MangoZeen

PUBLISHED IN ELK MAGAZINE 2006

My family moved from Falmouth Foresides, Maine in the summer of 1960.

Halfway to Boston my father stopped at the New Hampshire tollbooth for a lunch. After eating my Italian sandwiches, I asked for permission to go to the bathroom. My father ignored my request. He was busy corralling my three younger siblings into the station wagon. My mother was speaking to my older brother. Something about school. She was serious. I ran to the men’s room and held my breath, since the toilets smelled funny.
  
My business took less than a minute in the dim toilets. My eyes blinked several times in the bright sunlight. They blinked again. Our family car was not in the parking lot. My father liked playing jokes. I expected him to beep the horn, except only total strangers’ cars slowed to stare at me. I was scared. Tears went far away. A toll collector noticed my wandering in the picnic area and asked my name and address. The first answer was easy. The second was out-of-date. 8 McKinley Road was in Falmouth Foresides. Not Boston.

Back in the station wagon my father’s head count came up short and my older brother said that I had been left at the toll booth. My father thought he was kidding, although my mother’s roll call verified my absence and my father returned to the rest area at over a 100 mph.

Ford hadn’t designed station wagons for speed and everyone in the traffic plaza turned their heads to the engine’s whine. My mother dashed from the car and grasped my chest tight. My father thanked the tollbooth collector and we drove off at a less frantic speed for a suburb south of Boston.

When I mentioned the toll booth collector giving me an ice cream, my parents asked, “Did he touch you?”

“No one touched me anywhere.” My man had simply held my hand.

“If some man does, you have to tell us.” My father was speaking to my older brother and me, since my two sisters and younger brother were asleep in the back of the station wagon.

“Touch us how?” King Midas had turned his daughter into gold. That story couldn’t be true. If it was, someone had melted the poor girl into ingots centuries ago.

“You’ll know.” My mother closed the subject and upon our arrival in our new home my father installed aluminum bars on the station wagon to prevent a repeat escape.
My brother and I thought this measure extreme, however on the opening day of Our Lady of the Foothills the pastor warned boys my age to watch out for lisps, limp wrists, and less than manly attire and a police officer told about weird men lurking in Blue Hills Reservation stretching for miles behind our suburban development.

After school the boys held a confused debate about what men might do to men. My new best friend, Chuckie Manzi, had older sisters and guessed, “It’s something to do with sticking something into your belly button.”

It sounded disgusting and I taped over my navel for months.

My brother and I did well in school. We woke early each morning to deliver the newspapers and wandered the afternoons through the woods surrounding our neighborhood.

We saw nothing strange.

Autumn arrived with leaves fleeing the trees and from the top of Chickatawbut Hill the panorama of the South Shore spread to every horizon. My parents seemed happier than usual, although my mother was gaining weight like winter was promising to be harsh.

It did arrive early and Pearl Harbor Day 1960 dawned frosty south of the Neponset River. During lunch my 3rd Grade class studied sullen northern clouds between bites of their sandwiches without a single mention of a possible snow day tomorrow, for the nuns taught Jesus barely spoke during his Agony on the Cross and they expected their students to follow his example in thought and deed.

The recess bell shattered this divinely imposed silence and the classes boiled from the school into the sub-freezing temperature. Standing still meant frozen feet, so the girls skipped tattered ropes, while the boys kicked misshapen balls around the rear parking lot. Right before the play period ended, our station wagon rolled down the school’s icy driveway and Chuckie joked the jail truck had arrived from Billerica Reform School. Having endured ribbing from family and friends, neither my brother nor I laughed along with our classmates.

The car parked by a pile of plowed snow and my father got out of the car wearing a broad smile. Mother Superior didn’t share his amusement and steam fumed from her dragon beak. At this hour men were meant to be at work, women in the house, and children at school. Her rule was not absolute, for my father’s call confirmed his authority over the Church and my brother said, “Let’s go.”

“You have a baby brother,” he proudly announced to our confusion.

