Our day proceeded, everything from a mongoloid teenager with an ingrown toenail to a self-proclaimed swami who had fashioned himself a turban of urine-soaked towels. Clarence and I carted them to the infirmary and later returned them to their wards. “Shipping and delivery is all it is,” he said. “That’s all there is to it except when they got shit on their hands and smear up the cart.” The patients moaned, whimpered, and shrieked. They cackled and hooted and drooled in a drug-induced stupor. Clarence took it all in stride, but I had never imagined such a world. A bedsore would eventually heal, but what about the patient’s more substantial problems? A regular hospital, with its cheerful waiting room and baskets of flowers, offered some degree of hope. Here, there were no get-well cards or helium balloons, only a pervasive feeling of doom. Fate or accident had tripped these people up and broken them apart. It seemed to me that something like this might happen to anyone, regardless of their fine homes or decent education. Pitch one too many fits or spend too much time brushing your hair, and that might be the first sign. There could be something hidden away in any of our brains, quietly lurking there. Just waiting.
“Spare me the details, Dr. Freud,” Lisa said, sitting in the front seat of the car as our mother drove us home that afternoon. She had spent her day on the maternity ward, offering patients a selection of ladies’ magazines and paperback novels. “God, I hope I never get that fat. Some of them looked like they’d swallowed a portable TV.” She wore a crisp red-and-white-striped uniform and studied her reflection in the rearview mirror, rehearsing her smile in hopes of meeting a cute intern. Lisa didn’t understand what I was talking about, but my mother did. Every night, rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of her highball glass, my mother knew exactly what I was talking about. Health, be it mental or physical, had never been her family’s strong suit. The Leonard family coat of arms pictured a bottle of scotch and a tumor.
After his shock treatments my grandfather returned home, where he spent the rest of his life coring apples and baking pies. His children gone and his wife hypoglycemic, there was no one around to eat the pies, but that did not deter him. He baked as if the entire U.S. Marine Corps were stationed outside his front door, drumming their forks against tin plates and shouting in unison, “Dessert! Dessert!” Four pies in the oven and he’d be rolling out flag-sized sheets of dough for the subsequent crusts. Twice a year we visited my grandparents’ house, where I recall pies cooling on every available surface: the window sills, the television set, even the dining-room chairs. The man never said a word, but neither did he take another drink. He just baked, dying, finally, of a stress-related heart attack.
I worked at Dix Hill all that summer and then again the following year until, at age sixteen, I took a paying job as a dishwasher at a local cafeteria that had a practice of hiring outpatients. These were both current and former Dix Hill residents, grown men who would occasionally weep in panic at the sight of a burned casserole tray. They’d get behind and take to hiding in the stockroom or, even worse, in the walk-in freezer.
I went off to college and volunteered for class credit at a nearby state hospital. At Dix Hill I had functioned as an orderly without keys. I’d had responsibilities, whereas here I was nothing more than a human cigarette machine. Two evenings a week I would visit the fetid, stagnant ward and make small talk with women who wanted nothing to do with me. I was studying Italian at the time and would attempt to practice my verb conjugation with a paranoid Tuscan named Paola, a patient in her late forties with a perpetual black eye and a pronounced mustache. Some nights Paola could be very charming and helpful, while others she seemed truly possessed, overturning the television set, attacking her fellow patients, and tossing lit cigarettes at the nurses. I might spend a few pleasant hours with someone and return three days later to find she had no memory of it. At Dorothea Dix I went from one ward to the next, while here I spent all my time with the same group of people, week after week, and none of them seemed to be getting any better. LaDonna still sat in front of the television set, boasting of her personal relationship with Lee Majors. Charlotte continued to whisper into a plastic cup and hold it to her stomach in order to communicate with what she identified as her alien fetus; it was maddening. I wanted to slam their heads against the wall and scream, “Stop acting like an idiot and get better, god-damnit!” Then I’d notice the bruises covering their bodies and realize that someone had already tried that approach.
