The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (24 page)

Much of what she spoke of baffled me. I disagreed; I didn’t know what to think. But our conversations stimulated and comforted me in a profound way. Her presence, her ideas, the music, brought to me miraculous moments of serenity. I experienced a palpable sense that my body was a vehicle of spirit (as Brother Tom had once suggested), a porous collection of molecules, not a limited sentence of doom, a weighty problem. Sometimes, in the midst of our discussions, it was as if the room cracked open and I saw everything (including my own being) in some eternal, larger way. I couldn’t have put it into words but it was the rush, the delight of perceiving separateness as an illusion. A shimmering sensation of
all
being
one
. (A few years later, when I dropped acid on a glorious evening in California and the world revealed itself as one continuous tapestry of love, I thought of Winnie and her lessons.) Our talks made me feel—if even for a moment—that my fate wasn’t sealed by the trouble I’d been in. That despite who I was (perhaps even because of it!) I had a real chance at being good.

Often, I’d leave her house as if on a cloud, flying from our discussions about dimensionality or past lives. And very often, the farther I got from her home, from her lessons, the volume of other voices would grow and crowd in to tell me that she was nuts and that these ideas were nothing more than a cheap way to escape the hard truth of living on a troubled planet.

I did share with her, at times, how much I struggled with depression. I wasn’t specific, I didn’t know how to speak of the fear that I harbored regarding my sexuality, what I saw as the darkness of my desires, of “what I’d done.” That locked in me was a belief that I was an aberration. That I wrestled with the desire to kill myself. I remember asking her,

“What if who I am . . . authentically, is bad? Wrong?”

“Not possible.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“But you don’t really
know
me.”

“I know that you have love. That you honor life. Of course you struggle. I see that. We all do. I’m terribly sad at times. There’s a hell of a lot of pain to be experienced on this dimension. But, I remind you, there’s infinite joy too. And there is much you are meant to do, to give, in this life. And I know that you are preparing for it, for what you are to give. That’s why we’re here, after all—
to serve
. To serve others. What I am doing for you, you will, in some way, do for someone else, for others, one day.” She spoke so matter-of-factly. I looked at her, at her flaming red hair and bright eyes, and dared to believe her. “Our brains are not capable of grasping all the dimensions we are working on, living on, at once,” she said. “It’s our intuition that guides us.”

“Faith?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yes . . . a
knowing
.”

I think hers was the most vivid faith I had ever encountered. Strong, like Aunt Marion’s, full of joy like Sister Christine’s, but connected to a secular world, a singing world. She offered a glimpse of God, a vision of light, in daily doings, in art. A light that I sensed could outshine the dark, that could begin to mute the shaming voices of a Catholic upbringing.

Winnie attended all her students’ performances. She had a little purse into which she’d snap away the evening’s program. She’d bring them home and put them on the piano so that her students could witness the achievements of their colleagues. She took all that we offered, onstage and off, very seriously.

As my senior year was nearing an end, I received news that I’d been accepted to Stanford University. I told Winnie of my plans to head for Palo Alto.

“What will you study there?”

“Pre-law, I think. I plan to be a lawyer. Like my grandfather.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll do well in whatever you choose. But someone should tell you, darling, there’s no doubt that, if you want, you could enjoy a career in the theater. It can be a wonderful life, you know.”

“But that’s not a
real
life. A real living. It’s crazy.”

“Not crazy, it’s important work. It’s a way to channel the divine, Marty. Music, theater, can be a passport to the infinite. Healing for you and for others. It’s a way to reach people.”

“It’s so competitive, though. It would be impossible.”

“Most of the great, challenging things in life seem unattainable. But if you set your mind to it. . . .” She stopped herself and picked up a volume of arias, set it on the piano. “Whatever you choose, your life will be beautiful. I just know it. All I’m saying is that, if you want, I believe you could be a professional.”

Professional
.

The word moved through me as something sacred. It rang in my head like a distant, impossible dream.

