mondegreen2

When I am seventeen I am looking down into the eyes of a remarkable person; not the one I wanted, not the one I noticed. Rather someone who presented himself and made himself present and made himself, by the end, irreplaceable. He smells like a wrong chance.

He has a girlfriend back home in New York, in Arcadia, in a Bob Mould song that has everything to do with art and nothing to do with the truth and when I tell him that means Paradise he just scoffs, a blown-out breath as if I've hurt him.

I play on him like a harp, putting all my good work to work. All the ways a man can bend, if you pretend that you don't love him; all the ways you can force the question and then, in answering the question, leave the conclusion for another day.

I like it when he looks up at me. Always on his roommate's bed, for two reasons I think. One, because what we're doing isn't real. It's a romance, not a relationship. We are in love, but not lovers. And two, because I wanted his roommate first. Perhaps I still do.

Up at me and saying, "Flesh." Just that single word. I don't remember how we came upon it or how I encouraged its use, but somehow the language of us has become that way, that nudging way, that constant telling back and forth of what we are, and how we are, together. Only flesh.

Somewhere along the way my grandfather got the idea that their dorm room was mine, and so I get little missives and conversation from the roommate, about my grandfather calling them. Not at odd hours, but at specific ones, specific to our family. They say he sounds like Foghorn Leghorn; like a Colonel bereft of a company.

He used to pack me onto his shoulders, when I was little. Take me by my hands, and I would walk up his body, my grandfather. Tight, but soft. And he'd say, when I was aloft one bicep or the other, "Get up there and crow." Get up 'ere 'n crow, he'd say. And I would laugh.

I look down into his eyes, a strange color, not a usual color, a color like any other, and say, "Say it." And he says it, as many times as I ask. "Flesh." His tongue curls around it. And I laugh. And down inside myself I shiver. I can feel him, stiff against my thigh, but I laugh, and kiss him again.

When I am eighteen his girlfriend has come along, on the same program in our school -- the only outlet for a certain kind of person' the only scholarship of its kind, for people like us -- and I retreat. I don't remember when I'm twenty-five what the roommate's name was -- Andreas? Something German, something oppressively German -- but I do remember that, as we saw Bob spreading further, spreading wider and farther out, we both turned our eyes back toward him. Me and Bob's girlfriend, loving Andreas. Loving anybody but the man we'd loved.

We go for a walk, when I am eighteen. Me, and Bob, and Andreas, and Bob's girlfriend. Emily? It's always Emily. Bob cuts his finger on something, anything, and before thinking about it, I stuff his bleeding finger into my mouth. Emily tells me later that she was jealous, that night. Of his finger, in my mouth. Just the movement of it. She wants this to be an issue; she wants this to be part of the story of Emily and Bob, to be the new story in which Andreas is the center, but I don't feel that way. I love Andreas, simply as ever, as any other man. I wasn't trying anything.

When I am eighteen it has become a war, a war with Bob, for Andreas. He matters no more now than he did then, but it is something to fight about. So we fight. The answer, of course, is that I am a secret that Bob can't look at. Emily's fine; a bit of dishrag but not a bad sort. This is all Bob. We fight, sometimes, in the middle of the night: He begs me to believe that he hasn't changed, left me behind, left us all, but I don't believe. I cannot, constitutionally believe, but it's also true.

"If you had it to do again," I say, in these hot sad nights, in giving nothing, in playing out my hurt upon his skin, refusing him the very simple thing he is asking for, "If you had it to do again."

He brings me a story. A poem, that is a story also. This is how we show love, when I am eighteen.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

"Walcott," I say. "We read that last year."

What I mean to say is, "I want to put you at the center of my life. But you, or I, or both, will die."

It is decided a week in advance that our holidays will begin with Thanksgiving, at our house, hosted by Bertie. I am intrigued; Xaime is already exhausted by his presence. I can tell that Bertie's good for him, the way he punctures his moods and his artsy self-centeredness at every opportunity. It makes me feel like a Musketeer, or a member of a family. 

The guest list will include Rocky and Emily -- whose relationship is apparently on shaky ground, I hear from Bertie but not Rocky -- we three, and some assorted bohemians of Bertie's acquaintance. This footnote on the proceedings gives me hives, but in the order of things the guest list falls directly under Bertie's outfit, which he produces from his neverending bottomless carpetbag seemingly wrinkle-free: A peach silk shirt, grey three-piece with jodhpurs, and a matching twill baseball cap. 

"You look like a cricket player delivering newspapers," Xaime says when he models it for us. "You look like a fourth-grader." 

I think he looks fabulous. With a perfectly tailored vest, clinging, and the insouciant curl in his eye... But he always looks fabulous: Bertie makes clothes mean something. A story about your body, a story about your personality. I never even thought to consider what my body or my clothes have to say about me. I think they are an eloquent shrug at best. That's what I'm going for, I've decided. 

He doesn't fawn or primp, and he never actually looks as ridiculous as Xaime says he does, but he's willing to stare you down and tell you exactly why things are the way they are. In clothes, and in everything else. Bertie has his eyes on the prize and the bottom line simultaneously. 

Bertie says that the key to life is taking serious things lightly and trivial things very seriously. It makes sense, but the amount of sense it makes depends entirely on what he's wearing when he says it, which I guess proves the point. 

As the day draws closer, a brittleness sets in. There's something, a staging, a performance coming down and I have no idea what it is, but that's the tension in the air: Bertie's got something to prove. It shows in his gleaming grin and his clipped cadence, it shows in the way he answers questions in syllables rather than florid paragraphs: Some things are not a joke. Maybe this is one of those trivial things, but I think the answer lies elsewhere. Maybe there's a history, with these other invited guests, or maybe it's some other drama I don't know about, but whatever it is, I don't like it. He begins to wear on us; rather than applying the perfect pushpin to inflated ego or heavy drooping stress, he uses his wit like claws, slashing at anything moving. 

On the day of, in the early morning hours, none of us are at our best. But after a meltdown about appetizers and dietary constraints, directed at Xaime although neither of us actually understand the problem, I realize I'm going to have to deal.

"Bertie, you're being a bitch." Xaime can't say it, but I know it's keeping him down. 

"That's sexist. And homophobic. And all sorts of other things." 

"I'm not calling you a bitch because you're gay, or a lady, I'm calling you a bitch because you are being a little bitch. And you know it." 

"Entertaining is the only true division between ourselves and the beasts of the field, Jimmy." 

"That makes no sense whatsoever." 

"...I know. I'm freaking out." 

I know. He must be, he never calls me Jimmy anymore. Always Buddy, or Bunny, or Jimbo. Or Jim. I like Jim best; it makes me feel like a bosun, or a chimneysweep if the former doesn't mean what I think it means. It makes me feel like Huckleberry. 

"But it's just us, and... Who are these friends of yours, Bertie?" 

"They are a happy couple, a devoted couple, a nightmare of a couple." 

"He's your Rocky." 

"My Rocky. Yeah. Yes, you have said it. Now you've said it." 

Bertie leans back and tips a glass of something brown straight down his gullet. 

"Bertie, you'll be a mess. You haven't even finished your projects yet. Doesn't that scare you?" 

"Nothing scares me. Look after your own. Bullwinkle's outfit is said to be incandescent." 

Bullwinkle is what he calls Emily when he's feeling nasty, or more usually when he's trying to define our alliance. By taking up arms against his friend, even in secret, he's saying we're on a team against not only Rocky and Emily, but against Xaime himself. I wish I could say that I find it less than appealing, or that it doesn't do the trick every time, but I am weak and he is persistent. He knows the ugliest buttons to push, and I flip over every time. 

"Don't say Bullwinkle." 

"Bollweevil. Dragon Lady of the Southern Weirs. I'm so tired already, Jimbo. I can't think." 

"Then don't think. Bend yourself to service instead. Be a little flower. Be a saint. Just for a few." 

He pulls me down, into his lap, with both hands. 

"I am afraid, Jimmy. I am going to do some dreadful things."

I rest my head in the crook of his neck, where I can smell him best, and our hands rest easy on the sunken, faded velvet couch. His breath is abominable, but the rest of him is perfect as ever. I stare at his collarbone and think about the freckle on his knee, and the knickerbockers I'll have to fit around them while he slowly slips away from us.

I can tell the "things" are truly dreadful, by the quirk in his lip and the glint in his eye. He's anything but exhausted. I wish I could say something, or at least feel personally in my personal space that tonight didn't just get awesome, but I can't. It's just me, and him, on a couch; perhaps I am crushing him but he hums and I can hear his heart beating against mine, slowing slowly, as he bends himself into that necessary shape. The Bertie he must be, at least for a few. 

And then, with a sudden indrawn breath through the nose, a low-scooping prana breath of fire, he bends himself to our destruction.

"Every glass in the house, guys? Really?"

We stir on a couch in the sitting room, clambering out from beneath each other; I'm wearing his tuxedo tie around my neck, still perfectly tied, and Bertie's got a chenille throw around his head like some kind of turban. We never do figure that one out. Xaime's standing over us in the wreckage, hands on hips, feet wedged between couch cushions that must've been integral to a fort or something but now look like old Scottish ruins.

"This is why we can't have a dog, Jimmy."

"Oh, El Niño, tell us about how we can't have nice things!" Bertie snorts, rolling on the couch in a private paroxysm. I am horrified. "You grew up poor just like us, don't pull the bourgeois card."

Xaime's arms go every which way, and land back on his hips; Bertie and I throw back our heads and laugh, and pull him onto the couch between us, tickling him and kissing his cheeks, until his imperfect frustration gives way to the joy underneath.

Life gives way to a cascading satisfaction, for weeks. Rocky and Emily, who've faded away recently, start showing up with cheap wine and board games every other night. Xaime calls off the rest of the tour for a month; Bertie promises to stay for only two this time, just until he's finished his latest masterpiece. He's doing film scores now, and says he absolutely must be finished by the New Year. I make him promise to stay at least that long, and though he tries to tempt us into doing the holidays in New York, I can't imagine being happier anywhere else than I am at home.



I've woken from a sound nap to hoots and jackal laughter downstairs; Rocky and Bertie have a ratty cardboard box between them on the coffee table. They don't hear me, poring over my strange memories.

"Oh, oh! Here's a good one," snorts Bertie. "You, In My Eyes, by somebody named Robbie..."

I step backwards on the stair, afraid to touch their moment like a glycerin bubble. I don't want them to see my history, especially not that. I don't want them to see me see them.

"I can barely read this. The kid -- he's got to be fifteen -- he's got handwriting like a serial killer..." Rocky clears his throat, and Bertie as usual rushes past the warning. "You, In My Eyes, Are A Waterfall..." There's the sound of a struggle, and I hear the page rip in half. Bertie shrieks.

"Rocky, what the fuck."

"This is... I wrote this, for a friend. Something like this. See these symbols here, along the bottom? That was my signature. I was a stoner and I thought... I don't know. This is very much."

I rush them, intent now on stopping them in their tracks.

"Where did you get that? Where did you find those?"

"It's just a box of old stuff," Bertie says, and I lunge.

"My old stuff. You're hardly pristine. Have some respect."

"Jimmy, it's just nothing. It's just, like, having fun."

I point at Rocky, whose hands are shaking with the pieces of his poem in them. "Is he having fun? Look at my face, Bertie. Is this face having fun?"

"This would seem to be a situation that doesn't require me," he says unsteadily, and I can tell he's wounded.

"It really didn't require either of you. That box is all I have, from before. That's my life."

"Well, you certainly haven't taken care of it." he says, pointing at the withered pages, the scored and broken edges.

"But it is mine."

"Gosh. Honestly, Jimmy, I'm sorry. I didn't think you'd be..."

Rocky nods. "It wasn't like that."

"You're being like Harriet the Spy right now, Jim. You're scaring us."

"I've never asked you anything about Xaime, Bertie. Thing one. 'This is now, that's us.' You said that. You said we could be whatever we want."

"Then why's this box so important? I'm an open book. Ask me anything."

"I don't care! That's the point!"

Rocky clears his throat again, and I turn on him like a wolf. "What."

"You seem really, um, ashamed. Of this stuff. Jim."

"I'm not ashamed, it's just hard to... I didn't like that boy very much."

"Somebody did," Bertie huffs.

"Yeah and he's dead."

Oh, I'll play that motherfucking card. You bet.

