Not So Good a Gay Man Page 3

  The trip to Japan took two weeks and I shed twenty pounds—from 140 to 120. By popular acclamation I was made compartment cleaner, since I did the most to dirty it up. I couldn’t help it—I’d go to the head (bathroom) in the morning, and the first thing I saw was a mix of seawater and vomit sloshing back and forth in the bathroom trough. I’d promptly lose my breakfast. On inspection day, I’d sit on the edge of a bottom bunk with a bucket between my knees, stand up and salute when the captain came through, then go back to holding my head over the bucket.

  I probably could have gotten out of the navy because of chronic seasickness, but then I discovered if I went topside, on the bridge where the cold wind could catch my face, it would help a lot. I spent as little time belowdecks as possible.

  Another week and we were anchored off Yokohama. It was now a few weeks after the surrender. Some days later I was transferred to a small ship going upriver to Nanking, China, to pick up half a dozen women, White Russian refugees, and take them to Shanghai. Once on board the captain gave them several cabins near the bow, then posted guards to make sure that no members of the crew wandered forward to try to make friends with the women.

  I pulled one afternoon liberty, about which I remember very little except that I had never seen so many Chinese in all my life.

  The trip back to the States was uneventful, except for the “thrill” of standing at attention on deck in the hot summer sun going through the Panama Canal. A week or so later we docked at Norfolk.

  The day I got my discharge papers and was walking to the train station to go home I was picked up by the police for “being out of uniform.” It had been a hot day and I was wearing whites instead of travel blues. I spent the afternoon in jail.

  “Sailors and dogs keep off the grass.”

  The people in town meant it.

  I was looking forward to civilian life. I never in my worst nightmares thought that in a few years I would be back in the navy.

  III

  MY MOTHER HAD worn a small pin with four stars on it—one for each of her and Dad Knox’s sons in the service. She put it in her jewelry box when we came home. Gene and Mark were lucky. Both had served in the Pacific and both came home without a scratch—though neither ever talked about the war. Bill wasn’t so lucky. He had been in the Battle of the Bulge and lost several toes to frostbite. I, lucky fellow, had never seen any action at all.

  Gene and Mark went looking for jobs. Bill had been a star in math class in high school and I thought sure he would go to college. He didn’t—he drifted from job to job and eventually went into the antiques business.

  I spent my time looking for a college. Two years in the navy had bought me four years of the GI Bill. I finally picked Beloit College in Beloit, Wisconsin, just over the state line from Rockford, Illinois. It was small—the GI Bill didn’t exactly cover you if you wanted to go to Harvard or Yale—and close enough so I could go home on the weekends if I wanted and also send my laundry home and get it back the same week.

  Beloit was a quiet, midwestern college—probably one of the best small colleges in the country.

  I lived with the other returning veterans in “huts” the college had built just off the campus proper. Maybe eight or ten to a cottage, all of us ex-marines, sailors, or air force personnel.

  My major was physics—my hero had been Robert Oppenheimer, one of the creators of the atomic bomb, and one of the few who regretted it. I aced my freshman physics class—my education as a navy technician helped a lot. It was a different story a few years later, when I was struggling with calculus and physical chemistry. The smartest students in the college were majoring in physics, and I was out of my league.

  During the second-year summer break I took a short-lived job at Western Electric, working the line, assembling telephones. It was repetitious, low-pay work where you punched a time clock and your only break was lunch in the company cafeteria. I knew I was a fish out of water, that as a college student I didn’t belong, but I decided to make the effort—at least to the point where I’d try to “butch it up,” become one of “them.”

  I bought a pack of cigarettes and stuck it in my shirt pocket, and a pack of condoms, which I carried in my wallet.

  After lunch I lit up, and tried to talk with the people around me. I didn’t get much more than a suspicious glance and monosyllables. In the cashier’s checkout line I stubbed out my cigarette—I had been careful not to inhale, of course. (I had started with nickel cigars when I was a kid and never got past the first one, which made me violently sick.)

  I pulled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet to pay for lunch, and unfortunately the pack of condoms stuck to it. Without thinking I gave the bill a flip, and the condoms landed on the floor. Everybody around me glanced down and then at me.

  I wasn’t one of them and I never would be. They knew I was a fake, and they were contemptuous of my act. (In the late thirties there was a gulf between college kids, whose families presumably had money, and those who worked the line whose families didn’t. It was a while before the GI Bill evened out the difference.)

  With the start of the regular school year I was “rushed” by some of the fraternities. The students were split into two groups—younger students who had never been to war, and us veterans, older and more cynical. I pledged Pi Kappa Alpha, known as the “old soldiers’ home” because most of the members were vets.

  Come Halloween I discovered that of all the colleges I had considered, I may have picked the right one. Halloween night it was an unofficial tradition for the freshmen boys to knot their clothes tightly around themselves and go out to the grinder, an open field where the sophomore boys—stark naked—would meet them and try to tear off their clothing.

  When we heard of this a photographer in the house grabbed his camera and ran to chronicle the festivities. He came back with a fine selection of X-rated photographs. I was sorry I hadn’t gone with him.

