The summer between, p.6
The Summer Between, page 6
Maybe Montreal? It was cool when Lia took me to Man and his World, Expo ’67.
Disappear? That would freak out the central person in my life. My champion. Mother of the Century. Running off would devastate Lia.
I pulled the bedspread over my head and burrowed the side of my cheek against the pillow. I closed my eyes and counted backward but couldn’t fall asleep. The feeling of being raped clung like dirt.
Before I understood anything about the act of sex, there was infatuation. I had developed crushes on celebrities during elementary school. There was perky Karen Valentine on the high school sitcom Room 222, and Shelley Fabares playing a teen queen on reruns of The Donna Reed Show. David and little Shaun Cassidy, Robby Benson, and Bobby Sherman also ranked, but none came close to the rugged men riding across the western plains: cowboys. Squirrelly Little Joe on Bonanza, Trampas always quick to flash a smile on The Virginian, but best of all was Christopher Jones, the lead on the ABC-TV series The Legend of Jesse James. Chiseled, with a Southern twang, Jones was a weird hybrid of the boy-next-door and a bucking bad-ass. When Jesse James was canceled after one season, I wrote a letter of protest to the president of ABC Networks.
In the months that followed, while expecting a reply from ABC, my fickle devotion turned from cowboys to astronauts. Intelligent young scientists locked inside a spacecraft proved far more captivating than dusty, slow-poke cowboys. Astronauts signified the future, cowboys the past. Rather than hitch my rocket to Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, I fixated on his shipmate Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Buzz’s baby blues, jumbo ears, and wide smile made him boyish, approachable. One day, I piped up to Lia, “Mom, why don’t you marry Buzz? Wouldn’t he make the coolest husband ever?”
When I was ten years old, Lia introduced me to Where Did I Come From?, a children’s book illustrating the how of male and female reproduction. The lesson initiated my first conversation about sex. Side-by-side on the sofa one evening after chicken pot pies, Lia traced her finger across each drawing as we read the descriptions in unison. Then she’d recap: “An orgasm is like a sneeze, but instead of coming out of your nose, the seminal fluid, similar to the consistency of mucus, ejects from the tip of the penis.”
“From the same hole as pee? How does it switch from pee to semen?”
“Yes, the same hole, different tubes. Andy, don’t jump ahead. We’re getting to the part about the vagina.”
I’ll never forget the date, April 20, 1971, when I woke to a glorious twitch. Just like Lia had explained through Where Did I Come From?, my penis sneezed.
I was eleven.
Ignorant to the phenomenon but aware of the mechanics of reproduction, my first thought was, Holy shit, I’m a man, capable of fathering a child.
I peered at the pool of semen dripping from my belly to the bedsheet and remembered that it carried up to a hundred million sperm, swimming circles in search of a truant egg. For a solid year, once a week, I’d wake to an erection, wiggling in dry surprise—until my brain finally caught up with my body.
From then on, my boner intervened at the most inconvenient times in life. The smallest thing would trigger it. Like our substitute algebra teacher, Mr. Stelling, a hunk rocking tight polyester slacks. As he diagrammed the cubic polynomial on the chalkboard, my boner stood at attention in admiration. I was left to figure out how to conceal my condition when the end-of-class bell rang and we all filed out.
Unlike other boys my age, I felt my libidinous thoughts about guys seemed natural. Thank liberal Lia for that. But spontaneous boners invoked panic. For months, I listened to my buddies brag about jerking off to Penthouse and Playboy centerfolds. It wasn’t until I pulled Tommy aside and asked, “When you tell me you jerked off, how is that different than calling the school janitor a jerk-off? Is a jerk-off something good or bad?”
“Andy, Andy, Andy,” Tommy moaned, shaking his head. “A jerk-off is a putz. Jerking off is playing with yourself. Masturbation. Here’s a tip. If you roll a sock over your dick, it catches the jizz. Then throw the sock in the laundry bin. The custard washes right out. Your mother will never know.”
