Skinned Alive (21 page)

Mr. Grady wrote nothing and had few opinions. He occasionally assigned stories to reporters, but most of the time he filled out columns that ran short with curious scraps of information. These items were called, for some reason, “boilerplate” and were composed weeks, even months, in advance. For all I know they were bought ready-made from some Central Bureau of Timeless Information. Although Mr. Grady seldom said anything interesting and was much given to dithering over the practical details of his daily life, his work furnished him with the odd bit of startling knowledge.

“Did you realize that Gandhi ate meat just once in his life and nearly died of it?” he’d ask. “Did you know there is more electric wire in the Radio City Music Hall organ than in the entire city of Plattsburgh?”

He was capable of going inert, like a worm that poses as a stick to escape a bird’s detection (I have my own stock of boilerplate). When mother would hector him for not demanding a raise or for not acting like a man, his face would sink into his jowls, his chin into his chest, his chest into his belly, and the whole would settle lifelessly onto his elephantine legs. His eyes behind their thick glasses would refuse all contact. He could remain nearly indefinitely in that state until my mother’s irritation would blow over and she would make a move to head off for Miller’s Steak House, a family restaurant
with a menu of sizzling T-bones, butter and rolls, French-fried onions and hot-fudge sundaes, which would contribute to Mr. Grady’s early death by cardiac arrest.

In September 1954 the Kabuki Theater came from Tokyo to Chicago for the first time, and my mother and Mr. Grady bought tickets for themselves and me and Mr. Grady’s son Jim, whom we had never met (my sister didn’t want to go—she thought it sounded “weird,” and the prospect of meeting an eligible young man upset her).

The minute I saw Jim Grady I became sick with desire—sick because I knew from my mother’s psychology textbooks, which I’d secretly consulted, just how pathological my longings were. I had looked up “homosexuality” and read through the frightening, damning diagnosis and prognosis so many times with an erection that finally, through Pavlovian conditioning, fear instantly triggered excitement, guilt automatically entailed salivating love or lust or both.

Jim was tall and tan and blond with hair clipped soldier-short and a powerful upper lip that wouldn’t stay shaved and always showed a reddish-gold stubble. His small, complicated eyes rapidly changed expression, veering from manly impenetrability to teenage shiftiness. He trudged rather than walked, as though he were shod with horseshoes instead of trim oxford lace-ups. He wore a bow tie, which I usually associated with chipper incompetence, but in Jim’s case seemed more like a tourniquet hastily tied around his large, mobile Adam’s apple in a makeshift attempt to choke off its pulsing maleness. If his Adam’s apple was craggy, his nose was small and thin and well made, his bleached-out eyebrows so blond they shaded off into his tanned forehead, his ears small and neat and red and peeling on top and on the downy lobes.

He seemed eerily unaware of himself—the reason, no doubt, he left his mouth open whenever he wasn’t saying “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am” to my mother’s routine questions, although
once he smiled at her with the seductive leer of a lunatic, as though he were imitating someone else. He had allergies or a cold that had descended into his larynx and made his monosyllables sound becomingly stifled—or maybe he always talked that way. He could have been a West Point cadet, so virile and impersonal did his tall body appear, except for that open mouth, those squirming eyes, his fits of borrowed charm.

Someone had dressed him up in a hairy alpaca suit jacket and a cheap white shirt that was so small on him that his red hands hung down out of the cuffs like hams glazed with honey, for the backs of his hands were brushed with gold hair. The shirt, which would have been dingy on anyone less tan, was so thin that his dark chest could be seen breathing through it. He wasn’t wearing a T-shirt, which in those days was unusual, even provocative.

Mr. Grady was seated at one end, my mother next to him, then Jim, then me. My mother took off her coat and hat and combed her hair in a feathery, peripheral way designed to leave the deep structure of her permanent wave intact. “You certainly got a good tan this summer,” she said.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

His father, heavily seated, said tonelessly, without lifting his face from his chin or his chin from his chest, “He was working outside all summer on construction, earning money for his first year in med school.”

“Oh, really!” my mother exclaimed, suddenly fascinated, since she had a deep reverence for doctors. I too felt a new respect for him as I imagined the white surgical mask covering his full upper lip; “I want you on your hands and knees,” I could hear him telling me, “now bend forward. Arch your back, spread your knees still wider.” He was pulling on rubber gloves and from my strange, sideways angle I could see him dipping his sheathed finger into the cold lubricant….

