even had him sign the programs—I was stage-dooring a dude from my Chemistry class.

“Thanks for coming!” he wrote on one, and I wondered for hours if he was making a crude double-entendre. “As the good book says, ‘Merci beaucoup mon ami’” on another led me into a fantasy about French-active vs. French-passive.

At the height of my unhealthy mooning over Andrew, he landed a part in a legit community-theater production of Neil Simon’s
Brighton Beach Memoirs
. I was old enough to drive, so I bought a ticket and went and saw it without even telling him in advance. It was obvious why I’d see him in school plays, but I felt like following him to a city-wide production would be comparable to telling him it gave me a woodie when he told me I was an idiot for liking Madonna.

Unable to contain myself, I went into a flower shop across from The Fair Store and had roses delivered to the theater along with a skillfully handwritten (not in my writing) note that identified myself as a secret admirer. I’m sure this drove him crazy, and I never told him it was me. Even now, I am scared writing about it, even though I know that nothing about me would shock him anymore, and even though my feelings for him came crashing down before the Berlin Wall did.

Still, shadowing his acting career wasn’t getting me close enough.

Though I’d been friends with Mike and Eric and my other D&D buds since fourth grade, I cut them off. I saw Eric at work, but rarely elsewhere as I started piecing together where best to single-mindedly pursue Andrew. Because he was popular, he was involved in things like the student council. No interest there—my stint as a seventh-grade class treasurer had ended in disgrace when I’d gotten distracted watching cartoons at home and missed 95% of our year-end meeting. I bawled my eyes out and wailed how much I hated myself over the shame, taking it as seriously as a Japanese white-collar criminal, before my concerned mom talked me into splashing cold water on my face and showing up late with a lie that my aunt had been near death. (She’s
still
alive. No one bought it. I still have the ledger.) My mom was annoyingly good at knowing when I needed to be consoled, the worst time being when I was sobbing in the shower over Andrew and she gently knocked on the door to ask why I was crying.

“I’m not!” I chirped. “I’m singing!”

Instead of letting it go, she nudged me in her softest voice, “I know you’re crying.”

I wouldn’t hear of admitting it; all of my high school drama was something I was going to face alone.

Andrew was popular, yes, but because he was also artsy, his
real
hangout was where all the cool kids went, the Barkeys.

Kelly Barkey was a drop-dead cool girl who was kind of an unofficial queen of the alternative set. She had a Warholian otherness to her. She was not only artsy, she was artful, a gifted painter and progressive thinker. Most interestingly, as intimidatingly cool as Kelly was, she was no culture snob: She loved Taco Bell runs and was completely easy to talk to, girlish in spite of her Siouxsie Sioux packaging.

Kelly’s homestead had become Ground Zero for the kids who were smart and creative, the square pegs who didn’t fit into round holes. They weren’t exactly geeky, but their cerebral approach to sci fi novels and midnight movies and non-Top 40 music differentiated them from the popular kids. Some of them really looked down on Andrew for being a student council/jock type. Most of them drank, dropped acid, and smoked pot, none of which was in my comfort zone. In seventh grade, my teacher Miss Jones, who had boobs all the boys stared at like dogs in those “ultimate dog tease” videos stare at treats, had announced to us that some of us would start taking drugs and she wanted us to think long and hard and decide not to. I remember thinking she was completely delusional; no one from Flushing would take
drugs
. I had no idea many already were. By my senior year in high school, I still wasn’t comfortable with the prevalence of drugs. Now that I’m heading toward AARP-ville, I’m
still
not completely blasé about the fact that people take drugs. I think I value control a little too much.

Anyway, I insinuated myself into the Barkey crowd by signing up for the art class taught by Mr. Wolfgang, a painter who encouraged self-expression at the top of his lungs every single day. I had strong technical ability, having spent years carefully copying record sleeves and doing portraiture in pencils, a flare that caught Mr. Wolfgang’s—and Kelly’s—eye.

Kelly slinked up to me—she was an angular beauty with the eyes of a mythical forest creature who did everything with the leisurely pace of a bored movie star or foreign princess—and offered me compliments on my drawings. But both she and Mr. Wolfgang thought I should be less literal.

“Free your mind…get crazy!” Mr. Wolfgang would exhort over whatever soundtrack was playing that day; he let us take turns signing up to bring in albums to play, so I always brought in pop like Debbie Harry and Erasure. I didn’t dare bring in Bronski Beat yet.

