July 1979
Dragonflies skim above the surface of Young’s Pond, then dart among the tall grasses that grow at its edge. I sit on the ground beneath the canopy of a low-growing American Elm, between the water and a narrow stretch of asphalt leading into the woods. A paperback lies propped open in my lap. Half its cover has been scissored away, as I’d originally fished it out of Woolco’s ten cent cut-out bin. Given the clue that it’s
Jane E by a truncated Charlott, a clever person might be able to reckon what I’m reading.
Unrelenting sun and temperatures in the high eighties have banished the squirrels and chipmunks into cooler, shadier retreats. Cicadas huzz in the loblollies that surround the pond’s western end; their drowsy clamor makes my own eyelids droop. Bryan Park takes a siesta during these post-lunch summer hours. The man-to-man cruising action that occupies the park’s northern side won’t resume in full force for several more hours, once the sun descends beyond the ridge of pines.
But I’m here to escape, more than to get off. Every summer, my parents enroll me in whatever free enrichment programs they can find, hoping to add a few more bullet points to my college application resumé as well as to keep me out of their hair. This year, in the break between my ninth and tenth grade, it’s beginner’s Russian at the high school. Like most days, I’d finished my suggested Cyrillic exercises in the morning. And again, like most days, during our sack lunch break I’d hopped on my bike and vamoosed. It’s an ungraded course. I won’t get penalized. I doubt the teacher will note my absence.
No one expects me home for another couple of hours, so here I sit, reading a familiar favorite and sometimes dozing while I assess what trouble I might get into. This cruising area of the park’s not completely dead; every now and then a car will wind up the long drive around the pond, headed for the shady enclosure of pines beyond. The Virginia heat is too oppressive and the day too lazy for me to stir my bones, so when a driver’s head cranes in my direction as he passes, I pretend disinterest and let him continue on.
Then I see the white Cadillac turn from the residential road bordering the park. It’s a decked-out ’76 Eldorado convertible, bigger than the Queen Mary and almost as majestic. Sunlight glints from its chrome surfaces, blinding me as it draws over the bridge my way. The vehicle slows to a stop where I relax. Today, the driver has pulled closed the roof. When he rolls down the passenger side window, I feel the cool cloud of air conditioning from within. I’m jealous. Neither of my parents’ old junkers has A/C.
He’s not wearing a seatbelt—no one wears seatbelts—so he’s easily able to stick out his head, tip up his straw hat, and survey me. He sports a formal shirt and full suit of seersucker. “Good afternoon, young man.”
I nod. I know this fellow, but I’m never willing to look him in the eye. “‘lo.”
“Hot one,” he ventures. His Deep South drawl is as broad and wide as the car he drives. Again, I nod, biting down a comment that he might find it cooler were he wearing something other than a suit. I’m walking a fine line here: I don’t want to engage too much, but at the same time, I’m unwilling to deflect him away. So I toy with my book as if I hope to get back to it, but at the same time I arrange my body so that he’s got a view of my long, skinny legs spread wide in the grass. I can practically hear the man lick his chops, like he’s Wile E. Coyote envisioning roast Road Runner. “You enjoying yourself?”
I allow the comment to pass unremarked. The two of us have performed this dance before, mostly with the same result. Instead of speaking, I rise to my feet, brush dirt from the seat of my shorts, and lean against the elm. My book tumbles into the ground. As I toy with a blade of grass, I finally allow my eyes to meet his, if only for a brief instant. “Are you?”
He has to clear his throat several times before he can speak again. “I’ll be parking in the woods for a spell. If you want to get out of the heat…come find me.”
Shy once more, I nod and look at the ground while I wait for him to leave. The Eldorado’s motor hums as he pulls himself back into the driver’s seat. I watch the battleship maneuver its way past the pond and up beyond the bank of pines beyond.
When he’s out of sight, I seize the handlebars of my bike and, wheels clacking, hop astride to follow.
***
Jules Davenport is my father’s best friend. At least, as far as I can tell. The world of adult friendships mystifies me. During my grade school days I could have elaborated with uncanny precision the degrees of closeness between me and my friends; there wasn’t a year in which I didn’t have a designated absolute bestie. Even now, I can rattle off the names of the honored. Sweet Beth, with whom I shared birthday parties until third grade. Then Adam, who lived in one of the large houses fronting nearby Confederate Avenue with eight older brothers and sisters. Curly-haired Isaac, from fourth to sixth grade, until he’d become more interested in girls. Then Mark, the seminarian’s son. He’s nominally still my best friend, though I feel the closeness fading now we’re in different high schools.
Adults though. Man. Do they really even have friends? My dad has a weekly tennis partner from the university, but fumbling about the court is all they ever do together. My mom sometimes visits with our neighbor Kay from around the corner, but the moment she’s back home, she starts mocking Kay’s hippie affinity for carob and wheat germ. Adult attachments are nothing like the ride-or-die bonds kids maintain, from what I can tell.
