She got used to finding me there. Pretty soon, thanks to her dementia, she began to see the whole family on television. She saw my mother and sister in a fashion show, my brother drag racing with his high school buddies. One afternoon I arrived at Mayview to find her in a state of extreme distress, shaking even more than usual, because she had just seen my father being killed by “a mob of angry nigras.” (My guess was that she had just seen her first civil rights demonstration.) There was nothing I could do to shake the notion that her son was dead, so I asked Daddy to come down to Mayview to set her mind at ease. He was already in high dudgeon by the time he arrived. “Goddammit, Mama. I’m here. Look at me. I’m not dead!” When Mimi remained unconvinced, he snatched a plastic lily out of a vase and lay down lengthwise on a couch, holding the lily erect over his chest. “Okay? Are you happy, Mama? I’m dead. I’m one dead son of a bitch.” That finally made her laugh, which brought her back into the world for a while, as laughter almost always did.
That summer at the television station remains largely unmemorable except for the time that the newsroom sent me to cover a Ku Klux Klan rally in a tent on the edge of town. By then, the Klan had become an embarrassment to many white Southerners, even the ones, like my father, who still defended segregation. “They’re just a bunch of crazy folks,” he said, “and common as can be. It’s not like it was during Reconstruction when there were gentlemen under those hoods. Plantation owners and such. They needed it then to keep the niggers and carpetbaggers in line.”
I don’t recall there being hoods at this rally, just a lot of overalls and blue serge suits and a smattering of robes with gaudy insignia. It felt more like a revival than anything else, and the Imperial Wizard had the leathery, rheumy-eyed look of a country preacher. Pressed for something provocative to ask, I brought up Peggy Rusk, a young woman whose wedding photo had just appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Peggy Rusk was the daughter of Dean Rusk, Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of state, and her groom, a recent graduate of Georgetown University, was African-American. Only three months earlier the Supreme Court had struck down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage, declaring marriage to be “one of the basic civil rights.”
The subject was topical, to say the least, and I figured the Wizard would have something quotable to say about it. He seemed to be composing his thoughts, so I signaled the cameraman and leaned in with the mic. This could be my first big story.
“Well,” began the Wizard, “I don’t think anyone should be even slightly surprised.”
And how was that?
“Because Dean Rusk is a liberal. He’s one of the most liberal men this country has ever seen. Naturally he would’ve approved of this marriage. And his daughter must have been raised to think that way. To think there was nothing wrong with it.”
This was disappointingly reasonable for my purposes.
“No sir,” the Wizard continued. “I think that’s exactly what you should expect from the daughter of a man who’s a practicing homosexual.”
I stood there dumbstruck until the cameraman nudged me to indicate it was my turn to say something. I cleared my throat to buy time, then began: “You’re saying that the secretary of state is . . . um—”
“Yes sir. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
I drove back to the station with a racing heart, thrilled that I had a story so big that it might go national in a matter of days. Somehow, in the name of the almighty scoop, I had completely disconnected from my own reality. It’s possible, I suppose, that I saw this story as a smokescreen. I had already learned the cowardly trick of mentioning homosexuality with a tone of amused and tolerant detachment.
Normally, I would have gone straight to the newsroom when I had a story to write, but I couldn’t resist the urge to brag to my boss, the commentator. I spilled it out in the door of his office. He stared at me for a moment then took off his glasses and began to clean them with a tissue. He told me to come in and shut the door.
I obeyed, but I didn’t sit down. He had a very grave look on his face.
“We can’t run that story, son.”
“Why not?”
He returned his glasses to his face. “Because it’s libelous. The station can get sued from here to Kingdom Come.”
“But we’re not saying it. The Imperial Wizard is. I have it on film.”
His mouth hitched to one side, revealing that dull pearl of froth in the corner. “Dean Rusk is a terrible, terrible fellow, I’ll grant you that. But we can’t say that about him. That’s the worst thing you can say about anybody. It’s an abomination.”
It was awkward for him to get that long word out of his off-center mouth, but he said it more earnestly than anything I had ever heard him say.
“You understand me, don’t you, Armistead?”