I
T’S
1982
AND
I’m living in a big loft with three friends. The corner of Broome and West Broadway, SoHo, New York City. Raw space, raw talent, four crazy kids, cheap rent. There’s Kim—actor/puppeteer. Amy—actress/chanteuse. And my old friend from high school days, Jodi, who’s attending film school. We call each other “Broommates,” and all of us are pounding the pavement, waiting tables, serving drinks, singing show tunes, whatever it takes to make ends meet. On the sixth floor lives a cranky young woman who (though none of us know it yet) will soon be introduced to America as the “Material Girl” and whisked away in a limo by Sean Penn. On the first floor is a store featuring a fat man who guards shelves of live chickens and rabbits. He butchers them there, or you can take them home and do it yourself. We figure that that’s what the many Italian families in this Italian neighborhood must do. He sits next to our stoop in a folding chair. When friends come over, they scream toward our third-floor window and we throw down a stuffed sock with the key attached. Chicken feathers scatter everywhere. We four are consumed with the push, the drive, to unlock the secret, discover the combination, that will bring success. I buy
Backstage
, the actor’s rag, and go to any audition I can find—up back stairwells, into the basement of churches, to sing an uptune or deliver a dramatic monologue that might land me a job. I wait tables, sell typewriter ribbons over the phone, sew buttons on the eyes of Woody the Woodpecker for the Macy’s Parade, model naked for an art class, hand out fliers in Times Square for an aerobics studio, wait tables. And more tables. Ballet becomes my religion. Ten dollars a class with Maggie Black, a small and mighty New Englander. The finest dance teacher ever in the whole world. She strengthens my spine, lengthens my muscles. “Wide back, long neck, Marty. Straighten your standing leg. Good!” She talks about
line
and
simplicity
as Plato discussed the Forms of the Good and the True. Her discipline and grace remind me of the nuns back at school. She’s as rigorous and positive as the electrified city that surrounds us. The ninety minutes of her crackling voice over the live piano, the physical repetition, the routine, is a godsend. Her daily class pulls me through the ache of being unemployed, misemployed . . . nowhere. The daily angst of doubt and fear. Doubt that I’ve got what it takes, fear that I’ve made all the wrong decisions.

In the space of three years, I’d matriculated at Stanford, come out as gay, quit Stanford, entered an acting conservatory in San Francisco, and moved to Manhattan. Now, instead of taking classes in public policy and economics, I was scraping together rent and cash enough to study pirouettes and pliés. To learn to belt high notes and croon Broadway ballads. Instead of studying Tocqueville, I was memorizing Cole Porter. Eating pizza for dinner, bran muffins for lunch. It occurred to me regularly that I might be insane. But I was also replete with the resolve to give this artist’s life a go, to see if I could make it. And even in the darkest moments, I knew there was no going back. At least, not to Stanford.

I’d really thought that life would become lucid the moment I entered the great university. I thought that everything I’d secretly struggled with in high school would melt away as I embarked on this grown-up life in a brand-new state. I’d see to it. I had, in fact, forced myself to visit a Denver psychiatrist just before leaving for college. Sitting there in his office amid the Tinkertoys and teddy bears of his trade, I’d made myself express the affliction I feared was growing in me, the problem I wanted to conquer—
Homosexuality
. He sat in his khaki pants, unbuttoned cardigan, and red bow tie, he sat there like Mr. Rogers in his cute psychoanalytic neighborhood, and gently explained how the brain is like a switchboard. He reminded me that I was, indeed, the “operator” and, as a disciplined young man, it was my task to get the girl messages through. To make the right bulbs light up.

I’d left there all circuits smoking, thinking him an idiot, but the word
discipline
rang in my head and I sat down and reaffirmed, again and again, the paradigm that had grown in my mind. The strict plan that I would take with me to university: poli-sci, pre-law, lawyer, Catholic husband, father, senator, and, finally, happiness. I’d be
good
. And rich. I’d make my mother proud. I’d will it so.

