The Tricky Part: One Boy's Fall from Trespass into Grace (27 page)

It’s the beginning of my third year in New York, January of 1985, and I land my first off-Broadway play. It’s an experimental music-theater piece. An opera based on a Gertrude Stein novel, to be directed by a young woman named Anne Bogart. “She’s a big deal, very avant-guard,” a friend-in-the-know tells me. “Look, her picture’s in the
Village Voice
this week. She’s doing some wild production of a Wedekind play at NYU.” Though I find the Stein script bizarre and completely inscrutable, I’m thrilled to be one of the eight performers cast. To be working in New York with this up and coming woman director whose photo is in the
Voice
.

There’s an actor in the piece. He’s got cool leather boots—some kind of funky Asian design. Sleek black jeans. Bald head with long hair on the sides, which billows wildly out over his ears as though he’s standing in some great and constant storm. I keep watching him. “He’s from
Juilliard
,” the other actors tell me. I learn that he’s performed at the Guthrie, Arena Stage, and with Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater. He’s a
real
actor. His presence, his originality in rehearsals, is astonishing. He’s ceaselessly inventive, everything he does physically, an elegant surprise. His ideas, his sudden bursts of genuine emotion, are inspired and startle me. Seem to startle everyone. He’s like the furnace in the room, the one you go to to warm your hands, your mind. Who is this man? Thirty, bald, beautiful.

Henry.

The rehearsal room is electric, happy. Everyone is doing strong work. We believe—Anne inspires it somehow—that we are creating the most beautiful and important piece of theater in the history of the universe.
The hymn of repetition . . . Life is the hymn of repetition
. We belt out the Steinian verses, repeat the exacting choreography we’ve invented together. I sing and move with the budding sense that I am an artist among artists. I am bursting with the happiness of work.

It’s the end of the second week of rehearsal. We are in the midst of a physical improvisation in which we are moving rapidly around the rehearsal space on a gridlike pattern. Suddenly Anne screams, “Do something this second that you’re totally terrified to do!” And instantly, I’m tackled. I’m taken straight (and somehow gently) to the floor by this man called Henry. We are nose to nose, my back pressed to the slats of oak, his eyes burning into mine. Laser-beam scary. I have the most distinct feeling that, until now, no one in this world has ever really looked at me. It’s as though his being enters in, circles my heart, my liver, lassos all vital organs and declares:
Here I am. You’ve found your match
. The moment is over as fast as it began and we’re on to the next exercise. When the stage manager calls a break some minutes later, I go out into the hallway of the huge, dusty rehearsal loft and find a private corner in which to cry. I’m utterly baffled. I very seldom weep and don’t know why these tears come, except that something about the encounter with him has shaken me. Shaken something loose. Ten minutes later we’re back in rehearsal and move on with the staging of Stein.

The third week, he begins to walk with me from rehearsal to the subway. We discuss the play, our Catholic, middle American families. When we get to the stop on Houston Street, he pulls a rose from his knapsack. “Here,” he says. The following afternoon, it’s a box of chocolates. Not much said, a furtive smile. Out of rehearsal, he’s a quiet guy. A few days later, February 23, 1985, he stays by my side all the way to the loft, where he meets the three Broommates, where he wakes the following morning, still at my side.

MEN
.

It is there above the door, carved in white marble, in bold classical script. Like a commandment. So I enter.

I’m the young one. At twenty-seven my body is finished finding its height. He’s probably forty-five, the lone guy at the urinal, fifty, perhaps, with his tall, heavy frame and beret. He seems to belong to no one. He stands still, staring straight ahead at the sloppily painted brick. A slice of sunlight falls across his shoulder. I take a position two away and open my fly. I study the walls, dull beige with countless coats of paint. Sounds of revelers from the nearby park echo through the room. I should be working, singing, writing.
Should be
doing something, anything, else.

I play serious at the business of peeing as I feel him look up at me. Over to me. He’s giving off something I know. An admission, an admixture of desire and fear that clings to him even as it radiates toward me. I know then that, in a certain way, we are the same. I feel sure his heart is pounding like mine, his knees shaking. He’s got the madness; that unrest that sends you out searching off-limits where your mother or teachers or, dear God,
your lover
, would not in their wildest imaginings think you’d be—pulsing with want in front of a public toilet.

