Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (49 page)

We were 19. We had no idea what kind of forces we were unleashing.

“
It amazes me,” he lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “I always used to think gay people were just sick or something. I thought people like that just killed themselves.”

That touched a raw nerve. “Sometimes I’ve just wanted to end it all,” I broke down in his arms.

Then he broke down, too, clutching me. “No, John-John! Don’t!” he pleaded. “Don’t die! Live! Live for me!”

So I did. I lived for him, a straight guy who lined up dates every Saturday night with a string of different girls but who reserved every Friday night exclusively for me.

“
Why do you have to go out with John every Friday night?” his girlfriends kept complaining back at school.

I wasn’t sure why he did it, either. Maybe it was the conversation. Maybe it was the attention. Maybe it was the pure and unadulterated spiritual love that he felt for me. Maybe it was the margaritas. Every Friday night, we trotted to the El Torito restaurant in Georgetown Park at 7 p.m. and imbibed seven margaritas apiece, one of each flavor. Regular. Strawberry. Peach. Banana. Coconut. Pineapple. Melon. We ordered side dishes of sliced jalapeños. We held the hot peppers up to our mouths, kissed them, and licked them as we looked affectionately into each other’s eyes and laughed subversively. We made vicarious love to each other by means of tequila and hot oil. Then we left the restaurant, drunk and giggling. We stumbled on the brick sidewalks through the tony streets of Georgetown on the way back to his dorm room, where we lay in his bed and joked about his jealous girlfriends.

“
So what is it about me that you find attractive?” he changed the subject as we lay beside each other. “I mean, physically.”

I turned my face toward his. “Your eyes make me melt.”

“
That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” his eyes moistened. He rolled over and kissed my cheek.

I kissed his.

We cuddled, massaged, and explored each other’s bodies, but we didn’t have sex. He told me that his love for me was “90 percent spiritual and 10 percent physical.” That he was “99 percent straight and 1 percent gay.” That he was “heterosexual plus one.”

In our junior year, we moved into a house off campus with three friends. He and I became roommates. Our friends each had their own rooms, but we wanted to be together. We took classes together, studied together, worked out together, swam together, went cycling together, bought our groceries together, and cooked our meals together.

We spent our days together, and then he spent his nights with various girlfriends. “I can’t be everything you want me to be,” he apologized one afternoon as we lay in each other’s arms atop our sleeping bags in our upstairs bedroom. He lamented that nobody could be everything for him, either. “I can’t bond with you sexually the way I bond with my girlfriends,” he said. “When I’m with you, I feel guilty. But I can’t bond with my girlfriends emotionally the way I bond with you. When I’m with them, I feel empty.”

He and one of his girlfriends began sleeping together in the living room beneath our bedroom. When I heard them making love on the couch one night, I couldn’t take it anymore. The whole idea that she could be with him and that I couldn’t made no sense to me, while each giggle, throb, and squeal made a mockery of my deepest emotions. It felt as though my head was splitting in two and my heart was being blown apart. I crawled out of the sleeping bag, threw on some clothes, and dashed down the darkened stairs.

“
John-John!” he called from the couch as I flew out the front door. “What’s wrong?”

I charged into the empty street in the middle of the night and let out a mournful howl that sounded like something that used to come from Geri. A deep, pulsating howl. I was afraid I was losing my mind. I kept running and howling down the middle of the deserted road until I could run no more. And right then and there, my heart stopped.

Soon after our junior year came to an end, he packed his duffel bag for Officer Candidates School, a ten-week boot camp at the U.S. Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. He marked each item with his name, as instructed. He filled the bag with the gear required to report and nothing more: running shoes, orthotics, five pairs of underwear, one collared shirt, one undershirt, one pair of pressed slacks, and one pair of dress shoes. For candidates like him who had not yet enlisted, the Marines would provide the socks, shorts, green T-shirts, and camouflage gear.

He would lose himself. Gladly. For ten weeks in the heat of a steamy southern summer, he would shed his identity and attachments. He would put his honor, courage, and commitment to the test in service to his country. But on a different level of which he was keenly aware, everything would be simple again. Everything would make sense. There would be no uncertainty of purpose. He yearned to leave everything else behind.

I assumed he was leaving me, too. It appeared to be the perfect escape.

He slung his bag over his shoulder and clomped down the stairs. Others in the house gathered around him. They bade him farewell, patted him on the back, joked about his upcoming meals, and warned that the Marine Corps would never be the same. As he opened the screen door and propped his foot at its base, I belatedly entered the room.

“
Goodbye,” my voice faltered.

He gave me a where-in-the-hell-have-you-been look and managed a wry smile. “Bye,” he swung his foot free of the screen and strode out the door.

At Quantico, he mastered the leadership exercises and aced the classroom exams. He conquered the obstacle course, the fartlek course, the Tarzan course, the endurance course, the upper body development course, the conditioning hikes, the run circuit, the combat readiness test, and the pugil sticks.

Out of 400 men, he was one of only three to score a perfect 300 on the Marine Corps physical fitness test, accumulating 100 points for 20 pull-ups, 100 points for 100 crunches, and 100 points for running three miles in less than 18 minutes. The other men who scored a perfect 300 were enlisted Marines being sponsored for officer candidacy.

His triumph went beyond the thrill of victory. The most gratifying part for him was the clarity. He found beauty in the precise, immutable standards that demanded nothing but drive and determination. He had ample supplies of those and knew how to apply them. He wanted only to give his all in a way that would be fully appreciated. He found a place where he could finally do that, and he had never felt better about himself.

