What Binds Us (2 page)

I smelled him before I saw him or even heard his voice. It was a smell that was peculiarly his own—clove cigarettes and sex. A scent that clung to him even when he was freshly showered.

Our high-rise dorm “suite” consisted of a living room, a small kitchenette, a bathroom and a bedroom with aluminum bunk beds and two desks. When I entered what would be our shared bedroom, he was leaning back in his desk chair, legs up and crossed, back to me, the telephone receiver cradled between neck and shoulder. His long, pale feet were shod in ox-blood penny loafers; a few dark hairs emerged from beneath the cuff of his khaki trousers and curled in sensuous abandon around a naked ankle. A faint beard, like an afternoon shadow—the stamp of a strident manhood—tattooed his tanned face bluish-green. A thick mane of strawberry-blond locks swept back from his forehead and cascaded over the upturned collar of his pink polo shirt.

He looked around suddenly and saw me. He winked at me, his long eyelashes inscribing a graceful arc from brow to cheekbone. He indicated he’d be off the phone in a minute.

I continued to study him. He seemed about my age, but while I felt barely begun, he seemed complete, an epilogue to a fantastic story. With a mouth like a piece of open fruit that, over-ripe, had fallen to the ground and burst, spilling its bounty; he gave the impression that the best had gone before and all that remained was the dying.

He laughed suddenly, the sound like gunfire—a small explosion that mushroomed into the room and lingered for a moment before fading. Light skipped through his hair, gilding particular strands.

He was, I decided, altogether too theatrical: the drama of his red-gold hair, his rich tanned skin, his air of “playing to an audience.” His voice had a breathless quality, as if he’d just been somewhere fabulous and couldn’t wait to tell you about it. His intonation and inflection lent his words, no matter how innocuous, a certain effeminate insinuation. And he was loud, so that even a conversation as apparently intimate as this one was delivered to be heard from across the room.

With a shouted, “Darling!” he hung up the phone and in an astonishingly fluid motion, swung his legs off the desk and rose to his feet. “Hi,” he boomed, “you must be Thomas-Edward. I’m Donovan Dion Whyte. My friends call me Dondi. Since we’ll be roommates, I presume we’ll be friends.” He offered me his hand as if it were a gift. “I took your bed,” he said, gesturing toward the bunk beds. It was only then I realized my bed had been switched from top to bottom and neatly remade. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m a top.”

I said nothing, struck dumb by his beauty, imprisoned by his gaze.

“Have you seen the campus yet?” Dondi asked me.

“Not really.”

“Well, come on then. Let’s see what we’ve gotten ourselves into.” He headed for the door.

I followed.

I soon found myself marching to the irresistible beat of a very different drummer.

Dondi became my guide, my Virgil, on my personal odyssey of self-discovery. I remember our freshman year so clearly. I wore Chanel For Men and he wore an ankle-length black wool cape with a hood. He swept around campus like Batman. I, Robin more often than not, trailed in his glamorous wake. Over Christmas break I sent him a card that stated a simple truth: “This Robin misses his Batman.”

He was twenty, three years older than I was. He’d lost a year, early on, to rheumatic fever. He’d deferred his admission to Penn for a year. And he was rich. This he confided not as a boast, but as a point of information. There was, he said, a 1957 Studebaker Golden Hawk in the campus garage. I could borrow it whenever I liked. The keys were in the top drawer of his desk. He himself seldom used it, as he hated driving, was in fact a bad driver. “Too careless,” he explained, shrugging his shoulders. If he seemed worldly, it was because he was.

We ended up in the same Calculus class and the same Latin recitation. I’d skated through high school with straight A’s, rarely opening a book outside of class except to do homework. Calculus, however, was a different matter. Math, like money, was a mystery to me; I cared nothing about either. Dondi had a head for numbers, could absorb the impossible abstractions of
x
and
y
with an ease I could only envy. He tutored me tirelessly, sharing his notes with me, explaining the arcane theories of a thousand years of mathematicians.

