Major Conflict Read online

  Once a week I was allowed to go out for lunch with my friends. I was given $1.25, which bought me a slice of pizza, a Coke, and some penny candy. My friends and I were pretty much free to explore the neighborhood after school and on weekends as long as we returned home in time for dinner. The neighborhood was tight-knit, everyone knew everyone else, so nobody really worried. How things have changed! When I think of the paranoia today, of the stress parents seem to be under, worrying about the safety of their children even when they’re just down the block, I can’t help thinking that I grew up in a kind of golden age. It sounds funny, since the truth is that my childhood coincided precisely with the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s, when the crime rate skyrocketed, the city’s reputation plummeted, and everyone else in the United States became convinced that New York City was one of the most dangerous places on the planet. But believe it or not, growing up in Jackson Heights in the 1970s, long before things turned around under Rudy Giuliani, I never once was threatened or felt unsafe. Who knows, maybe I was just plain lucky. Then again, I think Jackson Heights was, and is, a pretty special place.

  My parents were quite young when they had me, so it was decided that I would be raised by my maternal grandparents. They raised me as if I were their own son. My grandmother was from Ohio, the daughter of Scottish immigrants. My grandfather was English, first generation. For forty years he took the subway to Twenty-third Street to go to work at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. One of my most vivid memories is of him walking down Eighty-second Street, on his way home from work. My grandmother and I made a habit of waiting for him every day on the stoop of our building. Around five-thirty he’d come into view, striding toward us, always wearing a hat and puffing on a big cigar, looking very much the gentleman, circa 1950. He had a great sense of style and a kind of old-world outlook that allowed for a healthy joie de vivre and professional success at the same time.

  As a little boy I was in awe of him. He was the most generous, kindest, smartest man in the world as far as I was concerned. Two or three times a week, sitting on the stoop with Grandmother, I’d notice a brown paper bag at his side as he approached, and I’d stand up and rush to meet him, knowing that the bag held a gift for me, usually a toy soldier or tank, a toy gun or knife, or later, a Matchbox car or one of the Hardy Boys books. It didn’t take long for me to amass a huge collection of soldiers and tanks and artillery with which to stage epic battles alone in my room.

  My grandfather read voraciously, four or five books a week. I owe my love of books to him. He made time every week to sit down and read with me. He’d bring me books from the Hardy Boys series but also books about history and war, books about monarchies, flags, baseball, dinosaurs. I loved adventure stories the best and truly believed that one day I would have adventures of my own, that one day I’d be just like one of the brave, heroic figures I was always reading about.

  My grandparents came of age during the Depression and, like many of their contemporaries, they remained cautious about money for the rest of their lives. But they were never too frugal to help out a man down on his luck, to do the Christian thing when called upon, and in one particular case, literally to give a man the coat off their backs.

  One day in January the three of us were on our way home when we passed a homeless man lying on top of a small stack of cardboard in front of the delivery entrance to the neighborhood Genovese drugstore. It was bitter cold, and he was poorly clothed for the weather. His legs were exposed, and the skin on them looked thick and dried and cracked, like the hide of an elephant. What’s more, his legs were covered with sores and scabs. He’d fashioned himself a pair of shoes out of old newspapers, cardboard, and rags. He just lay there, unmoving, but awake, I think, lost in his own despair, I assumed. It was the middle of a weekend afternoon, and the street was busy with shoppers. People rushed by without even looking at the man, not an uncommon reaction even now in New York, but more so then since the fiscal crisis and the resulting cutbacks in social services had exacerbated the homeless problem to the point where regular New Yorkers had little choice but to become immune to such a ubiquitous sight.

