Swish (3 page)

By the time Mike’s move was at hand, I had finished only one sock of the pair. In the few days I had left, I tried heroically to complete the other, sitting up nights turning the heel and decreasing like mad, but in the end the task was beyond me. The evening before he was to depart for the frozen north—thank God—I gave him the finished sock and an IOU. I knew I was creating the potential for messiness here: if I’d given him both socks, I could have made a clean break, whereas by incurring a debt I risked maintaining a closer connection to him than I wanted. My plan was therefore to finish the companion sock quickly, send it to him, and then e-dump him.

Unfortunately before I could do so he wrote from Boston asking me what was going on. Were we still boyfriends? Did we have a future? Would I go antiquing with him in the spring? I replied evasively, as was my custom with him. It was not clear to me whether we had ever been boyfriends, I said, I wasn’t sure whether we had a future, and I didn’t know whether I would go antiquing with him in the spring. All of this was a lie; it was clear, and I was sure, and I did know. But I couldn’t bring myself to say so, because he might have gotten mad at me.

He had dated me for nine months, though, and I suspected that he was able to see through this tergiversation to the rejection behind it; my suspicions were strengthened when he didn’t respond to my e-mail. This wouldn’t have been a problem except for the unfinished sock. The way I saw it, I had three options: 1) I could finish it and send it to him; he was, after all, its intended recipient, and my having broken up with him didn’t change that. Or 2) I could finish the sock in my size, get the yarn to make another matching sock, and keep the pair for myself. Or 3) I could leave the sock unfinished, to act as a beacon to my real true love, calling him to me as surely as a siren calls a sailor to the shore. Fate would deposit him on my doorstep, he would tell me his foot size, and I would finish the sock and knit a matching one. In a modern-day Cinderella ending, he would see that the sock fit his foot like…well, like a sock, and we would live happily ever after.

I had more or less decided on 3)—if nothing else it would allow me to stop bumping into people as I walked down the street because I was so engrossed in my knitting—when Mike sent me an e-mail with the subject heading “I want my sock!” It was an extraordinary piece of writing, full of forgiveness and warmth and wit. If I had been a character in a novel, this would have made me fall in love with him and we would have ended up getting married. Sadly, I was not a character in a novel. I moped around my apartment for the rest of the day, knowing that no one would ever love me and that I didn’t deserve to be loved anyway. Then I had sex with a stranger and on the 1 train back from his apartment I finished the sock, which I sent Mike the next day along with a lame note.

As I stood in line at the post office, sock-filled envelope in hand, I looked up at the grubby calendar on the wall and realized that it was ten years almost to the day I had last seen my mother alive. By the time I finished high school, the two of us had reached a détente: she no longer voiced any displeasure with my choice to be openly gay, and I did not push her for more. But the rift between us never mended completely. In 1992, in the morning hours before I left for my sophomore year of college, we sat together on the porch of my family’s ramshackle beach house and watched the tide ebb out to sea, knowing she would not live to see Thanksgiving. From the stereo inside, Joan Baez sang a song about the honest lullaby her mother had sung her, a song my mother had taught me years before, guitar on her knee and tenderness in her voice.

“We’ve had a lot of time together,” my mother said to me as the waves washed farther and farther away, “and a lot of that time we’ve been really close, so it’s as if we’d had twice as much time as we’ve actually had.” As we laughed the next song started, about how for all we knew we might never meet again, and we had to love each other tonight because tomorrow might never come.

My father came out to tell me we had to leave for the airport. I stayed put, because I knew what was coming next; moments later the air vibrated with Joan’s rendition of the spiritual from which thousands of people had drawn strength for hundreds of years. She was free at last, she sang, free from the world and all its sin; she was free at last, for she had been to the top of the mountain.

“Goodbye, Mom,” I said, and walked out to the idling car.

A few months later, the day before the 1992 presidential election, my father called to tell me my mother wasn’t long for this world. I flew home that night, but she, lying on a knitted blanket in her pale, wasted frame and her clean blue-and-white nightgown, barely breathing, had really already left, and nothing I could say would matter to her now. I flew back north the next morning. Her final earthly act of
tikkun olam
had been to sign her absentee ballot; shortly after Bill Clinton’s victory speech, she breathed her last. After my father called to give me the news, at two or three in the morning, I went to the campus church—I helped run the choir, so I had keys—and sat for an hour at the organ playing my favorite hymn:
Deck thyself, my soul, with gladness! Leave the gloomy haunts of sadness; come into the daylight’s splendor!
Then I called my friend Peter and we went out for pizza and he obviously wanted to console me but I did not meet his gaze and when we spoke it was only to gossip about friends and professors because what I felt was unnameable and because I feared putting it into words would shatter me.