  By my sophomore year, I was beginning to suck wind in my major of physics, though I was a straight A student in my minors. Anthropology I aced—it was a class I loved. There were a number of Indian mounds near Beloit, and the anthro majors would make periodic trips to excavate them and examine the bones. (They wouldn’t get away with that now.)

  Another minor that interested me was English composition. I had applied for a course in article writing, but the class was full, and fiction was the only thing available. I hadn’t wanted to sign up for it at first for fear I would discover that I wasn’t capable of doing what I really wanted to in life.

  One session we had a teaching assistant who assigned us to write a horror story. The best ones would be read in class. I rewrote my effort at least a dozen times and was not too happy with it. But it was read aloud in class and halfway through it I noticed something strange. It was deathly quiet in the classroom; everybody had been caught up by my story.

  Fuck physics. I had just found my profession.

  The process of storytelling was exciting—I thought I might even be able to make money doing it. And it was a lot more fun than learning formulas in physics.

  My other minor was history. One day the captain of the diving team, Don, asked if I would like to come over to the Phi Psi house and cram for a history test. I was flattered. Don was a top member of the swim team, a reliable man in relays, and a standout when it came to diving.

  I went over that night and thought for a moment that nobody was home. I rang the bell and a few moments later Don opened it. As I recall, he was starkers—obviously the only one home. I hid my surprise and followed him to his room, the only one lit in the entire house. I sat on the other side of his desk, stuck my nose in a history book, and kept it there, looking up at Don only to answer questions.

  I had no idea what he wanted, but the feeling was growing that he wasn’t that much interested in history. I was frozen; I couldn’t have done anything, not even touch him.

  After graduation in 1950 I heard that Don had gotten a job at the American School in Beirut, Lebanon, te
aching English to the sons and daughters of oil engineers. A year or so after that, word came that Don had committed suicide. It had run in the family, friends said.

  Much later on, when I was called back into the navy, I chose the Mediterranean as my theater of operations, and one of our ports of call was Beirut. On my first liberty I took a cab to the cemetery to pay my respects.

  The cabbie showed me the bluff above Pigeon Rocks, where Don had taken his last dive. I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked down at the Mediterranean crashing against the rocks a hundred feet out.

  I felt like shit.

  It was in the family, people had said. I didn’t believe it. I wished to hell that that night I had closed my history book and just talked to him.

  Both of us were lost, I thought. Of the two of us, he had been the unlucky one. I was desperately unhappy but I was still alive.

  Later that year I tried once again to break out of my closet. The fraternity had pledged a young basketball player, and he became my roommate. He was a nice kid, a well-built basketball type. One night we were studying and he had to use the pencil sharpener behind where I sat at my desk. He had on a floppy bathrobe, and I started to make a pass. He didn’t move but continued sharpening his pencil—a nub by now. He was waiting but I chickened out. He returned to his desk and both of us resumed studying as if nothing had happened.

  Michael was a member of the Newman Club, a Catholic group that met once a week. When he went to confession, I was afraid he would tell everything to a priest. In retrospect he probably would have been told “say twenty Hail Marys and what are you doing tonight?”

  What locked me further in the closet was meeting Barry Westlake, a man I liked and learned to love. He was an independent (no fraternity) and had a freedom of outlook that I admired. Both of us had gone to summer school, and one night we walked out to the college’s football stadium and sat in the bleachers and just talked.

  After half an hour of trading family history he was silent for a long moment, then began to talk about the highly personal things he had done in his family. They weren’t easy for him to say. Once his father had even threatened to throw him out of the house if he didn’t shape up.

  It was hard for him to talk about them, but at that moment I was his best friend. I’m sure he felt like he could tell me anything.

  What struck me later was a quote from the comic strip Peanuts, where Lucy has a little booth from which she’s peddling advice. The sign on the booth was “Sympathy is next to love.”

  What I felt was an overwhelming sense of sympathy and a sudden rush of love. I didn’t have enough experience to know when to sympathize and when to stop. I massaged his back, then slipped his shirt off. I was unsure what I wanted to do or how to do it but I was sure nature would take care of things like that.

  He turned when I got to his belt buckle, and the look on his face was a mix of anger and loathing. We were best friends but I had never had the courage to tell him I was gay, and what was worse, I had reduced his confiding in me to something physical.

  He put his shirt back on and started walking back to campus. I followed, not knowing how to apologize, not knowing what to say.

  There was no doubt in my mind that my life was now over. He would report me to the campus authorities, I would be kicked out of college, my faculty adviser would drop a note to my parents, and I would lose my family and my home.

  I didn’t sleep that night, running the scene over and over in my head and feeling worse every time I did so. The look on his face was etched in my memory. I started packing my suitcase in the morning, prepared to leave without a word. I was halfway through the packing when a pledge came up to the attic and said somebody wanted to see me.

  At the door Barry said quietly, “You okay, Frank?”