On my last night at the hospital, a fellow volunteer was taken hostage by a wiry, manic patient who held a knife to the woman’s throat and demanded freedom. The police were summoned and gathered in the snow-covered yard to negotiate her release.
“I want a girl,” the man shouted. “A prettier girl than this one. I want the prettiest girl you can find and I want her dressed in a bikini. Then I want you to put us up in a motel in Akron for… I’ll let you know when we’re ready to come out. Then I want a trailer with curtains and a water bed and a truck with four new tires. And a winter coat with a zipper instead of buttons. And I want an outdoor grill, the kind with a hood.”
The police captain agreed to all the demands, signaling to the four officers who were creeping up behind the wishful patient. “And I’m going to need a fish tank. And a blow-dryer for my hair, and then I want a set of matching goblets and some nice mugs for my coffee.”
The officers took him from behind, and even as they dragged him toward the waiting police car, he continued to voice more requests.
I returned to Dix Hill ten years after I’d first volunteered. A friend of mine had been dating a man who had turned spooky on her. They’d been eating in a popular Raleigh seafood restaurant when he’d taken a sudden urge to pelt the neighboring table with a side order of hush puppies. The manager was called, and a fight ensued. It turned out that this fellow had been institutionalized once before, at a state hospital outside Pittsburgh.
A guard led us through a familiar series of locked doors, and the young man emerged. His face was bloated from the drugs, and his tongue protruded from his mouth, thick and lathered as a bar of soap. My friend was hoping he might be cured with bed rest and willpower.
“The restaurant manager had it coming,” she said, taking his hand. “That bastard will get his soon enough; the important thing is that you’re getting better.” She petted his bruised knuckles. “You’re getting better now, Danny. Can you hear me? You’re getting better.”
i like guys
Shortly before I graduated from eighth grade, it was announced that, come fall, our county school system would adopt a policy of racial integration by way of forced busing. My Spanish teacher broke the news in a way she hoped might lead us to a greater understanding of her beauty and generosity.
“I remember the time I was at the state fair, standing in line for a Sno-Kone,” she said, fingering the kiss curls that framed her squat, compact face. “And a little colored girl ran up and tugged at my skirt, asking if she could touch my hair. ‘Just once,’ she said. ‘Just one time for good luck.’
“Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but my hair means a lot to me.” The members of my class nodded to signify that their hair meant a lot to them as well. They inched forward in their seats, eager to know where this story might be going. Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.
I sat marveling at their naiveté. Like all her previous anecdotes, this woman’s story was headed straight up her ass.
“I checked to make sure she didn’t have any candy on her hands, and then I bent down and let this little colored girl touch my hair.” The teacher’s eyes assumed the dewy, far-away look she reserved for such Hallmark moments. “Then this little fudge-colored girl put her hand on my cheek and said, ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I wish I could be white and pretty like you.’” She paused, positioning herself on the edge of the desk as though she were posing for a portrait the federal government might use on a stamp commemorating gallantr
y. “The thing to remember,” she said, “is that more than anything in this world, those colored people wish they were white.”
I wasn’t buying it. This was the same teacher who when announcing her pregnancy said, “I just pray that my first-born is a boy. I’ll have a boy and then maybe later I’ll have a girl, because when you do it the other way round, there’s a good chance the boy will turn out to be funny.”
“‘Funny,’ as in having no arms and legs?” I asked.
“That,” the teacher said, “is far from funny. That is tragic, and you, sir, should have your lips sewn shut for saying such a cruel and ugly thing. When I say ‘funny,’ I mean funny as in…” She relaxed her wrist, allowing her hand to dangle and flop. “I mean ‘funny’ as in that kind of funny.” She minced across the room, but it failed to illustrate her point, as this was more or less her natural walk, a series of gamboling little steps, her back held straight, giving the impression she was balancing something of value atop her empty head. My seventh-period math teacher did a much better version. Snatching a purse off the back of a student’s chair, he would prance about the room, batting his eyes and blowing kisses at the boys seated in the front row. “So fairy nice to meet you,” he’d say.
