Major Conflict Read online

  Though I studied hard, ROTC was my primary focus. The weekly training convinced me more than ever that I was meant to be a career officer. The ROTC staff at Fordham was fantastic. One person stood out, however, and he would become my close mentor and friend for years. His name was Sergeant Major Robert Carpenter. He was a Green Beret who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam. He started his career in the 82nd Airborne in 1961 and was selected to become a Green Beret not long after being made sergeant. Originally from Virginia, he’d gone into the army out of a great love for soldiering and to make a better life for himself. He was everything I wanted to be. All of us in the ROTC idolized him. Not only was he a great soldier, he was a great man, someone who just totally kicked ass. From him we learned not only our basic soldiering skills, but the culture and ethos of army life as well. His stories, especially his Vietnam stories, which he told like a pro, taught us that becoming a soldier is far more than just learning how to fire weapons and how to employ tactics and strategy; it involves becoming part of a special community, learning a new language, a new spirit, embracing ideals unique to army life.

  We couldn’t have been more different. He was from the South and had only a high school education. I was a city kid from Queens going to college. But he had a way of making all of that irrelevant; he’s what I refer to as “true blue.” He served selflessly, enduring great hardship on numerous deployments to protect our interests and our country. Guys like him are why we’re free, why the United States remains the greatest power on earth. He was a father figure not only to me, but to almost everyone who had the privilege of being trained by him. He was my hero, and I always wanted him to be proud of me. I hope that if he reads this book, he’ll understand.

  The problem was that as I tried making Robert Carpenter my role model, I kept running into a kind of disconnect on those occasions when I failed to keep my two lives separate, when I wasn’t able to keep Greg out of my mind. What would Sergeant Major Carpenter think about that? I didn’t even have to ask myself the question. I felt certain that he’d disapprove and disapprove mightily. And so I’d try even harder to convince myself that what I was feeling for Greg was nothing at all, really, that I was completely straight after all. There was simply no room in the self-image I was creating for the feelings Greg was stirring up in me.

  But I was learning fast that it wasn’t something I could control entirely. I found myself spending more and more time with Greg, going into work on my days off just to see him, going out with him after work for drinks, spending even more time with him on the phone at night. At work, when we were alone, I’d massage his shoulders and back playfully; one day, as we were sitting on the OTB counter at Grand Central, I lifted up his hand without thinking and looked at it, then took hold of it and tucked our locked hands between us. From that day on, though it made me nearly sick with fear, this was something we always did there, on the closed OTB counter at Grand Central; we secretly held hands while he smoked his cigarettes and I chewed my Starbursts.

  It began to feel almost like an addiction, something I was forever trying to stop. Just when I would get to a place where I’d feel certain that what I was feeling for Greg was simply the bond of male friendship, I’d say something or do something that went past the boundaries of simple friendship. After hanging out upstairs at Grand Central, we’d usually go down to the number 7 train below, where he’d wait for the westbound train to Times Square, and I’d wait for the eastbound train to Queens. One night as my train pulled in I jumped up from the bench Greg and I were sharing on the subway platform, planted a kiss firmly on his left cheek, and then rushed into the train just as the doors were beginning to close. As the train pulled away I looked through the graffiti-scrawled window to see Greg still sitting on the bench, looking somewhat stunned, one hand pressed up against the kissed cheek. A few nights later, standing in Rockefeller Center, the RCA Building lit grandly in front of us, I suddenly found myself grabbing Greg’s shoulder and turning him toward me and saying, “I like you. I want you to be my pal.” Later on that night, as we passed under the marquee of the Guild Theater on Fiftieth Street, Greg turned to me and said with a smile, “I like you, too, Jeff. I want you to be my pal.” And I said, “Ah, c’mon, you like me more than that,” and Greg’s face fell, he seemed embarrassed, then a little angry, and without thinking I pulled my ROTC pin from the front pocket of my jeans and handed it to him. “I want you to have this,” I said, and all the anger and embarrassment rushed from his face and he smiled again and hugged me.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this act of giving my ROTC pin to Greg, of connecting the two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of my life in one simple action, was the closest I would come to uncompartmentalizing my life, of bringing together the soldier and the man, for several years.

