(4)

There are very few incidents from my childhood that remain really clear in my mind.  Most of my memories have faded with the passage of time.  Those that remain with me do so largely because I've relived them in my imagination so often that they have long since become a permanent part of my personal mythology.  These memories form the basis of the story I tell myself of who and what I am.  One of them concerns something which happened between me and my father.

When I was eight years old, my parents separated.  I did not then know why.  I remember only lying in my bedroom late at night, shrouded in darkness, and sometimes hearing the sound of voices raised in a distant part of the house, sometimes feeling the reverberation of a door slammed in anger, occasionally hearing the noise of a car crackling along the driveway and roaring away down the road, leaving only silence behind.  Such incidents left me with vague feelings of anxiety, but little more; I was young enough – and they happened, at that period of time, often enough – to take on a feeling almost of normality for me.  I did not know then that the source of the trouble was that my father had developed a drinking problem.  Never did he demonstrate any particularly abnormal behavior around me, nor did he display any of the incoherences typical of the serious drinker that I can recall.  He was just my dad.  Sometimes he was playful, sometimes preoccupied; sometimes he was cheerful and full of fun; sometimes he was irritable and morose.  In looking back on it, I suppose I might best describe him as "moody."  In fact, he was probably at least some of the time drunk.

Then, one day, my father packed up a suitcase and went away.  I remember that day quite well.  It was early spring, too soon for flowers, still chilly outside and muddy everywhere.  I was sitting out on the backporch steps, hunched over with my knees drawn up not only because of the coldness in the air but because of the terrible scene that I sensed was being played out inside the house.  It was that hour of stillness that falls between afternoon and evening; daylight was waning, the sun nothing but a pale glimmer in an even paler sky.  I heard the door open behind me and, looking up, saw first the suitcase in my father's hand, and then my father's face.  I remember that suitcase:  it was tan and brown, with gold-colored locks on it that shut with a snap.  I remember too, with an even more vivid sense of detail, my father's face.  He had what I might normally call a strong rather than a handsome face, with its close-cropped frizz of curly black hair and its prominent nose, a scar running across the bridge of it where it had once been broken – but his face, that day, wore an expression that was terrible to see.  Mouth turned downward, black eyes wandering in bewildered pain, brow deeply furrowed, his was the face of a man both haunted and hunted.  I couldn't stand to see that face; I had to look somewhere – anywhere – else.  He paused on the steps beside me, and I remember wondering if he might speak – but he said nothing.  Perhaps he figured that there was nothing, really, he could say.  Instead, he reached down and ran his fingers lingeringly and, as it were, apologetically, through my hair.  Then he walked to the garage, got into the car, and just . . . drove away.

He was gone all that spring and summer.  At first he dropped by the house all the time:  he would come once a week or so to let my mother use the car for grocery shopping and occasionally at some other time if she had some special errand she needed to run; sometimes he'd stop by for no reason at all.  My brothers, my sister and I would run like excited puppies to the door, clamorously begging for his attention, and he'd squeeze each of us close.  I can still remember the feel of his hands cupping the back of my head as I wrapped my arms around his waist, pressing my face into his belly.  I remember the smell of cigarette smoke and detergent and the musty odor of cloth all mingling together with the warmth of his body to create a special smell all his own.  Those are the first memories I have of knowing what it's really like for people to love each other, of knowing that love is made both of a sweet promise and a bitter regret.  I'm sure that my father felt this way too.  That he loved his family was never in doubt; it was plainly evident from the keen pleasure he took upon seeing us, and from the look of unhappiness that showed in his eyes when he left.  Still, it was better to see him that way than to not see him at all.  Later, when my mother got a second-hand car of her own, he came to visit us much less often.  He still called on the telephone to talk sometimes, to ask us how we were and what we were doing; but eventually those calls grew more and more infrequent.  There was even one period of time, deafening to recall, when we heard nothing from him for weeks and weeks on end – nothing at all.