"Oookay, Jim. I apologize. Look, I'm putting everything back. We'll box it up and pretend it never happened, okay? We can put it at the very top of the very tallest closet in the house and never mention it again. I'm sorry."

"No, it's not that. It's not like you can just... No, because it's like that cat."

Bertie's eyes cross as he cocks his head at me.

"That cat! It's alive, it's dead, there's a gun and a toxic thing and a whole... The cat!"

I sound: Crazy.

"It's you, in the box," Rocky says, finally understanding. He nods firmly, and begins to pack everything back up as quick as he can. Bertie stares, amazed, as Rocky smoothes out the crumpled top and pats it tenderly, like a sleeping pet, and rises to put his arms around me, right there in the middle of the great room, and rock me back and forth until I can look at them again.

"I thought you'd be home tomorrow," Bertie says.

"I thought you'd be... British," I stammer, as though it's some vindicating accusation, and he throws back his head and laughs. It sounds like a crow picking his way across the ice.

"Rocky," he says, dripping weariness and tact, as though that's an explanation. And perhaps it is; there's something vaguely, threateningly European about his manner. He's still standing at readiness like I'm about to attack, and I wonder if I should.

"Well. Welcome. Or I guess welcome home," I say darkly, and he grins appreciatively.

"Where's the man of the house?" Bertie asks, and fills my glass. I can't tell him that I don't know, so I shrug in a manner I hope is both brusque and nonchalant, taking it from him greedily. We clink and drink, and I've downed mine before I see him savoring it, holding it in his mouth. I feel young and brutish and dumb. I like it.

"I like your hair." There's a picture of him over the mantle that I never thought to ask about: His hair in that one is long, hanging in loose curls from a sloppy strap at his neck.

"I had no idea it would be so curly when I cut it. I mean," he says with the gesture of a bow, "Thank you." He looks me up and down, churlish and remote. "I have to say I'm surprised. You're not what I pictured."

"You're exactly how I've pictured you," I say, and my voice is hollow enough that I wonder if he'll know how far back that goes, but he just laughs again, and nods.

"He's usually so predictable."

"I haven't seen any... I don't know what his usual type is." But I do: He's standing in front of me, all grown up.

"Well, I'm sure you're delightful."

"How long are you staying?"

He shakes his head warningly at this breakdown in tact. "Until the wind changes, Jimmy."

"It's a busy season. The new paperback is coming out, you know."

He does.

I put my glass down, unsure of where to go from here, and he surprises me, taking my hands in his as though we're going to squaredance.

"Let's smoke, outside, before he catches us. I won't tell if you won't." I shake my head, unsure, but he clucks at me and smiles without winking, and before I know it he's drawn me out, onto the back patio, and he's lighting my cigarette.

"The problem with El Niño is that he doesn't really believe we exist. We're just fodder. Cardboard figures for us to move around."

That's what you are, I think savagely. Old and tired as you are. "You didn't always think that, did you?"

He takes a long draw on his cigarette and shakes his head, ruminating. "No, I don't guess I did. I'm not sure I really think it now."

"What do you do, Bertie?"

"I play my music and I take pictures. I went to Burning Man, it was a drag. I've been in Venice. It smells like a wet dog."

"How long were you there?"

"Long enough to love it. Do you travel?"

Just for readings and conventions. Before that, nothing. I know nothing about the world, not really. "I don't really like to travel," I say instead. "I like comfort. I like home." This last with a gesture around the place, up toward the house on a rolling curve around to the yard, the pool.

"It's a lovely old place, isn't it? Horrifying when we bought it, but he does love a fixer-upper."

I think about dashing the champagne in his face, but there's something in it that I can't stop looking at. The cleft in his chin is less pronounced than mine or Xaime's, but he puts it to better use. He hefts the bottle again, finishing it off.

"I wasn't planning on looking for him, to say goodnight. Strange that he's disappeared, though."

"We can all have breakfast, in the morning," I say, and look up toward the bedroom.

"You're not really tired, are you? I was sort of looking forward to breaking open one of his bottles of billion-year-old tequila."

"He'll kill us."

"I assure you that he won't," says Bertie. For the first time I feel like I'm not being interviewed by a future stepmother, and simultaneously realize that this is A) A pretty fucked-up way to feel about him and B) Exactly what he intended. But his tone now is, while still complicit, not unctuous. For a moment I feel like we're at play in a castle, all alone, afraid to speak for echoes.

"Fine," I say. "But you're taking the heat."

Bertie sets them up in a straight line, using every shot glass in the kitchen. I stand at one end, staring down them like an Electric Company video about industrial production. The line goes on forever. At the end of the line he's standing there happily, he's blurry but I can still see him; the tuxedo tie over his bare chest like black diamonds, and the open shirt.

"We'll work our way toward each other. Down, or up considering on where you're standing. Five points for every shot, ten if you down it, and the first man to waver has to shoot from the bottle."

"Do we have to have points?"

"You have to have some way to measure your success, Jamie."

"Jim. Jimmy. It's Jimmy."

"Have it your way."

"Maybe I will, Bertie." I feel brave, and my breath quickens. I hear the onrushing clash of calamity in my ears but I still can't see what direction it's coming in.

With every shot, he looks less like a cartoon fox villain threatening peaceful forest creatures, and more like I imagine the villains from James Bond movies would be, if I'd ever seen one. Bertie sheds the tuxedo jacket and pulls his shirttails out, flipping back the cuffs. It makes me feel like a supermodel, just to be here in this stainless-steel kitchen, drinking shots without flipping the cups like my young collegiate neighbors in the studio flat taught me to do. Every shot comes with some bogus quotation.

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present," he says in some weird Hamptons accent, and we drink.

"History puts a saint in every dream," he says, and we drink.

"Never had a Cherry Valance of my own," he says, winding down. Getting slower. But I don't want him to fade, so I don't call for the extra drink. 

"What does that even mean?" I ask, and he grabs me by the hands, pulling me out of the kitchen and away from the limes and the salt and the infinite line of infinite glass, toward the CD player, toward new things and new music I've been missing.

"Don't. Even."

It's the hour of the wolf. All Xaime's done is take my hand in his, climbing quietly into the bed beside me, wondering if I'm even awake. I haven't slept. I have stared at the Chicago skyline through the hotel window, boiling my anger down to something small and manageable.

"What is your deal?" he chuckles; he's tipsy, jolly, but not drunk. Indestructible. It is exasperating.

"My deal? I have no deal. I just wish I had some warning, next time. Maybe next time a little bit of a signal or a clue or something."

"Are you talking about Gary?"

"Whatever, I don't care. I'm just saying I felt a little bit... My hair was still wet from the shower. I was wearing my glasses, Xaime. I wasn't prepared to go out and dance with sweaty old gay guys."

"Sweaty old gay guys." I can tell it stung.

"Isn't that where you went? Some kind of creepy leather bear bar? I know what you like."

He folds himself around me, ladle to spoon, and makes sure to aim his words directly into my Achilles earhole, which drives me as batty as it turns me on.

"What I like is you, you lunatic."

"How many people were in your graduating class?"

"What? What do you mean, at Harvard? Or in high school?"

"Whatever."

"I don't know, Jimmy. What are you talking about? Are you drunk?"

"My mind is clear, Xaime. I am not drunk, Xaime. I am asking a sober question."

"There were like five hundred people in my graduating class."

"Did you have to sleep with all of them?"

He laughs, squeezing me tight. I am suddenly mortified.

"Jimmy, you are incredible. What did you think was going on down there?"

"Some kind of creepy threesome action. A lemon party. I don't know. I'm nuts. I'm sorry. I just... Isn't he, like, totally in love with you?"

He thinks. I love that he actually thinks when I say things. When I am twenty-three other guys don't do that. They're just waiting for their turn.

"Probably. I never thought about it."

"But what about tonight? Because look, if you want to..."

"We went to a bar. Not unlike the one you're imagining. We had a couple of drinks. We had a lot to talk about, a lot to catch up on. You would have been bored..."

"History."

"No, not at all. Things we didn't know. Catching up, not reminiscing. We've been adults longer than we've known each other. It's just been Christmas cards and promises to visit. I don't even have his phone number."

"Because you know, if he wanted... Or if you ever want to..."

"What now, Jimmy? You'd better start at the beginning of that sentence."

"I just know how you are. How you like things. And I know that there are things I won't do, and probably you are used to doing those things, so if you ever get the hankering to..."

"You are being nuts, Jimmy. I like you. I'm with you. You're getting close to hurting my feelings."

"I'm sorry. You're not a bad... I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with it. Or with you. I just want you to know..."

"What, that you're willing to outsource our sex life? What does that say about me?"

"That I like you? That much?"

He nuzzles my neck, but there's exhaustion behind it. We are done talking. I am forgiven.

"I haven't ever... You know what I've done, who I've..."

"Yes, I've heard the speech. Fucking the straight guys that won't date you and dating the straight guys that won't fuck you. Brave new world. I sort of thought we'd solved that one."

"We have. I'm just saying, you know about things. This. How it works. And I'm just making things up as I go along, and I'm never sure what the thing is that's going to..."

"Jim. If you haven't pissed me off by now -- and I have to respect the fact that you've tried your damndest -- what makes you think there's some hidden button you can push that will make me break up with you?"

Um, because I have about a thousand? You just never go near them.

"I don't know the words. I don't know how to ask you what's okay. I just have to wait for you to show me. I don't want to be stupid or say stupid things or act like..."

"Tonight is the first time I've been unpleasantly surprised. I'll give you that."

"Because I was a dick to Gary?"

"Because you were a dick to Gary, and because you sat up here all night convincing yourself to be pissed off and jealous about nothing. Which means one or both of us has cause to be concerned."

I want to ask what he means, but I know if he explains one more fucking thing to me about the way the world works I'll probably puke. It's easier to just push back against him, slowly, until his arms grip tighter around me, and calculating our ages in my head, until his hot breath on my neck and in my ears brings me back to the present, and I can turn and kiss him without feeling like I'm apologizing to him, or he to me.


The night we return to his house on the hill, I fall into the bed exhausted, not caring if I rumple my tie or that my ankles will hurt if I don't strip off my shoes and socks. A few hours later, I kick off the shoes; the socks feel tighter than ever, drawing red lines on my ankles and across the tops of my feet. There's somebody moving around downstairs, opening drawers quietly and shoving them closed again one by one. The air conditioner clicks on in the silence and I wonder what's woken me.

Either way, I'm grateful. I change into pajamas and decide to look for Jaime, who often wakes up so early it's still actually late. He says it's his most productive time, and I wonder if he only falls asleep next to me as a favor, or if he's only pretending to fall asleep.

Coming down the stairs, I hear the curious non-sound of a foot depressing one of the pedals on the piano in the living room, and the velvet thump of the keyboard being uncovered. We never use it except at parties, and I wince thinking of how badly out of tune it will probably be when Xaime starts to play.

I want to sit at the keys with him, watch his fingers dancing across them, and I want to reward him with kisses for a phrase well-played. No, I will stand behind him, and put my hands on his shoulders, and gently pull him back away from the piano, to hear the squealing scrape of bench on tile as I clear a little space. "Don't stop, no matter what," I'll whisper into his ear, and he'll chuckle as I kneel before his feet. Measure by measure he'll lose his count, and fingers will lose their maps, and scales and arpeggios will sound out nonsense music until he forgets the keys altogether. My breathing quickens as I imagine it into being, creeping down the stairs ever more quietly and more slow.

There's a bottle of champagne chilling in a bucket, as though he's just been waiting for my arrival, and two flutes stand empty. I reach out for one, and disturbing the ice causes his back to go straight and stiff, as though he didn't know I was there. As though in his midnight tuxedo he thought he was alone. He stares straight ahead as though terrified, and slowly as he turns I see a curl at the forehead and realize that it isn't Xaime at all, playing the piano in a strange house with me watching, erection already half-mast.

His eyes are bright, this one, and his eyebrows are cruel. His cheek cuts like a diamond in the low light; I feel the bubbles before I've tasted my champagne, like diamonds whirling in a silent night. He looks delighted, he looks wicked, he looks completely at home in this house. The old enemy.

"You must be James," he says, and his voice is like a silver river down my back. His tuxedo tie, undone, flops against his chest as he stands, reaching out for the glass in my hand. Somehow I summon the wherewithal to stare right back at him, every bit as challenging and intrigued, every bit as cold and warm.