  But the ROTC pin wasn’t enough, of course, for Greg. Having come out at seventeen, leaving Pittsburgh to come to New York, Greg was light-years ahead of me on the gay curve. He was ready to have a relationship, and he became increasingly less tolerant when I’d suddenly close up and continue to insist that I was straight. I sensed that he’d fallen in love with me and that this love gave him an almost Herculean patience when it came to my being totally honest about my sexuality. But even that had its limit, and one night near the end of April everything snapped and he reached that limit.

  There’d been some talk at work about us, and I’d gotten paranoid. I was working the twelve-to-eight shift, he was working the nine-to-five, and when I came in at noon I ran into him taking a smoke break in the back staircase that led up to the sales floor. I told him we had to cool it, we couldn’t hang around each other so much, and then I told him that should the subject of his own sexuality ever come up with anyone at work, he should act as if he was straight, he should deny being gay. Looking back now, I honestly can’t believe how naïve I was, and how selfish. Did I really believe Greg would do such a thing? Did I really believe I had a right to ask him to lie about himself? Amazingly, I think I did. But I underestimated him.

  A confused look came over his face. He took a quick, long drag on his cigarette, staring at me the whole time, incredulous, as if he were seeing me for the very first time. Then, stabbing out the cigarette hard in the big plastic ashtray that was kept on the ledge there, he said, shaking his head, “I love you, Jeff, but I can’t do that. I just can’t. . . .” I thought he was going to start crying, but he pulled himself together and flung open the door to the sales floor and rushed out. “Wait, Greg,” I said, and I raced out after him, grabbing his arm just as he reached the large display table covered with travel books in the center of the store. It would have been hard to find a more conspicuous place, but I wasn’t thinking. “Ouch, damn it, Jeff,” Greg yelled, rubbing his arm. I’d grabbed too hard. “Why don’t you just rip my arm out of the socket, you idiot,” and he turned and continued walking toward the information desk in the front of the store. “Wait, Greg, I’m sorry—I . . .” and then I looked around and saw that, with the exception of the cashiers in the pit ringing up sales, everything else in the store had slowed down or stopped completely. I felt as if I’d been dropped into a film that had suddenly been switched to slow motion. Customers on the open staircase above the travel section paused between steps and looked down. Clerks shelving books in the back slowly turned their heads toward me. People browsing the green Michelin guides stopped browsing and looked up. Jane Light, the older woman who ordered the travel books and anchored the information desk, stopped talking and dipped her head down and looked out over her glasses at me.

  I froze. It felt as if the ground had just disappeared from under my feet. I got hot and dizzy, and I imagine I turned beet red. I looked down at the table of travel books, then squatted down, as if I were looking for something in the overstock section below. I tried to breathe while listening to the store return to normal. I heard Jane Light’s voice resume, and footsteps on the stairs again. And then I grabbed a travel guide, hurried back to the door to the back stair
case, rushed inside, and took the steps down two at a time.

  We avoided each other the rest of the afternoon, and when he left at five, I was relieved. This was it, I promised myself. No more hanging around with that faggot. I wasn’t going to do it. But then around seven-thirty he called the store, slightly drunk, from J’s downtown.

  “We have to talk, Jeff,” he said, sounding frantic, as if he’d been crying.

  “No, nothing to talk about,” I said curtly, ready to hang up on him.

  “Meet me, Jeff, please, meet me in front of the church at Fifty-fifth when you get off.”

  There was a pleading in his voice. I hesitated, but then hung up. Thirty seconds later the phone rang again. I picked it up.

  “What,” I said. “What do you want from me?”

  “Please, Jeff, you owe me this much, just meet me in front of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian when you’re done with your shift. We can talk on the way to the train.”

  “What will it take for you to understand?”

  “Oh, I understand, Jeff, I understand you better than you understand yourself!”