“Have you chosen a specialty already?” my mother asked as the auditorium lights dimmed.

“Gynecology,” Jim said—and I clamped my knees together with a start.

Then the samisens squealed, kotos thunked dully, and drums kept breaking rank to race forward faster and faster until they fell into silence. A pink spotlight picked out a heavily armored and mascaraed warrior frozen in midflight on the runway, but only the scattered Japanese members of the audience knew to applaud him. The program placed a Roman numeral IV beside the actor’s name, which lent him a regal importance. Soon Number Four was stomping the stage and declaiming something in an angry gargle, but we hadn’t paid for the earphones that would have given us the crucial simultaneous translation, since my mother said she always preferred the gestalt to the mere details. “On the Rorschach I always score a very high W,” she had coyly told the uncomprehending and uninterested Mr. Grady earlier over supper. I knew from her frequent elucidations that a high W meant she saw each inkblot as a whole rather than as separate parts, and that this grasp of the gestalt revealed her global intelligence, which she regarded as an attribute of capital importance.

A mincing, tittering maiden with a homely, powdered white face and an impractical hobble skirt (only later did I read that the performer was a man and the fifth member of his improbable dynasty) suddenly metamorphosed into a sinister white fox. With suicidal daring I pressed my leg against Jim’s. First I put my shoe against his, sole planted squarely against sole. Then, having staked out this beachhead, I slowly cantilevered my calf muscles against his, at first just slightly grazing him. I even withdrew for a moment, proof of how completely careless and unintended my movements were, before I sat forward,
resting my elbows on my knees in total absorption, leaning attentively into the exotic squealing and cavorting onstage—an intensification of attention that of course forced me to press my slender calf against his massive one, my knobby knee against his square, majestic one.

As two lovers rejoiced or despaired (one couldn’t be sure which), Jim’s leg held fast against mine. He didn’t move it away. I stole a glance at his profile, but it told me nothing. I pulsed slightly against his leg. I rubbed my palms together and felt the calluses that months of harp practice had built up on my fingertips.

If I kept up my assaults, would he suddenly and indignantly withdraw—even, later, make a remark to his father, who would feel obliged to tip off my mother about her son the fairy?

I decided to wait for reciprocal signals. I wouldn’t let my desire fool me into seeing mutual longing where only mine existed. I was dreading the intermission because I didn’t know if I could disguise my tented crotch or the blush bloom that was slowly drifting up my neck and across my face.

I flexed my calf muscles against Jim’s and he flexed back. We were football players locked into a tight huddle or two wrestlers each struggling to gain the advantage over the other (an advantage I was only too eager to concede). We were about to pass over the line from accident into intention. Soon he’d be as incriminated as I. Or did he think this dumb show was just a joke, indicative of other intentions, anything but sexual?

I flexed my calf muscles twice and he signaled back twice; we were establishing a Morse code that was undeniable. Onstage, warriors were engaged in choreographed combat, frequently freezing in midlunge, and I wondered where we would live, how I would escape my mother, when I could kiss those full lips for the first time.

A smile, antic with a pleasure so new I scarcely dared to trust it, played across my lips. Alone with my thoughts but
surrounded by his body, I could imagine a whole long life with him.

When the intermission came at last, our parents beat a hasty retreat to the bar next door, but neither Jim nor I budged. We had no need of highballs or a Manhattan; we already had them and were already in New York or someplace equally magical. As the auditorium emptied out, Jim looked at me matter-of-factly, his Adam’s apple rising and falling, and he said, “How are we ever going to get a moment alone?”

“Do you have a television set?” I asked (they were still fairly rare).

“Of course not. Dad never has a damn cent; he throws his money away with both hands.”

“Why don’t you come over to our place on Saturday to watch
The Perry Como Show
, then drink a few too many beers and say you’re too tight to drive home and ask to stay over. The only extra bed is in my room.”