The next time I went to his house, Tommy handed me a stack of his father’s dirty magazines to practice. That night, while Lia was at class, I fanned open a Hustler dated April 1970, featuring a freckled nurse wearing nothing but a stethoscope. In an October 1972 issue of Juggs, I stopped on page thirty-three, spotting a dewy-eyed cowboy encircled by twelve knockers the size of cantaloupes. In a rumpled Playboy, I discovered a nude blond woman holding a sexy brown-haired fireman by the hose. My dick was not responding as it should have. Finally, I uncreased the double-page spread of a Sears Catalog loaded with photos of men with Ken doll crotches, modeling underwear. The dudes brought me to completion. In no time.
The trajectory of sexual experience moved forward quickly. In a few months, I went from wet dreams to jerking off to photos to fantasizing scenarios with real people. I’d imagine coming around algebra class after school to ask the substitute for extra help with an equation. I imagined Mr. Stelling, tight pants stuffed nicely, closing the door, turning to me, and purring, “You can call me Matt.” The study session would reach a peak when the teacher would insistently rub his leg against mine. That was as far as my imagination went and all I needed to attain my quest.
Then there was the lanky redhead in the tight blue Speedo practicing dives at the town pool. I’d imagine sitting on a bench in the men’s changing room once the swim team had gone. Discreetly, I’d eyeball the bulge inside his wet swimsuit. Slowly he’d roll the suit down his creamy white thighs as his blushing penis swelled. That’s where the illusion ended because, at that age, I had no knowledge of how two guys went about horsing around naked.
The summer of ’74, between eighth and ninth grade, a new kid moved to the neighborhood. Joey moved in a few doors down from Tommy. He tried everything to work his way into our crew. Joey, with his spiky dark hair, was a space cadet who always had a pack of Kool menthols poking out of the rear pocket of his jeans. Archie, a classmate and occasional third wheel to Tommy and me, found Joey crude and not up to our standards. I took pity on Joey, who knew no one. One scorching weekday, we were walking to an air-conditioned matinee of The Towering Inferno and passed Joey on his porch.
“Can I come too?” he yelled. The ballsy squirt joined us before anyone could answer. Archie bullied Joey into sitting one row behind us. During the opening credits, little Joey loudly cracked, “These seats smell like ass.”
Archie forced me and Tommy to follow him three rows down, leaving Joey stranded during the film. On the walk home, when Joey would not stop ranting about how much better his old town of Red Bank was than Maple Ridge, Archie yelled, “Then move back. Shut the fuck up, Joey. You’re so annoying.”
Joey got the message and made himself scarce for a few weeks.
It was in the dog days of August when Joey tempted Tommy, Archie, and me to his attic with an offer we couldn’t refuse. We sat in silence as Joey loaded the film spool onto the projector, explaining that we were about to see a Portuguese movie called Television Repairman.
We watched in silence as a naked housewife, weighed down by huge knockers, answered the door. In walks a TV repairman, scrawny except carrying what looks like a baseball bat down one leg of his trousers. He puts down his toolbox, unzips his fly, and she drops to her knees and sucks his cock.
Joey knew he had us, and he squealed, “Tell me, fellas, is that not the biggest dick you’ve ever seen?” Tommy, Archie, and I watched in silence.
Not only was it the biggest dick I’d ever seen, but it was also the only erect dick I’d seen other than my own. I felt my own boner swell inside my cut-offs and contorted my body to hide it. When the repairman shot his load on the housewife’s massive tits, Tommy sputtered, “Yessss,” as if watching the Allies blow up the Nazis in The Dirty Dozen. Everyone else was hard too, based on how they carefully got up when the film ended.
“Thank you, Joseph,” Archie called up from the stairwell, a silent indication that the ballsy squirt had been officially accepted into our group.
I doubt anyone else had been turned on by the repairman like me, but I realized that Joey had shaken my earth off of its axis. I wondered if he was on to me. But we never discussed the private screening again.
During my freshman year of high school, I was able to explore my secret orientation by following the gender-bending performers from British rock and punk. David Bowie, Gary Glitter, even tame Elton John … spoonfuls of sugar for the medicine I’d later swallow. This radical kink did more than designate me as cool; it pushed the notion of acceptance. Art class, a place where perverse outcasts could hide, proved to be a fertile testing ground. Behind the studio’s swinging doors, you’d find Alice Brokowski sculpting wet clay in a black Ramones tee, torn then reattached with safety pins. She had a flair for applying punk rock makeup more skillfully than the art she crafted, earning Alice great respect. Another person who thrived in art was James, an effeminate, pencil-thin senior who excelled in the painting room. I feared guilt by association, so I’d ignore James in the hallway, but inside the art studio, we’d stand side by side, replicating Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album cover in vibrant gouache.