I understood all right. This was deeply personal to him. He cared about this subject in a way I’d never heard him care about anything. His usual response was to become red-faced in times of serious agitation, but now he had turned deathly pale. I found it disturbing in a way that I couldn’t define.
What happened to him? I thought.
I’m certain he had no idea about the abomination standing right there in front of him. As far as I know he didn’t learn about me until ten years later, when I finally came out in the most irrevocably public way I could manage—in Newsweek magazine. By then my former boss would be serving the first of five terms in the United States Senate, where he was already becoming known as the nation’s most rabid opponent of gay and lesbian rights. He called us, among many other things, “weak, morally corrupt wretches.” Though he never paid me the honor of naming me—that, no doubt, would have been impolite to my parents—I condemned him publicly on a number of occasions, most notably perhaps on the steps of the North Carolina State Capitol at the conclusion of Raleigh’s first Gay Pride March in 1989.
Several years later I returned to WRAL-TV on a book tour. The female half of the nightly news team was one of those lazy, tell-us-about-your-book spokesmodels that touring writers come to know all too well. (In those days I never got the male anchors; they weren’t comfortable being seen with men who loved men.) So, when my chirpy interviewer slipped into cookie-cutter mode about my novel, I decided to use the airtime for my own amusement and volunteered some useful information:
“You know, I used to work here.”
“Really? In Raleigh, you mean?”
“No. At this very station. I was a reporter.”
“Well, isn’t that a hoot?”
“I worked here when Jesse Helms was here. Now he’s in Washington, ranting about militant homosexuals, and I’m out running around being one.”
No response.
“Life is interesting, isn’t it?”
Somehow the poor thing got to the commercial without losing it completely. I was supposed to be given a full six minutes, but they showed me the door as soon as the camera was off and brought on an adoptable puppy from the Wake County SPCA—the very organization that my late mother had founded.
My mother and Mrs. Jesse Helms.
THE USS EVERGLADES was a destroyer tender based in Charleston, South Carolina, a graceless gray hulk whose task was to repair the destroyers tied up next to her. She rarely went to sea. Commonly known as Big Mama (presumably because a ship named after a swamp demands an effort at humanization), the Everglades had unsettled me from the day I’d reported on board. I had performed well enough on the USS Buttercup, the sinking-ship simulator at Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, but all you had to do there was bail water and stuff a mattress into a hole to keep from drowning. Here you had to find your way back to your bunk from dinner. Big Mama was big—six hundred men on board—a disorienting labyrinth of ladders and passageways that often led me to asking an enlisted man for directions. And the surest way to betray yourself as the new boot ensign was to admit that you couldn’t find your own room. Especially when you slipped up and called it a room.
I slept in my cabin for s
everal months until I could find a place ashore. I remember the neophyte shock of those first swampy-hot nights on board: the sinister clanking in Big Mama’s innards, the rainbow slick of oil on stagnant water, the mosquitoes buzzing through my porthole in search of blood and cleaner air. This was not Mr. Roberts or South Pacific or even In Harm’s Way. This was a factory in the sulfurous stink of North Charleston posing as adventure on the high seas. I was the communications officer. That made me in charge of the radios and the signal flags and the decryption of encoded messages. Once a week I picked up decoding rotors in a cinderblock building on the base and brought them back to the ship in a canvas duffel bag. I was qualified to do this because of something called a Cosmic Top Secret Clearance, a designation that suggested my powers extended well into the universe and beyond. I didn’t have a clue as to how those rotors worked, or the radios for that matter. The enlisted men did all that. If you were nice to them, though, they covered your ass, made it look like you knew what you were doing.
The captain of the Everglades was a tall, affable fellow whose pursed-lipped smile and protruding ears made him a ringer for Donald O’Connor in his “Talking Mule” movies. Captain Tidd was a good egg, and everybody knew it. He demanded professionalism, but even when he chastised me, he was decent about it. “Here’s the thing, Mr. Maupin, I’m fine with sunbathing on deck. It’s good for morale. But if your men are sunbathing on the starboard side, you should be doing it on the port side. Do you read me?” I read him all right, and began to wonder how well he read me.