Frank was nine and I was eight. Any discussion of the birds and bees was years off and my father laughed, “You didn’t know your mother was having a baby?”

“I thought Mom was getting fat.” Any woman would the way she had been eating.

“She was fat with your baby brother.” My father waved to the nuns that he was withdrawing his boys and our younger sister from school. Mother Superior protested against this disruption to the school day. As a convert to the faith he was immune to the nun’s wrath. “They’ll make it up at Church this Sunday.”

My brother asked timidly, “What about our books?”

“No one does homework on Baby Day.” We piled in the car and he drove to Beth Israel Hospital, humming IT’S BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS.

Our baby brother weighed seven pounds and his pink fingers were wiggling worms. My mother beamed the same happiness as my father. We were a bigger family by one.

My parents named their sixth child after my mother’s uncle. The young priest had met a twelve year-old emigrant off the boat from Ireland and placed my grandmother in a Salem household staff. She had danced with our grandfather at a church outing in Marblehead. My mother thought our next two generations owed their existence to Uncle Mike and prayed at least one of us might take up the Cloth to return the favor.

Michael was a miracle those first months and I rushed home from school to feed, bathe, and rock him in an ancient cradle. After five kids in seven years my mother was grateful for the help. This peaceful period ended with his teething.

My mother and I sang GOLDMINE IN THE SKY a thousand times. His bawling destroyed any attempts at harmony. One day he fell asleep and we sat on the bed in relief. The support struts creaked under our weight and his unearthly howl filled the bedroom. He seemed shocked for a second, then smiled before drifting into an infantile slumber.

That was as bad as it got. My baby brother walked and talked ahead of his age. Michael quickly grew out of his diapers, since my mother toilet-trained him before age two. She had no patience for bed-wetters. My sisters and brothers treated him like a gift from the gods. Our aunts and uncles doted on him. The priests declared an angel had landed in our parish and people were always commenting that he should be a model, otherwise he seemed a very normal baby.

When Michael was six, my mother stopped to buy milk at the store across from the church. She exited to an empty car. The gas station boys hadn’t seen my brother. The police searched the neighborhood without success. An hour later a woman caring for the parish priest carried Michael into the store. My brother couldn’t explained where he had been or with whom. Everyone was relieved to have him back and no one spoke much about the episode afterwards. The bars stayed on the car for another year.

My brother and I became altar boys. Chuckie’s mother forced him to join us. Other kids ridiculed our wearing a cassock. They could laugh all they wanted. We got out of school to serve in funerals. At weddings the father of the bride gave us $10 each to act like we were saints. It was a good racket, until Chuckie discovered that the pastor never locked the cabinet for the altar wine.

We were eleven.

We wanted to discover the secret of the Blood of Christ and snuck into the church after school. Getting drunk didn’t take much and we staggered home through the woods. Our feet took us onto a narrow path leading to the Springs. A Mafia victim had been found dead in the swamp and we hurried through the rocky brambles, until spotting a naked man chained to a tree. A paper bag covered his head. Hearing our feet in the leaves he asked us to do something awful and we fled with the horror of knowing what men did to men had nothing to do with your belly button.

We didn’t discuss this incident with anyone else, since boys in the 1960s had a million names for queers and everyone was suspect. In 8th Grade I was punched out every day by two boys, because I could read Latin and had a thing for the prettiest girl in school. The beatings stopped, after I fought the bullies to protect Kyla Rolla from a scandal. She regarded me as her hero and a reputation for violence followed me into high school.

My older brother taught Michael to ride a bike and I read him Classics Illustrated. He loved Rock Hudson movies. Never Doris Day. I felt the same way too. Like the rest of us Michael attended Our Lady of the Foothills, where his artwork outshone his grades. The girls loved him and the boys thought he was funny. His mimicking GOMER PYLE was priceless and the Boy Scouts awarded him merit badges. He seemed to have no troubles, until I came home from school one afternoon to find him crying. He was eight. A neighborhood boy had seen him of playing with Barbie dolls. he called Michael a queer.