But outside of that art haven, it was dicier to take a stand. Shooting hoops with the guys one night, I decided to defend Lou Reed’s provocative hit song about hustlers and drag queens, “Walk on the Wild Side.”
“The song is fucking brilliant,” I shouted to Archie.
“The guy’s perverted,” Archie spat out.
“The guy’s name is Lou Reed. He’s a big-name rocker, for Chrissakes. He’s like Jagger, and you love Jagger.”
“Jagger isn’t a fag.”
I chanted the lyrics about Holly Woodlawn who dressed as a woman all the time, to test my friend.
“Andy, don’t tell me you’re a freaking fruitcake!”
“Fuck you,” I yelled, laughing it off. “You’re a doofus extremis, Archie.”
But time went by, and I grew more careless, unwilling to repress myself twenty-four hours a day. So clues started to leak out.
“Do you know that dude?” Tommy once asked, catching me staring at a sales clerk rocking a handlebar mustache at Herman’s World of Sporting Goods.
“Yeah. He’s a friend of Lia’s. He doesn’t remember me,” I lied.
To avoid being busted, I learned to refine my method. Exiting a hockey game with my buddies, I catcalled, “Nine o’clock, smoking chick in the red halter top under the Rangers sign.” The tactic allowed me to rubberneck her hot ’n’ spicy boyfriend while Tommy and Archie ogled the girl.
Crushing on any of my male friends was too close for comfort. Instead, I shadowed unattainable figures like sandy-haired Skip from Dairy Queen. I’d imagine us sharing a large bucket of popcorn in the balcony of the multiplex as Barbra Streisand sang “How Lucky Can You Get” in Funny Lady. In my fantasy, I would reach into the bucket of popcorn, only to have Skip grab my hand and deliver a tight squeeze.
Skip became my main inspiration, my leading man when jerking off in my bedroom with the door locked. My fantasies of Skip became more elaborate, the most common being a friendly day hike along the trails of Ramapo Mountain that would lead to heart-stopping dick-play in a remote cave. At that point of the fantasy, I’d ejaculate into my sock, sigh, and go downstairs for a handful of Oreos.
Early in sophomore year, I decided my obsessions were getting out of hand. My fixation on Skip abruptly ended when I spotted him fondling the ponytail of a chick from Catholic school at Arby’s. And Tommy and Archie called me out more than once for ogling dudes.
I had no choice but to split my personality into two. Private Andy would beat off thinking of guys. Public Andy would play high school stud, talking smack and dating girls.
The strategy paid off. Within a week, prompted by cheap vodka, Public Andy had his first make-out session with a girl in full view of everyone at Archie’s party. Wendy Fenstermacher, a bouncy cheerleader of midlevel popularity, was determined to have me on her arm. To secure this position, she increased her campaign. The following afternoon, Wendy gave me a toe-curling blow job against a mausoleum in the town cemetery. In the ensuing months, whenever Wendy had the urge, she’d drag me to a musky loveseat in a corner of her basement and blow my pipe. There was something thrilling, even kinky, about satisfying her desire—with the possibility of her hunky older brother walking in. A college freshman, Dan had jet-black hair flawlessly parted at the side and draped over his right eye. Whenever he greeted me—“Howdy, Andy”—his stare lingered a second or two more than was right.
To be fair, I wasn’t faking things with Wendy. She loved sucking dick, and I loved getting my dick sucked—even by a girl. It just required closing my eyes and thinking about a guy, often Dan.
Luckily, she didn’t need more than fellatio. Only once did my fingertips roam the whiskers of her pussycat before she snatched my hand away and said, “Enough!”
Oral sex between us worked. Apart from that, we barely liked each other.
But sex only takes you so far. One night, following a late screening of The Other Side of the Mountain, I yelled at her in the parking lot, “Wendy, you’re only in this for the blow jobs.” Two days later, she dumped me, trading up for a varsity baseball player, telling me, “Troy and I have been in love since Christmas.”