"And you'll be Bertie." Right on time.

"Why did you talk all that shit the night we met? You don't like Madonna. You know more about literature than anyone I've ever known. You don't dance, or party, or do any of the things. You're normal."

He cocks one political eyebrow, and I shrug.

"I mean, like me. That's what normal means. It's nice."

"I was trying to impress you."

"You thought that would impress me?"

"I didn't know anything about you, Jimmy. I thought you were a kid."

"You still think I'm a kid."

"You still are."

I like that he doesn't use this in arguments; I like that he's as willing to pretend that our ages are the same as I need him to be. I've always been precocious, I think. It's just a number, I think. Xaime says that in the Qu'ran you're supposed to take half your age and add seven, and that's as low as you're allowed to go. I always nod impatiently as though I've read the Qu'ran a million times, and repeat the math in my head over and over again when I feel nervous. Half my age plus seven is nearly twenty. My age minus seven times two is 38. No matter whom I've slept with in the last six months, that puts me right on the edges of the window. It makes me feel wise.

Rocky's curious, always, about our time together. I tell him about the readings, the day trips, the short hotel visits, the way my job just drifted away like an object in space; that's not what he's asking about, but I'm not about to give up that secret. The hours Rocky's spent on my sex life rivaled my own even, before Xaime. I love this, but not as much as I love telling him nothing, blatantly changing the subject when he gets up the nerve to ask.

Six months is a record, obviously for me but also for almost everyone we know. Xaime doesn't see a problem with it, but I think it's a terrifying number. Six months becomes six years, and then I will be old. I can't tell him this, because I'll still be younger then than he is now.

It is hard, physically painful, to let go of the idea of myself as something wild and untamed; every domestic decision we make together and every possible thought I have runs through a filter determining whether it's a fight worth having. Emily says it's good for me to learn these things, because it means letting people in, men in, and that's her main mission in life: To make sure that I am happy with Xaime. It's sweet.

And she's not wrong. It was a pose. Even living on my own I never really took possession of anything, never saw anything as my home or my belongings. It was just the stuff in my life and the place I slept. I thrill and thrive under the roof, compose heartsick melodies for my drawer, my housekey, my car keys. All the objects that make up a life as I move smoothly into it. I dive beneath the surface of this easy life; I'm happy to keep my freedom rhetoric intact.

At a hotel bar in Chicago, after a reading, sweating in my necktie; I head upstairs to shower and change, leaving him unattended. We like to have a drink, to unwind; I've given up cigarettes for at least a month at this point, as far as he knows. I smoke quickly in a loading dock, change quickly, and when I get downstairs am confronted with a new human.

"This is Gary," says Xaime, of the man with the arm across his shoulders. He's gutty, not fat like me but big, like a football coach. He's got a goatee running with silver and a polite blush in his cheeks. He sticks out a hand and I take it, limply, with a look at Xaime.

"Gary's an old friend," he says, nodding slowly in some kind of private code, and I plaster on a smile.

"It is awesome to meet you, Gary. Were you at the reading?"

He nods, smiling widely. "I saw you there, in the back! I didn't know you knew Xaime, but I noticed you."

Xaime's smile is a stupid, pointy thing.

"I don't think I saw you there. Do you live in Chicago?"

He pulls up a motherfucking stool and sits down between us.

"Yeah! I've been here for about ten years. I've only seen Xaime a couple times. We went to college together; he was Ernie back then."

Ernie. Gross.

"He has a lot of college stories," I say, and signal the bartender. I'm wearing madras shorts and deck shoes and I feel like a four-year-old. My feet dangle.

"Anyway, he said you guys were staying here, so I wanted to come by and say hi. Buy you a drink."

"That's so awesome of you, Gary. It's been a very stressful trip. Very tiring."

"That's what Xaime said. I tried to get him to come out and see the sights, but he said you'd been up past your bedtime too many nights in a row."

He means this, I know, in the kindest way possible. He's not being creepy. He's not touching me, or Xaime, or doing anything wrong. He's just Gary. He looks like he programs computers. I don't care.

"Well, that's patronizing. But not untrue."

"Yeah, that's what he said," Gary repeats, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Yeah, I'm pretty exhausted. I was thinking nightcap." I flick my eyes nastily toward the clock: "But you know, it's early. Why don't you guys go out and have fun? Catch up? I can do some reading and turn in."

Gary looks at Xaime, whose face is a mask of serenity.

"That sounds really fun, actually," he says, looking me in the eyes. "I'm always so keyed up after a reading." He turns to Gary with a frown: "My wrist can't take these signings anymore." Gary clucks. I down my drink, staring hatefully at the ground, and with a sudden intake of breath beam brightly at them both.

"So. Great. You boys go have your fun, and I'll just stay here. Get some time to myself."

Xaime's shaking his head behind Gary, poor Gary who's disappointed I won't be joining them, poor Gary who is still in love with my boyfriend and probably doesn't even know it; poor Gary, sticking out his friendly meaty hand to say goodbye. I dart in, and kiss him on the cheek.

"Awesome meeting you, Gary. You guys be good."

On the way to the elevators, I trip over a wet spot on the floor, but I don't look back. There wouldn't really be a point.

When I am twenty-three I dream of a picnic lunch, somewhere on a coast I've never seen, with the waves crashing on a beach I can't see, somewhere close, and weeping willows enclosing us all around. Robbie sits on a branch the height of my chest, looking like a young forest god, crouched and grinning, with leaves in his hair. A dog lopes up, big and white, and licks my ear; the dog grunts happily in a human voice, and I wake to heat and wetness.

"Robbie: What."

"I just..."

"I made up the couch. The blanket is square. I gave you everything."

"I'm cold! It was cold, and I'm not getting warmer."

So I guess I'm Heathcliff. He's right, though: These spring rains creep into the garage house like arthritis. His hands go seeking.

"Robbie, get your tongue out of my ear. I have stuff to do tomorrow." I have to fit you into my life, a life into which I barely myself fit. I have to figure out Rocky and Xaime and figure out where I'm going to move next.

"I just want to."

I feel impossibly large. I feel like I could put my hands around his waist. When I am seventeen, he's taller than anyone in the world. It's not until our friend pulls out a ruler that I can be convinced he's not a foot taller than I am. Now he feels like nothing, a slip of a thing, a square blanket I could crush with my hands into a ball.

"Jamie?" He reaches down again, his hands hurried and rough against me, skidding down to flick a testicle. I convulse around him.

"Ow! God! Robbie, quit."

"Sorry. I'm not..."

"Robbie, are you drunk? What time is it?" It feels like seconds have passed. The clock is blurry but I still can read the red numbers: 5 AM. A time invented to be mysterious for everyone but third-shifters and cokeheads.

"A little. I thought it would get me warm. Got me hot," he giggles into my throat.

"You're like... A little kid, Robbie." He chuckles and pulls the blanket from between us, flipping it in the night around us both. His body is impossibly warm, like a line of fire down my body, and I shiver. It makes him laugh, like a little kid.

"My shit is complicated, Robbie. I... This isn't you."

"This is me. It's always been me. People try to sleep with you and you never even get it. You always think we're kidding. You don't know how easy it is."

"What are you talking about?"

"All through high school we would be like this, in bed like this, and I would say, Let's have sex, and you'd laugh and kiss me on the cheek. Like boners lie."

"So why didn't you ever just go for it?"

"Because I knew you wanted me. It was confusing. You are confusing."

"Well, I don't want you now. Be still. Lay like broccoli."

Our old joke. His laughter moves up my neck to my ear and my eyes roll back. He feels my entire body stiffen at once.

"I can stay?"

"Of course you can stay. I love you. But you have to cut this out. It's not right."

"What's not right? What's so scary? There's nobody here."

There's everybody here, I think. There's never been a room so full of ghosts. I can smell Xaime on the sheets.

"Why do you love me?" he asks, and I sigh.

"I don't know, Robbie. Because you're good. Because you've been through a shit-ton and you still try to be good. Because you taught me everything cool. Because I wanted to be just like you when I grew up. Because of the freckle on your knee."

"I love you because you make me forget," he says, finally drowsing. One fist goes to his chin, against my chest. The other finally relaxes on my thigh.

"I met a guy just like you. Older," he says quietly, as though to himself. "Cop or something. I hate cops."

"I know," I say, and just like always I forego pointing out how many times the cops saved him from his stepfather. It's just something you say.

"This one was nice. He reminded me of you. It's why I came here. I was looking for you and I saw you get out of a cab the other day but I was scared. So I just stayed with these people, but they weren’t cool."

"How do you live, Robbie?"

"People give you things. Everybody has something they can give you, if you ask right."

"Robbie, are you on drugs?"

"Not anymore. It makes it too hard to figure the next thing out."



When I'm seventeen Robbie gives me my first hit -- and last, give or take twenty years -- of marijuana. My stance is that pot is vile, trashy and ugly, but really it's just because I'm afraid. There's nobody at his house, it's just the two of us, listening to Blur and making quiet shapes in the afternoon. When he asks if I'd mind, if he just smoked a little, I tell him that his mother wouldn't like it. Girlfriend either. His answering laugh is filthy, full of dares.

He's made some kind of contraption out of a toilet-paper roll and tinfoil, and it will be years before I finally understand that this is improvised; I assume everybody's smoking pot out of toilet-paper rolls and they take on a great significance for a while. We crouch behind the house, under the empty firewood stand, and I watch him carefully. A thousand movies running through my head, all drugs running together in my head until I've convinced myself he's going to freak out and go running through the sliding-glass door like Helen Hunt in the PCP movie. Instead, he just looks at me, red-rimmed and glassy, and hands me a sexier grin than I've ever seen.

"We'll just chill. We can just listen to music," he says, and finally I take the roll from him, letting him light what's left. "Breathe all the way out. Then breathe deep, and don't cough. And if you do cough, do it away from the pot." I manage to mangle these instructions, even after repeating themselves to myself some few times, and sparks fly everywhere.

An hour later I am curled up against his chest, asleep, when his girlfriend -- my best friend -- enters the room without prelude, and turns the music down. They speak in low voices and I cannot trust what I think I hear, but I don't mind. It's their stuff. I'm just lying here.

In three weeks we've pulled the entire bookcase down on ourselves, the three of us working in concert to make each other as miserable as we are. We pull in ancillary players, one-line characters, the teen mom and the PE teacher's daughter, Shawna in her boots, anyone we can find to make it worse, and worse, and still worse. The PE teacher's daughter arrives at his house in such a fury that her car is less parked than aimed, and as I go running out into the driveway to get away from their dramatics I'm so disturbed by the erratic angle of the car -- door open, engine running -- that I snap a picture. When that one blows over, I can't show the picture to anybody. The last time I see Robbie, he's aiming another car for me in an apartment complex parking lot, one middle finger extended, the other paused upon the wheel with a cigarette burning. I leave for college shortly thereafter. I don't write home.



He makes me forget. When I wake up, sun well overhead, Robbie's gone. The ball of wet clothes in the corner of the bathroom's concrete floor is gone.

On my porch there's a box: Film tickets, poems from old boyfriends, tiny duckling figurines. A box of memories, some singed and some wrinkled: Soaked, and dried, in impossible shapes.


END Chapter Two: Compline

"It's not a sprint," Robbie's voice calls out from the bedroom, where I just know he's sitting on my bed in a towel, getting everything wet and stupid. And I'll go in there later after making up the loveseat and there the towel will be, getting nasty while I deal with things.

I'll have no underwear to give him, but he won't have showed up with any on and won't care. I'll give him a t-shirt and sweats for sleeping, and they will be comically large, and in the morning we'll walk his wet clothes from last night to the laundromat, or if they're unsalvageable I will toss them and buy him some new stuff, and we'll figure it out.

When I am twenty-three I am sitting at the table near the door in my tiny apartment, wondering if I'm Heathcliff or Catherine this time; wondering while I drink what's left in the house if he's here to suck my blood or take my soul.

"Jamie, it says It's not a sprint. What does that mean?"

"What are you talking about?" I sigh, and he grunts in frustration.

"This book, on the bed. The guy signed it. The author. It says, It's not a sprint, and there's a little heart. Do you know this guy?"