“Queer? You mean like Arthur?” my brother asked too quickly for comfort.

Arthur lived across the street with his parents. He flew for Eastern Airlines as a steward. Boston to Florida four times a week. Neighborhood women considered Arthur a dreamboat. His best friend was a fellow steward named Joe. Neither dated a swinging stewardess. They dodged any aspersion on their masculinity, because Arthur’s father had been a sub commander in World War I. The old man was tougher than a bent nail. He loved his son. Arthur returned the love to both his parents.

“Yes.” My brother nodded his crew-cut head.

“Arthur’s harmless.” He had given me a stainless steel model of an Eastern Airlines plane for my 10th birthday. We shook hands. Joe clapped me on the back. I felt funny, since The Bible condemned any male intimacy as an abomination.

“So am I and I never play with Barbie dolls.”

“Every boy in this neighborhood plays with his sisters’ dolls. Anyone who says they don’t are liars.”

Michael had me dead to rights. Chuckie and I conducted experiments with Ken and Barbie. We had no other show-and-tell way of learning sex. We weren’t queer. Neither was Michael. I ran down the street to a turquoise ranch house. My brother’s persecutor was a thirteen year-old. He wouldn’t come outside. I threatened to beat the snot out of his fifteen year-old brother. “No one calls my brother a queer.”

The two boys blubbered an apology. “Sorry, we were wrong.”

“Just don’t do it again or else I’ll burn down your house.”

I wasn’t kidding either.

When I got back home, my brother was singing OVER THE RAINBOW to a Ken doll.

No one in my hometown touched him again, at least not unless he wanted them to.

That autumn my parents went to dine at Joe Tecchi’s in the North End, entrusting the care of our younger siblings to my older brother and me. We bribed them with candy and TV to turn a blind eye to the descent of several boys and as many girls to the basement.

My girlfriend, Kyla, had a hairdo like Kim Novak in VERTIGO.

Once the lights were out, we made out on the couch. The record player repeated WHEN A MAN LOVES A WOMAN for two hours. I had a hickey on my collarbone. Kyla and out friends left at 10. Her dog, DJ, was waiting in the bushes. She kissed me good-night. DJ didn’t growl. He almost liked me now. My parents returned home in a good mood and we slept content in our deception of the older generation.

Early the next morning my mother’s angry voice taught the error of such arrogance. A piece of chocolate had stained the living room rug and she demanded to know how it got there. My baby brother snitched about our friends.

Guilt of one sin earned a conviction for another.

We were grounded for a month. I came home from high school in a fury. My brother was hiding under his bed and I yanked him out by the heels. “Don’t you dare call for Mom.”

“I was only telling the truth.” He offered no resistance.

“None of my friends came upstairs.” One punch would teach him a lesson.

“I only said they were here. I never said they dropped the chocolate.”

This manipulation of the truth exhibited wisdom beyond his years and I let him go with the warning, “Don’t try it again or else I won’t protect you anymore.”

“Against what?” My baby brother was only scared of the Wicked Witch of the West.

“They are people who will want to hurt you.”

“You mean like those boys who beat you up in 8th Grade.”

Moon Tully and Joe Barco. My shudder was an involuntary flinch of hidden fear.  “You knew about that?”

“Everyone knew.” It was a small town.

“And no one did anything.” I wanted to scare my brother. “Remember the time you disappeared from the car. Something really bad like that could happen to you again.”

“Not if you stop them.” Tears smeared his eyes. I hadn’t expected this. Somebody had hurt him. I vowed they would never steal him again, if I could help it and I prayed to god to save him from that fate of that naked man chained to the tree, however the Almighty hadn’t been able to save His Own son and neither shock treatment nor medicine could cure a kid from what he really was supposed to be.

My vow evaporated within the rising ocean of teenage angst. Kyla and I attended religious retreats to combat our shared lust. We were supposed to wait for marriage. At Easter Mass I said I wasn’t taking her to my senior prom, thinking she would surrender to my demands.

