Autumn 1985
Babyface, they call me. All the grad students in the English department have picked up on the moniker. “Hey, babyface,” they’ll say, as they pass me on the fourth floor of the Hibbs building. “How’re classes going, babyface?”
The nickname’s not used without affection. I’m well-liked within the department, much to my surprise. By the first two weeks of my Master’s degree program, I’d spoken up in class more than all four undergraduate years combined; I discovered my peers respected my opinions. The academic reputation that had taken a bruising as a sophomore and junior is on the rebound. Dr. Levan is a notoriously hard-to-please professor who teaches our academic methods class. He’s such a stickler for the MLA style that in our first assignment, only I and one other student escaped failing by producing error-free bibliographies. When, at the end of another class scolding, he had brandished one of my essays, called out my name, and announced, “This is of a quality that should be published!”, I’d feared from the other MA candidates the same sort of blackballing a teacher’s praise might have gotten me in high school.
But no, they were proud one of their own had gotten such high commendations from the most fearsome of faculty. Ever since, I’ve been in demand for study groups. The MFA students in creative writing invite me to the Village Cafe for coffee, where in a crowded booth, I nurse a cola and read as they hunch over their journals to scribble. When they throw bohemian parties in their little apartments, serving shots of Midori in jelly glasses, cross-legged on the floor, I’m always on the guest list. For the first time in my life, I’m popular—or whatever passes for it, among a certain subset of teaching assistants in one of the most minor graduate programs at a big university.
But still, when I emerge from the tiny office I occupy in shifts with two other students, it’s always to my new nickname. “Babyface!” they’ll say, dragging me by the sleeve to the terminal room. “I think the computer ate my paper. Come see if it’s really gone?” And I, with five years’ experience of writing long essays in EMACS, will follow.
The pet name is my own fault. An urban university attracts an older, working demographic. Most of my fellow graduate students are in their thirties and even forties. When I’d enrolled in the fall and found myself surrounded by scholars twice my age or more, I’d attracted attention. “How old are you?” they’d exclaim during break, or after class.
They gave the distinct impression they regarded my youth as freakish, and I, wary of being ostracized, demurred. “Oh, I just have one of those young-looking faces.”
They’d pry, trying to learn more. Wasn’t I fresh out of college? How old was I, exactly? My inclination is always to push back against public scrutiny of my private business; I share what I want, when and how, and not because of peer pressure. Through evasions and some outright lies, I finally manage to leave an impression I’m twenty-five and back in school after a break, instead of really being a hair past twenty-one, with an undergraduate diploma so fresh the ink is barely dry. Most of my freshman writing students are older than I. However, in my instructor drag—pleated tweed trousers and pinstripe dress shirts from the Spiegel catalog, my dad’s narrow ties from the nineteen-sixties—I have no problems leading a classroom. I assume a podium as if all my life I’ve been speaking in public before strangers. I’m engaging. Confident.
But still intensely private. My closest friend these days is Rand, a gangly thirty-five-year-old from Kentucky who has spent most of his adult life in the military. At times I wonder if I’m friends with Rand because in him I see an older, alternate-universe version of myself, one whose hair had gone from blond to pitch-black, like my mother, instead of remaining fair. If I’d not worn braces in my early teens, my teeth might be as crooked at his, my overbite as prominent; if I’d not gotten contact lenses, my spectacles might be as thick and unavoidable. Rand, however, is undeniably, doggedly heterosexual, though. His crush on one female teaching assistant is the stuff of legend. Whenever she walks into a room Rand occupies, he’s all puppy-dog eyes and wagging tail, an overgrown amiable Labrador anxious to please his mistress. I suspect it’s this behavior that accounts for the time I spend with Rand at school: his crush is discussed so much that it distracts any curiosity about my own affairs.
Not that there’s any romance in my life. Sex…some. I’ve returned to the Business Building men’s rooms when I’m horny. They’re nothing like a decade before, at the height of the seventies, when the overflow of men cruising for cock would spill upward, story by story, and one might encounter five floors of restrooms crammed with men in the stalls and at the urinals, eyes probing, mouths welcoming, hands reaching out to connect. A decade ago, there were only two venereal diseases of note and they both could be treated with antibiotics.
A decade ago, catching something wasn’t a death sentence.