Elena and I became close friends in junior year when the principal put us in charge of sourcing artists for an event to benefit the new pediatric wing of a local hospital. We put two finalists up for popular vote. Three to one, the student body voted for The Harlem Globetrotters over a folk singer Mr. Beasley nominated, Tom Rush, certain to draw parents to the event.
During the process of learning to book acts, Elena and I realized we were compatible. We shared affinities for cheese pizza, Jackson Browne, and the need to get the hell out of Maple. One frigid winter afternoon, Elena convinced me to cut advanced typing class to pick up McDonald’s hot apple pie and two hot chocolates. Elena parked her Vega, raced inside, and returned with a crumpled white bag.
“These are fucking heaven,” she said, nibbling the gummy center of the pie.
“Do you think these are real apples?”
“Duh. What’s a fake apple?” As she continued nibbling, Elena reached into her hideous brocade satchel and pulled out a paperback.
“The Front Runner, Patricia Nell Warren. Oh, this book is so good. It’s making the rounds in the girls’ volleyball squad.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Scandalous. It’s about a runner, like you. This older college track coach falls in love with his star athlete. I’m not sure why … but the story is really kind of hot, Andy. Guy-on-guy sex.”
“Gross,” I said, too loudly. Seeing her face cringe like a dry sponge, I added diplomatically, “But cool. To each his own. Good for them.”
“It’s a love story, kind of. I’m two-thirds through. If you’re really going to apply to colleges in the city, better keep an open mind, Andy Pollock.”
The following afternoon, I drove twenty miles through light snow to B. Dalton’s at Paramus Park Mall to find the book Elena had pushed on me. The only thing I remembered was its light blue cover, the word Runner in the title, and the author’s surname started with Wa. Purchasing a book about homosexuals freaked me out, but I needed to read about how two men love. I fast-walked the bookstore aisles, making certain no one shopping was familiar to me. I found the fiction section, awkwardly close to the front window, and located the book. With trembling fingers, I inched out a copy and hastily covered the gap with a misfiled volume of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. The distracted cashier paid no attention to my purchase.
On Friday night, I locked my bedroom door and ripped into The Front Runner, reading fifty pages until my eyes blurred. The next morning, I turned off the digital alarm and reached for the paperback again. I read as the closeted, conservative coach Harlan Brown was taking star runner Billy Sive to New York for a track event and hopefully intimacy. Fifty more pages later, I wandered downstairs as Lia said, “Andy, it’s Saturday. Cleaning day.”
“I need an hour, Mom.”
“What are you doing up there, honey? It’s nine thirty.”
“Reading a great book, Mom. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.“
“An interesting choice. Can you start the dusting? I left the Pledge and a few Handi Wipes on top of the stereo. Please use Old English on the coffee table—it’s looking a bit drab. What should we listen to today? How about the soundtrack to The Wiz?”
Ten minutes later, while reluctantly swiping clockwise as Stephanie Mills belted out the song “Home,” it dawned on me. The pages I’d read left me hopeful. Guys could fall in love with other guys. The Front Runner left me feeling less alone.
By Valentine’s Day ’76, Elena and I were locked into dating mode. She was the only person I wanted to spend time with. By George Washington’s birthday, I asked her to go steady. Given that I worshiped her kooky, capricious behavior, I thought maybe this could work. After all, my sexual hunger for guys was still untested.
Lo and behold, at a Saturday night drinking party, Elena and I made out like mad on Tommy’s parents’ bed. My aroused penis slipped inside the soft burrow of Elena’s vagina for a few seconds before I recalled I wasn’t wearing a condom. We stopped cold.
A few days later, in the Arby’s parking lot, Elena asked, “Andy, are we going to do this the correct way? I mean, all the way. I want to. I think I’m in love with you.”
Once I said yes, she confessed, “Andy, this won’t be my first time.”
Stuffed with french fries, my jaw dropped. “Who?” I asked.
“That doesn’t matter. No one you know.”
“Maybe we should wait, E. I want to make love if we’re each other’s first, but on second thought—I don’t think I’m ready.”
Elena burst into tears, threw her roast beef sandwich on the car floor, and unleashed a heartfelt monologue about wanting a real relationship. Her previous guy was a douchebag.