I thought sure this would end. That the grip of it would cease. Why is it happening again? Why am I allowing it? It’s like a trance, familiar the way it creeps in, creeps out from behind the angst. A hankering. A hunger that says only
this
food will do. Only this will soothe the sharp edge of anxiety. All my nerves screaming like spoiled brats hooked on it long ago.
Get some
, the synapses shriek,
get it now
.

It’s crazy, standing there full-bellied and famished, fly open, holding myself out because that’s the ritual, the prayer before a meal with a stranger. I stand there exhausted from the wish to be two places at once: Here and not here. The chaos feels ancient and I’m scraping up reasons as I stroke myself:

I was born oversexed, marked with a family gene; it’s in the blood, an overactive libido. I should look into this, get help. But, for now, I just have to see, please, this one thing swollen with proof that I’m here. Allow me this one quick glimpse of another man
.

It’s OK. Chill out. Just taking care of an animal need here. That’s all. That’s it. It is my earthly right as a guy to feel the pulse, the pleasure, the aliveness of body. This is what men have done since God knows when, since we were cavemen, for chrissakes. Don’t let the enemy, the old Catholic guilt, crush what the body desires, deserves. It’s cool, you’re not hurting anyone. Stay put
.

But why are you looking for aliveness inside a toilet? It’s deadness, isn’t it?

No, it’s just a few minutes of fun with the damned. A few moments to enjoy, then on my way
.

Go home and enjoy. Get out of this shit hole
.

This is what I’m choosing
.

If you think you’re choosing you’re crazy. This is desperate behavior. This surely is one thing you should be able to control, to sacrifice, to give up for love, for Lent. Stop hunting up excuses for being a rogue
.

And I watch the man. I glance up at his skeleton smile
(are
my
eyes that vacant?)
I watch him play with himself. At least I’m being “safe,” I think. I’m not doing anything dangerous in the midst of this horrible epidemic. At least I have
that
much control, and then it comes. A quick, silent release, eyes clenched, an obliterated chunk of time. Over in a second. Did that really happen? Wipe hands on the Kleenex stuck in your pocket, get out, out of the dank and into the sun, get on with the day, on with your life. For God’s sake.

And out into the light I march, stomach scooped hollow. And what rushes right in to fill the pit is punishment. A thrashing in the chest, the mad, criminal heart. Like day follows night, shame rises up and it’s old hat, it’s an old, surly friend come pounding, stubborn and loud, to announce he’s here and plans to move in. To crash in your living room for the foreseeable future.

I
N THE SPRING
of 1988 I moved into Henry’s place. A sweet and nervous leap of faith. A month later (the Gypsy life) I was hired to “Make ’em Laugh” as Cosmo in a Salt Lake City production of
Singin’ in the Rain
. I wanted to live up to the brilliant Donald O’Connor so I decided to incorporate the back flips off the wall during the big number. One night, midflip, I freaked and landed on my knee, then promptly in the hospital for surgery, and, knowing I couldn’t negotiate Manhattan on crutches, I ended up on my back in my old bed in Denver to recuperate.

Sprawled in a postoperative stupor and looking for the bright side, I decided that this stretch of time at home was meant to be a blessing. Since I’d left for Stanford ten years before, I’d hardly been back, and here, I figured, was a rare opportunity to slow down and reconnect with family and friends. Carpe diem.

Mom set up a convalescent bed in the dining room so I wouldn’t have to use the stairs. She organized meals and got me to physical therapy in the mornings, and Dad picked me up most days and took me to lunch. My little sister, Carolyn, and my brother, David, would stop in and shuttle me places. Here we were, all of a sudden, finding one another older and mellower.

Dad’s marriage, it seemed, had deepened. He’d quit drinking. His wit was readier and wryer than ever and his kindness, his wish to help, was as clear as his sober eyes. The love I saw there was lucid, not the glazed kind I remembered from dinners past, the kind lit up by vodka and birthday candles. Mom was working hard at her job, excelling at bridge, and becoming a keen lover of films. We saw movies together, went for dinner. Discussed the plots and themes and cinematography.