If either of my parents have a best friend, though, it’s probably Jules. For years, a couple of nights a week, he has come around in his formal, natty suits for a cup of coffee and a sit-down at the dining room table. Jules is an antique hunter who’ll from time to time take my mother to estate sales; she’ll arrive home with amazed reports of how much he’s spent on a settee or spindly secretary. He’s a professor of genetics at the Medical College of Virginia, the clinical branch of the university where my parents teach. Both he and my dad are on the faculty senate, so they spend long hours in my dad’s home office arguing over strategies to make the lousy university president see things their way. Just hearing that Jules is heading over is my cue either to retreat to my bedroom or leave the house outright, to escape the terminal boredom of having to listen to the grownups debate campus politics.
My mom and dad have both recently turned forty, but Jules is much older. Fuck, with his graying locks and white beard, he seems impossibly ancient. Like, maybe even as crusty as fifty-eight or nine. He lives in a house perhaps a half-mile away, nominally still in our middle-class enclave but perilously close to a transitional neighborhood that used to be red-lined, its inhabitants denied bank loans and mortgages that were anything less than punishing. Because his house is stuffed to the gills with the fussy antiques he collects, so close to a dicey part of town, my dad volunteers to check it twice a day when Jules takes one of his frequent get-aways to Palm Springs, or to Provincetown, or Key West.
Our family moved here in nineteen-seventy, right in the middle of my first grade. Jules has been a constant presence in the house ever since. He’s never anything less than polite to me, with his old-school courtly manners and traditional Southern gentleman mannerisms. And yet I shy away from him whenever he appears at my home—not merely because his arrival presages a lot of boring adult talk about faculty senate affairs.
Because even in grade school, like recognizes like. And fears it.
***
So hot is the afternoon that when I’d sat by the pond, the sweat on my skin evaporated as quickly as it formed. When I slide into the Eldorado’s passenger seat, the blasting air conditioning freezes every moist inch. My clothes adhere in frigid patches. I can’t deny the cool feels good, though.
My bike leans beneath a tree within eyeshot. Jules doesn’t even turn his head when I join him. I don’t always accept these invitations. He can’t take it for granted that he’ll whistle, and I’ll come. But today’s a scorcher, and I need a break.
He’s got the Richmond public radio station playing a piano concerto at a low volume. While I cool off, he pulls from his suit coat pocket a container of white Tic Tacs and helps himself. When he holds out the plastic box, I decline with a shake of my hand. He sucks on the tiny mint for a moment, staring at the empty picnic shelter beyond that bakes in the sun.
Then he makes a decision. “Time to help you out of those clothes, I think.”
I tremble a little when his fingertips brush my waist, but lift my arms high and allow him to draw my t-shirt up my torso. My skin blossoms with gooseflesh. Not from the blast from the vents, but from Jules’ warm breath, close to my chest. His hands run up and down my ribcage; I’m so skinny that he could play the protruding bones like a xylophone. His hands fumble at my waistband, popping open the button to my shorts and tugging down the zipper. I lift my hips so he can maneuver them down my thighs. Next, his thumbs hook the elastic of my white briefs. They join my shorts in a tangle around my ankles. Naked like this, I can’t conceal my arousal. My dick is rigid, pointing to the car’s roof.
But I turn my head away from Jules as he leans in from the driver’s seat to press his lips against my pale skin. If he asks—which he won’t—I’ll tell him I’m keeping an eye out for intruders.
The truth is that I don’t want to witness what he’s doing to me. I don’t want him at all to refer to my home or my family, to acknowledge in any way our years of acquaintance. From sheer willpower and need, between my comforting home life and this seedy realm of intrigue and danger, I like to pretend I’ve erected a wall of unbreakable diamond. One word, one stray smile from Jules might shatter it into thousands of glittering, lethal shards.
***
I might never have wondered about Jules’ sexuality at all, except that when I’m eleven or twelve, over dinner my mother makes an announcement: “Jules Davenport is definitely not a homosexual.” She looks around the table to ascertain that the information has sunk in. “He is a confirmed bachelor.”
Her use of his full name makes a curious proclamation all the more consequential. Why did she say such a thing? I can’t remember. Quavering on the cusp of self-discovery myself, I would never, ever have questioned Jules’ private life. Had my little sister asked? Doubtful. Perhaps my mother simply spoken the thought aloud to quell her own doubts about the man who spent so many evenings at this very table.
Regardless, I don’t take her words at face value. If anything, drawing attention to what she declares Jules isn’t makes me question why anyone would assume Jules is. Would it be because until her recent passing, he lived with his elderly mother? Because of his soft-spoken mannerisms, his formal suits, his Truman Capote drawl? Have people been speculating that he’s light in the loafers due to his unmarried state, his trips to the Keys, his preciseness of speech, the ostentation of his clothing and automobile? He’s never had a wife or even a lady friend. Is it because he prefers the company of men?