One day he failed to turn up in his usual seat next to me in Calculus lecture hall. I hadn’t been able to keep my mind from wandering, hadn’t even been able to follow the lecture long enough to tell Dondi what the subject was. I closed my notebook and, with a sigh, rose to leave with scores of other freshman who looked as baffled as I felt. As I came down the ancient marble steps of David Rittenhouse Lab, Dondi called me from across the street through the open window of a taxicab. “C’mon, slowpoke.”

I got in, threw my books on the seat between us. “Where were you?”

“Never mind,” he said.

The cab pulled away from the curb and moved downtown.

“Where are we going?”

“New York.”

“New York?”

“Yeah—”

“Dondi, I can’t just pick up and go to New York. I have classes—”

“Tomorrow,” he said dismissively. “You have classes tomorrow. I know. I checked. So, you’re free the rest of today. We’ll be back tonight.”

“I still can’t go,” I tried again. “I don’t have money for that.”

“I’m rich, remember? I’ll pay,” he said, as casually as if I’d said, “I have no change for the parking meter,” and he’d answered, “I have quarters.”

We went shopping: Macy’s. B.Altman. Bergdorf Goodman. Bloomingdale’s. Tiffany. We went to the Fiorucci store on Fifth Avenue—designed by Ettore Sottsass, Andrea Branzi and Franco Marbelli, it was a living carnival known as “Studio 54 daytime.” We’d hoped to see Andy Warhol or Diana Ross. Instead Dondi bought us half a dozen pairs of jeans in colorful canisters and had them shipped back to Philly.

Next Dondi hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take us to The Dakota.

“What’s there?” I asked.

Dondi drew a breath dramatically. “You can’t be serious? John Lennon and Yoko Ono live there.”

“Oh.”

Dondi sat back and stared out the window. “John Lennon is a genius,” he said.

We must have traversed the block in front of the building for an hour before hailing another cab.

We fed the pigeons in Central Park and ate hot dogs standing at Nathan’s bright orange counter. We rode the subway to the Staten Island ferry. Then rode the ferry back and forth. We stayed up all night.

In the morning we caught the first Metroliner back to Philadelphia. We weren’t even late for Latin.

***

Finally, weeks later, over an outrageously expensive brunch at Wildflowers—eggs Benedict and champagne—he asked me, “Are you gay?”

“Yes… You know, I don’t think I’ve ever said that out loud before. How about you?”

“Oh, no. I never say it out loud. Actually I’m bisexual.”

“Oh.”

“Tell me, do you have a lover back home?”

I thought of Jeff. The preacher’s son. How badly things had ended. “No,” I answered.

“Do you ever go out?”

“Out?”

“You know, dancing? Have you ever been to a gay bar?”

“In New Jersey?”

He took me to a club called Horses. It was located in an alley, the narrow passageway lit by a series of neon silhouettes of rider-less horses rearing against the night. Inside it was dark. A miasma of cigarette smoke rolled across the dance floor like fog. Gyrating male bodies sweated, glistened, struck a pose and, strobe-lit, paused then danced on, carried away on a wave of pounding rhythm. It was here a man told me for the first time that I was cute. I remember navy blue eyes, a hooked nose, the words floating out of the dark: “I don’t usually go for black guys, but you’re cute. Would you like to go home with me?”

I turned and stumbled toward the door.

“Hey! You can’t leave here with that.” A bouncer loomed out of the shadows and wrestled the bottle of Rolling Rock out of my hand.

***

“You must meet Calvin and Eddie,” Dondi said the night after my disastrous debut. “Calvin’s a troll, but Eddie’s a beauty.”

Calvin was very tall and extremely thin. As a child he’d been pale, fragile, with features so unremarkable that once you turned away from him it was impossible to reconstruct his face. Thus, he’d found himself in the embarrassing position of having to introduce himself repeatedly to the same neighborhood children. That changed the year he turned fourteen and shot up a foot and a half. He’d continued to grow until he was seventeen. He now stood six foot seven. Once he got to Penn he discovered that his great height, coupled with the stunning presence of Eddie, conspired to free him at last from anonymity.