There were about a dozen men in my division, all of them pretty likable. One of them, a nineteen-year-old Billy Budd of a blond named Spikes, was especially likable. He was one of our signalmen, a skill I had always found romantic, the Navy-est of all jobs. My father had learned of my birth via signal flags from another ship, when he was stationed in the South Pacific. (“Baby born. Mother and son both fine.”) When Spikes worked his signal flags, every muscle in his body participated. I did my damnedest not to let my appreciation betray me but was not entirely successful.
A junior officer who joined our division told me my favoritism toward Spikes was glaringly obvious. This made me uneasy, of course, but I couldn’t imagine what he had clocked, unless he meant the time that Spikes had an appendectomy and I visited him afterward at the base hospital. But that was just part of an officer’s duty, wasn’t it? To attend to his men in times of illness? I had read that somewhere, I’m pretty sure. At any rate, when the recovering Spikes grinned at me from his hospital bed, shirtless and golden, pushing down his pajama bottoms just enough to show me his “war wound,” the moment certainly felt important enough to qualify as a duty.
Temptation lurked everywhere on Big Mama. Some of my men stood at attention during morning muster with their morning wood pressed smartly against their thirteen-button flies. They thought that was hilarious. And they were fond of grabbing each other’s asses and saying, Watch out, or I’ll get me some of that. To them such homoerotic horseplay was neither homo nor erotic, and certainly not to be taken as an invitation. At least, I don’t think it was. In those days I was too filled with fear and self-loathing to read anyone’s signals with any degree of accuracy.
EXCEPT FOR MY weekly trip to the base for the Cosmic Top Secret rotors, my duties as com officer were minimal. I kept myself busy doing other things. With the blessing of Captain Tidd, I wrote a satirical newsletter called “The Tenderloin,” subtitled “Choice Cuts on the Chopping Block.” (Big Mama was a destroyer tender, remember, so I considered that the height of cleverness.) The most frequent victim of my lampoons was the executive officer, the ship’s second in command, a bald and introverted little martinet who was liked by absolutely no one on the ship. He was the easiest target imaginable, which made me, I realize now with a degree of shame, less of a courageous gadfly than a schoolyard bully.
Sensing my taste for the vivid, Captain Tidd put me in charge of the Welcome Home ceremonies for destroyers returning to the harbor. This usually included a “water welcome” (a tugboat or two ejaculating thick plumes of water) as well as various forms of fanfare on the dock. I enlisted a dozen cheerleaders from a local high school to shake their pom-poms as they spelled out the names of the ships (“Gimme a U! Gimme an S!”). I even arranged for a go-go girl to strip on the deck of Big Mama, where the sailors would catch sight of this sirenic hallucination upon entering the harbor, even before they saw their wives and girlfriends waiting breathlessly on the dock. I loved this scheme because it made me look like a good sport, an inarguably straight good sport. I had already gotten very good at using women to distract from my truth. A leer, I had learned, was as good as a lie.
Captain Tidd nixed the stripper plan, explaining to me cordially that civilian women were never allowed on Navy ships, a detail that might have occurred to me had I ever attempted to bring one aboard. The captain saw my disappointment at having missed a chance for a little showbiz and astounded me with his alternative proposal. “Get Lurch,” he said. This guy, as his name suggests, was a lumbering machinist’s mate who worked in the engine room. He was known to attempt pretty much anything if formally challenged. So it was Lurch who ended up stripping to that bump-and-grind tune from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, never once violating Navy regs as he peeled off a bright-red cocktail dress and shook his hairy ass at the troops.
We deployed to the Mediterranean during the second half of my tour, six weeks in Naples, six in Malta. As usual, Big Mama stayed put, servicing destroyers in the harbor, so the men—we men—could head ashore every night. In the waterfront fleshpots of Santa Lucia, the promise of sex shared the air with the tang of garlic and charred pizza crust. I felt suddenly compromised when a tawny youth approached me on the dock, asking, “Hey, Joe, you wan’ buy flying cock and balls?” until I realized he was just selling necklaces, winged phalluses like the ones on the walls of ancient Pompeii brothels. (My men thought it was a riot to hang a flying boner around their necks. For me it would have felt like a scarlet letter “H.”)