  On this particular day we, too, simply walked on by. No one spoke about it, and soon we were back in the warmth of our apartment. While pulling off my coat, I rushed to the kitchen to find something to eat. “Where you going?” my grandfather asked. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Hold on,” he said. “What do you say we go back out and get a slice of pizza?” As much as I knew I’d prefer a slice of pizza to almost anything my grandmother had in the kitchen, I hesitated because it was almost time for the latest episode of Lost in Space, and I really didn’t want to miss it. “Come on,” my grandfather said, as my grandmother handed him the winter coat he hardly ever wore anymore. He was still wearing his regular coat, so I was a little confused. Maybe he was getting it dry-cleaned, I thought. I guess the end of the story is obvious. On our way to the pizza parlor we passed the homeless man again, and my grandfather stopped and said, “Here you go, pal,” then set the coat down next to him. “God bless you,” the man said, quickly laying the old overcoat across his body like a blanket. My grandfather didn’t say a word, just kept walking, but he must’ve seen me looking at him because after a few minutes he turned to me and said, matter-of-factly, “If you can do something good for someone, Jeff, do it. Chances are it will come back to you.”

  Not long after this incident my grandfather died, leaving a big hole in the lives of my grandmother and me. He suffered a stroke while he and Grandma were in the Catskills. He lingered in the hospital for several weeks. When I went to see him, he appeared thin and drawn, the light in his eyes dimmed, though he seemed to make an effort to be cheerful and upbeat for my benefit.

  I was twelve years old when he died, and even at that age I sensed, in the vague way that children know things, that our family was different, though nothing was ever explained to me. His absence made this difference suddenly seem more pronounced. My grandmother took impeccable care of me, but I felt deeply lonely with my grandfather gone. To this day, even though I had him so briefly, my grandfather’s warmth and personal philosophy has been the most profound influence on my life.

  Twenty families lived in the six-story apartment building in which I grew up. Everyone knew everyone else. I was often enlisted to help an older resident move a bureau or a sofa or to help someone bring laundry up from the basement. The other residents in turn kept tabs on me, gave me advice, asked about my grades, encouraged me in every way. In the evenings the hallways were always filled with smells of cooking: pot roast, curry, pasta sauce—a mélange of ethnic cuisines prepared in an effort to keep the bond alive with the home country. In the winters the radiators would hiss and knock, and the aroma of food at dinnertime would be even stronger. Coming out of the cold into the overheated hallway filled with the smell of home cooking was the best welcome in the world.

  After St. Joan of Arc I went on to Archbishop Molloy High School, which I hated. I don’t think it was the school itself, it was just the idea of school, period. An indifferent student, uninterested in extracurricular activities, I cruised along in neutral, unsure what I wanted, unsure of myself. I hung around the neighborhood a lot, and went to an occasional school dance to meet girls from our sister school. But I felt awkward and clumsy at these and began to feel different from other people for the first time in my life. A chasm was beginning to open up, though I didn’t know it at the time, separating me from the rest of the world. So much has happened in the last thirtyfive years, and in the last ten years alone, that it’s easy to forget just how difficult things were back in the seventies for young gay men and for gay boys. That’s not to say, of course, that life is a cakewalk for young gay people today, but I’m not sure I even knew the word gay in 1979, when I was fifteen.

  Like most teenage boys I did, however, know the words queer and faggot. When I was about thirteen, I got into the habit of hanging out in front of the building with a group of neighborhood boys, most of them olde
r than me. I wanted to be cool. One summer afternoon we were out in the street playing stickball when a guy from the neighborhood went by on roller skates. He was in his early twenties, I guess, and seemed to go everywhere on his skates, usually in tight cutoffs and often shirtless. He had a perfect body. Looking back now, I feel pretty sure he was gay, though who knows? What mattered was that he was perceived that way by the super’s kid from my building, who felt compelled to spit on the ground as he rolled by and yell, “Queer!” with so much disgust in his voice that I jumped a little.

  The guy turned his head back to us, looking a bit startled, and then raised his middle finger as high as he could and shouted, “Fuck you!”

  The super’s kid rushed forward with the ball in hand. “What didya say, faggot?” he yelled, then threw the ball directly at the guy, just narrowly missing his head. The guy said nothing. He simply skated away and didn’t look back.

