Two other houses

We were sitting on the roof of the dog house in the backyard of his dad's house. His father kept great black woolly beasts, their name on a doormat outside the porch: I Love Bouviers. I don't know how much the family loved them; certainly Kyle and I never rode on their backs or danced with them or chased them around the yard (like Tom and I did with Ol' South, that wild golden retriever).

"I just have to tell you," Kyle said, "I can't hold it in anymore."

"What?" I asked.

"You need to clean your ears. They're disgusting."

I tried to brush it off by pretending that I knew. That it was genetic. That it was just the way my ears were. My special burden.

"Jiminy Cricket says you should never stick anything in your ear sharper than your elbow, anyway," I finally remembered.

In his father's basement we played truth or dare with the dangerous boy from the large green house at the far end of the cul-de-sac. Chris was a curly-haired bully at school, but he was tame around Kyle because they grew up near each other. But he still pushed Kyle farther than he would have gone, until both of them were swinging naked from the ceiling supports. When they dared me, I went into the bathroom, pulled off my pants and shirt, and sauntered out with a towel around my waist. They were wide-eyed with surprise. And then disappointed when I dropped the towel to reveal that I had broken the dare and left my underwear on.

At his mother's house—I remember she had to keep my once for several days while my parents were away. I got sick and stayed home from school, blowing my nose and dozing on the mattress they had pulled out and placed on the floor beside Kyle's bed. Later, over dinner with his mom, Kyle told me that there had been so many snotty tissues on the floor of his bedroom when he got home from school that he hadn't been able to get to his desk.

One night, after his mother had gone to sleep, we watched TV. We loved Johnny Carson, but it was the weekend. We watched Saturday Night Live and laughed at Martin Short ("Gimme a C, a bouncy C!").

"Let me show you something," he said, and he emphatically clicked the remote control. Soon there was a pair of bunny ears in the bottom right corner of the screen, and then loud music and a huge muscled man dancing in his underwear. "Oh," he said. "Usually it's girls." We watched until we grew tired. Lying on our open sleeping bags in the dark living room, I prayed the Kyle would find Jesus, and become an acolyte at his church like his mother wanted. I silently said good night to God and crossed myself.

"What did you just do?" Kyle asked.

"Nothing," I said, hoping somehow that the half-seen symbol might change him.

Notebook of exercises

Thank you to my wonderful Kentucky relatives, who sent me a copy of A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories for Christmas, in which a woman remembers the black stove of her childhood.

Tom lived down the street at the bottom of the hill in a gray mostly one-story house with a large fenced-in backyard hiding a pool. We became friends in the first grade. I was strong then: I spoke back to my teacher and had to put my nose in the corner. Tom and a girl named Nicole were drawn to my confidence and imagination in play, though most of my scenarios were based on the Superfriends and other things overseen on TV. Tom and I played together nearly daily until the fifth or sixth grade, when (according to some theories) he was drawn to stony strength and I was drawn to watery sensitivity.

Tom and I divided our time between the houses. I think there was a tension in his house that we somehow knew to avoid. His father was a brute of a handsome man, darker than many in that small town. And it was rumored in Boy Scouts that he carried dynamite in his truck.

We often played Stuffed Animals and Legos at his house. I remember one night he had a large smooth stone with a red smear on it, probably blood from a Halloween costume. (Tom's widow's peak predisposed him to Dracula, though he was fond of Frankenstein.) We set the stone at the center of a murder mystery involving the animals. Eventually there was even a trial for the suspect. My Snoopy, our premier animal, was the judge. (The second-in-command, Tom's, was a kind of bear unfamiliar to me, but with an unknown stuffed strength of character that made him stand above his brothers.)

Other dolls: my Gizmo, which I got through prayer, a deal with my parents, and some proofs of purchase from a dreadful cereal too sweet even for childhood. My very old rabbit doll, a thing passed somehow from my grandmother (it may have been seventy years old), all tubes of wool stuffed with cotton, fragile and beautiful. My big brown bear, fluffy and light, the influence of modern technology. My Spike doll, Snoopy's sleepy or suave cousin.

I cannot yet remember Tom's dolls, but I remember his Legos. We would play in the small study, next to the small spare bedroom, always hot, up the spiral staircase to the add-on over the kitchen. My friends were divided: Keith and I played with and collected the Castle set, Bobbie of course had the brightly colored and imaginatively designed Space set, and Tom had the City set. I was content to drive my Lego man from the gas station to the airport, but Tom often led us on police chases or had us recovering from meteors and earthquakes.

