In the darkness of my own room, lying beside Marilyn, now and again their sources began to return. They’d come from a book by the infamous Dr. Edmund Burgler I’d read as a teenager that had explained how homosexuals were psychically retarded and that told how homosexuals were all alcoholics who committed suicide. They had come from the section on “Inversion” by Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis, which I’d also read—the scandalous paragraphs in Latin translated in faint pencil along the margins by the diligent former owner of the secondhand volume. Some of it had come from Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and some from Andre Tellier’s The Twilight Men. Some had come from the pathos of Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction story “The World Well Lost” and his western story “Scars.” And some had come from Jean Cocteau’s The White Paper and some came from Andre Gide’s The Immoralist. And some had come from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.
When you talk about something openly for the first time—and that, certainly, was the first time I’d talked to a public group about being gay—for better or worse, you use the public language you’ve been given. It’s only later, alone in the night, that maybe, if you’re a writer, you ask yourself how closely that language reflects your experience. And that night I realized that language had done nothing but betray me.
For all their “faggot” jokes, the Hanks of this world just weren’t interested in my abjection and my apologies, one way or the other. They’d been a waste of time. They only wounded my soul—and misinformed anyone who actually bothered to listen.
I thought about Herman—and what he had (and had not) been able to say.
I thought back to my old, dear, concerned heterosexual roommate, Bob Aarenberg, when we’d lived together on 113th Street, there in our room full of ham radio equipment. In many ways, right around my father’s death he had been my closest male friend. But after that first experience with the Israeli, though I’d talked about it endlessly to Judy, to Gail, and to Marilyn, I knew by instinct I should not mention it to him. Some months later, however, Judy (she and Bob were desultorily dating) told him about it. One evening when I came in, he looked up from his microphone, switched off his set, and stood up, somewhat uncomfortably, with his blond hair awry, in his bare feet on the cluttered rug, in his jeans, with his overlong nails and grubby fingers pulling at his T-shirt. “I’ve got something very important to say to you, Chip,” he began. “You don’t have to say anything back. Judy told me that you … did something. Down on Forty-second Street. You know what I’m talking about. We don’t have to say exactly what it was—no, don’t say anything now. But I don’t want you to do anything like that ever again! That’s very important! You have to promise me—no, we’re not going to talk about it. But you have to promise that—see? I don’t want you to try to explain it. I don’t want you to say anything about it at all—except that you promise me you’ll never do it again. And now I’ve accepted your promise—” All I’d done was kind of raise an eyebrow—“and now it’s over. We’ll never mention it anymore. It’s all been taken care of. I won’t—I promise you. And you won’t. Because you’ve promised me. That’s all there is to it.” Nodding his head, he’d turned back to sit at his radio.
And I was left to get a soda from the icebox, sit for a while and read, and finally leave the little apartment—go off down the hall, and drop in on the twenty-four-year-old southerner who rented a room there, and with whom, unbeknownst to Bob, I’d been having a pleasant and casual affair for more than three weeks and tell him how superior I felt to Bob; and how silly and self-righteous Bob had been—but we better be careful, the two of us. And I did not speak.
At least to Bob.
Were Bob’s and Peter’s and Lorenzo’s—and my—silences finally, on some historical level, one? Had I, even in my discomfort with them, taken them in and made them my own?
That night, when I came home from the hospital, as I said, I thought about Baldwin and Vidal and Gide and Cocteau and Tellier. They, at least, had talked about it. However full of death and darkness their accounts had been, they’d at least essayed a certain personal honesty. And the thing about honesty is that all of ours is different. That day in group, I’d talked. But the talk had been the talk of a homosexual corresponding to Bob’s so well-intentioned, and utterly misplaced, exhortation. Speaking the language I had, I now knew, was tantamount to silence. I just had to find my own voice. (Though it is given, not found. And it has to do with.…)
It’s rare we get a chance to make a second try as quickly as I did that winter.
Next day at the hospital it happened that I was interviewed by a bunch of medical students and interns interested in going into psychiatry. While the white-smocked students listened and took notes, the chief psychiatrist, an iron-haired, balding man in his middle fifties, asked me questions.
And it was a very different encounter from the one I’d had in my group.
I explained to them that I was a writer. I was black, I was homosexual, I was married, I was twenty-two, and I had published—as of a week ago—four SF novels. But whatever problems I had, they didn’t seem to lie in the area of sexual functioning. While I was talking, I felt pretty self-assured, and probably sounded it—I remember wondering, vaguely, if that made me sound to them even more disturbed—but since it was the truth, it was their problem, not mine. And I talked of course about what I’d come to feel, by then, some of the actual problems were: problems with change, problems with structured vs. unstructured situations, problems establishing gay relations and my fear that they would jeopardize my marriage, and problems from the anxieties of social responsibilities in a situation where doing pretty much what I wanted—writing—was what was actually earning me a living; and the problems of integrating this into a life situation with someone else—Marilyn—who wanted some very similar, but also some very different, things.
The questioning psychiatrist’s tongue kept slipping so that he would accidentally call me “Dr. Delany …” The students would laugh, and, embarrassed, he would correct himself and call me “Mr.” awhile—till his tongue slipped again. And again they’d laugh.