I don't know what my brothers and sister thought about any of this, or if they knew the reason why our father had left.  We've seldom spoken of it in the years since, preferring to let that dark period of the family's history fall away from our collective memory.  Nor was much said about it at the time, at least not so far as I remember; but then, being the youngest member of the family, I was not always made privy to whatever knowledge the rest of them shared.  They wanted to protect my innocence I suppose, for their sakes perhaps as well as my own.  I do remember catching my mother and my eldest brother having an earnest, emotional confrontation in the kitchen one night soon after my father left and I suspect that, whether out of need or necessity, she confided the secret shame of my father's alcoholism to him.  At any rate, I know that from then on my brother went about the house with an air of mysterious self-containment, and that whenever I tried to ask him about what was happening he would take on an adult's preemptive attitude towards me – though if I pushed him hard he would grow fierce, forcing me away from him as if afraid that some undercurrent of confusion might be exposed.  I would go off on my own then to find what comfort I could in solitude, for solitude alone seemed to provide me with any succor against the gulf of fear I felt gaping inside me.  My father was not here.  He was not here, he was not here; and I did not know where he was or how he was, if he were sick or well.  But it was in those days of disquietude the summer after he had left that I felt some subtle shift occurring inside me.  No longer was I afraid merely for those of us my father had left behind.  Now I was afraid for my father too.

In the fall, when my ninth birthday came, I remember my father coming over to the house to take part in the little family celebration that was being held for me.  I imagine that night as being one of both great excitement and great strain for us all.  He gave me a notepad of drawing paper I remember, and a box of colored chalk, for I loved at that time to make pictures.  But after the night of that party, there is nothing else for a time – I have no other memories of him.  I only know that, about a month or so later, my mother drew me aside one day to tell me that I was to spend the whole of the following weekend visiting my father.

Over the years I've often wondered about how the decision to do this was reached.  I suspect that I was being offered up to him as a kind of test of his ability to resume his place in the family.  I'm sure he must have told my mother that he had his drinking under control – or, more likely, that he had stopped altogether:  she would not have allowed me to stay with him otherwise.  I was meant to be, I suppose, a kind of reward for the good work he had done, as well as a sort of temptation offered of all that he might succeed in regaining were his good work to continue.  I was, for that one weekend, to be his surrogate family, to stand proxy for my mother and his other sons and daughter.  As to my having been chosen as opposed to one of my siblings, I suspect that this had to do with the fact that I was the youngest.  As the tenderest bud, so to speak, on the family tree, I was probably considered to be the one most in need of a father's as well as a mother's influence.  My brothers and sister were told that they too would get their turn to spend time with our father – if all went well this first time with me.

He picked me up one Friday evening after dinner and drove me over to the apartment house where he lived.  To get to it we had to cross a bridge that spanned a broad, shallow creek; on the other side of it lay a section of town known simply as Fifth Ward.  Fifth Ward was full of decrepit old houses and unkempt, weather-beaten yards; it's where the poor people of town lived – still live, in fact.  My father was poor then, too; he had, of course, to send most of his paycheck back home to my mother.  He lived at this time in a large, ramshackle house that had been subdivided many times over into apartments.  As I remember it, the apartment he lived in was quite small:  aside from a tiny kitchen and a bathroom, there was only a curiously long and narrow living room – more like a wide hallway, really – with a sagging couch and several heavy armchairs stuffed into it; off that was a little nook of a bedroom where he slept.  For me the weekend was to be a kind of camping trip:  I'd brought my sleeping bag and pillow along.  I don't remember much of what we did that first night – played one of the games I had brought with me perhaps; or perhaps we just lay in on his bed and watched the ancient black-and-white television he'd set up in there.  All I remember is waking up the following morning in my sleeping bag on the living room floor, feeling strange in my new surroundings but full of a kind of excited suspense.