Eddie came out of the bathroom, a white towel wrapped around his waist, the curve of his penis clearly visible beneath the terrycloth. “Hi, I’m Eddie,” he introduced himself. He spoke softly, a vague accent playing hide-and-go-seek with his words. He was a sloe-eyed beauty. His features were so perfect that looking at him, I could believe God had created man in his own image. A vein in his temple jumped, disturbing for a moment the almost magical sweep of his brow. There was a depression in the flesh between his upper lip and his nose. I wanted to lay a finger there, to feel his scorching breath.

Their apartment contained a futon and cinderblock bookcases. Secondhand furniture draped in sheets was a ghostly presence in the dimly lit studio. In the kitchen a lone canary sang arias, apparently undaunted by his imprisonment in an elaborate gilded and painted rosewood regency birdcage. Billy Joel was a constant vocal presence. I had grown up listening to calypso and the Ray Coniff singers, so to me Calvin and Eddie’s music was exotic.

Dondi and I spent most of our free time with Calvin and Eddie. It was in their small, cluttered apartment that my education began in earnest.

One night when we arrived at their apartment, Calvin answered the door. The son of one of his father’s business associates had stopped in for a visit. “He’s straight,” he cautioned us, “so behave yourselves.”

Calvin was nervous and watched over us like a hawk. He watched every word as it fell from his lips as if it had physical dimensions and could, at any second, turn against him. Eddie was so self-conscious that he sat with his legs spread wide, his big, dark eyes smoldering, and barely said a word all evening.

The whole charade fell apart when Pat, their neighbor, sailed in the door without knocking, hands fluttering like a flock of startled birds. “Girls! Girls!” he shrieked. Seeing Barry, he stopped short. “Who’s
she
?” he asked sotto voce.

“Barry,” Calvin said tightly, “This is my neighbor, Pat.”

“
Patricia
, if you don’t mind. And I can introduce myself.” Pat glided over and offered Barry his hand. “
Enchanté
,” he deliberately lisped.

Barry looked uncomfortable, his chapped hand imprisoned in Pat’s manicured one. His eyes contained the desperate look of a drowning man.

“What
is
the matter with everyone?” Pat cried, moving across the room, arms akimbo, hips swaying. He spotted Dondi, who was in the kitchen mixing a pitcher of martinis (even then, he drank martinis). “Daughter!” He sashayed over and leaned forward in an attempt to kiss Dondi on the lips.

Dondi pulled away. Pat lost his balance. On his way to the floor, his spasming hand reached for the table, sought purchase on the tablecloth, succeeded only in bringing everything to the ground with him.

Dondi, while we watched in horrified amazement, simply stepped over Pat’s prostrate body and walked to the couch. “So, Barry,” he asked, sitting down, “how about those seventy-sixers?”

“Ahh…umm…yes, well… I think I’d better be going.”

Calvin bounded to his feet and ushered him to the door. “Well, thanks for coming by. Give my best to your parents.” He thrust Barry’s overcoat into his arms and shoved him through the door. Once the door was closed, he leaned against it as if he feared Barry would burst back in at any second. “You
bitch
!” he screamed at Pat.

“Oh, please!” Pat said contemptuously from his position on the floor. Then, climbing to his knees, “Has Miss Priss gone?”

“Goddamn you, Pat. He’s a friend of the family. He’s straight—”

“From one man to the next,” Pat finished for him.

Calvin couldn’t help but laugh.

“Let’s go dancing,” Eddie suggested.

We went to an after-hours club called The Crypt. It was a subterranean lair—a labyrinthine party place where drugs flowed like cheap liquor and sex was had as easily as your next breath. Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” was playing when we arrived.

“Oooooh! Daughter! When I hear her, I just can’t control these girls,” Pat cried, indicating his dancing feet. He grabbed Dondi’s arm and they pranced onto the dance floor.