"...Sort of." I'm not up to explaining Xaime. I'm not up to explaining anything in the hour of the wolf. I just want to drink until I'm asleep and then look at things in the morning when the sun comes up. All Robbie would tell me is that his parents are getting bad, real bad, and he's been on the streets for about a week. But his parents live in some other town, the town we grew up in. The town I grew up in. He offered to show me their house on a map.

"That just means I'm not very good in bed," I say, and that shuts him right up as intended.

"This is a nice apartment," he calls from the bedroom.

"No, it's not. I can be better."

"This guy looks like your type," he says, flipping idly through the pages.

"Do you think?" I ask, unprepared and unwilling to talk about my type. This town is my refuge from type. My type is Rocky. Gypsy fingers and hairless chest. My type is in the bedroom, getting everything wet and stupid, and it's no longer my birthday, and Rocky is a few blocks away, nestled in his bed with Emily like two young mice, chirruping and cooing in their sleep.

"The couch is all... I made up the couch. All I could find is my letter blanket from high school, it's sort of scratchy but there's a sheet underneath it so you won't... It's square. The blanket. Are you hungry?"

"You already gave me some food, Jamie. Before you started drinking."

Before I put him in the shower, unbuttoning his sodden jeans and realizing he could do that himself, then backing away slowly, blushing, feeling awkward and lumpy for treating him like a child. He looks so young. He looks perfectly Robbie. There's a dash of dirt across his lip that is the concept of a moustache; there is a glittery stubble across his jaw and a darker line heading down from his chest, or up from his beltline. Depending on where you're looking from, we used to say.

"Hey Jamie?"

"Yeah, Robbie," I say, caught out of my imagination.

"When did you start drinking?"

When you died, I think, but that's not true either, and not as romantic as it sounded in my head.

When I went to college. When I realized you were never going to grow up, so I went looking as hard as I could for somebody to hurt me the way that you used to, forever and ever, amen. When I met Rocky.

"You've seen me drink before, Robbie."

"Not like this. I looked in your cabinet. You came prepared."

"That's what grownups do, Robbie."

He's silent; he is still, on the futon, without moving. I can picture him, tracing the picture of Xaime on the book's inside flap.

"Hey Jamie?"

"Yeah, Robbie." A little harder this time, a little more bedtime in the voice.

"...Nothing."

He slumps out of the bedroom, naked, and I hand him the clothes I've laid out for him.

"Robbie, why are you here?"

He shakes his head. "Your light was on. I guess you fell asleep."

"No, why are you here?"

"Why were you here?" he asks, and I don't have an answer.



When I am seventeen, I ask questions because I want to know the answers. "Why do you love me?" I ask, head on his stomach, bodies curled around themselves in unending punctuation.

"I love you..." His voice catches and I know we don't have much time left, even when I'm seventeen. "Why do you love me?"

"I love your guitar fingers and your big stinky feet," I say, and reach down to scratch his heel, staring at the ceiling. He chuckles and convulses around me, bashing one knee against my head. Through the hole in his jeans I can see one tiny freckle; it seems like the answer to a question.

"I love you because you make me forget," he says, and I have no answer. His heart thrums beneath my hands, speeding up, and I pat his chest tenderly.

"I love you, because you make me remember," I say. Everything I say when I am seventeen is heavy with meaning, even when it isn't. That's one of the things he loves about me.

"What's going to happen when you move away? What happens when I'm stuck here? What happens when we get old? " he asks, and I click my tongue.

"We don't."

"But you didn't even COME," I wail, and before he can stop himself Rocky gasps like someone's just stabbed him with a fork.

"I mean..." I have nothing. I'm startled too. Jaime -- Xaime, it would seem -- giggles in the bedroom and emerges, zipping up his stupid jeans:

"What, now?"

"I mean..." Again, nothing.

He looks from me to Rocky, who is shiveringly uncomfortable, and bursts out laughing. I send a new wail up into this fresh hell, and can only issue a blanket apology. For overlooking him, for condescending to him last night, for being so selfish generally, for being unprepared, for hating his eggs, for wearing my pajamas in the morning in my own home, for being an unpublished author, for talking self-importantly about my own novels at the party, for thinking he was stupid, for refusing to dance with him, for promising to dance with him, for using him in some imaginary creepy game: It's all covered. I am crushed under the weight of my own stupidity.

And on top of it, the whole scheme is blown. I can't actually use Xaime to make Rocky jealous when by all rights he should be jealous. That nets me nothing. I am standing in the wreckage of something major, without even proper shoes on my feet.

"Well," he says. "You're a kid." He kisses my cheek, still laughing to himself, and high-fives Rocky on his way out of the house. "You promised: Dancing next weekend, okay?" There's a spring in his step that makes me want to die, or kiss him, or slap Rocky or something. Anything to substantially change the circumstances of this morning. I want to go back to bed. Do people drink in the morning? Yes, it's called brunch. There is a pitcher of mimosas on the counter that Xaime didn't even get to drink before we rushed him out. Which is painfully rude, but lucky for me.

Holding up one finger in Rocky's direction, realizing now that I am for sure still drunk from last night, I drink right out of the pitcher. Only a gulp or two, but it's warm, and I feel like a person in a movie, taking a drink and immediately feeling better. Putting down the pitcher, I turn toward him, but then can only stare at my feet, feeling like a horrible monster. I feel like somebody's pimple.

When I look up, he's grinning; the bunches at his shoulders, beneath his shirt, have smoothed themselves. He looks, as always, like heaven: A slumpy, unthinking, overthought heaven. I raise my shoulders instead, and let my terror and confusion show, and he begins to laugh.

"So you guys had fun, huh?"

"Yeah, it was awesome," I say, and down another gulp or two of mimosa before pouring them into glasses. Mimosas, the gayest of the beverages. "But, you know, he's a nice guy. Very up kind of guy. Which I need. Or, you know. It's good."

"Do you like him like him?"

"Don't be jejune."

"You do! This is going to make Emily's day!"

Yeah, I think: That's the point.

"He's really more her friend, I guess. Well, maybe not now because he's like my brother-in-law or something. But she worries about him all the time. So that's why."

"Brother-in-law. You think that's how it's going down?"

"Oh, he said so. As long as Bertie stays out of town, you're his favorite."

"And who is this Bertie?" And when is this Bertie coming home, and can I make him a cake?

"Bertie's British. They break up a lot. It's like tempestuous. They're really hot together."

"Fantastic."

"Yeah, so like, maybe he'll stay gone this time. But if not you will probably get to have a knife fight, which would do wonders for your cred."

"I'm not going to knife-fight some kind of Brit... Wait. Wait. Bertie? Ernesto and Bertie."

He nods, laughing. "Emily says it's most of the reason they stay together."

"Okay. Well, are there any other secrets I should know? Is he a hired killer, on top of being my favorite writer and some kind of... Moonlighting Muppet?"

"He's loaded, of course, but that's not really a thing. He's a got a great house, you have to see it. We should hang out this week, you shouldn't wait until the weekend. Gotta lock this down."

"Does 'Bertie' have his own house, or does he live in this palace? Am I going to get a nice poolhouse to live in?"

"Bertie's rich. Like wealthy. It's not really... Nobody knows what he's up to. He's really great, though. I always liked him better. It's a good double date, because he's like over here, and Xaime and Emily can talk about their stuff over there. I don't know. You'd love him."

"Yeah, well, I can't wait to meet him. Tell me, since you seem to have figured all of this out in advance, how that's all supposed to work?"

"You know how they are," he says, and I don't take offense until his face tells me I should.

"They, who?"

"Guys. Like, older guys. You know? Because of the '70s?"

I shake my head, uncomprehending.

"Like Studio 51? They... Things are flexible, for like old guys. Guys like... You know."

"Gay guys. Yes, I have cracked your secret code. And it's Studio 54. Area 51 is aliens. What you're telling me is that they're swingers. I just slept with a swinger. I'm sleeping with international jet-setting swingers now. I moved to this shitty town so things like this wouldn't happen."

"Um, did that kind of thing happen a lot where you come from?"

"It's not where you come from," I spit my mantra, "It's where you're going."

Rocky's face goes suddenly slack, afraid. "Where are you going?"

It's not out of the question; part of me is enchanted that he knows that about me, and fills in the blanks so easily. He must really love me.

"I'm not leaving town just yet, but you're sweet to ask."

"Jimmy, what part of this is not totally awesome?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then it's settled. I'll call Emily."

"Yeah, you go ahead and do that. I'm going to get dressed for the batting cages."

In the morning he's still there, even scarier-looking with sobriety on his side, milling around my tiny house and making strange bored noises with his lips, alternately quacking and buzzing them like a raspberry, and nearly silently naming every author, I assume, he hasn't heard of, which is all of them. He takes one down off the shelf with a happy sound of recognition and, before he can either attempt to borrow it or attempt to discuss it with me, I realize we have reached a deliriously critical moment.

"Jaime," I say from the bed, slowly rising. "Are you a Republican or a Democrat?" It's fucking nine AM on a Sunday morning, cut me a break. I have to work fast.

He looks at me like I've just turned my skin inside-out and put it back on like everything's fine, and then narrows his eyes: "What are you?"

"Oh, I'm a libertarian," I say, and remember too late the dawning confusion on his face: "Basically a Republican, but like... Meaner."

"So you're a Christian?"

Not even at my bleakest. Not even in service of the highest goals imaginable.

"No, but I do believe in... Voodoo."

"Yeah, I saw your books. My grandma did Santeria."

"...Awesome?"

Without being asked, or encouraged, Jaime starts making breakfast. I return to bed, not to sleep but to stare at my ceiling and count my troubles, one by one.

As he's serving it up on my donated ice-cream table, in the area near the door of my $200/mo. garage studio that I think of as my dining room, kitchen, and receiving area, there's a knock at the door.

"Who the eff," I whisper weakly, unable to deal, and terrified it's going to be some kind of bad-idea police showing up to slap some sense into me.

Which essentially it is, because: Why hello, Rocky and his girlfriend. What an appropriate time to visit my home. But no, even better, because although the girlfriend can't stay, and is just dropping Rocky off to spend the day with me as a birthday present, she gets a look at Jaime's dancing, bobbing rear in the kitchen, pouring out mimosas, and shoots me a look of supreme fucking triumph.

Which is how I find myself standing awkwardly in my pajamas in a room two small for three people, head nearly bumping the ceiling, with Rocky watching my last night's conquest bump and grind in his boxers. Good God, I think. If his dick gets loose and I have to be in the same room with Rocky and Jaime's dick at the same time, I will literally expire.

When I come out of the bathroom, having brushed the hell out of my teeth, Rocky's reading a newspaper or a comic book or something at the table, gnawing sloppily on the breakfast that Jaime proudly presents me now, his face a mask of total desperation. Eggs, naturally, which I choke down and exclaim over, making exaggerated and delighted noises as I chew. I wonder if it would be better to throw up now, or wait until Jaime leaves and then puke all over Rocky, or what the protocol is, or whether Jaime is ever going to leave, or if we just live together now and Rocky is visiting our tiny home, and whether that's maybe how all people end up together, tricked by fate, and I'm just the latest person to twig to this fact moments after it's all been sealed, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life explaining basic shit to Jaime, who for all his years seems to be an unremitting source of energy and enthusiasm, so excited by life generally that he can't even sit down long enough to eat his fucking eggs, and must dance wildly around the room to some horrible song he's found on my radio, counting the steps aloud like Debbie Reynolds and snapping his fingers for no goddamned reason at all.

I look blankly across the chaos and Rocky smiles sweetly, before turning back to the comics. I am in love with, have always been moving toward, this very scenario: Springtime sun coming in through my open windows, the curtains stirring, a mug of tea on the table between us. Quiet smiles and private time, together, on a Sunday. I just never pictured Jaime voguing his happy ass through the middle of it.

Finally taking in my jaw-dropped inability to comprehend Jaime or what he's doing in my house, Rocky mistakes it for something like wonder, or delight, and I see in the corner of my eye his lips go firm. It's a disappointed line I've seen before; it vanishes before I can see it properly. He folds the newspaper and decides to join my team, grinning snarkily behind Jaime's back, as though this isn't all his fault. As though it's not about him.

"So Jaime, we were planning on doing stuff today..." he says, and I'm pleased. Maybe Jaime's not so bad. If it bothers Rocky this much, maybe I'll date him awhile. Demonstrate my ability to hold down a stable relationship, open up the possibility of sex again since he's clearly learned to look at me the other way. It could work. It would work masterfully. I can call off our dates at the last moment and giggle privately to myself about having "other plans," and he can roll his eyes exasperatedly, and sooner or later it will break him. This will work, I know it.