I can't really recall much of what we did that second day.  I think my father drove me around in the car with him while he ran various errands, and then it seems to me that we stopped at a diner somewhere to eat lunch.  When we got back to the apartment I remember him making me call my mother on the telephone right away to tell her how I was doing – and then I think we really did play some of the games I'd brought with me.  But what I remember most clearly about that afternoon is how at some point my father went into the kitchen and opened up a bottle of beer.  "Just one won't do no harm," he said, and gave me a little wink.  That wink I remember particularly because it made me feel as if he were inviting me to enter into some kind of private alliance with him:  I was to be his co-conspirator.  My response to this suggestion must have been acceptable because that first beer was soon followed by a second, and then a third . . .  I don't know how many times he went to the refrigerator that day, how many beers he ended up drinking.  All I know is that we played my games and teased each other about who was winning and who wasn't until after awhile it got to be dinnertime.  Then he got up, went to the kitchen stove and boiled some noodles, threw them into a frying pan along with a package of hamburger meat and some kind of a sauce, and we ate.  We didn't speak much during dinner though.  My father had told me time and again how glad he was to have me with him, and I believed him; but I felt as if he were looking for some kind of affirmation from me that I didn't really know how to give, or that he was perhaps trying to provide me with some kind of sustenance he wasn't entirely certain he had it in him to offer.  After we finished eating we cleaned up the dishes; then we went in and lay on his bed and watched hours and hours of TV.  Eventually I got tired and went into the living room, curled up in my sleeping bag, and fell asleep.

I don't know how long I slept, but I woke up some time later that night filled with a sudden sense of unease.  There was nothing particularly wrong; I think it was just the darkness, the unfamiliarity of the room, and the fact that I'd been away from home two nights in a row that made me feel all at once unhappy, and maybe a little bit scared.  I got out of my sleeping bag and, clad only in my little-boy's droopy white cotton underwear, made my way to my father's bedroom.

My father had undressed by then; he was sitting up in bed with a pillow stuffed behind him, an open bottle of beer on a little table nearby and a lit cigarette in his hand.  I remember the sight of his bare, hairless chest and thinking how pale the skin there looked, as if he hadn't gotten any of the summer sun.  Also I remember that his shoulders seemed to me narrow and too thin.  But he had one leg crooked out from under the bedcovers, and that was muscular, the white skin covered with curly black hairs.  He saw me standing in the doorway and asked if anything was wrong.  When I nodded, he said, "What is it?  You have a bad dream or something?"  And although this wasn't precisely true, I nodded again.  I asked if I could get into bed with him.  He thought about that for a moment, then said, "Sure."  So I crawled under the covers and curled up beside him, his arm draped loosely about my shoulder.  I can still remember the smell of his skin, mixed in with the smell of beer and cigarette smoke hanging in the air; it was an odor not sweet, not sour, but a smell like a sort of warm fermentation, altogether human and comforting to me.  I lay my head down against his chest, my hand resting on his belly, and tried to go to sleep again.