Later on, in my therapy group, I even explained what I felt had happened with my “confession”—where I’d needlessly and inaccurately presented myself so much as a victim, in order not to offend them and to assuage their (i.e., Hank’s) imagined anger. (I’ve often wondered if heterophobia isn’t at least as much a gay problem as homophobia.) Straight, white Hank wasn’t much more interested in that than he’d been in the original confession!
A few days later the suicide of another patient (she was not in our group; still, some of us had known her: it was the woman Hank had tried to defend from the doctors who’d been trying to force medication on her) shifted us all into another mode. Deidre had been eighteen; she was pregnant by another patient and suffered from grueling headaches. She had not been able to get the doctors to authorize a therapeutic abortion for her; she was too unstable, they claimed, for such a psychologically difficult operation—though she wanted an abortion desperately. Refused one once again, she had hanged herself in the third-floor bathroom with a stripped-up towel from a shower curtain pole.
Her death broke up a number of people in our group, especially Cecile, Hank, and Beverly.
45. “Well,” Dr. G. said, “you’ve been here almost three weeks. We’ve decided to let you go home three days from now, on Friday.”
I grinned. “Thanks.”
I was excited. It was not just the termination of the hospital stay. There’d been talk of my returning to college. It seemed a good sign to me and everyone else. Marilyn already had—even though I’d forgotten to pay an electric bill, once, so that on the day before her chemistry final the lights had been turned out in our apartment.
She’d still got her A—and, six weeks later, in a gray cardboard cylinder delivered by the mailman, her degree.
Over the first two weeks at Mount Sinai, my immediate symptom—the subway fixation—had faded before the conjunc
tion of medication and simply being in a different, less fraught environment. Taking the subway to and from the hospital each day, now I only felt it as a vague and (less and less) troubling memory.
I left Dr. G. and stood around in the foyer, listening to people talking, over in the therapy room, for about two or three minutes. …
On an impulse, I walked inside.
There wasn’t anyone there.
I frowned. I went out. I went off and did some occupational therapy. I went up to the gymnasium, stopped in the john, went into the stall to read a chapter of a book I’d brought with me—and looked up three minutes later; some guy had gone into the stall next to mine and was, I realized from the panting coming through the partition and the jumping about of his sneakers on the floor I could see below, masturbating. When the noise and the foot movement increased, suddenly I thought it sounded more as if he were not masturbating after all, but having some kind of convulsion! I got up, stood on the commode, and glanced over. It was a Puerto Rican kid, about sixteen, whom I’d seen in one of the closed wards. No, he was masturbating. But as he fisted his genitals, his body spasmed and twitched. Upturned now with eyes clamped closed, his face snarled in a hideous expression. His hair flung forward as, with a grunt, his face swung down. As I watched, his brown shins tore the gray rope his briefs had become around his legs.
In the baths, at the trucks, I’d seen men—and boys—masturbate, many of them very excited. But even in the fantasized excesses of gay pornography, I’d never encountered this.
There was nothing seductive in his frenzy. Or pornographic. Oblivious to being watched, he grunted and shook and gasped and shivered—not like any notion I had of someone pursuing sexual relief, but rather the way someone might perform a desperate ritual to ward off otherwise unavertable disaster.
It was as scary, in its way, as the exodus from the trucks or the dormitory-wide orgy at the baths. (When we come upon it in a place, context, or simply in a mode we don’t expect, the sexual always frightens.) I sat again in the stall and listened till he was finished. Yes, I was sexually excited from it. But I was too frightened to intrude my excitement on his.
He finished—and, with a growl of the toilet-paper holder, a creak of the stall door’s hinge, left as if he were late for another activity.
I closed my book, went out through the gym, passed the volleyball game, and took the elevator down to the Day/Night Center.
In the vestibule, I could hear Hank, Beverly, and some others talking in our therapy room when I passed outside. Again I stepped in, to see what they were doing and join the conversation.
Again, the room was empty—except for Cecile, who stood looking out the window.
She turned, smiled, and said, “Oh, hello, Chip.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought I heard people in here.” Then I said, “You weren’t talking to yourself, were you?”
She laughed. “No. Not just now, anyway.”
“Okay.” I went out again.
I told Dr. G. the next day—about the kid in the john, my fear, and the voices. And an hour later, he called me to speak with him. “We’ve decided to keep you here another two weeks.”
“Huh?” I said. “Why?”
“Well,” he said, “if you’re hearing voices, it may be your way of telling us you’re not quite ready to leave. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean that. But it certainly won’t hurt.”
It came as a surprise. But the fact is, I felt more relief at this decision than not.
Two days later I could ignore the voices.
Three days later they’d gone away.
Two weeks later I was discharged.
45.1. Although the pressure of writing was only one cause of the problem, still, in three years I had written and sold five SF novels—not to mention produced most of the thousand pages of Voyage, Orestes! That pressure was certainly a large factor.