I had a breakthrough using the insurance company-branded, fine-tipped black markers of which my dad had an unlimited supply in the basement and I started drawing in a large sketchpad. Instead of trying to capture the exact pose or expression of Madonna, Greta Garbo, or Marlene Dietrich, I drew a slightly Asiatic male face, suggesting hair with a series of interlocking shapes. The left half of “his”—did I mention how transgender he appears?—face is a lion-like mask. From there, I drew without thinking. I let even the images in my mind become abstract. Clearly drunk on my appreciation for Dal
í
and not uninfluenced by Escher and my long love affair with D&D, the drawing eventually filled the entire page with three-dimensional doorways, checkered ballroom floors, and indefinable figures with shamelessly exposed breasts and shamefully concealed identities. It was a black-and-white horror. I called it “The Beautiful Leper”, and realized it was the first
real
thing I’d ever drawn.

When I showed my work to Mr. Wolfgang, I was hoping he’d be approving, but I couldn’t have guessed how supportive he’d be—after all, tits were happening in this thing. Mr. Wolfgang showed the entire class what I’d done and told them to use me as their example. I’d poured all my angst into this thing, and it had brought me high praise. But my angst was self-refilling, so I had no trouble duplicating my effort on a daily basis, getting weirder, wilder, and more provocative. I was razzed for all the naked breasts I drew, so I created one intricate piece called “Boob Hunt”, inside of which I hid a dozen breasts to be found. I also incorporated words into my drawings, my writerly side seeping in. I would use a dippy lyric from a Company B tune and give it new meaning in the context of an ominous drawing, or I’d cut to the chase, such as in one illustration of a confidently grinning male model on whose chest is emblazoned, “Charm is a game. You win handfuls of friends but find you desire none of them.”

Hey, I said it was real, not real good.

Among the handfuls of friends I was winning were more than a couple I actually
did
desire.

In my journal, I wrote: “Something that really bothers me is how I can become so aroused by such a large number of men.” Readers of my blog will LOL at this one.

I know it’s true that I
thought
I was a conservative as a teenager at the same time I
knew
I was gay because I have a journal entry from November 5, 1984, in which I wrote of the next day’s presidential election:

“I am a strong Republican-believer and I, therefore, hope Ronald Reagan will win.”

I also sniffed that “burn-outs and sluts make up one-third of Flushing’s students” (there’s that superiority complex again), so I guess I really was a Republican.

But in the same journal, I was crushing on a flirty female classmate and saying she was “sexy” and would hopefully date me, so it’s hard to really rely on anything I wrote as heartfelt.

In line with my apparent right-wing mentality, I was staunchly anti-abortion. I felt it was murder, but I think also in the same way some of the guys who are currently most infuriated by the advent of PrEP make arguments about how PrEP makes casual sex safer and therefore more likely to happen (which should be a net gain), my belief was also that if a woman was enough of a dumb slut, she should have to pay for it and not get off easy.

Thinking of other people as sluts is a sign not only of conservatism, but of a warped relationship with what sexual expression really is. Being a closet case can definitely warp that relationship and make you lash out against anyone who seems not to be as messed up as you are when it comes to getting off.

Though it’s hard for me to truly remember, without my own journals as embarrassing proof, how Republican I was as a teen (I was so on board with invading Grenada…go, U.S.A.!), the reason I strongly remember being anti-abortion is that it was a topic I argued almost daily with my best female friend in high school, Sue.

I actually don’t even know how I first got to know Sue, but she sat in front of me in French class and seemed to enjoy engaging me in debate. She was seen as bookish and even boyish thanks to her short hair, but it was funny to me because she actually looked like an Italian movie starlet from the early ‘60s going incognito as a strait-laced student. She had beautiful, thick eyebrows and lashes, bedroom eyes, a feminine laugh that was coy and insinuating, and an hourglass figure often hidden under plaid shirts and in jeans a dude might wear. She also had a temper like a flash fire when in the throes of argument.

As we talked about the kinds of things the smart kids talked about—books, our grades, current events—abortion almost always came up. She was unreservedly for a woman’s right to choose and I was against both the act and the concept that men in our society should have no say on the topic. We would fight about it with the same kind of electricity you’d find on an A+ episode of
Moonlighting
, even though our actual chemistry was more Alan Turing/Joan Clarke.

My only concession was that of course an abortion should be performed if the life of the mother and/or child were in jeopardy.

I remember one day when our French teacher, a sweet lady who walked like she was a marionette under the control of a novice puppeteer, interjected, telling me I was wrong.

“I think it’s even more important not to allow an abortion in that case,” she told me. It seemed like madness to me and made me re-think my position a little. Even more damaging to my conviction that abortion was wrong was what happened when I repeated to Sue something I’d been told at church.