Disappear? That would freak out the central person in my life. My champion. Mother of the Century. Running off would devastate Lia.
I pulled the bedspread over my head and burrowed the side of my cheek against the pillow. I closed my eyes and counted backward but couldn’t fall asleep. The feeling of being raped clung like dirt.
Before I understood anything about the act of sex, there was infatuation. I had developed crushes on celebrities during elementary school. There was perky Karen Valentine on the high school sitcom Room 222, and Shelley Fabares playing a teen queen on reruns of The Donna Reed Show. David and little Shaun Cassidy, Robby Benson, and Bobby Sherman also ranked, but none came close to the rugged men riding across the western plains: cowboys. Squirrelly Little Joe on Bonanza, Trampas always quick to flash a smile on The Virginian, but best of all was Christopher Jones, the lead on the ABC-TV series The Legend of Jesse James. Chiseled, with a Southern twang, Jones was a weird hybrid of the boy-next-door and a bucking bad-ass. When Jesse James was canceled after one season, I wrote a letter of protest to the president of ABC Networks.
In the months that followed, while expecting a reply from ABC, my fickle devotion turned from cowboys to astronauts. Intelligent young scientists locked inside a spacecraft proved far more captivating than dusty, slow-poke cowboys. Astronauts signified the future, cowboys the past. Rather than hitch my rocket to Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, I fixated on his shipmate Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Buzz’s baby blues, jumbo ears, and wide smile made him boyish, approachable. One day, I piped up to Lia, “Mom, why don’t you marry Buzz? Wouldn’t he make the coolest husband ever?”
When I was ten years old, Lia introduced me to Where Did I Come From?, a children’s book illustrating the how of male and female reproduction. The lesson initiated my first conversation about sex. Side-by-side on the sofa one evening after chicken pot pies, Lia traced her finger across each drawing as we read the descriptions in unison. Then she’d recap: “An orgasm is like a sneeze, but instead of coming out of your nose, the seminal fluid, similar to the consistency of mucus, ejects from the tip of the penis.”
“From the same hole as pee? How does it switch from pee to semen?”
“Yes, the same hole, different tubes. Andy, don’t jump ahead. We’re getting to the part about the vagina.”
I’ll never forget the date, April 20, 1971, when I woke to a glorious twitch. Just like Lia had explained through Where Did I Come From?, my penis sneezed.
I was eleven.
Ignorant to the phenomenon but aware of the mechanics of reproduction, my first thought was, Holy shit, I’m a man, capable of fathering a child.
I peered at the pool of semen dripping from my belly to the bedsheet and remembered that it carried up to a hundred million sperm, swimming circles in search of a truant egg. For a solid year, once a week, I’d wake to an erection, wiggling in dry surprise—until my brain finally caught up with my body.
From then on, my boner intervened at the most inconvenient times in life. The smallest thing would trigger it. Like our substitute algebra teacher, Mr. Stelling, a hunk rocking tight polyester slacks. As he diagrammed the cubic polynomial on the chalkboard, my boner stood at attention in admiration. I was left to figure out how to conceal my condition when the end-of-class bell rang and we all filed out.
Unlike other boys my age, I felt my libidinous thoughts about guys seemed natural. Thank liberal Lia for that. But spontaneous boners invoked panic. For months, I listened to my buddies brag about jerking off to Penthouse and Playboy centerfolds. It wasn’t until I pulled Tommy aside and asked, “When you tell me you jerked off, how is that different than calling the school janitor a jerk-off? Is a jerk-off something good or bad?”
“Andy, Andy, Andy,” Tommy moaned, shaking his head. “A jerk-off is a putz. Jerking off is playing with yourself. Masturbation. Here’s a tip. If you roll a sock over your dick, it catches the jizz. Then throw the sock in the laundry bin. The custard washes right out. Your mother will never know.”