But today, I'm not in the mood for that. Certainly not for Jaime in his current state of simple-minded joy, and anyway: I was promised the day with Rocky. That's what I can handle today, tender as a kitten, and it's all I ever want. I'm content to let him do the heavy lifting.

"Like what," Jaime says distractedly, knocking the silverware drawer closed with one hip and starting on the pots and pans.

"Like, um, the comic book store... And the music store. Maybe a punk band later. I was thinking about going out to the batting cages..."

Like hell, but I like his style; I like even more the bad-smell wrinkle of Jaime's nose. It's a noble nose, that one. Strong, like my mother's grandparents had. He bats his eyelashes at me from the sink, looking ten years younger for a moment, and grins.

"I'll be out of your hair shortly. But I demand that you come dancing with me next weekend, okay?"

I nod, grinning flirtatiously, and Rocky's hands fly to his hair. His arms begin to move impatiently, picking at his jeans and at nothing, and feeling brave -- and, yes, probably still drunk -- I move to Jaime and kiss him quickly on the lips, leaning into a strong hug before letting go. "Promise."

Rocky's impatience is so vibrant you can feel it thrumming, like a convoy going past. It is awesome, it worth all of it. I gaze out the window -- a useless if theatrical gesture, considering the window opens on nothing but the terrifying shed of my front-house neighbor, who drives rented cars on the nights he dates and whom we've decided is a killer of children -- while Rocky vibrates in the kitchen behind me. I indulge in my favorite activity of late, the construction of scenarios in which some overdramatic conversation we can have in a few moments, where he calls me to task for some imagined slight and I can yell, "Don't pretend you care!" and he melts into a pile of rumpled slacker gear and destroyed feelings, but when he clears his throat it's to yell something weird into the other room: "Hey, you should sign your book before you go!"

Jaime sticks his head out of the tiny bedroom with a look of equal parts horror and guilt, shaking his head at Rocky in a way that speaks volumes of their own intimacy; I am no longer able to locate the precise coordinates of my jealousy and just decide to be pissed off generally, spitting, "What are you talking about, what book?"

Rocky rolls his eyes. "He's so bashful, it's retarded. It's why I wanted you to meet. He knows that," he growls at the bedroom door. Through which Jaime's guilty hand, only, reaches out holding his book: Ernesto X. Puente's The Declension Of Pleasure Through Time.

When I am twenty-three, I would prefer to spend my birthday alone, but Rocky and his mate won't hear of it. I want to drink alone in my apartment, and make art or write stories, but Rocky is convinced that I need to be introduced to a larger circle of friends, namely his. I've seen them and they don't amount to much, but I don't judge him for it: Loneliness is the first thing I lost, I say to myself. He shouldn't be held to that standard. But there's a transitive judgment in my head that says if I am his friend, and they are his friends, a terrible miscalculation must have been made at some point, because that makes me less.

The night is a disaster. Not for any real reason, not that we're not all very friendly and they don't bring wonderful gifts for the man none of them have met. I'm touched, truly, and more than a little encouraged to see the brighter parts of their lives, their minds. Rocky's relief is a palpable thing, and I see myself through his eyes for a moment: Cerebral, lonely, eccentric. All the things I've been trying not to be. It puts a fear in my heart that, hours into the night, is given a face and a name:

A friend of Rocky's ten years our senior, bleached streaks in his hair, long eyelashes and tight jeans, a gap in the teeth and an unmistakable lilt hovering over his grammatical errors and southern drawl, as he drops names and leers unequivocally. Jaime. I feel sacrificed to some kind of terrible god.

We spend the evening in stilted conversation -- he's brought me yet another copy of This Side Of Paradise, my favorite book, which awkwardly joins the other three copies brought to the party -- about Jaime's likes (big guys, Broadway musicals), dislikes (mean people, racism), favorite movies (oh, anything with Bette Davis is fine by him, not that he can name more than three of her movies), favorite books (some fat British woman has written a diary about being a fat British woman that is just hilarious), favorite TV shows.

TV shows. When I am twenty-three, even admitting to me that you own a television is like saying you prefer a front-row seat at cockfights: Less distasteful than it is bewildering.

I try to come up with a better list of authors, people he might know, but suddenly I panic and can only think of the Latino authors that line one shelf when I am twenty-three: Neruda, Marquez, Allende. Is Calvino safe? Lots of people who think they're educated love him, including myself, and it's possible somebody gave him a copy of that one time. I think he's Italian, but that could just be because of his name, and anyway, I know I read other authors that won't immediately label me as some kind of pandering racist liberal.

Nothing. All I can see is the cover of my favorite book of the week: The Declension Of Pleasure Through Time, by Ernesto Puente, which is so new and so lauded I'm sure nobody in this town has ever heard of it, so it's back to kiddie cartoons and what I can remember from last fall's TV billboard ads.

We get about ten minutes out of Watcher In The Woods, which is where his Bette Davis obsession and mine intersect, before moving on to the music of Madonna. Time for the strange faces aimed at Rocky, who has been watching this bloodbath go down like a proud father at his son's first Little League game. Have I honestly made such an ass of myself that he thinks I can't get a date? I don't want a date, I want a friend: Him. And I already have him. I don't want more, I just want better.

When I am twenty-two I am celibate, sober, atheist, straight-edge, non-drinking and non-smoking. One day, trapped in a friendship and unable to find the way out, I've applied a bit of masking tape to my mouth the better to listen more closely to the selfish, self-important words that threaten to come spilling out. My head becomes an echo chamber for an hour and I attain a fleeting realization that everything is advertising. Every single thought. In this moment I become something new.

I have become a product: A brand, authentic and unafraid, with zero spin and zero eccentricity. I speak when spoken to, and when I speak I only them what they want to hear. Only the real. At night the words spill out, and in the morning I see them for what they are: Greed, grasping need for things I must remember I will always already have. I divorce myself from attachments, from ambition and from my family, and live in a clear white bubble with a minimal amount of things. It is a good life. It has in it no changes and no messes. I eat little. I think, and read. My search for a way out of myself is an act of commitment to myself, and I imagine a white ceremony. The goal is to increase the whitespace, to open up new places in which to write my life, when it begins.

I hear Robbie died, but I don't believe it. Less and less, as the reports begin to accumulate. He has only dropped out of sight, like me, to escape the pressures of the history that ties him down. He is taking on new names and new faces, like me; like me, he is facing new people, new names, and like me he is on the make. I would know.

I have moved to a small town for reasons I've forgotten by the time I move there. I read voraciously and write furiously, but only ever in public spaces. Coffee shop down one street, all-night pancake house down the other. I don't drink coffee, it's too impure and uncontrollable. I choose songs on the jukebox based on their effect, not out of any enjoyment; I wait desperately for people to approach me so that I can freeze them off again.

It's in the late hours that I feel him before I consciously realize I've seen him: Rocky, some boy I met on a visit to this town a year or two ago, in whom I saw something, some spark of something; the romance I created about him at the time is the inspiration for my move here, this lone outpost and the intellectual serving time as the manager of a pancake house. I roll my eyes at myself and toast myself with a soda; it couldn't have gone any better if I'd planned it.

I didn't make much of an impression on that first visit, I could tell at the time, but I didn't mind. The dents in other people's memories are one of the handiest ways to recreate yourself. I've pretended not to recognize people from the past plenty of times, out of respect to their new identities, with whom I have not yet been acquainted. I don't think that's what this is, but who can say? He pretends not to recognize me and pretends to recognize me all at once, which is how I feel with him. I tell him I moved here for him, drunk on not caring. He nods quietly, and smiles. I'm not the first.

"Guys, um. Well, I don't have a problem with... That. It's nice to meet you."

I'm intrigued. He's better at not caring about things than I am, and thus I must apprentice myself. What was only barely romantic becomes nothing romantic at all, I explain to myself. At the end of the night, with the sun coming up, he says it's like we've known each other forever. I say maybe we have, and stick out a hand to meet his girlfriend, picking him up on the way to work. She is wary at first, but Rocky explains me as an old college friend. True separately, if not as a sum.

He wants to know what I am, and asks me endless questions. All that history, quietly sanitized, that I haven't thought about in years. Family members whose names stick on my tongue. Never boys, never that part of things; I don't want to offend him, or for him to think that part of my life intersects with the part that is ours. He is a writer, so I am not a writer. Not a serious writer, like him. A dabbler. I answer his questions and pore delightedly over his work. It's a kind of portraiture too. I rediscover curiosity, and stop watching my words so carefully in response. I lose a little something.

Rocky is the subject, thanks to geographical convenience, of her portraiture. I praise the photographs vociferously when a new batch is produced; I scour the shots one by one, the contact sheets as finely as the prints, looking for everything about his face. I want to understand where he came from, where he's going: If I can memorize his face I will know it the next time it comes around and I'm taken hostage again.

She's warm, and funny. They make a handsome couple: Identically normal-looking, identically pleasant and inquisitive. He writes his stories, she takes her photographs. I move as quickly and easily into their lives as a champion diver; the water barely ripples.

When I am seventeen, we are newly minted freshmen, too exhausted from childhood to follow through on the plans to recreate ourselves that we drew up all summer, drinking in the heat and feeling at the curious edges and boundaries of our oncoming freedom. The fever passed before the summer, and we find ourselves abject and terrified in the face of what's left, clinging to whatever we knew when we were children.

I reread more books in one semester than I've read in years, trying to remember mere months ago when I knew everything and had perfected myself. I try to remember being good, when all the world seems to require manipulation and jealousy and terrible rage. His name is Rob, he is from the Northeast, his hobbies include socialism and obscure punk rock; he is deeply unhappy and needs someone, anything, as long as they don't acknowledge his desperation. He is perfect.

We lie in his roommate's bed, kissing softly without tongue, slowly building walls of afternoon denials and midnight desertions between us. Only in the roommate's bed, never in either of our own, because that would be a declaration. Our fumbling is never in the service of something better, it is only fumbling, but it represents a light at the end of some tunnel somewhere, and so we keep going.

"Time is like this," I tell him: "We've only met. We think we have made the friends we'll have forever, now. That it's easy as the movies. But I say that we will be disappointed in ways we can't even imagine just yet. By the time the winter comes we will have made enemies of our friends and made love to the people we hate most."

"That's only like two months away," says Rob, and laughs. He's right, but so am I; I don't know how I know it, but I know it. This is only a temporary respite in the illusion of comfort. I don't speak about it again: Just watch it happen, as it happens.

Staring down at him, two bodies nestled in a single twin bed as though born there, like twins, I make him say a single word, again and again: "Flesh." It stirs trembles in me; I know he understands the fire, if nothing else. He thinks it's because it makes me laugh, the strange gruff way he says the word, tasting every syllable, but it's not only because it makes me laugh. It also makes me brave. When I ask him what his perfect world, his heaven, looks like, he says, "Another green world." All alone, I think. That's the garden he wants back into. I don't ask again.

I pretend to have forgotten everything I ever knew, in order to hear it again from his lips, from the cruel curve of them, with his opinions attached to facts, blending into his hatreds and his loves, until I have drawn a perfect map of him inside. It's hard to love; loving it makes me better, I think, and submit to late-night pawing. We are sober, but not out of conviction: It's only that each day holds only so many hours, spent devouring each other, that we don't have time for experiments.

Two months later, I'm still seventeen, but everything has changed. Every love is a single day, morning until faded afternoon. I barely recognize him; he pretends to remember nothing, and we are both satisfied by the arrangement. I have woken up to the world around me, thanks to him and the moments he gave me, to be safe, but he's not the one. I never thought he was the one; he never thought I wasn't, but now those boys don't even exist anymore. I'm still going home at the holidays, that first year, before I give up altogether and stay with friends and their families, or hole up in the dorms to be alone. It's a green world, too. Sometimes, late at night, he comes to me, begging me to recognize him. I tell him, we all tell him he has changed too much, but he says he never changed at all. He begs me to believe him, and in that begging proves it true.