A few nights after the physical fitness test, the lights went out in his barracks. He lay in his cot, listening to the snores and other sounds of his barrack mates. One of them arose in haste and scurried to the latrine. Another soon followed, but neither returned in short order. And then he, too, detected the sickening sensation of enemy infiltration. An intestinal flu had spread its contagion, causing so much dehydration from the vomiting and diarrhea that he and the other stricken men in his barracks required several days off, followed by several days of weakness. He fell behind and left the program after being “NPQ’d”—found not physically qualified. He was honorably discharged and invited back to camp whenever he wished to try again.

As he rode the train back to Washington, he fell into despair. He felt that he had failed. That he had given his all, yet it wasn’t good enough. That he had found his place, yet it was denied him. “If anyone can relate,” he glimpsed the city, “it’ll be John-John.”

He walked through the door of our home and dropped his bag. “John-John.”

“
Hey,” I walked past him, oblivious to his pain, engrossed in my own.

His chin fell to the floor. And right then and there, he realized that he, too, was alone.

He was wounded by our relationship at least as much as I was, but he was even less prepared to deal with it. He didn’t know what his affection for me meant for him, and I didn’t know how to alleviate his pain regarding Quantico or much of anything else.

The look in his eyes grew slightly deranged. They flared with the hunted look of Al Pacino in
Dog Day Afternoon
. He couldn’t concentrate on school. He started missing classes. Lots of them. He spent more and more time at the gym, blowing off steam.

“
How can you focus on school?” he stormed into our bedroom one night and howled at me while I was hunched over my desk. “That just goes to show you,” he argued, “that I love you more than you love me!”

His words jolted me backward, forcing me to think. “For me, school has always been the escape,” I replied. “When you find refuge at the gym, I find it in the books.”

We remained close friends, but we began to detach ourselves from the consuming intensity of the relationship. We had tried to push each other beyond our sexual bounds. But we could never quite do so. Our attempt to carve meaning and virtue out of a vast new psychological frontier had failed miserably.

I moved to a different bedroom.

Nobody else in the house knew about the nature of our relationship. Nobody asked. Nobody told.

I couldn’t imagine what redeeming virtue might come from this tattered string of taboo relationships. It didn’t seem to matter if other guys were straight, gay, or confused. There simply seemed to be no good place in the world for the kind of love I could offer. But I began to recognize that it wasn’t just gay people who were suffering because of it.

And right then, for the first time in my life, I stopped blaming myself. A radical notion occurred to me: If there was no good place in the world for the kind of love that I or anyone else could offer, then the problem lay with the world. All that stuff about not fitting in forever was a bunch of bunk—a myth spun by society and religious groups that had done everything they could to make gay relationships taboo in the first place. And then society and religious groups had blamed gay people for being incapable of building healthy relationships. The outcome had been rigged from the start.

At 21, I was in no position to take on the world or even a small part of it. I felt emotionally whiplashed, permanently partially disabled for the challenges that awaited. I knew I couldn’t change the past. I couldn’t change anything that I had done or that anyone had ever done or failed to do for me. I could change only the future.

“
Maybe someday,” I mused, “I can make the future as different from the past as possible.” But I had no idea how one might go about doing that.

In the meantime, I stopped following my heart. I doubted that I had much of a heart left to follow anyway. It became more important for me to regain my spirit.

The Jesuits of Georgetown encouraged me to develop a new philosophy of life, a new set of values, and a new sense of purpose. I loved it, needed it, and immersed myself in it, taking electives in philosophy, theology, and comparative religions. I spent most of my discretionary time in monastic contemplation at a wobbly assemble-it-yourself desk.

It was more than an inward journey. I needed to look for meaning beyond Roman Catholicism. That faith seemed to have taken me as far as it could, at least on its own. So I embarked on a pilgrimage into a much larger spiritual universe.

The obscure Roman Catholic concept of the Holy Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit—never meant much to me until I took a course on the Hindu-Christian Dialogue and encountered the Hindu concept of
saccidananda
. The exotic term combines three Sanskrit words that represent the three components of God:
sat
(being),
cit
(consciousness), and
ananda
(joy). Being, consciousness, and joy correspond to God the Father (the source of being), God the Son (the self-awareness of God on earth), and God the Holy Spirit (the joy that comes with the self-awareness of God). What better definition of a Holy Trinity could there be than “being conscious of joy”? Once I learned the meaning of
saccidananda
, I could never make the sign of the cross in the same mechanical way again. Hinduism had taught me about Catholicism.

Each religious tradition could contribute something toward a shared goal, I learned. The best examples were the parallel spiritual paths taken by Saint Francis of Assisi, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. They were Catholic, Hindu, and Protestant, yet they strove for a higher common ground. Each man transformed the violence within himself as the first step toward promoting peace among others. I came to regard Martin Luther King Jr. as the greatest American of them all.

I didn’t stray far from my native religion, because that would have violated the Gandhian notion of
swadeshi
. The word translates crudely to mean “patriotism,” or “service of immediate neighborhood.” In religious terms,
swadeshi
means that people should adhere to the religion into which they are born. They should seek to correct its defects, to assimilate into it the truths of other religions, and to build a fellowship of faiths, each spurring the others in the pursuit of truth. Catholics should become better Catholics; Hindus, better Hindus; Muslims, better Muslims; Jews, better Jews; and so on.

Religions could learn not only from other religions but also from science, I discovered. The thinker who impressed me the most in this regard was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a French Jesuit, soldier, and paleontologist of the early 20th century. He fused his unlikely collection of interests into a controversial “theology of evolution.” He argued that evolution and Christianity, far from being at odds with each other, are part of the same process: the evolution of a benign spiritual force through increasingly complex forms of material life on earth. Evolution, in this view, is nothing but the historical process of matter evolving into spirit. Rather than disproving the existence of God, this theory of evolution points toward the transcendent destiny of all living things.