Yesterday, after finishing a pair of socks for my friend Victoria, I started knitting a polka-dotted tea cozy. This is my first felted project; that is to say, once I’m finished knitting it, I’ll put it in the washing machine and when I take it out it will be not a shapeless mass full of little holes but a piece of imperforate green, lavender, orange, and light blue polka-dotted felt the perfect shape and size to keep a teapot warm.

The pattern I’m using requires only a small amount of the light blue yarn, but almost right away I found myself working it into places it wasn’t called for. The blue is the exact color of my mother’s dress in the painting that hung above my family’s fireplace for years; the oils depicted a four-year-old with short hair and a little ball in her hands. I asked her once why she looked so sad in the painting. “I was terrified,” she said. “Your grandmother wanted me holding that ball in the painting but I almost hadn’t been able to find it. And I knew what would happen if I made her angry.”

“Why is the painting up there if it’s such an unhappy memory?”

“So I can look at it every day and remind myself that I vowed never to do to my children what my mother did to me.”

And I believe my mother kept that vow.

So how then can she have done everything within her power to protect me and yet still not have done enough? How is it that into the boundless love I feel for her is woven inextricably such a boundless rage? How, if there is a merciful Mother, am I not remade and restored?

Last night I didn’t get much sleep, because, as usually happens when I begin a new knitting project, I stayed awake long past my bedtime, turning the lights off and saying to myself again and again that I would knit (or purl) just one more round and then I would go to sleep. There was a
Law & Order: SVU
marathon on and for a while I concentrated on Chris Meloni as I worked, but when I turned the TV off there was still light coming in through my window from the streetlamp outside, so I continued to knit in silence and watched the fabric growing in my hands.

O
N
C
ASUAL
S
EX

I
t was sometime in the fall of 2001, I believe, that Tom broke up with me. It may very well have been on Thursday, October 17, at 8:12 in the evening, in an anticlimactic conversation on Broadway between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth, on the east side of the street, just north of French Roast—but really, who can remember these things after so much time has passed?

We were one of several Manhattan couples I knew whose relationships didn’t survive the terrorist attacks on September 11, but I suspect that the writing had been on the wall for us well before the planes flew into the World Trade Center. That night, as I sat stunned in front of the television, staring at Paula Zahn with glassy eyes, Tom stepped over to me and put a hand on my shoulder and said gently, “We’ll come through this. There will always be evil in the world, but you’ll see—America will be courageous enough to face this and in the end we’ll only become a stronger nation.”

And I looked up at him and, through my tears, I found the strength somewhere to shriek, “Who gives a
fuck
about that when
YOU FORGOT TO TAKE THE DOG OUT LAST NIGHT
?”

We started seeing a couples therapist, hoping to repair whatever fraying bond still connected us, but he told us in the middle of our third session that we really needed to break up. So we took his advice, and then I did what any sensible gay man of
twenty-nine
twenty-eight
twenty-six in my position would do: I became a ravening slut.

As I see it, the problem with heterosexual sex is that it involves two creatures whose evolution (if biologists are to be believed) has given them conflicting needs. For women, I am given to understand, physical desire and emotional intimacy go hand in hand. Men are not like this. We just want sex. And since the people gay men want sex with, being men themselves,
also
just want sex, everything becomes remarkably easy, at least for those who wish it to be. Many don’t wish it to be, of course, and of course even the most promiscuous among us can also dream of a lasting connection to a man with whom to raise children or at least a small dog. But casual sex tends to be a much simpler proposition. The individuals involved don’t run into each other again, at least not until we’re at a party with a date and realize we have to avoid five-eighths of the men in the room because we can’t remember their names.

I had never been a slut before. Tom had been my first real boyfriend, but even prior to meeting him I had not held the idea of casual sex in high esteem. When I came out of the closet in junior high, my head was filled with fantasies of a man who would bring me flowers and—would God I were making this up—take me for walks on the beach. Never mind that I cry when I get sand in my shoes; I still wanted to date a Hallmark card. By the time I finished college, I had gotten over my naive insistence that sex and love were inextricably intertwined. I was still foolish enough, however, to believe that intercourse was somehow more magical if you had seen your partner in more than one shirt.

Then I moved to New York.