Or is it Jules’ home, which even my dad has described as fastidious and feminine? I’ve only seen inside the house once, but it’s so fussy and heavily strewn with doilies that I recoiled, frightened at this glimpse into what I am certain will be my own inevitable future: the domicile of an elderly homosexual with no one in his life and nothing to do but collect monstrosities of mahogany. Already by my late middle school years, I’m policing myself for any manifestations of what makes Jules suspicious to others and eradicating them before they become a habit. Or worse, a problem.
My parents are as broad-minded as anyone. More than most, in fact. But not even my progressive parents would admit to knowing anything as vile and pitiable as a homosexual.
***
Among the pickup trucks, cheap Datsuns, and beat-up gas guzzlers that the local cruisers drive here, the Eldorado stands out. The first time I’d spied it, I knew immediately to whom it belonged. I don’t always make time to climb inside with him. I’m wary about Jules coming to expect my attention. This afternoon, though, I’m unlikely to get many offers. Certainly not one with better air conditioning.
So I endure the touch of his hands on my bare skin, freckled though they are with liver spots. Despite the lingering clinical scent to his seersucker, I rest my forearms across his shoulders when his mouth goes searching for its prize. And though his hair is gray and stiff from whatever potion he uses to slick it down, I run my fingers across it and pull him down upon me, because my aggression always elicits a vibration of pure pleasure from the very back of his throat.
But I keep my gaze out the window, my head lolled back against the seat rest. I only tolerate what’s happening to me.
Tolerate. What bullshit. My erection betrays more than tolerance. So does my quickening pulse, the prickling at my skin, the way my hips automatically move as his mouth slides up and down my cock. I’ve happily submitted to worse from fellows a fraction as polite. I’ve given my body to infinitely uglier men. For the sake of a couple of bills, I’ve spread my legs to brutes who smell like day-old urine, and I’ve done it without a second thought.
Yet I treat Jules as if he’s Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo. I know it’s wrong.
I am growing up queer in a time when queerness is outlawed, in a place where no one dares admit any sexual expression that’s not hetero. Pride in being gay is absolutely unimaginable. Even with another of my kind, I am utterly alone. There are no school clubs for me, no discussion groups to join, no public consensus on the proper ways to behave or the correct words to describe myself. In a wilderness where none of us may embrace our identities, I’ll find nether mentors nor guides. I’m constantly starting from scratch. Developing my own ethic. Hewing my own moral compass out of raw materials. This secret life of mine is the ultimate DIY.
I’ve never yet heard the phrase pity fuck, but I’ve arrived at the concept on my own. Yet I see no harm in allowing someone undesirable a chance at my body, on occasion. Giving myself strikes me as a kind thing to do. Perhaps in my old age, someone will return the favor. These periodic trysts with Jules aren’t charity, though. Pretending that Jules is too loathsome to deserve me does him a disservice.
No, what we share in these moments, stolen beneath a canopy of pine, is greater than youth condescending to age. Worlds collide whenever I allow Jules to remove my clothing—and that frightens me. Our proximity is a taboo; we cross a line whenever I climb into his car. In the Eldorado’s cool, liminal space between fantasy and reality, we can make real the carnal dreams no one suspects behind our everyday facades.
Every time I’m here, though, I’m aware that beneath this convertible roof, the impenetrable wall of diamond I’ve erected between my two existences becomes soap bubble thin. I am afraid to stir or even to move, lest it pop.
My breathing becomes ragged. My right hand clutches at the window ledge; my left pulls the back of Jules’ head onto me as I plunge myself to the back of his throat. He gags, but quickly recovers to gobble my copious spurts, swallowing each with a satisfied gargle. When I subside, the air conditioning once again chills my clammy skin. Jules sits up, draws a handkerchief from his suit pocket, and dabs at his forehead. He tries to wipe away at me, but I hastily retrieve my tee from the floor and swab myself off with that.
Please don’t talk to me, I silently pray as I pull up my shorts. Please, no questions. Please just let me go. Two planetary bodies may temporarily have veered close, but it’s time for them to resume their separate orbits.
I want to bolt out and slam the door behind me, but I have been instilled with the manners of a junior Southern gentleman. So I pause, hands folded in my lap. “Thanks,” I murmur, staring straight ahead.
He’s equally diffident, though he laughs slightly with embarrassment as he continues sponging away at himself with the handkerchief. Perhaps struggling with similar feelings, he to looks elsewhere. “And I thank you,” is his grave reply.
Finally, I can clamber from the car and reclaim my bike from beneath the nearby tree. When I pedal down the road in the direction of the pond, Jane E stuffed in my back pocket, my legs seem a little shaky. Moments later, I hear the Eldorado’s engine purring close.
When I look over my shoulder to gauge how much of the road it occupies, for a split second my eyes connect with Jules’. Almost immediately, we look away.
But when he passes, I can see him nod into the rear view mirror, once, with deliberation.
Like has recognized like.
***
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