The next time I went to his house, Tommy handed me a stack of his father’s dirty magazines to practice. That night, while Lia was at class, I fanned open a Hustler dated April 1970, featuring a freckled nurse wearing nothing but a stethoscope. In an October 1972 issue of Juggs, I stopped on page thirty-three, spotting a dewy-eyed cowboy encircled by twelve knockers the size of cantaloupes. In a rumpled Playboy, I discovered a nude blond woman holding a sexy brown-haired fireman by the hose. My dick was not responding as it should have. Finally, I uncreased the double-page spread of a Sears Catalog loaded with photos of men with Ken doll crotches, modeling underwear. The dudes brought me to completion. In no time.
The trajectory of sexual experience moved forward quickly. In a few months, I went from wet dreams to jerking off to photos to fantasizing scenarios with real people. I’d imagine coming around algebra class after school to ask the substitute for extra help with an equation. I imagined Mr. Stelling, tight pants stuffed nicely, closing the door, turning to me, and purring, “You can call me Matt.” The study session would reach a peak when the teacher would insistently rub his leg against mine. That was as far as my imagination went and all I needed to attain my quest.
Then there was the lanky redhead in the tight blue Speedo practicing dives at the town pool. I’d imagine sitting on a bench in the men’s changing room once the swim team had gone. Discreetly, I’d eyeball the bulge inside his wet swimsuit. Slowly he’d roll the suit down his creamy white thighs as his blushing penis swelled. That’s where the illusion ended because, at that age, I had no knowledge of how two guys went about horsing around naked.
The summer of ’74, between eighth and ninth grade, a new kid moved to the neighborhood. Joey moved in a few doors down from Tommy. He tried everything to work his way into our crew. Joey, with his spiky dark hair, was a space cadet who always had a pack of Kool menthols poking out of the rear pocket of his jeans. Archie, a classmate and occasional third wheel to Tommy and me, found Joey crude and not up to our standards. I took pity on Joey, who knew no one. One scorching weekday, we were walking to an air-conditioned matinee of The Towering Inferno and passed Joey on his porch.
“Can I come too?” he yelled. The ballsy squirt joined us before anyone could answer. Archie bullied Joey into sitting one row behind us. During the opening credits, little Joey loudly cracked, “These seats smell like ass.”
Archie forced me and Tommy to follow him three rows down, leaving Joey stranded during the film. On the walk home, when Joey would not stop ranting about how much better his old town of Red Bank was than Maple Ridge, Archie yelled, “Then move back. Shut the fuck up, Joey. You’re so annoying.”
Joey got the message and made himself scarce for a few weeks.
It was in the dog days of August when Joey tempted Tommy, Archie, and me to his attic with an offer we couldn’t refuse. We sat in silence as Joey loaded the film spool onto the projector, explaining that we were about to see a Portuguese movie called Television Repairman.
We watched in silence as a naked housewife, weighed down by huge knockers, answered the door. In walks a TV repairman, scrawny except carrying what looks like a baseball bat down one leg of his trousers. He puts down his toolbox, unzips his fly, and she drops to her knees and sucks his cock.
Joey knew he had us, and he squealed, “Tell me, fellas, is that not the biggest dick you’ve ever seen?” Tommy, Archie, and I watched in silence.
Not only was it the biggest dick I’d ever seen, but it was also the only erect dick I’d seen other than my own. I felt my own boner swell inside my cut-offs and contorted my body to hide it. When the repairman shot his load on the housewife’s massive tits, Tommy sputtered, “Yessss,” as if watching the Allies blow up the Nazis in The Dirty Dozen. Everyone else was hard too, based on how they carefully got up when the film ended.
“Thank you, Joseph,” Archie called up from the stairwell, a silent indication that the ballsy squirt had been officially accepted into our group.
I doubt anyone else had been turned on by the repairman like me, but I realized that Joey had shaken my earth off of its axis. I wondered if he was on to me. But we never discussed the private screening again.
During my freshman year of high school, I was able to explore my secret orientation by following the gender-bending performers from British rock and punk. David Bowie, Gary Glitter, even tame Elton John … spoonfuls of sugar for the medicine I’d later swallow. This radical kink did more than designate me as cool; it pushed the notion of acceptance. Art class, a place where perverse outcasts could hide, proved to be a fertile testing ground. Behind the studio’s swinging doors, you’d find Alice Brokowski sculpting wet clay in a black Ramones tee, torn then reattached with safety pins. She had a flair for applying punk rock makeup more skillfully than the art she crafted, earning Alice great respect. Another person who thrived in art was James, an effeminate, pencil-thin senior who excelled in the painting room. I feared guilt by association, so I’d ignore James in the hallway, but inside the art studio, we’d stand side by side, replicating Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album cover in vibrant gouache.
