We Should Not Be Friends, page 4
My friend was up for that; he was underweight bordering on malnourished, but he had fat cheeks and so was always on a diet.
I don’t know if Maxey saw me. I don’t think he did. We went to opposite sides of the dining hall to eat and soon he was gone. This came as a relief. Our friendship seemed to me so tenuous that I wasn’t sure it was up to a test: I didn’t want to see how he would treat me when he was amongst his tribe—nor was I keen to have my lunchmate snub Maxey.
* * *
—
In the weeks following the retreat we were supposed to start our audits. An audit was a verbal presentation you shared with the group. You were meant to tell the others everything you had ever done and thought from your first memory to the present. Whatever was shared was to be treated with complete confidentiality: nothing was ever to leave the hall without the explicit permission of the person who had shared it. The audits, we were told, were the heart of the experience we would have that year. You were encouraged to do it—but it was up to you how deeply into your life you dove. Most of the time, people talked for two or three hours without stopping. Sometimes they went to four or five. Only one audit would be scheduled per week, and it was totally up to us what order we followed: who would give the first and who the last.
Having been a debater and actor in high school, I wasn’t nervous about the idea of giving my audit. But many of the others were anxious bordering on hysterical.
Before the first audit, we were given a training by an alumnus of the society to set our minds at ease, and it did. I try to keep the lessons he taught us in mind to this day, whenever anyone is telling me anything sensitive or personal.
We were told that the most important thing was to listen, really listen, and to keep an open mind and heart. We weren’t to ask any questions until and unless we were invited to do so. We were told to be thoughtful about our questions—that they had to be genuine. It was fine to ask for more information or clarification if we were curious or didn’t understand what we’d heard. But questions were never to be used as challenges or veiled criticisms. We were warned particularly about “Why” questions. It’s hard to ask about motivation without implying that you would have handled the same situation differently. Far better to ask “How” and “What” questions (as long as the “What” was never a sarcastic “What were you thinking?”).
Also, we weren’t to follow a person’s audit with statements of our own values, share our own stories in the guise of questions, or use queries to show how smart we were. Finally, no matter how gentle or well-meaning we thought our questions to be, the person who had presented was under no obligation to answer, or to give a reason why she or he didn’t want to elaborate or explain.
This wasn’t an investigation or interrogation, the trainer said. It wasn’t a commission or a hearing. It was a chance to share our lives and thoughts with one another.
One of us asked whether audit was really the right word, then, to describe what we would be doing, given that an audit is “an official inspection.”
“Probably not,” we were told. “And yet that’s exactly the kind of question you shouldn’t ask right after an audit.”
* * *
—
I can’t remember whose audit was first, but I was soon after. I spent several days preparing, writing notes of every single thing I could remember about my life. As I was figuring out what to include, I started to become nervous. I put everything down on paper but would decide what to share in the moment.
The evening started with us gathering around the sofas for drinks. We were supposed to be prompt, and we were. Then we all sat down for dinner. Tim wasn’t kidding about the food; the hall’s caretakers were a couple who made delicious, hearty meals served family-style.
At the audit dinners everyone stayed quite sober. Since I was giving the one this night, I drank nothing. After pie for dessert, it was back to the sofas.
I pulled out my notes and began.
First, the facts. Both parents grew up in New York, and both went to PS 6—though they didn’t know each other then, as my father was born in 1927 and mother in 1935. Father enlisted in the navy right after boarding school in time for the last year of World War II. Served on a destroyer out of Norfolk, Virginia. Mother had wanted to be an actress but then became assistant to a producer.
I was born in New York in 1962. Brother eighteen months older. Sister four years younger. Moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I was four. Mother went into admissions first at Radcliffe and then at the combined office of Harvard and Radcliffe. Father managed Harvard’s theater.
Then I tried to describe my personality and early life as an indoor child, reading and painting. I also talked about how I loved to act. I mentioned a production of Life With Father, where I’d played one of the kids and had to dye my hair bright red the summer before I went to boarding school, and how, when I got there, everyone called me Red until it grew out.
I went into much more detail than that. I was probably well into an hour by the time I was fourteen. And that’s when I started to talk about being gay.
I backtracked to my early crushes on boys when I was as young as six or seven, and talked about a recurring dream that began when I was in middle school, which so terrified me that I would wake up not just sobbing but grieving: in the nightmare, a boy in my class named Ben was killed by a mob while coming over to my house. The other emotion I felt in addition to grief, I explained, was guilt. In the dream-turned-nightmare he was on his way to see me; that’s why he was killed.
I talked about wearing a shirt with pink stripes in ninth grade and my panic when a jock sidled up to me and said, “Nice shirt, wrong color.” And about staring at my feet whenever I was in the locker room, lest anyone think I was looking at them, but really wanting to look at the same time. I talked about being an apprentice at a summer stock theater when I was fifteen where I lived with four other kids, including an older gay roommate named Hooch, who boycotted orange juice to protest the homophobia of Florida Citrus spokeswoman Anita Bryant. He became a friend that summer, but I still hid my feelings about men from him and everyone else.