“OK,” he said in that stifled voice. He seemed as startled by my efficient deviousness as I was by his compliance. When our by now much-livelier parents returned and the lights went back down, I wedged a hand between our legs and covertly stroked his flexed calf, but he didn’t reciprocate and I gave up. We sat there, knee to knee, in a stalemate of lust. I’d been erect so long my penis began to ache, and I could feel a precome stain seeping through my khakis. I turned bitter at the prospect of waiting three whole days till Saturday. I wanted to pull him into the men’s room right now.

Once at home, my mother asked me what I thought of Jim, and I said he seemed nice but dumb. When I was alone in bed and able at last to strum my way to release (I thought of myself as the Man with the Blue Guitar), I hit a high note (my chin), higher than I’d ever shot before, and I licked myself clean and floated down into the featherbed luxury of knowing that big tanned body would soon be wrapped around me.

Our apartment was across the street from the beach and I loved to jump the Lake Michigan waves. Now I’m astonished I ever enjoyed doing anything that athletic, but then I thought of it less as sport than as opera, for just as in listening to 78 records I breasted one soaring outburst after another by Lauritz Melchior or Kirsten Flagstad, so was I thrilled by the repeated crises staged by the lake in September—a menacing crescendo that melted anticlimactically away into a creamy glissando, a minor interval that swelled into a major chord, all of it as excited and endless as Wagner’s
Ring
, which I’d never bothered to dope out motif by leitmotif, since I too preferred an ecstatic gestalt to tediously detailed knowledge. We were careless in my family, careless and addicted to excitement.

Jim Grady called my mother and invited himself over on Saturday evening to watch
The Perry Como Show
on television. He informed her he was an absolute fanatic about Como, that he considered Como’s least glance or tremolo incomparably cool, and that he especially admired his long-sleeved golfer’s sweaters with the low-slung yoke necks, three buttons at the waist, coarse spongy weave and bright colors. My mother told me about these odd enthusiasms; she was puzzled by them because she thought that fashion concerned women alone and that even over women its tyranny extended only to clothes, certainly not to ways of moving, smiling or singing. “I wouldn’t want to imitate anyone else,” she said with her little mirthless laugh of self-congratulation and a disbelieving shake of her head. “I like being me just fine, thank you very much.”

“He’s not the first young person to swoon over a pop star,” I informed her out of my infinite world-weariness.

“Men don’t swoon over men, dear,” Mother reminded me, peering at me over the tops of her glasses. Now that I unscramble the signals she was emitting, I see how contradictory they were. She said she admired the sensitivity of a great dancer such as Nijinsky, and she’d even given me his biography to
make sure I knew the exact perverse composition of that sensitivity: “What a tragic life. Of course he ended up psychotic with paranoid delusions, martyr complex and degenerative ataxia.” She’d assure me, with snapping eyes and carnivorous smile, that she liked men to be men and a boy to be all boy (as who does not), although the hearty heartlessness of making such a declaration to her willowy, cake-baking, harp-playing son thoroughly eluded her. Nor would she have tolerated a real boy’s beer brawls, bloody noses or stormy fugues. She wanted an obedient little gentleman who would sit placidly in a dark suit when he wasn’t helping his mother until, at the appropriate moment and with no advance fuss, he would marry a plain Christian girl whose unique vocation would be the perpetual adoration of her mother-in-law.

At last, after our dispirited Saturday night supper, Jim Grady arrived, just in time for a slice of my devil’s food cake and
The Perry Como Show.
What a coincidence that I’d chosen the Como show at random but that Como really was Jim’s hero! My sister skulked off to her room to polish her hockey stick and read through fan-magazine articles on Mercedes McCambridge and Barbara Stanwyck. Jim belted back the six-pack he’d brought along and drew our attention with repulsive connoisseurship to every cool Como mannerism. I now realize that maybe Como was the first singer who’d figured out that the TV lens represented twenty million horny women dateless on Saturday night; he looked searchingly into its glass eye and warbled with the calm certainty of his seductive charm.

As a homosexual, I understood the desire to possess an admired man, but I was almost disgusted by Jim’s ambition to imitate him. My mother saw men as nearly faceless extras who surrounded the diva, a woman; I regarded men as the stars; but both she and I were opposed to all forms of masculine self-fabrication, she because she considered it unbecomingly narcissistic, I because it seemed a sacrilegious parody of the innate
superiority of a few godlike men. Perhaps I was just jealous that Jim was paying more attention to Como than to me.