But outside of that art haven, it was dicier to take a stand. Shooting hoops with the guys one night, I decided to defend Lou Reed’s provocative hit song about hustlers and drag queens, “Walk on the Wild Side.”
“The song is fucking brilliant,” I shouted to Archie.
“The guy’s perverted,” Archie spat out.
“The guy’s name is Lou Reed. He’s a big-name rocker, for Chrissakes. He’s like Jagger, and you love Jagger.”
“Jagger isn’t a fag.”
I chanted the lyrics about Holly Woodlawn who dressed as a woman all the time, to test my friend.
“Andy, don’t tell me you’re a freaking fruitcake!”
“Fuck you,” I yelled, laughing it off. “You’re a doofus extremis, Archie.”
But time went by, and I grew more careless, unwilling to repress myself twenty-four hours a day. So clues started to leak out.
“Do you know that dude?” Tommy once asked, catching me staring at a sales clerk rocking a handlebar mustache at Herman’s World of Sporting Goods.
“Yeah. He’s a friend of Lia’s. He doesn’t remember me,” I lied.
To avoid being busted, I learned to refine my method. Exiting a hockey game with my buddies, I catcalled, “Nine o’clock, smoking chick in the red halter top under the Rangers sign.” The tactic allowed me to rubberneck her hot ’n’ spicy boyfriend while Tommy and Archie ogled the girl.
Crushing on any of my male friends was too close for comfort. Instead, I shadowed unattainable figures like sandy-haired Skip from Dairy Queen. I’d imagine us sharing a large bucket of popcorn in the balcony of the multiplex as Barbra Streisand sang “How Lucky Can You Get” in Funny Lady. In my fantasy, I would reach into the bucket of popcorn, only to have Skip grab my hand and deliver a tight squeeze.
Skip became my main inspiration, my leading man when jerking off in my bedroom with the door locked. My fantasies of Skip became more elaborate, the most common being a friendly day hike along the trails of Ramapo Mountain that would lead to heart-stopping dick-play in a remote cave. At that point of the fantasy, I’d ejaculate into my sock, sigh, and go downstairs for a handful of Oreos.
Early in sophomore year, I decided my obsessions were getting out of hand. My fixation on Skip abruptly ended when I spotted him fondling the ponytail of a chick from Catholic school at Arby’s. And Tommy and Archie called me out more than once for ogling dudes.
I had no choice but to split my personality into two. Private Andy would beat off thinking of guys. Public Andy would play high school stud, talking smack and dating girls.
The strategy paid off. Within a week, prompted by cheap vodka, Public Andy had his first make-out session with a girl in full view of everyone at Archie’s party. Wendy Fenstermacher, a bouncy cheerleader of midlevel popularity, was determined to have me on her arm. To secure this position, she increased her campaign. The following afternoon, Wendy gave me a toe-curling blow job against a mausoleum in the town cemetery. In the ensuing months, whenever Wendy had the urge, she’d drag me to a musky loveseat in a corner of her basement and blow my pipe. There was something thrilling, even kinky, about satisfying her desire—with the possibility of her hunky older brother walking in. A college freshman, Dan had jet-black hair flawlessly parted at the side and draped over his right eye. Whenever he greeted me—“Howdy, Andy”—his stare lingered a second or two more than was right.
To be fair, I wasn’t faking things with Wendy. She loved sucking dick, and I loved getting my dick sucked—even by a girl. It just required closing my eyes and thinking about a guy, often Dan.
Luckily, she didn’t need more than fellatio. Only once did my fingertips roam the whiskers of her pussycat before she snatched my hand away and said, “Enough!”
Oral sex between us worked. Apart from that, we barely liked each other.
But sex only takes you so far. One night, following a late screening of The Other Side of the Mountain, I yelled at her in the parking lot, “Wendy, you’re only in this for the blow jobs.” Two days later, she dumped me, trading up for a varsity baseball player, telling me, “Troy and I have been in love since Christmas.”