For the first years we would often camp out in the spare bedroom adjacent. A marble chess set rested on an old trunk, and I had not yet discovered my eternal resistance to strategy. I won once or twice over many long years. We would sleep in the hard bed under the plastic bubble of a skylight. Tom wore the pajamas of little boys, which I thought silly. And I wore my day clothes, which he thought gross. And always, whichever we wore would make sparks as we stretched our legs under the bedspread. What do children talk about—late at night, floating a little, away from the barking of grownups, not yet broken?

Later, when computers came (for his family the IBM PC Jr.; for mine, through my desperate insistence, the Tandy 1000), his sister's downstairs bedroom was turned into an office, and she moved to the upstairs spare. I should say: Later, when his sister began to enter puberty, she sought to escape and begged for the privacy of the upstairs. Her old bedroom conveniently became the computer room. I sometimes feel like some people were misplaced in that town, or deserved some better place. Or perhaps were models for rebellious living. She was one, as was the brother of my dear but secret female friend, Jill. But that's another memory.

Though I must admit I like the fantasy that my notebook, which I take to coffee for half an hour each morning, is full of ALL WORK AND NO PLAY . . .

Why I Can't Be Sad

Why can't I be sad? Because then I would have to explain to you why I am sad.

You'll say, "Why are you sad?"

And I'll say, "Because of these things."

And you'll say, "What are these things?"

And then I'll have to list these things. Some of them will sound ridiculous, and some of them will sound sad. And I will forever be crossing off and adding, always looking for things to add to the list and reviewing the list for things that no longer fit. And the naming of the things will give them power, and the listing of them will make me into a Keeper of Lists.

Work might be on my list.

Then you might ask, "Why does work make you sad?"

And then I might say, "It is large. And metal. And I haven't any friends."

And then you might ask, "And what can you do so that work does not make you sad?"

And I will make a list of things to do, and will try some of them. When I succeed, I will be happy; when I fail, I will be sad. And then I will realize that I am trying to change myself and work so that I am less sad. And then, when I realize that work is not trying to change to make me happy, I will be angry.

Then I will tear up all of my lists and be happy.

Special Announcement

Check out my story, "Now We Shan't Never Be Parted," in Best Gay Love Stories 2006, published by Alyson Publications and edited by Nick Street. (It's on page 212.)

Find it at Amazon.

Death in Venice: A Side of Requiem

Ah, Ward. I killed him less by my psychosis than by my strange indifference when I read—quite by chance in a newspaper I picked up at a cafe while grabbing a coffee before heading to a weekend vacation in Charleston—that he had died.

I consumed him in my psychotic storm, though he was never exposed to the strange sad eye. My adolescent strivings were discovering that the world was not a place of organic growth, but material decay. Although I had not fully crumbled, I was in the midst of discovering that there was nothing worth growing up for.

He believed the flaw was in my perception. "It's zerdenken. My wife does the same thing. She thinks everything to pieces," he explained, bent over. The spiral of his body began at the waist and curved through his neck and head down his arm into his thumb and forefinger, which were pressed together to make a point. The curve meant that he was always looking up at you, slyly.

I felt guilty; I was exercising a test of my charisma, and found that I could bend him toward me. Several old men before him had bent, and listened to my stories, and gasped, and fallen in love. But these were horny old gays, and I was young and my skin still soft. Ward was not a horny old gay, though he may have concealed some secrets from his wife and daughters. And he must have done something to draw not just one, but two, of his students into his office to work on theses of Death in Venice.

Ha! I thought I was the spider, but he had his own webs. We were each a Tadzio and an Aschenbach, each the unattainable, innocent muse and each the cracking black heart. It was easy in those days to get carried away; I was so deeply involved in Death in Venice and its peripherals: caught between the secret diaries of Thomas Mann and Benjamin Britten and the world-tearing language of Michel Foucault.

He was not perfect, of course, and as a professor exercised an abuse of power. Not the kind that, when combined with the right militia, results in totalitarianism in the outside world. His patience was tried by a girl who had been majoring in German for over a year and hadn't yet done well enough in any class to receive credit toward her degree. When she said "Ich weiss nicht" once too many times, he replied, "Frau Rainey, is there anything you do know?" Ward's power was the cruelty of the one who has what the others want: the queen who coldly ignores her sycophants, or the diva who disregards her devotees.

New identities

In the new year, I am an actor, composer, dancer, filmmaker, flutist, painter, photographer, pianist, poet, and writer. These are for now.

In the new year, I am not an architect, biographer, chef, clothing designer, conductor, metalworker, novelist, perfumist, psychologist, or rock star. These are for other times.