Instead I invited Jenny, a skinny girl from the Surf Nantasket. She dressed like a hippie. On prom night Jenny and I danced to the MC5. We went all the way in the back of my father’s Delta 88 and did it again the next day on Horseshoe Beach.

Kyla and Pal Monahan were elected King and Queen at the town prom. Their marriage the next summer was only a three months before the birth of her baby boy. I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Michael served the Mass and her father gave him $5. Michael spent it on hip-huggers.

My Summer of Love with Jenny ended with her falling for the guitarist of the Ramrods. They lived in a commune on the Hull peninsula. There was no going back to Kyla.

My father noticed my moping and suggested I coach Michael’s baseball team. I should have said no. My baseball skills were minimal, however the league needed someone to count heads and insure the equipment wasn’t stolen.

While most of the players on Gleason Funeral Home had a fair grasp of the basics, my brother’s fielding and throwing arm exiled him to right field. The players on the other teams made fun of his batting. Halfway through the season, he said, “I want to quit.”

“Me too.” The team hadn’t won a single game and angry parents yelled at my batting orders. My father said there were no quitters in our family and we suffered loss after loss.

Our last game was against the league’s best team and somehow we led into the last inning. My brother batted first and the opposing coach commented on his practice swing. I called time. He had twenty years and an extra fifty pounds. My brother said, “Don’t.”

“What about protecting you?”

“You’re not going always be there. I can take care of myself.” He parodied the macho coach by hitching his pants and scratching his ass. Our team giggled with a loser’s disregard for authority. The other team saw the humor in the uncanny mimic and soon everyone on the field laughed at his antics. The pitcher on the mound caught the spirit and lofted a cream puff at the plate.

My brother squibbed a hit into left field. He was tagged out stealing home.

Our opponents scored two runs in the bottom of the 6th and the season ended with a record of 0-17. I bought the team pizza and toasted my brother as having given us a victory in the throat of defeat. The other players would have preferred the win.

By 1970 my hair was down to my shoulders and my older brother had sideburns. My father had a moustache. One photo shows the four boys in hip suits and the two girls in mod dresses looking like the Partridge Family substitutes. My father could have been the band manager. We loved each other. Not all the time, but we obeyed my mother’s dictate of never saying anything about each other to someone outside our circle.

At summer’s end my brother and I commuted to Boston College. My envy of the dorm students grew under an ancient regime of parental restrictions and I moved to an apartment in Brighton’s Bug Village. Driving taxi paid the rent and I spend more time behind the wheel than in the classroom. Off-hours I smoked pot with hippie co-eds from BU and drank beer at the Phoenix on Commonwealth Avenue. They had twenty-five cents beer, pinball, and Mexican food. I sold mescaline to Arrowsmith at the Hi-Hat.
I visited my parents every weekend.

The trolleys and subway trains provided a rocking study hall for the week’s lessons. My father usually picked me up at Lower Mills. One afternoon no one answered the phone and I rode the Rte. 28 bus to a seemingly empty house. Within minutes my clothes were stuck in the washer and eggs were frying in the pan. Over the hum of the suction blower I heard a giggle upstairs. I crept to my parents’ bedroom and opened the door.

Neither Michael nor his friend, Manuel, tried to explain why they were wearing my sisters’ mini-skirts and mother’s wigs, because the answer wasn’t that boys will be girls. His friend was clearly embarrassed. Not my brother. Michael posed before the full-length mirror. “Don’t you think I look like Peggy Lipton?”

“Only a little.” My crush of her was almost as big as the torch I carried for Susan Dey from THE PARTRIDGE FAMILY.

“Mom says that when you were born she wanted a girl and dressed you up like one for two years.”

“That doesn’t make me a drag queen. Get out of those rags.” Lou Reed’s WALK ON THE WILD SIDE followed the Kinks’ LOLA in my brain’s jukebox.

Michael changed into jeans and a tee-shirt. “We were only having a little fun.”

“Fun?” Only one group of people would have interpreted cross-dressing that way.
You’re too young to be getting into this.”