Then I explained how a librarian at school introduced me to the works of James Baldwin and how I started to admit to myself that I was gay, confiding in a minister at school whom I strongly suspected of being a lesbian. “Don’t tell anyone until graduation,” she advised; I had been elected school president, but we were both sure I would have had to leave had anyone found out. There had never been an out gay student or teacher at my school.
I talked about other authors and books I’d discovered that helped me learn that I wasn’t alone: The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal; The Lord Won’t Mind, a steamy gay romance by Gordon Merrick; and City of Night, the 1963 novel by John Rechy featuring a Los Angeles hustler, a celebration of gay men as outlaws that is as erotic as it is dark.
At this point in the audit, I paused to take a breath and see how people were reacting. Everyone was smiling encouragingly. So I decided to go further than I had before and tell this group things I had told only my closest friends: I talked about going to a bar when I was sixteen and getting plastered and going home with an older man and then throwing up in his bed. And how he had said, “You have to stop hating yourself.” I talked about how much weed and cocaine I had done in high school, and about taking mescaline. And about the first time I had full-on sex, which I described in infinite detail. I talked about summer weeks working as a temporary secretary to fund weekends spent at the infamous St. Mark’s Baths, formerly the home of James Fenimore Cooper, where I would prowl the halls hour after hour, rejecting and being rejected until I found a match. I talked about life in Los Angeles in the term I’d taken off, and how my friends and I would flirt for drinks in a bar called the Mother Lode and try to go home with someone from a different state every night. I talked about how proud I was to have had a story published in a gay literary magazine called Christopher Street, and how I loved that they had illustrated it with a drawing of an enormous male organ scrawled on a bathroom wall.
Throughout, I continued to keep an eye on the faces of the others in the group. The dancer, Renata, was no stranger to gay men and nodded in support throughout. I kept glancing at her and every time I did, she smiled. Every now and then I looked over at the football player, Tom, and at Maxey, who were sitting together. Where I had expected to see some kind of disapproval, there was none. Maxey was particularly focused, leaning forward and smiling.
I talked next about AIDS and working on the hotline and speaking with a man in his twenties who was clearly dying, and how there was almost nothing I could do for him; how everything I said felt wrong and how my apologies made it worse. I talked about that friend in LA whom I’d slept with many times, the one who had died, and about how I tried for months not to think about his death but couldn’t stop, and how I was becoming increasingly convinced that I would be dead by twenty-five. I talked about a benefit I had just put on to raise money for Gay Men’s Health Crisis and AIDS Project New Haven: it was a performance of a play I’d written about conjoined twins, one straight and one gay.
I told them about going home with the boy I met in the bar over that last summer, the angel of death with the rusty knife under the bed; how I still didn’t leave after I discovered the knife, and the way he haunted my sleep.
I talked about the threat of violence I felt almost everywhere, whether cruising in New York’s Greenwich Village—where a group of kids in a Jersey car had once thrown a beer bottle at my head that missed by inches—or even sometimes on Yale’s campus. I talked about the homophobic gunman who had opened fire at a New York City bar I went to called the Ramrod; he had killed two men and injured six more. “I want to kill them all,” he had said, referring to gay men: “They’re no good. They ruin everything.” I talked about the loathing and disgust I would so often hear when anything gay was mentioned. And the way politicians and the media constantly demonized or trivialized what they called our “lifestyle” and we called our lives. I explained how it was totally legal to fire someone for being gay in every state in America, except for Wisconsin.
Then I talked about the worst day of my life, after I had taken a Valium that a friend had given me to help me sleep. All my friends knew I could never get to sleep. I described how I had slept a blissful night with no dreams but woken up to a nightmare, in which I felt that my whole life was a farce, that I was a dreadful person, that I had no reason to go on living. I remember distinctly knowing that I was no less happy or blessed than I had been the day before —I was sure the Valium was the culprit— but I also remember the terror that maybe I would never be happy again, that I would eventually need to end my life to make the agony stop.
It was the first time—in that hall, surrounded by thirteen kids I barely knew—that I had told anyone I had ever thought of taking my own life. I shared with them my feeling that even talking about it filled me with shame; that it seemed obscene to me that I had thought, even for a day, of killing myself when so many gay people were dying too young. I also told them how relieved I was to be able to share both the story and the sense of shame.
And then, always the entertainer, and feeling a bit like I had brought the room down, I talked about my crushes (Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, Bobby Sherman, and always, always, Matt Dillon). And, of course, I was rhapsodic about Prince. I talked and talked and talked, for at least four hours, if not five.
And then I was done.
People did have questions. One listener wanted to know when I had come out, which was just about the only story I’d forgotten to tell. I explained that it was at a senior party on the last day of high school. I’d confided in a handsome friend from San Francisco (I hoped that maybe he was gay, given his native city, but he was not) and asked him not to tell anyone; he told everyone. Right there. At the party. And far from being mad at him, I’d been grateful. Another member of the secret society asked me to recommend the best Matt Dillon film, and someone else asked me about my favorite author, which gave me a chance to talk about Christopher Isherwood.