But as the minutes went by, I grew not more sleepy, but gradually more and more wakeful instead.  I had seen my father in states of partial undress before, but had never lain close to him this way when he was unclothed.  I know that I was already at this age becoming aware, however indistinctly, of an intense interest in the male physique:  I found my father's body fascinating.  His chest was hard with bone; it rose and fell under my cheek like a broad, flat shield with each undulation of breath.  I stroked his belly a bit; it was soft and warm to my touch.  Under his belly button there was a line of fine dark hairs feathering downward; I petted these hairs with my fingers, following them down to where they began to broaden and spread until gradually I'd worked my hand a little ways underneath the covers.  My father was wearing no underwear.  Suddenly I came to a thick patch of coarse hair.  My fingers coiled with surprise – I had no hair down there at all and hadn't realized he would have so much.  "You're hairy!" I said, looking up at him.  He sort of smiled a little at that and shrugged his shoulder.  "Sure," he said.  I smiled too.  Then, with a sudden, intense burst of curiosity I reached down a bit farther and, much to my surprise – and his, I'm sure – felt my fingertips brush the long, soft, floppy length of his penis.  When I touched it he stiffened a little and shifted in bed, giving me a hard, quick squeeze across the shoulders that warned me to stop now, stop whatever it was I was doing, but had at the same time the effect of pulling me a little closer to him.  I withdrew my hand and glanced upwards – but my father did not look at me.  He took a long drag on his cigarette and then stamped it out, set the ashtray carefully down on the bedside table, swallowed the last of his beer, then turned back again to watch TV.  I replaced my hand on his belly and for a time just let it rest there, feeling its warm roundness rise and fall with his breathing.  But by now my curiosity had been piqued, and it was as if I sensed that a small window of opportunity was opening up for me, a chance to find out something about grownup men that, for better or worse, I wanted very much to know.  I think it was the fact that this was my father's body that made me feel as if it might be permissible for me to explore it.  Whatever the reason, I once again pushed my hand slowly down under the covers and, finding myself uncorrected in what I was doing, carefully began my explorations.  First I ran my fingers lightly along his thigh, wondering at its broadness, its hairiness, its hard muscularity and intrinsic strength.  Farther up where his legs began to meet I noticed that the skin grew warmer, was almost moist to my touch.  Then I felt the soft, warm, fuzzy puddle of his scrotal sac and, above that, the heavy weight of his penis flopping off to one side.  My father gave a little snort of impatience as I touched it again and brought his legs together sharply; again he gave me that jerky little squeeze across my shoulders that warned me to stop what I was doing, but which also pulled me more tightly to him.  I withdrew my hand.  Pressing my ear against his chest I heard, deep inside his body, the steady thump thump thump of his heart; my heart too was beating fast.  I was wide awake now, alert to the fact that what I was doing was somehow dangerous, but also intensely exciting to me.  I don't know what I was thinking exactly – just that I felt nearer to my father then than I'd ever felt before, and didn't want that feeling to stop.  And I thought:  Perhaps my father was feeling that way too.  I couldn't tell.  I glanced up at him but he only stared, as if transfixed, at the television set.  I saw that a little furrow had formed between his eyebrows and that his eyes were a far-away black.  And then, still not looking at me, he slowly drew one leg upward until I felt his kneecap brushing against my curled-up legs; the other leg he bent and raised so that it created a little tent of the bedcovers.  Whether this was to provide me with a secret place to continue my explorations or merely to hide his growing erection I don't suppose I'll ever know for sure.  But I took my cue, so to speak, from him.  Pretending as though I too was not really thinking about it, as if I weren't really aware of what I was doing, I gazed steadfastly at the TV while allowing my hand to gradually slip under the covers once more.  Again I felt the thick patch of coarse hair under my fingertips; again I felt a certain warm moistness there; and then – there it was, my father's penis, grown much bigger now.  Thick and muscular, it arced upward as if to greet my hand.  When I touched it he took a small, sharp breath; then he shifted his weight in bed so that his body was turned towards me slightly.  A sense of excited expectation seemed to well up between us.  I heard him say, soothingly, cajolingly, "It's alright" – though whether he was speaking to me or to himself I couldn't tell for sure.  Now I grew confused; I didn't really know what he expected me to do.  I ran my fingers experimentally along the length of his penis, which felt like a giant's to my hand; touched again the loose soft folds of his scrotum . . .  Then I withdrew my hand and just let it rest for a time on his belly.  "It's alright, it's alright," he kept saying, more urgently now – but still I didn't know what he meant.  I felt his breath against the top of my head; he kissed me there lightly; kissed me again.  One large, rough hand ran up and down my back, found my shoulder and cupped it, squeezing its roundness in a hard, broad palm.  He reached down with his other hand and placed it over my own.  Then he took my hand in his and pushed them both under the covers, curling our fingers tightly together around the shaft of his penis.  Slowly he began to stroke it up and down, up and down . . .  "It's alright, it's alright," he murmured, but now his voice had grown heavy and low – almost he sounded tired, I thought, his breathing had become so deep and labored.  His lips grazed over the top of my head; he squeezed my shoulder with his palm and moved my hand up and down his penis, up and down faster and faster for I don't know how long until suddenly I felt his whole body clenching together like a fist.  He gave a pained little cry, then another; I felt his penis spasm . . . spasm . . .  And then at last, very slowly, that sense of something that had been between us, joining us together, seemed to empty itself out and ebb away.

He grew very quiet then, almost rigid, very tense.  Suddenly he jerked my hand away from him and, disentangling himself from me and the bedsheets he all at once got up and left the room so quickly I hardly had time to see him go.  I heard water running in the bathroom, and when he came back a few minutes later I saw that he had a heavy towel wrapped about his middle.  I sat very still and watched him closely for some time, but he did not look at me.  Instead he sat down on the edge of the bed, his back long and curved, his head drooping low.  He sat there so long and so quietly that after awhile I grew worried.  "Daddy?" I said, reverting to a babyish form of address I'd seldom used before, "Are you you okay?"  His head jerked up at that and he stared at me intensely, a look of wonder, almost of alarm, on his face.  "Sure," he said.  "I'm okay.  What about you?  Are you okay?"  I shrugged.  "I guess so," I said.  He continued to stare at me for a long time.  At last he said, "Do you think you can go back to sleep now?"  I nodded.  "Then why don't you go lay back down in your sleeping bag," he said, and gave a little jerk with his chin towards the door.  So that's what I did.  I got up, went to the living room, burrowed down into my sleeping bag on the floor, and went to sleep.