When the DJ cued up Dan Hartman’s “Vertigo/Relight My Fire,” Eddie shed his knapsack (he was the only person I’ve ever met for whom dancing required a complete change of wardrobe). He grabbed Calvin’s hand. They joined the mob on the dance floor.

I went looking for the men’s room. I stumbled into a back room. On the floor, sawdust and semen. In the heavy air, the sounds of copulation like a kind of sexual muzak. In the men’s room, half a dozen penises in various stages of arousal were held in half a dozen hands, suspended over a long porcelain trough in a burlesque of urination.

When I returned, my companions were lost in the crush of people. From time to time I would catch sight of one of the four of them, but as I made my way toward them, the crowd would revolve and they’d disappear into the cacophony of dance. Once, I spotted Eddie and called to him. He just waved and kept on dancing.

A young man stepped over to me. “Hi,” he said. “I’m David. Wha’s your name?”

“Thomas-Edward,” I responded, glancing at him. He was short, shirtless, muscled. It was impossible to tell whether or not he was handsome in that murky flesh-colored light.

“Ain’t never seen you here before.” His tongue brushed his large lips. Perfect white teeth leered out of his dark face.

“I’ve never been here before.”

“You a college boy?” He exhaled in my face, the smell of beer and tobacco.

“Yeah, I go to Penn.”

“Thought so.” He nodded to himself, or maybe to the music. “You got a lover?” he asked suddenly.

“No.”

“I bin watchin’ you. You a foxy dude.”

I took a step backward. A rough brick wall pushed back. “Ahhh…thanks…”

He moved in closer. His hands encircled my waist. In a sudden convulsive move, he thrust his pelvis against me and began a slow grind.

“Please don’t do that.”

Dondi materialized out of nowhere. “I think you’re bothering the gentleman.”

“Dat so? Why don’t you mind yo binness?” he snapped, turning around, ready to fight.

“This
is
my business,” Dondi growled, looking him in the eyes. Something in Dondi’s face took the fight out of him, made him reconsider.

“Hey, no offense, man,” he said, backing away. “Plenny a fish in this sea.”

“You okay?” Dondi asked me when David had gone.

“Yeah, fine. You were great.”

“Yeah, I was, wasn’t I? Did you notice how deep my voice got?”

“I did.”

“See? I can be butch when I have to be. C’mon. Let’s go home.” He laid his hand across my shoulder.

When we walked upstairs, it was daylight.

“Shit. It’s cold,” he said. “I forgot to get our coats. Let’s go back.”

“No,” I said.

“Are you crazy? It’s cold. I’ll freeze my balls off!”

“So?”

“So? Now you
know
you wouldn’t like me without my balls.”

I laughed. “I really don’t want to go back in there, Dondi.”

“All right. Let’s get a cab.”

Back at our dorm, even though it was daylight and we’d passed most of our floor mates on their way to breakfast or the library, we prepared for bed.

“How did you know I was in trouble?” I asked him.

“Eddie came and told me he thought you were in over your head. He says you’re the most innocent person he knows. And he’s right.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No. I think it’s sweet,” he said, climbing into the upper bunk.

“Well, anyway…thanks for being my hero,” I called up from my prone position.

“Sure. Hey, you’re not gonna fall in love with me, now, are you?” he asked sleepily.

“Nah, I won’t. I don’t want to suffer.”

“I wouldn’t make you suffer,” he murmured, sleep overtaking him.

“No, I would make
me
suffer,” I said half to myself.

***

One day Dondi handed me a tiny stone, gray and white. Pitted in some places, smooth in others, it was a mass of contradictions like Dondi, like me, like life itself.

“What’s this?” I asked him, turning it over in my hand.

“It’s just a stone,” he said. “I found it on a beach on the worst night of my life. I picked up a whole handful as I was walking that night. At some point I sat down on some rocks. I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up it was morning. I’d made it through the night. I opened my hand, and those stones were still there. I kept them and give them only to my very special friends.”