Maxey hadn’t asked anything, but he also hadn’t looked the slightest bit shocked at anything I said. Eventually, there were just a few of us left drinking beer in the hall, and I realized that he had something to say to me before we called it a night.
“You know, Schwalbs,” he said, giving me a new nickname on the spot. “I’ve never really met a gay person before.” Then he amended that: “I mean, I’m sure I’ve met a gay person, but I’ve never been friends with one. I got to tell you: I still don’t really get it. But when you talked about being in the gym surrounded by hot guys and having to look at your feet, I really understood. I was trying to think what I would do in a locker room full of naked girls. And your other stories: you’re as boy crazy as I am girl crazy. So maybe I do get it. But I have to tell you one other thing: when you talked about that beer bottle being thrown at your head, that really pissed me off. I just wanted you to know, if anyone ever gives you a hard time, tries to hurt you, or even looks at you funny, you just let me know—and I’ll kick the shit out of them.”
I should have disapproved, firmly believing that violent retribution is never the right answer to violence. Yet I couldn’t help smiling.
MAXEY’S AUDIT
Several audits followed mine and each drew the group closer. One of us spoke about growing up the only child of parents who had lost the rest of their family in the Holocaust. Another about the Svengali-like role that coaches and teachers had played in her life. Another about the death of a beloved father when she was in high school. It wasn’t the stories that bound us; it was the way we framed them for one another and the fact that we shared them in the first place. We had come from all over: suburbs and small towns; an industrial city whose factories had closed a generation ago; a university campus; our nation’s capital and NYC. Yet we had all wound up in the same place—if with different theories about how we got here and what that meant.
Most of us admitted to suffering from imposter syndrome; there was relief in that admission. Inadequacy loves company. We also discovered over the course of the fall that we had an eclectic array of fears, ranging from common childhood terrors (Spiders! Mimes!) to more esoteric phobias (Swiss cheese! Guinea pigs!) to thoroughly adult concerns. Several in our group had grown up in alcoholic homes and were terrified of their fathers.
We discovered at least one shared fear. We were children of the Atomic Age: our communities had well-marked fallout shelters, and we had been taught how to huddle under our school desks in case of nuclear attack. Other fears common to our generation included overpopulation, pollution, and hijacking. Then there were fears about our own futures and whether we would be happy. There was an Auden line I thought of often: “Every young man fears that he is not worth loving.” Of course, every young woman, as well. I believe we shared this, too, though not all of us admitted it.
The audits provided, for many of us, our first chance to share our fears without adding one more to the list: the fear that those fears would be weaponized against us. Week after week, over beers and candles, we handed one another the nuclear matter of our lives, yet there was no thought of mutually assured destruction, no anxiety that we would use our secrets against one another, no need for any treaties.
As the audits multiplied, we learned that there was another fear we all shared in addition to thermonuclear destruction of our planet and being unworthy of love: we worried that we might squander the almost obscene opportunity we had been given. We knew that because we were there—not just in the hall but at the college—others hadn’t been given this chance. Each week that went by brought us closer to graduation and the obligation to do something with our lives. We all had hopes and thoughts—but even by late autumn few of us had anything that resembled a plan.
While we were meeting, talking, drinking, competing, acting, sleeping, and worrying, the world was far from quiet. In October, two suicide bombers had struck US and French barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American Marines, 58 French servicemen, and six Lebanese citizens. Days later, the United States had invaded the tiny Caribbean nation of Grenada. At Yale, the clerical and technical workers were negotiating a new contract; relations between their union and the university were growing increasingly strained. As for AIDS, I had yet to convince most of my friends that this would affect more than a few thousand gay men, Haitians, and hemophiliacs.
Outside the hall, students were constantly arguing about issues from around the world and problems at the college itself, and inside we began arguing, too. The two most frequent combatants were David Singer and David Kelly, continuing the sparring that had begun when they were roommates. It was a sure thing that if one of them made a statement, the other would challenge it. I usually kept quiet, as did most of the others, but Maxey liked to fan the flames, which I sometimes found entertaining but often made me cringe. On the evenings when there were audits, everyone behaved; the other dinners, however, could be a free-for-all.
If we had been friends of friends at an ad hoc dinner party, we probably would have vowed never to see one another again. This person was condescending; that one shouted everyone else down; a third refused to concede even the smallest point. But we had to see one another again. Twice a week. Thankfully, no matter how acrimonious things got, the audits always brought us back together. Sharing our stories forced us to reexamine one another and the labels we’d applied when we first met. What an irony, I thought: a secret society was teaching us to be more tolerant and open-minded. For the first time, I began to understand what Tim meant when he’d said that this experience would open me up.
Just before Thanksgiving, when we’d worked our way through half the audits, it was Maxey’s turn.