“I’m just playing around.” His friend fled from the house. He was in the closet. Michael was too young to come out too and he demanded in a sudden panic. “Are you going to tell Mom?”

“I’m not a snitch.” The criminal’s philosophy of undying loyalty had migrated to the suburbs with the Bowery Boys and reinforced by the Three Stooges.

“Thank you.” He replaced the wig back in the box almost as if he were saying good-bye to a treasure. His future lay in one direction. I could not help him get there. Queer life was a mystery to most straights. I only knew what I knew from driving cab.

Young hustlers worked the chickenhawks on Marlborough Street near the Boston Gardens. Leather boys traipsed through the Greyhound bus station. Elegant queens wore colorful leisure suits to the Combat Zone’s piano bars. Provincetown was a ferry ride across Massachusetts Bay. It was an exciting time for men seeking men, except my brother was 10.

“Wearing a dress isn’t going to make you popular at school with the boys.”

“Not all of them.” He was taking it lightly as only the young can do, when they haven’t witnessed the cruelty of reality. The police hunted sword-swallowers in the streets, bullies assaulted fudge-packers in schools, and priests castigated their catamite behavior. All I wanted to do was save him from any pain. “You be careful.”

“And prepared just like a Boy Scout.”

That summer I worked in my father’s office.

An older woman found my youth amusing. Linda was divorced, 26. She had a young daughter. We went to an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert on the Esplanade. We did more than kiss in the bushes. Our weekly rendezvous were accelerated by desire. I thought we were in love. She confessed in the end my father was her original choice.

Her rejection led to heavy drinking and harder drugs.

My grades descended to sin laude, while the taxi fleet awarded my high bookings with a shiny Checker cab. One night I picked up a fare outside Boston Garden. The stocky man had a moustache. We praised Bobby Orr on the ride to the Fenway. Bruce looked like a hockey player. He told me to stop in front of the 1270 Club. Only men were going inside. “You want to have a beer?”

“I’m not gay.” The two-story bar was gay.

“And hippie taxi drivers aren’t my type. Neither are hairdressers. Come on in, we can talk about the Red Sox.”

“I said I’m not gay.” I turned around to face my passenger. 

“I know already. Come. Don’t come. Up to you. Only you’ll miss meeting some sweet fag hags. They don’t need to know you’re a breeder. In fact it’s better, if they don’t. You’re not scared you might be gay, are you?” It was a question most men couldn’t answer while looking in the mirror.

“I’m not scared of anything.” I went into the disco and danced the night away with a ravenous blonde model. Bruce warned not to kiss her. She asked if I found her beautiful. I said I wasn’t into women. She asked if I found her sexy. She was wearing a flowing dress with no bra. I could see her nipples. They were bigger than mine.

“You’re sexy like Olivia Newton-John.”

“Really? You want to come to my place for a drink. I won’t touch you. Promise.” She tested my resolve at her apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. I failed with an F.

The 1270 and Jacques were more fun than trying to outdrink co-eds at Kenmore Square boozers. Whenever the fag-hags doubted my persuasion, Bruce would proclaim my swordswallowing talents. I danced with men as camouflage. Diana Ross’ LOVE HANGOVER was a great song. Kissing Bruce drove a stewardess into my arms. It wasn’t all a lie and my college life grew more separate from my nights.

Bruce and I went to baseball games together .We sat in Boston Garden for the Celtics. Both teams were shit. he didn’t care. bad teams had small crowds. We sat where we wanted.  He told me not to tell his friends about sports. “They wouldnt understand.”

“And you don’t tell them I’m not gay.” Nothing was more attractive to his friends than a straight man. Burce’s lies were useless. They saw me for what I was and constantly sought my conversion to the cause. Bruce declared at a tea dance in Provincetown, “He’s not gay, but no man is 100% straight. Leave him alone.”

By my graduation college in 1974 my gay friends outnumbered my straight. My brother didn’t know what to make of this association. Bruce was his hero. We turned him onto pot and Eartha Kitt. He wanted to join us. Even Bruce said he was too young.