Fearful of drawing any attention to myself, I hooted and squawked along with the rest of the class, all the while thinking, That’s me he’s talking about. If I was going to make fun of people, I had to expect a little something in return, that seemed only fair. Still, though, it bothered me that they’d found such an easy way to get a laugh. As entertainers, these teachers were nothing, zero. They could barely impersonate themselves. “Look at you!” my second-period gym teacher would shout, his sneakers squealing against the basketball court. “You’re a group of ladies, a pack of tap-dancing queers.”
The other boys shrugged their shoulders or smiled down at their shoes. They reacted as if they had been called Buddhists or vampires; sure, it was an insult, but no one would ever mistake them for the real thing. Had they ever chanted in the privacy of their backyard temple or slept in a coffin, they would have felt the sting of recognition and shared my fear of discovery.
I had never done anything with another guy and literally prayed that I never would. As much as I fantasized about it, I understood that there could be nothing worse than making it official. You’d seen them on television from time to time, the homosexuals, maybe on one of the afternoon talk shows. No one ever came out and called them a queer, but you could just tell by their voices as they flattered the host and proclaimed great respect for their fellow guests. These were the celebrities never asked about their home life, the comedians running scarves beneath their toupees or framing their puffy faces with their open palms in an effort to eliminate the circles beneath their eyes. “The poor man’s face lift,” my mother called it. Regardless of their natty attire, these men appeared sweaty and desperate, willing to play the fool in exchange for the studio applause they seemed to mistake for love and acceptance. I saw something of myself in their mock weary delivery, in the way they crossed their legs and laughed at their own jokes. I pictured their homes: the finicky placement of their throw rugs and sectional sofas, the magazines carefully fanned just so upon the coffee tables with no wives or children to disturb their order. I imagined the pornography hidden in their closets and envisioned them powerless and sobbing as the police led them away in shackles, past the teenage boy who stood bathed in the light of the television news camera and shouted, “That’s him! He’s the one who touched my hair!”
It was my hope to win a contest, cash in the prizes, and use the money to visit a psychiatrist who might cure me of having homosexual thoughts. Electroshock, brain surgery, hypnotism — I was willing to try anything. Under a doctor’s supervision, I would buckle down and really change, I swore I would.
My parents knew a couple whose son had killed a Presbyterian minister while driving drunk. They had friends whose eldest daughter had sprinkled a Bundt cake with Comet, and knew of a child who, high on spray paint, had set fire to the family’s cocker spaniel. Yet, they spoke of no one whose son was a homosexual. The odds struck me as bizarre, but the message was the same: this was clearly the worst thing that could happen to a person. The day-to-day anxiety was bad enough without my instructors taking their feeble little pot-shots. If my math teacher were able to subtract the alcohol from his diet, he’d still be on the football field where he belonged; and my Spanish teacher’s credentials were based on nothing more than a long weekend in Tijuana, as far as I could tell. I quit taking their tests and completing their homework assignments, accepting Fs rather than delivering the grades I thought might promote their reputations as good teachers. It was a strategy that hurt only me, but I thought it cunning. We each had our self-defeating schemes, all the boys I had come to identify as homosexuals. Except for a few transfer students, I had known most of them since the third grade. We’d spent years gathered together in cinder-block offices as one speech therapist after another tried to cure us of our lisps. Had there been a walking specialist, we probably would have met there, too. These were the same boys who carried poorly forged notes to gym class and were the first to raise their hands when the English teacher asked for a volunteer to read aloud from The Yearling or Lord of the Flies. We had long ago identified one another and understood that because of everything we had in common, we could never be friends. To socialize would have drawn too much attention to ourselves. We were members of a secret society founded on self-loathing. When a teacher or classmate made fun of a real homosexual, I made certain my laugh was louder than anyone else’s. When a club member’s clothing was thrown into the locker-room toilet, I was always the first to cheer. When it was my clothing, I watched as the faces of my fellows broke into recognizable expressions of relief. Faggots, I thought. This should have been you.