But forces stronger than will were at work. Between classes, my feet kept taking me away from studies and off to auditions. First it was the all-school musical
Gaieties!
followed soon after by the dorm’s Shakespeare production. I landed a lead in
Gaieties!
and then played Feste in
Twelfth Night
. I fled campus as often as I could and went to the theater in San Francisco. I sat in the balcony of the Geary Theater, thrilled beyond measure to see men and women playing Shaw and Chekhov and Stoppard. Playing for a living! Weekends I visited my high school pal, Ken, who was at Berkeley. These bayside cities were liberating and exotic, especially in comparison to lily-white Palo Alto. Ken and I went to People’s Park, saw women there dancing topless, smoking joints. One night I ventured on my own to the Castro district in San Francisco. I saw guys (so many of them!) spilling out of doors and onto the front stoops of gay bars. Tank tops and mustaches moving to an earthshaking beat. I observed from across the street, repelled and fascinated by what seemed an impossible, sinful mirage. There were gay coffee shops and galleries and bookstores. One Sunday when I went to my first opera,
La Gioconda
, I saw a guy on the steps of city hall wearing a button that said,
I AM A COCKSUCKER
, and holding a sign:
WE ARE EVERYWHERE
. In utter panic I ran around the corner.
Not
here, not here, not me!
my switchboard was shrieking. How sad their gay ghetto, I thought, how embarrassing their lives. Even that lanky politician, the goofy guy on TV, Harvey Milk. Even he, whose courage somehow thrilled me, embarrassed me.

On the 27th of that November, Harvey Milk was murdered, along with Mayor Moscone. I sat vigil in my dorm room, a storm of sadness and indignation and confusion raging through me. I don’t recall saying one word to anyone ever about the tragedy. About all the feelings surrounding the terrible event unfolding not thirty miles from campus. Sadly, I did not want to reveal even the slightest connection to those people in the streets. Those fags who’d lost their brave leader and were daring to rise up in outrage.

I meant to buckle down into my freshman track, but I was continually drawn to the city, to these arty, sexy, urban places, even as every fiber of me was fighting it. I walked that idyllic campus, moving between mad bouts of despair and ecstatic bursts of defiance. Despair that I was still battling these “dark” forces within and yet a stubborn sense that my desires had to somehow be good. They were mine and they were real and maybe they were pointing the way toward a life, toward an authentic self that had little to do with this technocratic school. That had not one thing to do with “lawyer” or “marriage” or “church.”

In the space of one evening late that first semester, a single event broke the floodgates and cleared the path.

It was a cool autumn night a few weeks after I’d finished playing Feste. An elder classman recognized me at the library and stopped me to say hello and to compliment me on my performances. I recognized him. He was a star athlete. His name was Dan and he was dazzling. He was extremely popular and clever. He was sometimes involved in creating the halftime antics at the football games, which had made the Stanford Marching Band so famous. He asked me over to his off-campus digs for drinks. Sure, I said. Later that night, sitting on the edge of his queen-size bed, we got stoned. We talked quietly of our aspirations. Though he was studying medicine, he wanted to be a musician, guitar, and I confessed that I couldn’t stop thinking about being an actor. That I felt a passion for the stage and was beginning to think I didn’t belong at Stanford. That I should look for other schools.

He touched my knee and seven thousand volts shot through me, switchboard blown. “You should,” he said. “You could be a
professional
. You’re absolutely dynamite.”

The light in his brown eyes, the Hawaiian dope, his fingers brushing my dungarees, I was a goner. His room was tiny. We were knee to knee. I was aware, through the warm hum of THC, that I wanted one thing in the world more than any other. To kiss him. I wanted to hold him and be held. It was clear as clear as anything I’d ever known. Solid and real and vibrant and fabulous. His hand moved up my leg—the sky on the Fourth of July—and written in lights across the universe, across the inside of my buttoned-up head and the gooseflesh of my arms, there it was:
Hello, you want this. Here it is
.

It felt as shocking as it did inevitable.

Awkwardly, shyly, the star athlete and I managed to get horizontal. The warmth of this boy near my own age, near my own body, was some kind of beautiful, breathing truth. It was like holding (after all those high school years of denial, after all the awkward dating of girls) my future. God, here he was in my arms, this smart and funny and talented guy and I liked him. I really liked him.

It was wildly erotic and frustratingly chaste. I wanted more but couldn’t even bring myself to say a word, much less kiss him. Lying right there next to me, he’d suddenly gone away. Disappeared. I could feel it. He was more afraid, it seemed, than even I. We’d taken off our shirts but still wore pants and I was holding on for dear life and wondering just what (everything, I hoped) would happen next. If there might be love here, if we’d sleep together and make scrambled eggs in the morning, if maybe he felt the same, when, with a jolt, he jumped up.