  “Fuck you,” I said under my breath. I was standing at the information desk. “And don’t come up here. Don’t come up here! Stay down there at your faggot bar!” And I slammed the phone down. I was so angry I felt sure that if Greg had been standing in front of me I would’ve beat the shit out of him.

  After finishing my shift I hurried through the revolving doors and started walking briskly down Fifth Avenue. It was the last week in April, an unusually warm night, humid, windy, strange. It felt like rain. They’d been calling for rain all day, and I’d brought my big golf umbrella with me to work. At Fifty-sixth Street, while waiting for the light to change, I took off my suit jacket and flung it over my shoulder and loosened my tie.

  I’d calmed down since the phone call from Greg and managed to get him out of my head. I had homework to do when I got home and ROTC matters on my mind. The light changed and I crossed Fifty-sixth Street. I passed Harry Winston, the famous jeweler, and was just approaching the Rizzoli Bookstore in the middle of the block when I noticed a figure standing up on the steps of the church. I realized that it was Greg, always so solemn, with his books and his worn-out shoes, his school-boy sweaters and his old blue corduroys that shone from too much wear. I froze, then made a beeline to the street, started walking across Fifth, trying to act as if I hadn’t seen him. But he’d seen me, and he started coming after me. “Jeff! Jeff! Wait!” he shouted, and I started to run then, down Fifth Avenue. But he was faster than me, and by the time I reached Fifty-third Street he’d caught up with me. The light was red and there was traffic and I felt trapped.

  “You fucking hypocrite!” he shouted. It was obvious he’d had a few more beers since the phone call.

  “Do you know how ugly hypocrisy is? Do you know how ugly that is? It’s the ugliest thing in the world, Jeff; it’s the ugliest thing you can be. And it’s like a disease, it’s like a cancer, it’s insidious, it’s going to eat you up until you’re empty, until you’re dead!”

  I didn’t look at him. I didn’t speak. I tried to act as if he were a crazy homeless person. I couldn’t wait for the light to change. I had to get away from him, so I turned down Fifty-third and starting jogging away. He jogged after me. It started to rain hard—one of those tremendous spring storms. I opened up my umbrella and, realizing I wasn’t going to outrun him, just walked briskly across Fifty-third Street, trying my best to ignore him. But he didn’t have an umbrella of his own, and as he yelled at me he kept trying to get under mine, and I kept hurrying up and pulling away, leaving him stranded in the downpour.

  “Christ, Jeff, do you think I’m blind? Do you think I’m an idiot? I see. I know. You keep saying, ‘I’m straight, I’m straight, I’m straight,’ but I see what’s in your eyes when you look at me! Look at me. Look at me! Look at me now, Jeff! You fucking asshole, I can’t believe I ever got involved with you. What am I doing? What am I doing? I can’t believe . . . it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Do you think I moved from Pittsburgh to New York so I could sneak around with some fucked-up closet case? You’re straight? Straight! Do straight boys hold hands? Do you hold hands with your straight friends on the OTB counter at Grand Central? Do you talk on the phone with your ROTC buddies for hours every night? Go ahead, walk away, I’m soaked, fine, it’s just water, Jeff, it’s only rain, natural, a natural substance, I won’t melt, unlike you. I know you can hear me. You’ll be hearing this voice for the rest of your sad sorry life unless you get your shit together and face up to what’s happening inside you. God, Jeff, you want everything to make so much sense! You want the whole world to make sense! You want structure. Your religion, the military. You need those nice, neat little hiearchies where everyone knows exactly what everything is and precisely where everyone stands. Everything wrapped up in these nice, tight little boxes. Fuck you! Go ahead, just keep walking, just keep walking, dry, stay dry, Jeff, make sure you always stay perfectly dry!”