When I am eighteen we celebrate, by buying cigarettes at a store notorious for carding, and we celebrate by smoking them. I haven't seen Robbie in a bit less than a year; he's not doing so great. I'm not that much older than him, but since I skipped forward and he was held back, the months have become logistical years. We drink and try not to reminisce. There were so many betrayals in that last year that at times I feared for my life. When it becomes clear that he only wants to talk about those times, that he's gearing up to discuss -- or worse, reenact -- that night we babysat the little boy upstairs, I make sure to leave him with the pack. That was in high school. I don't love him anymore. I leave him behind.

I will never love another sad boy. No broken things. If they bring you sadness let it only be a game, a momentary break in the routine, before the assumption reasserts itself that life is worth living. I have learned lessons, of a kind. In pretending to be happy I have brought myself into a greater happiness, but in pretending to be normal I have realized a happiness I never knew. The old world falls away and I realize we are there, in his green heaven, where nobody cares or judges by our histories; where nobody even wants to hear about them.

I leave him behind; I have Rob now, and all the trouble that brings. We spiral around each other for years, sleeping with the same boys and girls, using everything we have to hurt each other, and without facts we just rely on lies and propaganda, never striking directly. When I am twenty-two and have left that school forever, my memories are vague beyond a general feeling of hustle: Trying, giving up, disconnecting and searching desperately, building social capital and burning it down again.

It comes to me cleanly one night when I am eighteen, and in the half-light I gather everything, moving quietly to protect my roommates: Everything with meaning. Knickknacks and movie tickets, careless doodles I've saved from boys who scrawled my name again and again on whatever paper they could find, little figurines. My diaries, my journals, the half-mad writing of my desire: It all goes in a box, and I take it with me out into the night.

Find the thing, don't find the thing. In one I am looking for a t-shirt in a house with infinite rooms, looking for my bedroom and this one shirt, which I am sure when my friend Matthew wears it, although it is small, will solve the problem of the coming apocalypse. Or the wall will sometimes peel away, revealing a multilevel slumber party taken from a Jerry Lewis film. Or the walls and doors and windows are all that exist, and the world will be made of pouring water and skeletons of a sincere and somehow threatening dark wood. In any case, everyone is there. Everyone is watching.

The lover dreams fade on waking, and fade as I grow older, but they are of a similarly uniform character: I awake fully dressed, in a strange bed. Usually wearing a tuxedo or suit or something else constricting. I move from the bed across a strange floor, richly appointed, and down stairs appropriated from Katherine Hepburn films or modern films set in New York lofts, into opulent homes. Comfortingly sterile, more like hotels than the grubby houses I know in life. The unending waves of books with which my homes contend in waking life have all been hidden away in safe places, or soothing libraries.

I am drawn to a room -- lounge, parlor, inferior dining room; always somewhat secret, always richly appointed -- where a man is playing the piano. He is also dressed in finery; in the dream, I know that he's unable to sleep, as he often is. As artists often are, in dreams. The music is complex, polyrhythmic but still and melancholy, never jolly. We hate ragtime, we hate jazz. We hate anything hard as much as we hate anything easy.

Improvised, always: Going back to the beginning of a phrase in order to rewrite it, this time better, this time stronger or more beautiful. Before continuing on into the next maze, painting itself into the next corner: I can barely follow. Each repetition seems, to me, gilding the lily: Taking something perfect down from the air and caging it away instead of moving on. It's not as if we'll remember in the morning.

I want to be a comfort. I want to sit quietly, with him but not with him, and let him make his music. There is an open bottle of champagne or heavy red wine, and reaching for I make a sudden sound. I have disturbed him. I have broken it, trying to get inside it with him. He sighs, and his hands raise from the keys. I feel guilty, but not afraid. And as he turns to look at me, thunder written in the cruel curl at his temple, weariness in the wrinkles at his eyes, the cracks beginning to show, I discover the fear. He will turn, and he will look at me. He will see my face, and I his, and the world will end.

When I am eight, when I am sixteen, when I am twenty-four, I wake from these dreams weeping. Hot tears, in the back of the throat. Not sad, not really afraid once I have thrust myself back past the veil and into time, but there all the same. A sort of shame, maybe, in the face of immensity, or a yearning.

I know this dream like the key around my neck, as I know the danger is real. When I am four, when I am eight, when I am thirty-two, waking from this dream sends me prowling the house. Looking for him, perhaps. Always in the blue light, just before dawn, when the lines between the dream and the present tense are at their haziest and I can walk for awhile in that halfway place, neither awake nor asleep. At these times I can move objects with my mind.

At these times I can hear the thoughts of the stars outside in the sky; at these moments I can travel the landscape of a home become strange, looking at my things and placing him among them; breathing in the dream-scent of him, catching sight of him around corners, replaying again and again the sequence of playacted, promissory emotions dreams give us: He was like this, I was like that, he turned just so, I was undone.

There is a toy, a scientific gift from bewildered grandparents, that sits on my desk near the triplet globes of Moon and Earth and Venus: A glass bulb with a pinwheel inside, Harlequin diamonds in black and white verso, balanced perfectly on a filament, ready to spin when the bulb heats up. It demonstrates for us the value and duties of pressure, barometric and kinetic; it demonstrates for us what makes the world go around. Heat.

When I am eight, when I am ten, when I am thirteen I can make it spin, in the blue half-light; sometimes standing, sometimes simply lying in my bed, unsure if I have woken, not yet disappointed to be a boy again, and in such desperate circumstances. At these times, at my most oracular, I think of the man, playing piano in the dark, and how one day he will come to me. No matter whom I love or how, in that blue morning I can feel him waiting for me, pulling me forward by both hands; it is terrifying and exhilarating but most singularly it isn't something I can affect. I can't change it, can't escape it, can't escape the certainty itself until the sun has risen: I can't fear him, therefore, or want him either. He just is. He just stands there, patiently. If he knows I'm coming at all.

He's just standing at the other end of a very long hall, at the end of dreams, and I am working my way toward him with dedication, without hope or lust of result. When I am fourteen I comfort myself with thoughts of him, physically and mentally: Most men are only wishes. We inform them with the qualities we want, approximate the rest, destroy ourselves to accommodate them in turn, and call this a life, but this man is a mystery, the opposite of a circle to be filled with #2 graphite. The journey lies in learning and knowing more about him, not less. And if this means abandoning myself to those who look or feel like him, in that slice of a moment I catch before I wake myself, it is only in service of a future that forces the breath some little bit faster, sends the diamonds in me spinning ever faster, pressure rising as the morning pulls us forward.

When I'm seventeen and in high demand, it's a rare night when I have nothing planned or hopeful happening. I've left home, I'm preparing for school on a scholarship, and the taciturn and vague guidance given me by my father's nanny, with whom I live in a small two-bedroom apartment near school, is just like running wild. I won't miss her when I'm gone, and I won't miss her when I find myself twenty, and thirty, but it is a good time in life.

Thus it's all the more random when the single mom upstairs and two apartments over comes knocking, rattling our door. She's a level-headed lady, a secretary or something with frizzy hair and horrible clothes, who loves her garden and her young son. She calls him Little Bobby Shaftoe, which I love, and though I've learned to keep my distance from kids I don't send him away when he comes to bother me. I just don't let him into the house.

She's looking for Rita, the woman with whom I live, and whom I -- like my younger brothers -- call "Nana." Rita is out of town, visiting her ex-husband in a bordertown as she does most weekends. "Don't worry about it when he sleeps over," I remember her telling me after I'd met him the first time. "He was in Korea. He has a truss."

When I am a thousand I still can't recall a time I've ever been less curious about a person, a word, a concept. So little information is really toxic. When I am seventeen I let it go with a sage nod, and look it up later in the fat dictionary I keep near my bed.

Her eldest son, though, is another thing again: Late thirties, with a young son of his own and a moustache. I'm seventeen, I want it all, but there's something about him -- a kindness in his eyes that bypasses all my teenage attachment to intelligence and superiority -- that I can't get out of my head. He's an auto mechanic by trade, with that smell. Have you ever smelled it? Add it to the list: That mixture of stale cigarettes, sweat long-worn, and gasoline, soaked into the skin and inescapable. It is the smell of sex, I think.

He is divorced, and often without a place to live, so sometimes he stays with us too. I keep him lingering before work on those mornings, sometimes missing the bus to ask him questions about Cat Stevens -- Teaser & The Firecat is his favorite album of all time -- and pretend to care about the answers. When I am seventeen I'm still young enough to think I can trick him into sleeping with me. What he is, is tolerant to a fault.

"Can you get a ride here? I'm just hanging out with Bobby from upstairs while his Mom puts the world back together. It'll be fine, just no... S-M-O-K-I-N-G." Bobby's eyes go wide and he claps his hands to his mouth, making me laugh silently and shake my head.

END Chapter One: Housekey

When I am thirteen, I take up the flute. Inspired by my younger brother, who watched the children bicycling past from his second-floor window for a good week before pronouncing himself "ready" -- and taking to his wheels the first second in practice, like a fish in water -- I have decided that knowing music is possible, and having genetic proof that I am not unusually or unnaturally denied this gift, I have no good reason to keep from at least making the attempt.

A girl next door owns a flute, so I don't immediately have to save up the money to buy my own. Within a week I have mastered the keys and a few scales, at least to the point at which she no longer winces and holds out her hand, demanding it back, after a few sour attempts. Within two weeks, I have moved past simple mechanics and into practice, at which point the girl, her sister and her mother confront me as a group and suggest that I make a purchase of my own.

I've been saving my money -- as difficult at thirteen as it is when I am twenty, or thirty, or older -- and, once I explain my aim to my mother, am easily able to hitch a ride to the music store. The street nearing it and the stores surrounding it have changed, but it's the same store: Smaller, more typical, less interesting, less special than when it held denial. I'm by now old enough to be mortified by my mother's existence, and ask her to leave me there: I'll take a bus home, and would have taken a bus there if I weren't so excited.

I fork over the money for a silver beauty, with only two previous owners, and as it's being wrapped up I notice a boy in the corner, lingering near the flute cases. He is chubby, but happy. His hair is growing out, like a fuzzy dandelion, from some mistake or inspiration. He runs his finger along the counter like a budding cat burglar, but I know he is only biding his time. I can hear his mother attempting to haggle the owner, somewhere else in the store.

On the counter near me, there is a grimy brass key. I know its every angle, although mine is cleaner and shines more brightly: HOME, it says across the top, and the grooves down it are long and straight. The geometry of its angles has comforted me through many nights of uncertainty; its twin burns beneath my shirt.

The boy is wearing an unflattering sweatshirt, and shorts that are painfully out of style. He looks uncomfortable even in the idea of his body. I approach him, offering to demonstrate the flutes even though I'm only weeks into my own training, and he gladly stares back at me, amazed at being treated like a human being.

"Just wait," I say. "It gets better." He nods, barely listening.

Staring at the rows and rows of instruments we both know will be denied him, when it's time to open his mother's wallet and see where his dreams measure up. His name is James; he is delighted that mine is Jimmy. He is beautiful, and doesn’t even know it. I play a few scales, quickly as my fingers will allow, and his eyes widen. I teach him this word, embrasure, and after some ceremony allow him to try it for himself. "Not too hard and not too soft," I say, and he nods. His eyes are somewhere far away, looking at a packed crowd in the future. Looking at the tourists on a hillside square, the day it hailed and rained and the sun shone, all at once.

They will leave, and get into their station wagon, and go back to a house smelling of cold peanuts and rage. She'll climb into bed for two days, exhausted by the outlay, and he'll stare at the English horn across the short expanse of his bedroom, hatefully, and these two will be in their separate bedrooms, hating it for different reasons entirely, never knowing the other's echo. The little brother, I imagine, will dance madly from one room to the next, doing his little dances, trying to make pancakes and sending up acrid black smoke into the air. He won't care, because he loves the chaos. It brings us together.

And he'll wake up on Monday and head off to school with a heaviness and an English horn in hand, and the passion for music won't last. He'll come back to his house in the evenings and stare it down, as disgusted by the flabby honking sounds it makes as the rest of them. They'll send him down to the courtyard, or across the alley to the abandoned lot, when it's time for him to practice, and he'll set there at a rubber-coated picnic bench or on a weathered termite stump in a field, and play until the rain comes.

"It gets better," I say again, worrying over the bumps in his future, and he nods proudly.

"It gets easier," I promise him. He closes his eyes, trying to play a single note.

The boy's hands shiver at the keys, trying not to disappoint me. When his mother approaches I get out of there -- she is too old, and too young; I can't get a fix on her face -- and I can hear the adult resign in his voice when she produces the English horn, begging him not to throw a fit. I've left the key I found on a closer counter; I know that he'll know I left it for him.