Other dockside vendors offered the thrills of an “exhibeesh,” a live sex show featuring a man and a woman, or, for a little bit extra, a woman and a donkey. I never went to these places, but I heard about them from my men when they returned to the radio shack late at night, drunk and jolly, and I would pretend to be worldly and amused and not at all repulsed by the thought of it. It was worth it just to feel the chianti breeze of their breath in that dim, twinkling room, or, if I got really lucky, the heat of a hand gripping my knee for emphasis.
SOMETIMES, ON MY days off, I would take a ferry across the bay to Capri. My shipmate Jim and I would wear our officer’s whites to impress the tourists and spend our afternoon drinking wine on cliffs above the sparkling sea. Jim was in it for the chance of girls, but I just liked having company, someone to gab with. Once, during a Revlon festival, Jim made a feverish sighting on the terrace of the Hotel Quisisana. “Don’t look now, but that’s Faye Fucking Dunaway!” She was sitting two tables away, sleek as a seal in white satin pajamas and matching turban. Yes, of course, I was thrilled that Bonnie Parker had just lowered her sunglasses to check us out, but what I felt was nothing more than a brush with Hollywood glamor. I was much more taken by two youths striding through the square, tanned, feral creatures with silver-dollar nipples peeking through their fishnet T-shirts. I had never seen shirts like that. I imagined the two of them behind the closed shutters above the square, stripping each other naked in the musky twilight of their room. I could already smell them there. I was with them completely.
“She’s really hot,” I said to Jim, as I took another sip of my Negroni.
I THINK WE were in Malta when I was assigned my first cabinmate as part of an officer exchange program. Giorgos was an ensign in the Greek Navy, so I was teased in the wardroom before he came on board. “You know how those Greeks are, Armistead. Better not drop the soap.” No such luck, of course. Giorgos turned out to be gentle and soft-spoken and thoroughly straight. When I told him how
much I loved the movie Zorba the Greek, he offered to teach me the sirtaki, so we became a chorus line of two one night on the dock in Valetta, our arms draped across each other’s shoulders. Therein lay delicious freedom, since it was all right, even manly, for men to dance like this. Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates had already made it so. Years later, when both actors were dead and I learned that Bates himself had been queer, I would realize how complete an impersonation Giorgos and I had pulled off.
Malta was so ancient and monochromatic that you could barely distinguish the terra-cotta cityscape from the hills in which it lay. This was East and West, Africa and Europe, converging in a spooky sepia-toned fairy tale that set fire to my imagination. I remember a night when Jim and I took a taxi to the far end of the island where there was an isolated restaurant that had once been the actual castle of a knight. As we rounded a corner on a desolate stretch of road three widows cowled in black were caught like apparitions in the headlights of our taxi. Those cowls were not an unusual sight on Malta. Mourning seemed a permanent state there, just as longing was for me. My theme song was a haunting Gypsy tune whose bittersweet la-la-las seemed to drift from the shadows of every alleyway and door. It was a song of lost love and vanished youth, and knowing all too well that I’d never had a love to lose, I wallowed in it like an aging drunk. The words were in English, but for a while I thought “Those Were the Days” was a Maltese song, not a worldwide hit sung by a young blond Welshwoman.
When Captain Tidd appointed me editor of our Mediterranean cruise book (the Navy’s version of a high school yearbook), I proposed that we call it “Those Were the Days.” He loved the idea, especially that line “We’d fight and never lose,” since it sounded sufficiently bold and military. I had that refrain printed on the flyleaf of the cruise book, omitting the part that comes later when the singer sees her troubled face reflected in a window and wonders: “Was that lonely woman really me?” I had not shown those lyrics to Captain Tidd, since they would have obliterated the manly flavor and revealed far too much about my state of mind. The skipper might have been able to cook up the idea of Lurch and his drag striptease, but baring my solitary heart would have been unacceptable to us both.