  He reached over and pulled the umbrella away from over my head, and I pulled it back, but even that short amount of exposure left me half drenched, it was raining that hard. “See, Jeff, it’s just water, it’s just rainwater, it won’t hurt you. It’s the most natural thing in the world!” We’d reached the Citicorp Building, and I ran down the steps to the plaza and the entrance to the subway station. When I got out of the rain, I stopped and closed my umbrella and turned around. Greg had stopped midway down the stairs. He stretched open his arms and raised his face directly into the rain, then looked down at me. “You’re not going to stay dry forever, Jeff,” he yelled. I wasn’t sure, there was too much rain, but it looked as if he was starting to cry, the way his head fell and started to shake a little. I turned and quickly fished a token from my pocket, rushed through the turnstile, and, without looking back, hurried down the steep escalator to the trains below.

  We didn’t speak to each other for the next month. I managed to focus on school and ROTC and avoid him as much as possible at work. But when the semester was finished, I started full-time at the bookstore for the summer. And slowly, we drifted back together. This time it became more serious. We played on the store softball team together, and after the second game a bunch of us went to a BBQ on the Upper West Side. Halfway through the meal, Greg got up and went to the bathroom. A few minutes later, I followed him, and we kissed for the first time, his back to the bathroom door in case anyone walked in on us. We went to the movies. We saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Sonia in a crowded, smoky Times Square movie theater, the two of us hunched down low in our seats, knees touching the whole time, our fingers occasionally locking together as we passed the Coke and popcorn back and forth between us. Periodically Greg would light up a cigarette and then rest a hand on my knee. Afterward we had dinner at the Beefsteak Charlie’s nearby on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, where Greg had waited tables for a few years (the space is now used by ABC’s Good Morning America). The following week we spent a day together up at the Cloisters (Greg lived close by, in Inwood), listening to Gregorian chants in the courtyard, walking through Fort Tryon Park, the Hudson and the Palisades spread out so grandly below us.

  For his birthday in July I invited him out to my apartment, and we walked over to Flushing Meadow Park and made out on the ground in front of the Unisphere, the big silver globe left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. I don’t know what came over me. I mean, it was broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon, in a city park. There was a group of Mexicans playing soccer on the dustbowl of a field in front of us. I bought us two Cokes and two hot dogs at a cart, and we sat down on the grass nearby and watched them play. Occasionally the number 7 train, up on its elevated track, would rumble by behind us. A Mets game was in progress, so every now and then we could hear the crowd cheering and the organ playing over at Shea Stadium. It was Greg’s twenty-third birthday, so after finishing our hot dogs we started horsing around, kind of wrestling, and I said I had to give him his birthday punc
hes. I started out softly, just tapping him, really— Greg was thin and somewhat delicate—punching him lightly on the arm. And he was laughing at first and pretending to struggle, but as the numbers grew higher, I don’t know why, the punches grew progressively harder. I began to feel something well up in me, not anger, really, but something else, I’ve never known what to call it, and as I got closer to twenty the punches got even harder and Greg started saying, “Stop, Jeff, stop,” though still laughing, still taking it all goodnaturedly—but then at twenty-one I just let loose and really smacked him hard on the arm, and I saw the look on his face, a little water welled up in his eyes, and then twenty-two, harder, and his laughing stopped, then twenty-three, and I was holding him down now. “And one to grow on,” I said, and hauled off and popped him as hard as I could. “Ow—fuck, Jeff, damn,” he said, crawling away from me on the grass and rubbing his arm. He was trying his best to hold back the tears now, and I looked at his face and suddenly was filled with such regret and longing at having hurt him, and such overwhelming desire, that I crawled over and took him in my arms and kissed him deep on the mouth. We collapsed onto the grass, rolled around, our mouths locked together, our tongues twisting around each other. We both got hard instantly and the rolling around turned into a kind of wrestling, and I feel certain that had we not been interrupted, we would have soon been tearing off our clothes. But “Maricón!” came flying at us from a dozen different sources, like a swarm of flies. The Mexicans were shocked. “Maricón!” again, and laughter, and then the soccer ball came flying toward us, just barely missing Greg in the head, and we stood up and hurried off toward the train and Queens Boulevard.