Bruce got tickets for the 2nd game of the 1975 World Series. We celebrated the Bernie Carbo’s homer in Game 6 at 1270. My friend swore several players were in the crowd. Soon after Bruce fell in love with a jealous stockbroker. “I’m settling down to be a wife.”

The scene was less fun without him and I took up with a teenage girl from Brookline. Her family was crazy. Her ex- and I fought over her, while she was in the hospital. He won and I lost.

On a visit to New York I fell in love with an artist. I quit my substitute teaching job at South Boston High and arrived on Thanksgiving. She left the next day to fulfill a painting scholarship in Paris. Stranded I moved into a Park Slope brownstone with a jazz impresario I had met at the Riviera Café on 7th Avenue.

James Spicer swept his hair back like the Silver Surfer. Sunglasses were for day and night. The claim of a one-night stand with James Dean dated his age way past 30. His lessons on loft jazz, robbing ATMs, and the delights of Hudson River shad roe were invaluable. They had a price.

One night I woke to his oiling my feet like he was Mary Magdalene and he drunkenly professed his love. I was no Jesus and told him to go to sleep. It was no big deal, until Jim stole my unemployment checks. I was broke. Any thoughts about returning home were short-circuited by a visit to the unnerving suburban calm of the South Shore.

Michael was the only child left at home. His girlfriend invited us for diner. Her parents weren’t home. Their split-level sat across from Kyla’s old house. She and her husband had moved to the Cape. Their baby would be about seven. My brother noticed my staring. “You thinking how different your life would be, if you hadn’t broken up with Kyla?”

“Something like that.” I lit up a joint. “I can’t remember why I did it.”

“Maybe you wanted to be something more than that person.” My brother took a puff of reefer and coughed like a cholera victim. At 18 his entire life was in front of him. I didn’t want him to make my mistakes. “Are you happy with Patty?”

“Patty hopes one day she can change me.” He rolled his eyes in disbelief.

“It’s not nice to play with someone’s emotion.”

“Patty knows the odds. Some breeder will be very happy with her. For now she protects me from anyone thinking the worst. It wasn’t like you were around to fight every fag-basher in Boston.” Michael signaled to Patty we were coming inside.

“Have you two even had sex?” Only curiosity spurred that question.

“We’re saving it for our wedding night.” The idea of him with a woman was a horror. He could never tell Patty that.  “Patty goes to church every Sunday.”

After dinner Patty put on a record of CABARET. My brother acted out a sinister Joel Grey. He didn’t have to lip-synch either. Manuel came over with another boy. He had a beard. They went upstairs together. I left for home. My mother asked if I was bored with the suburbs.

“No more than usual. In fact it almost feels good being bored.” I kissed her goodnight and slept in the basement, unable to face the ghost of my bedroom. In the morning I went to catch the train at 128. My parents gave me $50. With the $10 in my pocket I had $60. It was enough for a week’s rent at an SRO on East 11th Street and I hitchhiked to the Mass Pike. The rest of the trip took four hours.

Serendipity 3 on East 60th Street was hiring busboys. The waiters’ favorite movie was MILDRED PIERCE. They went by women’s names. I was called by my own name to my face. The kitchen staff loved to shout out, ‘Pebbles’, since they thought I resembled like a caveman.

The pastry cook looked like Josef Goebbels’ nephew. Klaus sang castrati roles for opera. His name at the restaurant was Eva Braun. We toured clubs in the West Village. Men explored the farthest reaches of sexuality in the backrooms. These exploits caused their mothers to weep and their fathers to gnash their teeth, yet the boys kept asking for more too.

The West Village and San Francisco surrendered to their invasion. The Village People scored #1 with YMCA. Football fans sang WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS by Queen. When Anita Bryant beseeched God to punish the sodomites, gay consumers boycotted OJ and within six months she retired from her position as the Florida OJ Lady. They had the power.