What I remember of the next day is rather vague.  I know that my father gave me so many worried looks as we sat eating breakfast that I asked him finally if I could just go outside and play.  He helped me on with my boots and my jacket – I let him even though I felt too old to be needing such help – and made sure that I was wearing a hat.  In fact, he did all the things that a good father is supposed to do.  Just as I was about to go out I remember him kneeling down before me and looking me straight in the eyes.  "Lemme ask you something," he began, then stopped and glanced away.  "Are you . . . alright?  I mean, are you . . .  Is everything . . .  Are you . . ."  "I'm okay," I told him.  He sighed, as if in relief.  Then he took my chin in his hand and looked me in the eyes again.  "You're a good boy," he said, and now his voice was almost stern, as if he were telling me something important.  I nodded vigorously and turned quickly to go.  He didn't need to explain; I knew right away what he was trying to say.  He meant that I was not to speak about what had happened between us the night before.  He meant that I should forget all about it, should forget it so completely that it would be in a way as if it had never happened.  Perhaps I never could forget it, not entirely; and perhaps he knew that too.  But I knew what he was trying to say.  In fact, it seemed to me that from that day forward I often understood the things that people wanted to say, but didn't know how.  Or at least, I understood that sometimes there are things for which people have no words, that there are things which happen sometimes in life that can't ever really be explained.  They are nameless.  Nameless not because they are unspeakable exactly, but because we simply have no words with which to properly express them, and lack the necessary courage to use such words as we have.

It was rather bleak outside, as November days around here tend to be.  The sky was white, the air chilly.  There was not really much to do in the yard behind my father's apartment house, but I spent a long time out there anyway.  I remember that the yard itself had large patches in it that were scraped clean of grass; the dirt underneath was as hard and cold as cement.  The trees were all shorn of leaves; they reared up like huge thorns against the sky.  There was a dog tied with a rope to a metal peg in the ground over in the neighbor's yard.  He was a scrappy little fellow, but he seemed lonely.  I remember I spent a long time playing with him.

In the years following I often thought about what had happened between me and my father that night.  My brothers and sister never did go to stay with him – but he moved back home with us the following spring, having given up drinking for good; and when he did he and my mother were so much in love again that the whole house seemed to blossom with it.  Under its influence all the family bonds were fully restored; we became once more, in fact as well as in appearance, as normal a family as any other.  Perhaps my father and I were from that time on somewhat restrained in the physical expression of the mutual affection we felt – but there is nothing really so strange in that.  It was simply part of the normal growing apartness that comes sooner or later to all parents and children.  There was one brief period when I felt anger towards him, thinking that what had happened between us that night might constitute some form of "abuse" – but I always knew in my heart that this was not the case.  I knew that what had happened was caused as much by my own innate attraction to men as it was by my father's loneliness, both emotional and physical.

I've also had to spend much time disentangling what happened that night from the thought that it may have somehow inspired my homosexuality.  But the truth is that I would have turned out to be the same man that I am now, regardless.  What I've been left with instead is an understanding of just how intense an emotional life most men carry within them, and at what cost they hold it at bay.  It has since then become my desire, almost my cause I might say, to try to provide emotional support as well as give physical succor to the men with whom I have been in love.  However poorly I may have applied my cause, the cause itself remains a valid, almost a noble, one.  And although it is true that there are some things which happen in life that ought perhaps never to have occurred, they need not I think remain forever unnamed.  The reasons for their occurrence – loneliness, sorrow, desire, pleasure, love – are, after all, intrinsic to everyone.  What happened between me and my father in that dingy little apartment bedroom one cold autumn night was not a dirty thing, nor an ugly thing, but a thing almost innocent in its expression of primitive need.  It was, at any rate, a thing altogether human.  Sometimes, I think, there is justification enough in that.

IT'S ABOUT TIME