Several of my teachers, when discussing the upcoming school integration, would scratch at the damp stains beneath their arms, pulling back their lips to reveal every bit of tooth and gum. They made monkey noises, a manic succession of ohhs and ahhs meant to suggest that soon our school would be no different than a jungle. Had a genuine ape been seated in the room, I guessed he might have identified their calls as a cry of panic. Anything that caused them suffering brought me joy, but I doubted they would talk this way come fall. From everything I’d seen on television, the Negros would never stand for such foolishness. As a people, they seemed to stick together. They knew how to fight, and I hoped that once they arrived, the battle might come down to the gladiators, leaving the rest of us alone.
At the end of the school year, my sister Lisa and I were excused from our volunteer jobs and sent to Greece to attend a month-long summer camp advertised as “the Crown Jewel of the Ionian Sea.” The camp was reserved exclusively for Greek Americans and featured instruction in such topics as folk singing and something called “religious prayer and flag.” I despised the idea of summer camp but longed to boast that I had been to Europe. “It changes people!” our neighbor had said. Following a visit to Saint-Tropez, she had marked her garden with a series of tissue-sized international flags. A once discreet and modest woman, she now paraded about her yard wearing nothing but clogs and a flame-stitched bikini. “Europe is the best thing that can happen to a person, especially if you like wine!”
I saw Europe as an opportunity to re-invent myself. I might still look and speak the same way, but having walked those cobblestoned streets, I would be identified as Continental. “He has a passport,” my classmates would whisper. “Quick, let’s run before he judges us!”
I told myself that I would find a girlfriend in Greece. She would be a French tourist wandering the beach with a loaf of bread beneath her arm. Lisette would prove that I wasn’t a homosexual, but a man with refined tastes. I saw us holding hands against the silhouette of the Acropolis, the girl begging me to take her accordion as a memento of our love. “Silly you,” I would say, brushing the tears from her eyes, “just give me the beret, that will be enough to
hold you in my heart until the end of time.”
In case no one believed me, I would have my sister as a witness. Lisa and I weren’t getting along very well, but I hoped that the warm Mediterranean waters might melt the icicle she seemed to have mistaken for a rectal thermometer. Faced with a country of strangers, she would have no choice but to appreciate my company.
Our father accompanied us to New York, where we met our fellow campers for the charter flight to Athens. There were hundreds of them, each one confident and celebratory. They tossed their complimentary Aegean Airlines tote bags across the room, shouting and jostling one another. This would be the way I’d act once we’d finally returned from camp, but not one moment before. Were it an all-girl’s camp, I would have been able to work up some enthusiasm. Had they sent me alone to pry leeches off the backs of blood-thirsty Pygmies, I might have gone bravely — but spending a month in a dormitory full of boys, that was asking too much. I’d tried to put it out of my mind, but faced with their boisterous presence, I found myself growing progressively more hysterical. My nervous tics shifted into their highest gear, and a small crowd gathered to watch what they believed to be an exotic folk dance. If my sister was anxious about our trip, she certainly didn’t show it. Prying my fingers off her wrist, she crossed the room and introduced herself to a girl who stood picking salvageable butts out of the standing ash-tray. This was a tough-looking Queens native named Stefani Heartattackus or Testicockules. I recall only that her last name had granted her a lifelong supply of resentment. Stefani wore mirrored aviator sunglasses and carried an over-sized comb in the back pocket of her hiphugger jeans. Of all the girls in the room, she seemed the least likely candidate for my sister’s friendship. They sat beside each other on the plane, and by the time we disembarked in Athens, Lisa was speaking in a very bad Queens accent. During the long flight, while I sat cowering beside a boy named Seamen, my sister had undergone a complete physical and cultural transformation. Her shoulder-length hair was now parted on the side, covering the left half of her face as if to conceal a nasty scar. She cursed and spat, scowling out the window of the chartered bus as if she’d come to Greece with the sole intention of kicking its dusty ass. “What a shithole,” she yelled. “Jeez, if I’d knowed it was gonna be dis hot, I woulda stayed home wit my headdin da oven, right, girls!”