Klaus frequented Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs. They were my home at night. No one there cared what you were as long as you were a punk. The Ramones played once a week. I bought a leather jacket. Bruce came to visit from Boston and said I looked ‘butch. He was still happily ‘married’. We had a good time dancing through the night, until he vanished to troll the back rooms of the West Village with Klaus. They loved it. The sex.

During the 1977 Black-out the boys from Serendipity raided Fiorucci, a disco accessory shop on East 60th Street and I chucked a cinder block at the window in hopes of snatching a silver Elvis suit. The concrete missile bounced off the protective glass and nearly struck my head. We ran for our lives from the guards. It had been a funny story told ever funnier each and every time by the boys.

The boys from Serendipity 3 introduced me to a smart hillbilly girl. Lana had different colored eyes and in a borrowed penthouse bedroom she called out for god, as I entered her for the thousandth time.

I was only a man.

Once she graduated, we moved into the East Village, which was a burnt out as a junkie’s vein and we loved it.

My brother started college in 1978. U-Mass Amherst gathered like minds and bodies. He was in heaven.

That Christmas my girlfriend returned to her hollow in West Virginia. I headed north to New England on the train. It was standing room only. My father met me at 128. He told me I looked tired. I was working at a nightclub. We closed at 4. I didn’t say much on Christmas Eve. My sisters pleaded for my good behavior and I wore a tie to Midnight Mass, although not kneeling tested my mother’s patience.

My atheism died during the Creed. Rote repetition forced my lips to speak in tongues. My brothers joined the ancient prayer. We were all ex-altar boys. My mother cried hearing the old Latin. After the final amen, she said we were the best boys in the world. She gave us all money. I bought a nickel bag.

My younger brothers and I smoked a joint in the backyard. My older brother was straight in every way you’re supposed to be straight. He didn’t criticize us. I felt a little bad. He was my best friend. The stars shone over the trees and Michael asked if there really had been a Jesus. I wasn’t so sure, even though IF JESUS CAME TO MY HOUSE had been a favorite bedtime story. “Back in 1974 my friends and I dropped acid in the White Mountains. We spoke to the rapids of the Saco River. This kid comes out of the trees. The sun was bright and he seemed to have a halo. My friend said it was Jesus. We asked him questions and thought he was Jesus. A minute later a teenager girl grabs him by the ear, telling him to stay away from hippies.”

“Jesus.” My brothers wowed and we went inside for a good night’s sleep.

My mother’s scream woke us in the morning.

I ran downstairs thinking she had dropped the turkey. The bird was fine, however my father was raging before the Christmas tree. Michael stood by the fireplace. It was his turn to ruin Christmas and he explained, “I told them I was gay.”

My parents guarded the secrets of sex behind their bedroom doors.  I had followed their lead throughout my adult life and dragged Michael into the basement. “What did you want to do that for?”

“My friends at college decided to come out of the closet.”

I found nothing wrong with his being gay. “You did it for them?”

“I thought you would understand.” His face wore a doubting anger. “You went to gay discos. You have gay friends. I even heard stories about you.”

“Whatever you heard doesn’t matter, because this is about you and not me and not about your friends. If you want to do something, then do it for yourself.”

“You mean like to your own self be true.”

I thought he was quoting Crosby Stills Nash and Young.  “Yes.”

Turkey must have tasted of wood for my parents. The giving of presents was subdued, although Michael had the perfect gift for everyone. He gave me a studded dog collar. Of course upon his return to UMass-Amherst, his friends admitted never coming out to their parents and it would take him years to put this lesson to work. I was just as smart.

Lana organized a concert at Irving Plaza with Blondie and the B-52s and I worked security. At the end of the show I asked everyone to leave. Several rockers told me to go fuck myself. A fight broke out. Someone kicked in my ribs. I could barely breathe the next day.

I had fought with Blondie’s band. They refused to play, if I was in the hall. Lana sided with them. A legal suit against the group for the profits from HEART OF GLASS would have earned thousands. Instead I took a job at a punk disco uptown. It paid $100 a night and all the free drinks you could manage to glom from the bartenders. Lana and I drifted apart.