Henry came for a couple of weeks to visit. With great care, Mom prepared our room. She’d done a lot of work through the years to comprehend and accept her son’s homosexuality. And, besides, during the few trips she’d made East, she’d grown very fond of Henry.

Crutches under my arms, I proudly showed him around my boyhood town and, one evening, even took him up to the Rockies, into Estes Park, where we spent a night in the Stanley Hotel, the prototype, supposedly, for Stephen King’s ghostly resort in
The Shining
. We couldn’t help but laugh after the gawky guy at the counter gave us a ghoulish stare when we asked for a queen instead of twin beds.
Redrum, Redrum
, Henry intoned all the way up the tiny, squeaking elevator.

One afternoon I brought Henry, unannounced, to the
Denver Catholic Register
, where my father was then writing. Dad mumbled hello, staring at the keys of his typewriter. He never got up from his chair. Henry stood in the doorway, struggling, suddenly, through a fit of coughing. I died a thousand deaths as we stood there for two excruciating, wordless minutes before I croaked out an irritated and hasty goodbye. “Some things will never change,” I said to Henry as he helped me hobble back to the car.

“That wasn’t a great idea,” he said.

“I know. Sorry.”

But, even with the barriers and tensions that remained, there was a truce, a quiet acceptance, which reigned over the family reunion.

My old pals from high school, Mike and Kelly and Dave and Steph, came by and got to know Henry. And in the weeks after Henry left to play Trofimov in a production of
The Cherry Orchard
in D.C., friends continued to stop in and take me to dinner, once, to a Sting concert. Here was a beautiful Colorado summer, chums nearby, workmen’s compensation footing the bill, family taking good care. A gift.

So why, I kept asking, did I feel so intensely troubled? The smell of the night air (so distinct in Colorado), the clouds moving over Mount Meeker, rendered me black with an inexplicable despair. Everything I laid eyes on—the green street sign on Flamingo, the gold leaf dome of the state capitol, the ash tree in our front yard—caused sudden bursts of remorse. As if Denver was booby-trapped with forgotten devices, triggered by sight, that sent shrapnel flying. Flying straight for the heart. Suddenly, I was once again confronting serious thoughts (the kind that had begun to recede after I left Stanford and headed toward New York) of suicide.
Christ, get a grip
, I thought. Was it the Vicodin? Postsurgery blues? Or was it just that, without the rush of Manhattan, without the push of the next performance, I was suffering from none other than time. From too much of it on my hands.

I needed a project. I borrowed Mom’s old IBM Selectric. We set it up at the dining room table and, acting on advice I’d received from my newfound friend, an old and wonderful actor, Morgan Farley (a cousin in Los Angeles who Aunt Marion had told me about), I began to type out, as neatly as I could, every line that Hamlet utters. “Memorize the great parts,” Morgan had counseled. “Get ready, don’t wait for the bastards to call you.”

I punched out the script, studied the words, popping Vicodin along the way more for the buzz than the pain in the knee. A couple of afternoons into the Dane’s drama, I found I kept stopping to scribble bits of text in the margins, odd fragments floating by, asking to be pinned down.
What happened when you were twelve? Tell the truth
. It was irritating and strange and it was messing up my neat columns of iambic pentameter.

The pen, as if on its own, would get to my hand and dash things off.

What do you mean, lover? Molester, more like. And so what?

Soon the words moved off the typing paper and onto a yellow legal pad and off it went, or I went, as if dictated to. My heart pounded, my groin swelled as I wrote because with the spilling of ink came an instant response. An instant erection, powerful, Pavlovian. I described a fence, a field, a truck, a man, a loft, a sleeping bag. Images of a ranch, horses eating hay, ghostly and beautiful. A lost fable unfolding. It went on most afternoons for several weeks. At the top of each page I began to place a capital
C
, with a circle around it. It stood for a name I could not yet spell out. I hid the scribbled pages in a peach-colored folder that I stuck under the typewriter. I’d take them out and add sentences each day.