  The look on his face this time was one of deep concern. I wanted to bust out crying. I didn’t know what he thought of the previous night, but to me it meant a good deal more than just sex. I had offered him what I thought was the best of myself—the love I felt for him, my sense of pride. I swore that I would never lose my pride again.

  (I did, of course—and more than once.)

  Barry and I became even closer than before and went on long bike rides over the Wisconsin hills (you haven’t lived if you haven’t tried pedaling a balloon-tired bike over thirty miles of rolling hillside). We went fishing once and stayed at Barry’s home that night. His mother offered us the spare bedroom. The bed was big enough for two but I didn’t trust myself and, oddly, I didn’t trust Barry, either.

  That night I slept in my sleeping bag on the floor.

  With time we drifted apart but I would see him sporadically and once flew down to San Jose for the wedding of his son. When I started back to the airport after it was over, Barry asked if he could come to the airport and wait for the plane with me. He and I sat in the airport lounge and talked and suddenly Barry was confiding in me again, telling me his problems at work and life in general. It got more personal and I began to feel the same surge of sympathy that I had felt so many years before.

  I wrote a long letter to him when his wife died. He told me afterward he had cried for months. The last time I saw him was a few years ago, in the early 2010s, when we met at the Monterey Bay Aquarium—he, his son and his son’s wife, and me. Barry had worked in the Forest Service most of his life, and the sun had weathered him. He was much older now, his hair white and the skin on his forearms not just tan but tanned, like leather. He said he skied and even had a kayak he used during the summer.

  When we left we said good-bye, and then his son turned to him and said quietly, “Go ahead, Dad—you know you want to.”

  Barry walked over and hugged me, saying, “How can I thank you? You’ve done so much for me all my life.”

  I wanted to remind him about the time he’d saved my life so long ago. I didn’t; I was afraid I would embarrass him.

  But my feelings for him then and my feelings for him now hadn’t changed a bit.

  I felt very good about that.

  I sold my first short story when I was a junior at Beloit in the late 1940s. It didn’t sell right away—editor John W. Campbell of Astounding liked it but said, regretfully, that he was overstocked with stories of that length. I showed Chad Walsh, my composition instructor, Campbell’s letter. He suggested I cut a few thousand words out of it and resubmit the story.

  I did and this time Campbell took it and sent me a check for $200. I immediately told everybody on campus that I was now a published author.

  Well—not yet. Campbell was still overstocked, and the story never appeared that year. Most of my friends now looked at me with suspicion. I was sure they thought I was a status liar.

  That year was also the year I was elected president of Pi Kappa Alpha. For a variety of reasons, besides the obvious one, I was woefully unsuited for the job. My major supporter was a muscular ex-marine named Jeff Richards, but that was support enough.

  (I was not the only gay man at Beloit. After graduation, the president of the senior class became the lover of a Chicago puppeteer with an early TV show. We never knew each other in college but met briefly afterward. In college, both of us were in the closet.)

  It was expected that the president of the fraternity would play on our basketball team during the intramurals. I knew better than to even show up. (It turned out I was a pretty good right-handed handball player, but I didn’t discover that until years later.)

  My last summer break I got another low-pay job at a metal job shop. Once again I was a fish out of water but didn’t try to pretend otherwise. My job was simple enough—grind irregularly shaped pieces of metal until they were roughly smooth on both sides.

  I ran into my first Neanderthal at the shop, or at least a man who could qualify as one. He was short—about five-six—with relatively short legs and extremely thick, muscular arms. A stumpy man who probably weighed 225 or 250 pounds. I’d throw the finished lumps of metal into a barrel until it was almost full and then look
around for a cart or something to move it over to a different part of the shop. I didn’t have to bother. My stumpy friend would trundle over, put his arms around the barrel, lift it, and carry it over. The barrel had to weigh 300 to 400 pounds.

  (Anthropologists have now figured out that all of us have somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of Neanderthal genes. My muscular friend had more than his share.)

  By now I was becoming a minor VIP on campus. I had become the news editor of the weekly campus newspaper, The Beloit College Round Table. (In 1972, Don Bolles, the editor in chief, became part of the investigative beat of The Arizona Republic. He was killed when six sticks of dynamite exploded beneath his car as he went to meet a contact. Don became an early hero of mine.)

  The other major social activity on campus at which I was woefully inept was dating.

  Occasionally the college had a dance, and the various presidents of the fraternities were expected to attend, especially the senior prom. At that time many girls going to college considered it the happy hunting ground for marriage prospects.

  My date had had few boyfriends, and she was enthusiastic about the prom. I danced with her only a few times (I dance badly). Afterward, you were expected to walk hand-in-hand back to the sorority house, telling her how gorgeous she was and proving it when you got to the sorority house, sealing the evening with a tight squeeze and a hot and sexy kiss.

  I flunked the course. I kissed her briefly, then turned and left. I’m sure it was the worst date she ever had in her life, and to be destroyed on prom night had to be too much to bear. When I was back in the house I had trouble remembering her name. My guess was that she also had trouble remembering mine—or perhaps forgetting it.