When I am twelve, at the end of my year, I have conquered many of the groups I set out to conquer. The freak-adjacent girls with their lipgloss and soccer-player boyfriends, that love INXS and love me for my weirdness and homosexuality, are such an unexpected boon that I will remember their names and several of their outfits twenty years later.

One of the soccer-player boyfriends, with a blonde weightline and perfect jeans every single day, names me one of his best friends before I leave town, moving away once again, shocking me further. Joel. For him specifically I have invented the concept of blowjobs, and don't see a distinction, or even really a connection to the world of sex: Just something that seems like a good idea, like etiquette, like a natural expression. Thanks for being my friend, and so hot at the same time.

After winter break a girl calls me a "ho" across the courtyard, and I picture for some reason a wagon wheel. When somebody explains it to me, I'm confused: I can only wish. She must not know the word either. All it means is that we aren't friends anymore. I don't mind. Her bangs are six inches high and crinkly as spiderlegs.

On the last day of school, the thrumming of the wild inside the walls is so deafening that the teachers finally let us out, open the doors and blow the bell, and we go screaming onto the dusty intramural field, caught in a madness, throwing down bookbags and dancing wildly, as some bright soul plays music over the public address system, and we finally all grasp that feeling we'd seen so many times in movies and television,  that School's Out feeling we'd all ached to feel authentically, for ourselves, one day.

I have spent the morning between classes trading books with nerds, disappointing some by having forgotten to return their stuff and being disappointed in my turn. I am ready to go wild with the freaks. I have committed myself to the idea of getting lost in the city, of just disappearing and letting my mother search the streets all night before returning home. I have no idea how lonely and fearful her life, her parenthood, has been. I only want to dance, to see the strange clubs and grottos I've heard so much about. And as the students disperse, picked up by mortifying parents and impressive older siblings, I see it's all coming down: The only people I recognize, on lawn and field and courtyard, are the freaks. They are gathering.

When I am twelve I am presented with a choice: Side with the nerds, or side with the freaks. Not a choice that has ever been ignored by entertainment or media, but very real and very much essential when I am twelve.

The nerd boys are my brothers: Comic books, role-playing games, science fiction, puzzles, theoretics. They are as blameless and disconnected from their penises as I am, which frees us to fall in love as easily and passionately as Anne of Green Gables, composing her paeans to Diana Barry. It is my version of a heaven: Whirlwinds of implication, territorial and overt, declarations of brotherhood and partnership, the trading of locker keys and combinations, the late-night sleepover discussions of Robotech and Stephen King. The tender correction of my pronunciations of words like "Magneto" and "integral"; my tender explication in turn of matters of hygiene and etiquette and in the theoretical ways of men and women.

But the freaks! Dissecting and repeating, endlessly writing and rewriting the words of songs by Depeche Mode and the Cure and New Order; trading tapes and posters; discussing sex in frank and delighted terms. They are not my people, but I desperately want to be one of them, and determine consciously to change my entire life. It will be years before I understand that, in this group, my aberrant sexuality is my main cachet.

Among the gay kids, there is an unspoken agreement never to discuss or even imagine the possibilities of homosexuality in other than the vaguest terms; there is the unspoken agreement that any assembly among us is not only a declaration of terms but an acceptance of the cliché we've spent our lives attempting to avoid, and thinking that it's working. While I find myself in the company of similar boys and girls -- across drama, nerd, writing and similar categories, including a seriously disabling stint in the Just Say No club for reasons I will never be able to accurately resolve -- I am convinced this is only a coincidence, and not a serious loneliness given social accessibility.

Chief among the freaks, who welcome me into their ranks bemused and fascinated -- one boy agrees to tape his Bryan Adams and Like A Prayer albums onto cassette for me, on the dual conditions that I tell no one he has done so and additionally accept and purposively listen to three Cure albums of his choosing, with the intent to produce opinions about them -- is a vision of a girl, beautiful by any measure, half her head shaved and the other half dyed in a wispy aubergine, who wears ratty black dresses and black-and-white stockings. She explains to me that while Prince covers are nice, she feels encroached upon by this sudden popularity, since she's been in love with her since Lion & The Cobra. I am convinced she will be my savior.

Shawna is the most interesting person I have ever met in my whole life, both by painful determination and by natural enthusiasm and intellect. To be admitted into her careless company is a gift I could never have asked for. I keep the details of my private life -- mother in and out of a constant whirl of hospitals and religions, myself in and out of a constant whirl of foster homes and socioeconomic strata -- private, more to my later amusement, since I suffer simultaneously from an unending desire to retain their interest in me.

Shawna lives in the city -- Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States -- while I live an hour outside town; as an urban kid her social life outside of school is in full and riotous bloom while mine, as a resident of the poorest of the suburbs, amounts to weekly pathetic attempts to find a reason to stay in town for the weekend, or the night, or even just the evening. Her social circle includes older kids, but as I am twelve I'll never be able to relate their true ages: They could be teenagers, grown adults, kids from another school. They are older than me in a way I don't understand yet, straddling the three worlds of latent nerd, gay socialite and secret ward of the state.

They visit sometimes, at lunch, or take her away with them in the middle of the day like Sloane and Cameron, and I spend those afternoons privately musing on their adventures. One of them is a boy named Robbie, with long hair and a quiet, delicate way about him. He is gritty though, too; his uniform is torn jeans and t-shirts for bands nobody has heard of. I am fascinated by him, but frightened too, as I am made nervous by anything I consider cool. His softness exists entirely in tandem with his strength, his punk aesthetic, his disinterest in being cowed or spoken down to. He gives us lectures, on the rare occasions that I'm lucky enough to see him at all, on fighting the power and saying fuck no to gym class. It is said that he has smoked weed and possibly fried acid, and I believe it.

I am scared to think of speaking to him personally, because he is real: A real man, not much older than myself, but so secure in every aspect of himself that when a beautiful graffiti covering the entire west wall of the school is discovered one morning, and we're dismissed from school for the afternoon because it includes an eight-ball that looks vaguely like a bomb near a time of day, I am convinced it was him. His revolution is multivalent. He probably dates Shawna's older sister, or an older version of Shawna, or Shawna herself, and has amazing sex at all hours, when not drinking beer or smoking from bongs. He is the man I want to be as soon as I rid myself of the fifteen things holding me back.

A lunchtime conversation -- square pizza that day, and french fries -- with the freaks turns once again to homosexuality, which I have just been learning in my other life is definitely something to avoid. Shawna and one of the gay kids crane their necks to stare at me, urging me to continue. It is political, it is religious, it involves AIDS and bestiality. It goes on for a long while. I am always flattered when something I say causes such a stir, no matter the age I find myself.

When I am done -- nothing rhetorically or logically sound, not even anything I personally believe in, or think applies to any of us -- Shawna shakes her head, unimpressed. "I have friends that would kick your ass for saying that." I know she means Robbie -- beautiful, effortless, proud Robbie -- and the world abruptly turns over. Either Robbie is, like all of us nominally, gay-friendly to his usual militant degree, or else he is... Something strange, and new, that I don't understand yet.

She watches the wonder and desire arise in my eyes, the blush coming up in my cheeks, and grins to herself, nodding: "Yeah."

I am perturbed. When I am eight, my body begins to act on its own inclination, without my conscious permission. I think of my penis rarely, but if given any thought I would describe him perhaps as a curious mute friend, or a friendly helper: Like the animals in a fairytale, or the talkative props in the hardback Value Tales I enjoy so much, in which Nelly Bly or Reggie Jackson overcome adversity, while learning important civic lessons and strengths of character from her washcloth or his catcher's mitt. Comfortable for years with this relationship, I am unnerved by what I see as the drastic and erratic gerrymandering of his jurisdiction.

At first it is a curiosity: minorly offensive, but interesting. When it happens, I make sure to investigate closely before it goes away. When I am nine, I have finally apprehended a pattern in his behavior, and -- intuiting that understanding of the phenomenon is now within my grasp -- I decide to approach the experts.

When I am potty-training, it is quite clear that my mother finds my genitalia and bodily functions more fascinating than anything on earth, far beyond their capabilities to surprise or intrigue. I am the recipient of a glut of information -- scatological and copulatory, do's and don'ts, events requiring medical evaluation -- so when I am nine, it seems clear that in all her knowledge of this area of the world, she may have simply forgotten to mention something crucial regarding this latest development.

Sitting on the stairs of our two-bedroom condominium in Phoenix, Arizona, in the United States, I discover that while I have the words, I haven't the bravery. While my course is clear, the act of asking further information about this aspect of things is suddenly an overwhelming prospect. While my mother is an intellectual superior, liberal in her judgments, there is a bristling in the air regarding men, penises, the actualities of things. She finds much in the world of men as distasteful as I do, and I can only imagine scenarios in which she is either horrified or otherwise troubled by this latest news.

I submit to her the hypothetical question of his behavior of late, and to the wariness in her voice I can only add my own. The familiar question-and-answer regarding possible exposure and/or exploitation by other men or boys is quickly put to rest, as I stress once more that these questions are part of a hypothetical series -- if they are ruinously inquisitive, it is only in the pursuit of science. She laughs quietly, and bades me continue.

If, then, these physical occurrences were to become commonplace, would it be helpful to examine and analyze the conditions and stimuli under which they result? A long pause, and then vociferous agreement followed by tentative -- but, I see when I am fourteen, already knowing -- exploration of the character of these possible patterns of conditions and stimuli. "Well," say I, and list them thoroughly. Certain men, both in image and in proximity. Other boys, but rarely and usually older.

Around the corner, the kitchen has become an auditory black hole, absorbing all sound. It gives me time to consider whether this is the complete list, and I warm to my subject. Aloud, it is an impressive amount of information to have collected:

All kissing, no matter where it happens or under what circumstances. Soleil Moon Frye and Alyssa Milano. Lady Aberlin and Daniel Striped Tiger, but only separately. Where The Wild Things Are. People who play the guitar. Men with long hair, beards or both, excepting the Beatles but including Jesus. The shirtless man from the Doors. The Green Lantern and Robin, the Boy Wonder. Basically every moment in the television shows The Wonder Years, Magnum PI, and Doogie Howser MD. The voices of Lindsay Buckingham, Robert Plant, Peter Cetera, Eddie Rabbit; everything about Roger Waters and the film Jesus Christ, Superstar. Numerous henchmen and allies of Skeletor and He-Man respectively. (Prince Adam, but not He-Man himself.)

Several film actors across the decades, whom I describe to my mother in order that she'll produce their names: Marlon Brando, James Dean. Jimmy Stewart, Jack Lemmon. Gregory Peck, but not Humphrey Bogart. Spencer Tracy, but not James Mason. Michael J. Fox, but not Christopher Lloyd. The mean guy and the girlfriend -- both blondes, I note, in case it bears medical significance -- from Karate Kid. Sigourney Weaver, Ian Holm, Bill Paxton; any and all commercials for or references to the films Top Gun, Chariots Of Fire and Dirty Dancing. Boo Radley, but only because he reminds me of Dobie Gillis, who produces the effect most reliably of all listed stimuli.

When I am eleven, my mother is in the hospital, and I live with my father. It's an experiment we try every few years that invariably falls to ruin because of my distasteful relationship with my stepmother. When I am twenty-five I understand that this dangerous conflict is born not of difference but of similarity; when I am eleven neither of us understand much about each other beyond a visceral hatred. We both love my father, midcentury furniture, her brother Bradford and Princess Diana; we are both wounded in the same ways, and irritate each other without even trying. So I spend the summers away at camp, outside Durango by some coincidence, and find solace in three things:

The first, of course, is fighting with my own bunk's counselor, a soft advertising junior who is frustrated by my snotty cleverness. Intimations about his (obviously apparent) feelings regarding one of the girls' counselors, compounded by an unending volley serious questions about his masculine ability to accomplish outdoor tasks, means our two-day camp-out is prematurely aborted, due to an abject loss of control on his part in the wilderness that only rights itself once he realizes that the person he's got up against a tree by the throat is a child. After this, we love each other fiercely, and weep in each other's arms on the last day of camp. Twenty years hence I will still have the drawings he makes, just for me, with his artist's hands.