Elena and I became close friends in junior year when the principal put us in charge of sourcing artists for an event to benefit the new pediatric wing of a local hospital. We put two finalists up for popular vote. Three to one, the student body voted for The Harlem Globetrotters over a folk singer Mr. Beasley nominated, Tom Rush, certain to draw parents to the event.
During the process of learning to book acts, Elena and I realized we were compatible. We shared affinities for cheese pizza, Jackson Browne, and the need to get the hell out of Maple. One frigid winter afternoon, Elena convinced me to cut advanced typing class to pick up McDonald’s hot apple pie and two hot chocolates. Elena parked her Vega, raced inside, and returned with a crumpled white bag.
“These are fucking heaven,” she said, nibbling the gummy center of the pie.
“Do you think these are real apples?”
“Duh. What’s a fake apple?” As she continued nibbling, Elena reached into her hideous brocade satchel and pulled out a paperback.
“The Front Runner, Patricia Nell Warren. Oh, this book is so good. It’s making the rounds in the girls’ volleyball squad.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Scandalous. It’s about a runner, like you. This older college track coach falls in love with his star athlete. I’m not sure why … but the story is really kind of hot, Andy. Guy-on-guy sex.”
“Gross,” I said, too loudly. Seeing her face cringe like a dry sponge, I added diplomatically, “But cool. To each his own. Good for them.”
“It’s a love story, kind of. I’m two-thirds through. If you’re really going to apply to colleges in the city, better keep an open mind, Andy Pollock.”
The following afternoon, I drove twenty miles through light snow to B. Dalton’s at Paramus Park Mall to find the book Elena had pushed on me. The only thing I remembered was its light blue cover, the word Runner in the title, and the author’s surname started with Wa. Purchasing a book about homosexuals freaked me out, but I needed to read about how two men love. I fast-walked the bookstore aisles, making certain no one shopping was familiar to me. I found the fiction section, awkwardly close to the front window, and located the book. With trembling fingers, I inched out a copy and hastily covered the gap with a misfiled volume of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. The distracted cashier paid no attention to my purchase.
On Friday night, I locked my bedroom door and ripped into The Front Runner, reading fifty pages until my eyes blurred. The next morning, I turned off the digital alarm and reached for the paperback again. I read as the closeted, conservative coach Harlan Brown was taking star runner Billy Sive to New York for a track event and hopefully intimacy. Fifty more pages later, I wandered downstairs as Lia said, “Andy, it’s Saturday. Cleaning day.”
“I need an hour, Mom.”
“What are you doing up there, honey? It’s nine thirty.”
“Reading a great book, Mom. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.“
“An interesting choice. Can you start the dusting? I left the Pledge and a few Handi Wipes on top of the stereo. Please use Old English on the coffee table—it’s looking a bit drab. What should we listen to today? How about the soundtrack to The Wiz?”
Ten minutes later, while reluctantly swiping clockwise as Stephanie Mills belted out the song “Home,” it dawned on me. The pages I’d read left me hopeful. Guys could fall in love with other guys. The Front Runner left me feeling less alone.
By Valentine’s Day ’76, Elena and I were locked into dating mode. She was the only person I wanted to spend time with. By George Washington’s birthday, I asked her to go steady. Given that I worshiped her kooky, capricious behavior, I thought maybe this could work. After all, my sexual hunger for guys was still untested.
Lo and behold, at a Saturday night drinking party, Elena and I made out like mad on Tommy’s parents’ bed. My aroused penis slipped inside the soft burrow of Elena’s vagina for a few seconds before I recalled I wasn’t wearing a condom. We stopped cold.
A few days later, in the Arby’s parking lot, Elena asked, “Andy, are we going to do this the correct way? I mean, all the way. I want to. I think I’m in love with you.”
Once I said yes, she confessed, “Andy, this won’t be my first time.”
Stuffed with french fries, my jaw dropped. “Who?” I asked.
“That doesn’t matter. No one you know.”
“Maybe we should wait, E. I want to make love if we’re each other’s first, but on second thought—I don’t think I’m ready.”
Elena burst into tears, threw her roast beef sandwich on the car floor, and unleashed a heartfelt monologue about wanting a real relationship. Her previous guy was a douchebag.