Ah, New York, the cradle of Gay Liberation, where you can so comport yourself as to be incapable of walking a block without bumping into somebody you’ve slept with. Yet for a long time the night found me far more often in the arms of Morpheus than of, um, Whatshisname. This was partially because I was throwing all my energy into my graduate program in musical theater writing; mostly, though, it was because I was fat. Compared with much of the rest of America, I was average, or perhaps slightly overweight; furthermore, I am shaped in such a way that I didn’t look as big as I could have. But in gay weight I was Jabba the Hutt. During the holidays I was Jabba the Hutt’s fatter cousin, the one who goes to Hutt family barbecues and is offered celery sticks.

But my weight plummeted in the waning days of my relationship, as I found myself doing things like consuming the entirety of an Entenmann’s Chocolate Fudge Cake for breakfast and then eating nothing else until the next morning. Occasionally, in the days immediately following Tom’s departure, I would open the kitchen cabinet and catch sight of, say, a package of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and instead of eating it I would dissolve into impassioned sobs when I recalled that
Tom and I had once eaten Kraft Macaroni and Cheese together.

Gradually, however, pasta lost the power to make me want to kill myself, and one morning I realized that, far from rendering me unlovable, being svelte, single, and
twenty-six
twenty-five opened up a world of possibility to me. I was free—free to spread my fledgling wings, free to become the person I wanted to be, free to soar in search of my soul. So I joined
men4sexnow.com
.

Thank God somebody invented the Internet. I have trouble ordering pizza because I’m scared I’ll make a mistake and the guy on the other end of the phone will immediately realize that I am so far beneath his notice I’m not even worth mocking. Naturally, then, the idea of going to a bar and trying to figure out whether the look a cute guy was giving me meant “let’s go back to my place and have the kind of sex we’ll both remember for the rest of our days” or “oh, yuck” made me want to peel my skin off. My fragile psyche was simply not up to the task.

Men4sexnow.com
was therefore a greater boon to me than I suspect its architects imagined, as the system is designed to eliminate even the slightest trace of uncertainty. Anybody who has spent time on a dating website will be familiar with the principles of online matches; the only difference on
men4sexnow.com
is that no one pretends to care who your favorite authors are. Instead, you list information of actual practical value—the measurements of relevant body parts, the times of day you’re available for liaisons, and, most importantly, your sexual interests (“Jacking Off,” “Spanking,” “Anything Goes”). The parameters of the database to which you are then allowed access are marvelously specific: you can look for Latino bottoms who are HIV-positive and willing to “host” (as opposed to “traveling”); you can look for tops under the age of twenty-three who live in your borough and are over six feet tall; you can look for men who feel a sense of existential despair so crushing as nearly to prevent them from leaving their apartments in the morning and who are uncircumcised and into public sex.

With such a comprehensive search apparatus at my disposal, it was not long before I made my first contact. Browsing the list of members one Friday night (I hadn’t yet sunk to trolling for anonymous sex on Tuesday morning, though I would reach such a pass soon enough), I saw a picture of an attractive man with salt-and-pepper hair whose carnal interests matched mine (“1 on 1 Sex”). The sticking point was that I lived in Washington Heights and he lived in the Financial District, which, for the benefit of those who have never been to Manhattan, is like saying I lived in Montreal and he lived in Buenos Aires. But as a budding harlot I realized I would never reach full bloom without making a few sacrifices, so I agreed to meet him at his apartment.

On the A train downtown I flipped through a copy of
Us Weekly,
pausing here and there to read more about Rupert Everett’s hair or the Olsen twins’ deep appreciation of vinyasa yoga. Then I saw an item about Johnny Depp and a movie in which he was going to be playing
Peter Pan
author J. M. Barrie, and I was transfixed.

I have worshipped Johnny Depp ever since the premiere, when I was fourteen, of
21 Jump Street,
the television series that launched the Fox network and rocketed him to stardom. I looked forward to the first episode as if it were Christmas without the drunk relatives. Cops going secretly into high schools where they would doubtless make drug busts in locker rooms filled with half-naked football players still dirty from the field or wet from the shower—what could possibly be more appealing to a boy feeling the first stirrings of something to which he couldn’t even put a name? Or, rather, of something to which he could put a name but the name was
sissy homo faggot
?