  “Fucking faggots,” the super’s kid said, spitting again, and running up the street to get the ball. There was so much venom in his voice that I almost found myself wanting to defend the skater. But I kept quiet, knowing that defending a faggot was the fastest way to be banished from the land of cool. And besides, a large part of me actually agreed with the super’s kid.

  So despite the changes that were taking place in the seventies, in San Francisco mostly, and in the West Village in Manhattan, for those of us still in high school then, it might as well have been the fifties or the sixties. The one gay character on prime-time television—on the series Soap—was a pre-op transsexual. The message was clear: male homosexuality was incompatible with masculinity, incompatible, even, with owning a penis.

  And so I was clumsy and awkward at the high school dances, and I goofed around a lot. But I was absolutely convinced that I would one day marry a woman. I didn’t feel particularly feminine, so I couldn’t be gay. And I certainly didn’t want to lose my penis. I wanted to be a soldier so I couldn’t be gay because soldiers aren’t gay. Soldiers are masculine. That’s what I was learning, that’s what I internalized, and that’s what I’ve spent the last twenty years of my life attempting to exorcise.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Starbursts and Cigarettes

  After graduating from Archbishop Molloy High School in 1982 I seriously considered joining the service. The idea of college was anathema to me. I wanted to have some adventure and see the world and get on with my life as a soldier. I went into a recruiting station one day just to look around, and one of the cadre talked me up and basically conned me into giving him my phone number. For the next few months I was inundated with calls encouraging me to sign up. I was torn. While I knew I wanted to be a soldier, I realized I wanted to be an officer and I’d need college for that. Unable to make a decision, unwilling to commit at the time, I decided the best thing to do would be to work for a little while. I figured that if I was going to continue living at home with my grandmother, the least I could do was to help her out financially.

  I found a full-time job at the flagship Doubleday Bookshop on Fifth Avenue between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-seventh Streets, directly across the street from Trump Tower. The store’s been gone for years. Today the space is occupied by Prada, and if you watch The Apprentice, you can actually see it at the end of every episode, when the person who’s been fired comes down at the end and rides away in a cab.

  It was a very special store in its time. A book superstore before superstores had been invented, with four floors of books and an exposed elevator in the center with a window that allowed passengers to look out onto the sales floor. In its own way it was considered a kind of literary landmark, the place where the rich and famous would come for their book needs when in the Big Apple. As a nineteen-year-old kid from Queens the experience was thrilling at first; I was easily starstruck. During my time there I met and waited on the likes of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Sylvester Stallone, Shimon Peres, Cher, Ed Koch, and many others. It was the place Imelda Marcos came for books. Her husband owned the adjoining building directly to the north. And it was the place where I met the first man with whom I had a relationship, though maybe “relationship” is stretching it a little, maybe “relationship” is stretching it a lot, but it was the closest I would come to one for a long, long time.

  He didn’t start working at the store until the winter of 1985, when I was in between semesters in my freshman year at Fordham University. I’d applied to a handful of schools in the New York area in 1983 and was surprised when I received an acceptance letter from the well-known school. I hadn’t even taken the time to visit the campus up in the Bronx, thinking that my acceptance was such a long shot. Having spent so much time in Catholic schools I was attracted to the Jesuit tradition at Fordham, the phrase “homines pro aliis,” Latin for “men and women for others” jumping out at me from the school’s brochure.

  Financing school was tough, though. Through federal grants and savings I was able to come up with the first semester’s tuition, but I’d have to commute. Fortunately one of the first things I did when I enrolled was to stop by the ROTC office on the campus. I learned about their scholarship program and decided to go for it. I’d have to prove myself first, though, maintaining at least a 3.0 GPA my first semester. That first semester was really when my life began to change. The two years off from school had apparently done me a world of good; I wanted to be there, and I wanted to learn. As a result, I ended up getting a 3.8 GPA, and I got the scholarship.