Late one night a doctor from NYU Hospital called our apartment. He reported that James Spicer was dying from pneumonia. My hillbilly had never met James and was angry that I was leaving her alone. I couldn’t blame her, mostly because I had been seeing a blonde model from Buffalo. My promise to come back soon sounded phony even to my ears.

The hospital ward was empty. The nurses appeared reluctant to enter James’ room and the Italian doctor explained gay men had been dying from a mysterious ailment. This was the first I had heard of the disease and I sat by James’ bed without any fear. I should have known better. He coughed like he was giving birth to a lung and opened his eyes to say, “You?”

“Yeah.” I sang songs and lullabies during the long night. At dawn his mother and father arrived from Florida. They were like my parents. Good people with a loving son unable to live in a small town.

I went to the basement cafeteria for chocolate milk and a bagel. Nothing had ever tasted so good and when I got back to the ward, James’ parents were crying in the corridor. My girlfriend thought it was a lie, until his funeral on Washington Square. Merce Cunningham spoke. Cecil Taylor played piano. Hundreds of people showed up. No one knew the real cause of his death. It was 1979.

My infidelity was a killing blow for Lana. The blonde model from Buffalo was no ingenue. She fielded dreams of strobe lights on a fashion runway. They didn’t feature a nightclub punk good at pinball. She flew to Europe for catalogue work. The phone calls ended after a week. I treated my broken heart with drink and drugs. My brother came down to visit. He was doing badly in school and my father had sworn to pull him out of U-Mass., if his grades didn’t improve to C. My odds were 5-1 against my father’s demand. At an old-timers’ bar in the West Village, I said, “You can always come to live with me.”

“Really?” He loved New York.

“Free rent for the first three months and I can get you a job at Serendipity.”

“I’ll have to think about it.” My brother’s eyes lit up at the entrance of a heavy bearded beast. More hair than a dog. Michael left with the bear for rest of the weekend. Everyone likes what they like.

His college career ended within the year and he was hired by the Ma Bell. My mother and father tried every tactic to turn him straight. Blind dates failed miserably. Patty still loved him. Psychiatrists prescribed therapy. My brother seduced two. Priests avoided any attempt at sexual exorcism. My parents accepted my brother’s sexuality and he moved into the South End to be on his own.

He wouldn’t leave Boston.

There were Easter egg hunts for our nieces and nephews. His comedy routines were well received in his circuit. Men sought his company. My brother gave them a night or two and moved onto another flavor. One summer he spotted a speedboat offshore a Provincetown beach and swam out to meet the owner. Tom and he became close friends. Neither ever admitted to being lovers. My mother loved Tom. My father too.

Michael stopped doing drugs. He wanted to be healthy. His body was a weapon in his ministry of Gay Liberation for freedom. He grew more radical, as AIDS was reaping its harvest.

Lana spoke to me at funerals. We lost the boys from Serendipity one by one. Her best friend bequeathed an elephant foot to me. I called it Stumpy. My brother was well aware of the dangers and spoke out on a radio show for the gay community. My father drove him back and forth to the studio. He was proud of his son and went to celebrate the show’s first year on the air at a South End restaurant, where the station manager praised about Michael’s civic contribution.

My brother guided his cousin, Tara, on her dream of singing on Broadway. She ended up as Julie Andrew’s understudy. After her first show Tara declared that the star of VICTOR/VICTORIA had called her ‘darling’. Michael joked under his breath that Julie couldn’t remember anyone’s name. Living in a small city hadn’t stopped him from being funny.

My prayers for his eternal life were wishful thinking, for he contracted AIDS in 1994. The doctors at Beth Israel fought the infections with a series of toxic drugs. His health fluctuated between bad and worst. My friend, Scotty, opened a nightclub in Beverly Hills.

I asked my brother, if it was all right to go. He was aware of my five year affair with a married woman. Once he had gotten sick, Michael started to thinking about the Commandments. Not all of them. Just one and it was about me. Not him. His morality was funny when it came to his older brother. He was right. It was time to end it with Ms. Carolina. Moving to