The second thing I love about camp is a grimy, funny boy in the next bunk over, one of Counselor Kevin's. His older brother sleeps in the bed above mine and, our own friendship aside, finds our mutual fascination troubling. My thinking is clear only to the point that I am willing to spend all day and all night watching him do things and encouraging him, and that he seems to have the same agenda. By the second week, Counselor Kevin has them all calling us "Ralph" and "Jack"; I love it, although none of them ever explains why.

One stormy night, both counselors gone somewhere to do boring young adult things with the girls' counselors, the younger kids next door admit they are powerless over their fear, and crowd over into our bunk. I sing them all to sleep, including my own bunkmates, and we stay up on the porch outside, discussing our counselors and the stories they tell and read to us. Our favorites are from Counselor Kevin's copy of Stephen King's Night Shift, which we agree is the most fascinating book ever written, as far as we can tell from the handful of stories we've been allowed to hear.

The third thing that keeps me sane through the summer is the clever tenderness of Counselor Kevin: loves Cinderella and Def Leppard, is from Maine, climbs trees so often and naturally we often wonder if he notices he's doing it. Counselor Kevin's favorite activity is a game without a name: "I used to be a ________, but now I am a ­________." It becomes my favorite too, and quickly. The boy next door and I compete to find the most bizarre words to fill in the blanks, but it's well-known that Counselor Kevin is only really interested in one sort of metaphor:

"I used to be a skyscraper, but now I am a timber wolf."

"I used to be a Toyota hatchback, but now I am an Appaloosa."

"I used to be a talk show host, but now I am an eco-terrorist."

The boy next door and I are more interested in the truth: We used to be curfew, but now we are howling. We used to be quiet, now we are strong. We used to be lonely, now we are useful. We used to be comfortable, now we are filthy.

He is not soft, not one of the boys or men I know instinctively is my ally; he is something better: wild, and inquisitive. He asks so many questions I find myself forced to be interesting. I try to be wild, like him, to learn to love the forest. In an all-grades competition of Hide & Seek, I think to wear my green satin pajamas, thinking they will increase my invisibility powers and hide me in the woods; that they will then make a brave statement at that night's bonfire, when I accept my ninja prize.

By the end of the evening, I have won, but my pajamas are in tatters. I don't mind; the wolf-whistles from the girls' counselors at seeing my outfit's debut is recompense enough. I used to be a weird fat kid wearing matching satin pajamas in the forest, as though that makes any sense at all, but now I am the smartest kid in camp, nice to younger kids, more than willing to fight the counselors in hand-to-hand combat.

When I am fifteen, memories of camp flood back and I draw a connection: In joking about my bunkmate's affection for a blowsy girl in our sister bunk -- who managed to learn to play decent guitar in our six weeks together, enough to play and sing Barry Manilow's "I Write The Songs" for the parents, who will never understand just how much repetitive practicing the rest of us had survived -- I cut too close, and draw blood. "Well, you're in love with my brother," he spits, suddenly upset, and I nod, uncomprehending, with an elaborate shrug.

I don't yet know how vast the difference is, between "love" and "in love," and assume he means the former, although it seems obvious to me that both are equally true. Which is why at that prize-giving, in my pajamas, my neighbor boys pulls the nearest girl close, apprentice to the guitar-player, and drapes his arm casually across her shoulder, lazily, refusing to meet my eyes. I see nothing wrong with this in principle, although I know by now that I'm going to have to work twice as hard to make him love me again. So I do.

It is on the penultimate night of camp that we exchange gifts. I have, unluckily, drawn the camp owner-operator's name from the hat: A harsh, staunch mountain goat of a woman who has no time for my abundant emotions and bizarre ideas about what constitutes friendliness and appropriate behavior. Especially after the choking incident, which seems to be an ongoing problem for everyone but the two of us involved. Having spent perhaps an hour weaving her a succession of friendship bracelets -- friendship bracelets being the only one of the mind-numbing crafts that I actually enjoyed -- I am horrified to find them missing from the railing at the foot of my bed in the moments before the ceremony.

After a quick survey of the bunk's relatively unimpressive treasures and completely undone both creatively and motivationally, I pick up a lame handful of interesting-seeming rocks from the road on the way to her lodge-house, presenting them with red cheeks. She is not fooled, and makes it clear I am not the first camper to default on gift-giving in just this way. I am horrified to disappoint her, most of all because she's originated the concept of Vespers: An hour of quiet contemplation each evening, that makes me feel like a Sufi mystic by the simple virtue of its existence.

My shame only compounds at the end of the night, when my now-distant neighbor is one of the last to give his gift: A leather strap, threaded through a rawhide tag with my name burnt into it, surrounded by several branded seashells. It is perfect. He blushes when he hands it over, and I realize we've made an agreement and I never even knew it. I am touched by his gift; I've watched him working on it for the last week, from afar, and wondered whose name was sending up those little plumes of smoke.

It says JAMES on the tag, but I only ever see JACK.

But the money, the amounts, don't function. Not for flutes. Not for silver and not for gold, not for any of the gleaming garden of metals in their multicolored velvet beds, waiting to be plucked. She plays the wounded bird, as I knew she eventually would, and lets the tobacco man lead her down all sorts of ugly paths, and I quickly lose interest and return to the flutes.

There's a boy there, probably five or six years my senior. When I am five the world is divided between children and grownups, all equally interesting and delightful, but when I am ten, the groups have shifted, to frightening teenagers and merely disappointing adults. There is something about this teenager, though, that I like. He is overweight; when I am ten I am only chubby. Enough to remark upon, for the other children, but still something I can take in stride. I do not yet hate my body.

His name is Jimmy, mine is James. His clothing is strange, a mixture of genders and styles, but neither outrageous nor out of place for a teenager. He plays the flute, and noting my slavering interest in the things has given his boredom full rein. He takes one flute down from a higher shelf, and holds it to his lips, throwing off a few casual arpeggios and looking to me for my response. I am enraptured. He hands me the thing, and after seeing his fingers play so rapidly and gently across the keys I am shocked by how light it is. It is like a newborn and I am nervous, holding it: Unable to stop imagining crushing it in my hands or under my heel.

The word, I am informed, is embrasure: The proper placement of the lips across the mouthpiece that allows your breath to flow out properly, creating the tones and shadings of the music. When Jimmy says the word his mouth naturally forms the shape, lips both soft and hard at once, and I find myself copying him without meaning to. I am sure that I look ridiculous, playing my invisible flute with a real one gripped delicately in my hands, but I don't mind.

There is a kindness in this boy that outstrips his babysitter's readiness to treat me like a human being; there is a pervasive softness in his voice and manner that reminds me of my own. I know that he is one of mine, and I can tell he feels the same way: As though we've known each other for a long time. As he encourages me, and my utter failure to make a single note or sound, I fall into imagining that he is my elder brother, engaged in only one of an infinite sequence of instructional and cooperative lessons in the ways of the world. When I am ten, I have been an elder brother for three years; when I am seven, I am rapidly and unceremoniously transformed from only to extraneous.

I imagine myself becoming Jimmy, someday soon, and explaining something kindly to a younger child, becoming neither frustrated or overinvested like a man would; I will simply lean back like this, nodding when necessary, until the child figures it out on his own. For years, I will think of him, and try to emulate his easygoing tenderness and bored grin, and wonder where he came from. How he stayed soft, when all the world demands such harshness.

My mother approaches, more wary as I age, and stands uncomfortably watching while Jimmy and I discuss the proper handling of the flute. He offers her advice, about the money and about the instrument's upkeep, and she's patient with his information until it is discharged and he says goodbye. I look around for his mother, but don't see her anywhere.

In the space where Jimmy was standing during our impromptu lesson, sitting on the glass counter, is a key, dingy and brassy in color. I snatch it up without thinking and place it in my pocket while my mother completes her transaction. There is a blush in my cheeks, from having made a friend of my own accord, and my mother grins down indulgently before issuing her proclamation: No flutes will be purchased, rented or financed today. I will be playing the English horn.

I shrug, having lost a battle I never expected to win, and picture myself with the awkward, tubby thing. It looks like me, I think, and having never smelled its mouthpiece I imagine myself sophisticated one day, wearing a tuxedo onstage, blasting my horn in a great orchestra. The reality soon proves somewhat different, and I abandon the English horn exactly six weeks after it is acquired, explaining to my mother that the Band teacher is a member of the patriarchy, and thus proving the whole experience was a valuable one.

But I think often of the boy in the music shop, and the item he left behind. When I am finally twelve I lose my third quartz crystal -- strung just like the first two on Mother's embroidery thread, royal blue and bright red every time -- I am informed that I will not be gifted with another. Enlightenment, my mother learns and relearns, is not cheap. But I don't mind losing its cool comfort against my chest; I take the key from my navy-blue change bank, digging it out of its bed of wheat pennies and buffalo nickels, and hang it on a plain leather strap, and wear it only when I need it most.

"Because I'm ten," this means nothing. When I'm ten we move so often, around the American Southwest, that you can't even depend on it to mean a new school or new things. Twelve means a milestone, it means that time has passed, that I have lived twelve years on this planet. That is all it means. When I am ten, all I can think about is the future. I am unpleasantly surprised by the existence of even trivial responsibilities, often several times a day. I am unpredictable. Lazy at times and overly productive at others, creating imaginary worlds and cities and occupations. Whole lives.

Because I am ten, I am lonely, and because I am ten, I imagine that nobody else in the world is lonely, and because I am ten I imagine that when I do make friends it's only a coincidence, born out of mutual misery. I cannot imagine that my existence amounts to much, because I am ten, and assume that I vanish from the mental landscape of my fellows when I'm gone as quickly as they do from mine.

When I am ten, I am jealous of my parents for their musical talents. My mother is a lovely singer, my father an accomplished instrumentalist with his own mournfully lovely voice. I decide to join the school band, in order to better understand the musical notes and tablature that entrances them.

This is the beginning of mutual breakdown, in my relationship with the English horn -- sour spit smell of brass -- and with the Band teacher, a moustachioed man married to the school principal, who two hours a week made the trek to our small elementary school in order to be offended by our lack of talent and our associated lack of respect for him and for music as an abstract concept.

When I am ten, the selection of the English horn is a concrete and unforgettable signpost on the road to understanding the abstract concept of poverty. The decision to join Band, made in a split second, is accompanied by another, secretive decision: That I shall play the flute. Even so young, from Peter & The Wolf alone, I know there is something precious and a little too sweet about the flute. But it is gorgeous.

There is a weekend getaway when I'm five, to some mountain paradise, Durango or Cloudcroft: surprised by a hailstorm, tumbling down the dandelion hillside with my mother to escape, laughing all the way into a tourist shop. I choose for purchase a train engineer's cap to match my overalls, blue with white pinstripes, and cherish it until it is outgrown and passed along to a teddybear, who wears it proudly.

When the skies have cleared again, and the patrons and visitors have come back out into the square, grinning and laughing at each other about the sudden shifts in weather, my mother and I have lunch. Afterward, there is a man -- slim and beautiful, with hair to his shoulders -- leaning against a wall on the train station's porch, playing the flute. He reminds me, sharply and physically, of my most beloved television character, the young Toby from Unico In The Island Of Magic, who plays the flute sadly in the night, standing on branches before a wide moon, overpowered and controlled by his master Lord Kuruku, forced to summon animals to their doom. I am transfixed.

It is some measure of time before I regain my composure and move from blankly staring to an even more awkwardly pretended nonchalance, at which point I recognize the tune he is playing: "The Rose," one of my mother's most favorite songs. The coincidence, I believe, is profoundly meaningful; I squeeze my mother's hand so hard she jumps. I spend a few moments fantasizing that my mother will take her place beside him, and they will entertain the tourists for hours, singing song after song.

The poor young busker's hair blows in the quiet after-storm breeze, across his face; it is the most romantic moment of my life. I wonder if I am experiencing what they call a heart attack, which is to blame, I know, for the recent death of my mother's grandfather. When I am five, death sounds like a vacation to somewhere fantastic, which would be at this moment redundant, and so in some way, the pieces fit together. Some say love, it is a hunger, but no matter what age I only recognize it as a roaring, ripping, ecstasy of destruction. I don't know what I am feeling, looking at the boy with the flute, but I consider seriously and impassively that it could be the onset of death.

Realizing that my mother's attention is flagging, I commandeer some money from her and make a show of presenting it to the young man. He barely looks up, just nods and continues to play, and I lose something.