  In many ways January 1985 was a watershed month for me, a month in which both my professional and my personal life would change dramatically and move in directions I’d never imagined. When I wasn’t working at the bookstore, I spent much of my time waiting anxiously for my grades to arrive from Fordham. My grandmother had spread the word throughout the building, so everyone was rooting for me, waiting with me, and, when the news finally arrived, everyone celebrated. My grandmother was so proud and happy that, knowing how hard the long commute was for me every day and how much I wanted to live on campus, she went ahead and paid for my room and board without telling me. I was stunned. I have no idea how she figured out how much it was and where to send the money order and all that. She was seventy-eight years old, after all. We had a rotary phone. She believed most of what was written in the National Enquirer, especially anything to do with aliens. I suppose I underestimated her. What I never underestimated, though, was her enormous heart, which I’ll be grateful for until the day I die.

  The other event that shook up my life in January 1985 was meeting a guy whom I’d become involved with off and on until we finally lost touch in the early nineties. The first time I saw him he was working a cash register in what we affectionately called “the pit.” It was the busiest cash-wrap area in the store, and most of the new clerks were thrown in there at first as a kind of initiation. His name was Greg, and he was a tall, skinny guy, good-looking, with short, straight brown hair. I was drawn to him right away, though I can’t say I understood why. I didn’t think of myself as gay then, and I don’t think I was even capable of translating my attraction to Greg into a language that made any kind of emotional or sexual sense. It was as if a light switch had been flipped on and I had no idea how the switch worked, what it was connected to, or where the source of energy was located. All I knew was that something that hadn’t been lit before suddenly now was, and I was drawn to it like the proverbial moth to the flame. That switch has been turned on for me twice since Greg, and each time I’ve gotten better at recognizing all the qualities of the light, and at understanding the source, and at making sure not to hurt the person inside the light. But with Greg I was a novice, I was totally lost, and he ended up being the first great casualty in my journey toward self-acceptance.

  Greg and I became fast friends, taking lunch together, spending our break time together. It got to the point where if you saw one of us you were bound to see the other. He said he wanted to learn Spanish, so I started giving him lessons. We walked to the train together at night, down Fifth A
venue and over to Grand Central, where sometimes we’d sit on a closed OTB (Off Track Betting) counter and talk. He’d smoke three or four cigarettes and I’d eat a pack of Starbursts, and we’d talk about religion (he was an atheist, was reading too much Sartre, I thought) and politics (he was a big liberal, I was a small one). We’d talk about everything, and in the evenings we’d talk more on the phone. Sometimes we’d talk for two or three hours. One night we went out with a bunch of people after work and had too many beers and on the way to the train Greg just came out and said how much he liked me, that he was attracted to me. I said I was flattered but I wasn’t into men, and he said sorry, sorry, but after that moment I found myself even more drawn to him.

  The truth was I’d never been so close to a gay man before. And being so close, and seeing how perfectly at ease he seemed to be with his sexuality, all my preconceptions about gay men—that they were effeminate, that they were weak, that they were only hairdressers and dog groomers and interior decorators—began to fall away in the face of the evidence now before me. Greg wasn’t a theoretical gay person, some perfect stranger who rolls by on his roller skates whom I know nothing about, but a real person, standing in front of me, talking to me, at ease in his body, not so strange or unfamiliar or that much different from me at all.

  While this was happening at the bookstore my first semester on campus at Fordham was in full swing. The two parts of my life seemed oceans away, irreconcilable, as different as the idyllic Rose Hill campus of Fordham—with its bucolic setting and nineteenth-century buildings—was from the crime-ridden streets of the Bronx just beyond the campus walls. At Fordham I was the hard-drinking ROTC guy. I thought of myself as a leader, all-American, a man’s man. I overcompensated at school, throwing myself more dramatically into typical college-boy activities, as if by doing this I’d cancel out all the uncomfortable feelings Greg was bringing up in me. And in a way it worked. Basically, he stopped existing when I was on campus.