In the
21 Jump Street
pilot, Johnny Depp played the straitlaced Officer Tom Hanson, transferred unwillingly to the Jump Street Unit. This was a band of ephebic police officers who, under the guidance of the tatterdemalion Captain Jenko, disguised themselves as Cool Kids and infiltrated schools at which there were Problems. Upon Hanson’s arrival, the other officers took one look at his starched shirt and barbershop haircut and realized there was no way he could pass for a Cool Kid without a major overhaul. And so in a two-minute montage accompanied by Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life Again,” Officer Huffs (played by the incomprehensibly beautiful Holly Robinson) turned him into a completely different person. She outfitted him in stonewashed jeans and a leather jacket; she teased his hair to an altitude I found dangerously seductive (this was, after all, 1987); she took him to an arcade where she taught him to play video games, eat hot dogs, and laugh, three activities in which he had apparently never before engaged; she corrected his taste in LPs by discarding his choices at the record store in favor of other, more stylish albums; and, finally, she pierced his left ear—in those days only fags pierced their right ears—and adorned it with an earring the size of a chandelier. To top it all off, a stern but supportive Captain Jenko educated him on the Cool Kids’ two basic food groups, potato chips and soda. “Back in the High Life Again” faded out and there stood sneering disciplinary nightmare Tom Bauer, dripping disdain on the outside but secretly ready to come to the rescue of any troubled high school student who needed him.

The episode went on for another hour and a half but those two minutes had imprinted themselves so spectacularly on my brain that I paid very little attention.

It wasn’t that I was in love with Johnny Depp. Of course I
was
in love with Johnny Depp, but my fascination ran deeper than that. I had spent my life being overjoyed to do as I was expected to do—overjoyed to get good grades, overjoyed to be polite, overjoyed to speak when spoken to—because I had no idea that the universe admitted of any other choice. Before
21 Jump Street
I had never seen anybody break the mold in which society had cast him and assume instead a shape of his own choosing. I had never before seen somebody I admired understand what was expected of him, choose to act otherwise, and be happier for it. For the first time in my life I realized that it was possible to reinvent oneself.

So I reinvented my adolescent self, with a vengeance, in the image of Johnny Depp.

All right, not
exactly
in the image of Johnny Depp. He had dark hair and cheekbones with which one could slit one’s wrists; I was a redhead and my acne was so bad it eventually required pharmacological intervention. He was a heroic TV star; I was a fey child secretly delighted by the rumors that I had read the
Encyclopædia Britannica
for fun. Nevertheless, I had grasped the essence of Johnny Depp’s makeover, and I swung into action. I bought some corduroy pants and a pair of Jams from JCPenney to supplement the school-approved khaki slacks of which most of my wardrobe had until now been composed. I bought a week’s supply of Snickers bars to eat for breakfast and gum to chew at school (though only during break and lunch, since chewing gum during class was against the rules). I looked in the Yellow Pages under “Hair” for the trendiest-sounding establishment I could find, which proved to be a place called Whispers Hair in Motion. Puzzled briefly by the absence of a subject—“
Who
whispers hair in motion?” I kept asking myself;
“Who? Who?”
—I decided that, mystifying syntax notwithstanding, this would still be a vast improvement over Mooney’s Barber Shop. When I arrived for my appointment at what I had come to think of as Whispers: Hair in Motion, my stylist introduced himself as Jean. At the time he seemed both ancient and French, but the wisdom that has come with age tells me he was thirty-two and faking the accent. I was both tantalized and deeply disturbed when he flirtatiously aimed the blow-dryer at my crotch after giving me a haircut that, in South Carolina in the days when people still knew who Soleil Moon Frye was, might as well have come straight off the runway in Milan.

Of course the corduroy pants went in the wash at some point, and Jams were against the school dress code, so I had to wear the khakis again, and after I spent all my allowance on Snickers I had to go back to Rice Krispies for breakfast, and when break and lunch arrived I usually forgot to chew gum. I did continue to patronize Whispers: Hair in Motion for a few years, but I was never brave enough to take Jean up on his offer of a massage at his apartment. Eventually he gave me far too stylish a haircut the day before my junior prom, and I dumped him for TJ of TJ’s Hair Space.

But what remained through college and into what passed for my adulthood was the delectable, slightly unsettling knowledge that I could decide for myself who I wanted to be, and that I could make that decision as easily as I could, alas, put on a pair of Jams. This had been my governing principle since the premiere of
21 Jump Street,
even though the show went off the air in 1991. The summer I decided to become a strictly observant Jew; the year I spent at the gym making myself buff; the semester I started wearing vests and a pocket watch—it was Johnny Depp who had made them all possible. Officers Hanson, Huff, Ioki, and Penhall were eventually supplanted on Fox by the ravings of Ann Coulter, but I kept reforging myself over and over in the fires of whatever fancies seized me.