Science fiction has always been attractive to young writers. It offers a possibility of writing for a living rather more quickly than certain other practices of writing, literary or paraliterary. But to the extent that young writers take their work seriously, it opens them to great internal strife for very meager rewards. And it’s arguable that the nil-reward situation that greets most young literary writers is finally healthier, because it does not hold out the initial illusion of economic stability, which becomes hopelessly muddled with the thrill of seeing your work in print—in embarrassingly ugly packages!
45.2. Today The Fall of the Towers’ three volumes strike me as very naked. They show—not necessarily in the best light, either—all the preoccupations to be expected of a young man whose family two years before had merited a paragraph in a popular nonfiction bestseller, High Society in the United States (in a chapter on “Negro High Society”), who’d then gone to live in a Lower East Side tenement where rats leapt on the sink when you went to brush your teeth in the morning and wild dog packs ran on the stairs. To say that the homicides, suicides, and madmen who dominate the final volume reflect the pressures that were building within me is probably too dramatic. Nevertheless, they are there to be read, however one might. The relationship between Jon and his sister, Clea, is very much the one I would have like to have had with my own sister, Peggy—and which I did not begin to develop until some years later, when she came to my rescue during a bout of illness while I was languishing in a seedy residence hotel. (The spastic duodenum had acted up again. …) The rapprochement between Jon and his father (that I meant to be the emotional climax of all three books, but it’s in the wrong place …) is very much the one my own father’s death, four years before, had prevented me from having. I wept when I wrote the scene—aware as I wrote that, as I cried, tears were no assurance it would be any more than melodrama.
46. But now I had an idea for a new SF novel. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d organize it. I’d been reading various books by the semanticist Mario Pei, which, however popularized, were full of fascinating facts about various languages. My book was going to be about a young woman poet—a topic I thought I ought to know something about by now. Its theme was to be language.
46.1. A late night phone call from Chuck reaches me in Amherst: “There’s no mention of the draft in your book, Chip! I don’t know about you, but for most young men back in those years, that was an incredibly important part of our late teens and early twenties. I was just thinking about what I’d read, and suddenly I realized it wasn’t there.” Chuck himself had gone on to spend over a decade in the Air Force. …
When my family first moved into Morningside Gardens, over the summer after my first year at Science, one kid I knew also moving into the new cooperative with us was a guy who’d gone to Woodland with me, David Miller. Round-faced and sharply intelligent, he lived at the other end of the fourth-floor hall from us with his mother, an astute, soft-spoken woman, who walked with a slight limp. Half a dozen or so years later, David was among the first publicly to burn his draft card, which kept his picture in the papers—first ubiquitously, then with fading frequency—for a decade.
My own draft call came just weeks after I was released from Mount Sinai. Dr. G., whom I still saw for follow-up therapy, wrote me a letter, which I took to my medical examination. It was held in a chain of institutional green offices, with dozens of other young men—most, at the particular board I’d reported to, black and Hispanic. I moved from desk to examination room to desk again, finally to be dismissed as 4-F on a combination of mental grounds and homosexuality.
“You know you can’t change your mind about this,” said the aging medical man in glasses and white smock, leaning toward me over the desk corner to frown as intimidatingly as possible.
Intimidated, I said softly, “Yes, I understand.”
But as I walked down through Union Square, I was pleased: it meant my writing could continue. Also, since I’d been out of the hospital, I’d started thinking about returning to school—a reasonable idea if I didn’t have to go into the army. And, however ethically
shaky this solution, the Vietnam War was one I simply could not have fought in. This had been at least a way of solving the problem.
Twenty-five years later, on the phone Chuck and I discussed those days of the compulsory draft, working together to create a single history for our very different youths. “You must remember all those stories guys used to tell each other, about how to get out—staying up three days before you go in, or drinking ten cups of strong coffee right before your exam …?” I did.
“If it’s not there, it’s really as though the book is about another time entirely.” Only I said that, not Chuck. He agreed. Yet it had not been there—till now. But it was the tension between its narrative absence and Chuck’s exhortation that produced the account. That tension was the field within which our seemingly simple consensus—“I did,” “He agreed”—signified, produced its signs above, recomplicated [into] the very text it emends.
47. Sometime in December, I spent a morning up at the City College registration offices. In the sprawling, noisy room (because of construction elsewhere they’d moved to some huge and temporary, white-walled space), I showed the balding, bespectacled counselor my printed books. A friend of my mother’s, who worked with her in the Public Library, had told me to seek out this particular counselor. I’d phoned him. He knew my name, told me to come on up, was dutifully impressed by what I’d written, sympathetic about my stay at Mount Sinai, and said he’d help me on my readmission. We filled out forms. Registration material would come to me at Sixth Street. Feeling I’d accomplished something, I walked down the hill behind St. Nicholas Park and through the General Grant Houses, stopped into the George Bruce Library, with its yellow walls, wooden paneling, and iron-neweled banisters—the single preproject building (three floors) standing among the twenty-one-story pink brick slabs outside—and said hello to my mother, who was working behind the checkout desk. She was very pleased when I told her I’d started the registration procedure. “This isn’t going to hurt your writing, is it …?” she asked me, anyway.