Lately the restrooms are nothing like they might have been even three or four years in the past, much less ten. The long-standing second floor glory hole has long since been bolted over with metal plates on both sides. The graffiti urging men to show up at certain times or at other campus hot spots has disappeared. In the past I could walk into the room, take a stall, and within moments have an erect cock and a pair of spread legs shoving beneath the partition, demanding attention.
These days, I grade papers or read for my own seminars, the lone occupant of the echoing restroom. Sometimes, after a half-hour or more, someone will push open the door next to mine, drop his trousers, and tap his toe. But it always takes a long while, and sex is never a guarantee. A hand extending beneath a stall used to be a gay greeting, harmless and welcome as a fist bump. Now it’s a risk. A threat. A reminder that any stranger potentially carries the virus that feels like it will kill us all.
So men stay away. I wonder what they do now, in this strange new world in which we’re not supposed to touch or hunger for each other. Do they pleasure themselves while thinking of times past, as I often do? Do they limit their fantasies to the two-dimensional images within the pages of Honcho or Inches? Or do they deny themselves altogether, and think themselves more virtuous for doing so? Many of these men never thought of themselves as gay. Perhaps they’ve scampered back to their wives and girlfriends, reformed for good…or at least until they slip up.
And I sit in my solitary stall, back cramped, ass growing numb on the institutional seats, lonely and bored, wondering why I am the lone holdout who keeps returning when he shouldn’t.
It’s after one of these lengthy sessions that I limp back to the fourth-floor English Department and my office, backside dead after sitting in a stall for ninety fruitless minutes, intending to drop off the cache of freshman essays I’ve graded before I return home. Rand is waiting at my desk, however, his lengthy praying mantis limbs folded over each other. “Let’s do something,” he suggests.
“Like what?”
His brow furrows. “Coffee? Early dinner?” I shake my head. I’m not a coffee drinker, and three-thirty is too early for the evening meal. “Record store?”
To the last, I happily assent. Weekends, Rand and I sometimes meet at Plan 9 Records in Richmond’s Carytown. We’re both diehard vinyl collectors in a world of cassettes and lately, compact discs. Compact discs are new, however, and much as I covet their shiny, jewel-like surfaces, I can’t afford the four hundred dollars or more it would cost to buy a player. Vinyl is cheap, and the burgeoning market in used LPs makes them even cheaper. Carytown is a haul from campus, though. Bohannon’s on Grace Street is closer, but it sells more drug paraphernalia than it does actual music. “Beezie’s?” He nods at my suggestion.
Beezie’s Records sits on the southern edge of our urban campus. My bedroom at home is bigger than its retail space, but the elderly owner trades only in used LPs. B.Z. himself is an elderly man with the long stringy hair and affectations of a former hippie, who communicates only in grunts and sighs. When I show up with an armful of promo albums courtesy of my college friend Carol, who now works in music promotion, B.Z. will flip through the stack with a practiced eye, express his lamentation with a deep exhalation, slam the big knob on his mechanical cash register with the side of his fist, and slide over a few bills that usually within minutes I’ll spend upon albums from his bins. The closest to actual speech I’ve ever gotten from him was the one time he rejected an album: Claudja Barry’s I, Claudja, which he separated from my stack of trade-ins and pushed back over the counter at me with a firm, nuh-uh.
B.Z.’s not behind the counter by the front door when Rand and I squeeze into the little shop. My friend immediately heads toward the bins of used albums that sit on waist-high tables in neat lines. I linger by the counter for a moment, glancing through a stack the store’s owner has priced, but not yet shuffled into place. My current passion is Canadian band Martha & the Muffins; I’d do anything for a hard-to-find copy of their release of a couple of years before, Danseparc. There’s nothing in the M bins, though, nor do I find anything new by Robyn Hitchcock in the H’s. I’ve slid down to the D’s, vainly hoping I might stumble across Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band Goes to Washington, which I’ve coveted for a few years, when someone emerges from the store’s back room to sit behind the counter. It’s not B.Z. But even B.Z. Isn’t much of a presence when he’s there, so I don’t pay much mind to his stand-in.
“Babyface!” Rand calls from the corner. He waves a release by the Allman Brothers Band, which is far from the kind of music I listen to, but I give him a thumbs-up. “You find anything yet?”
“Still browsing,” I say, turning back to the bins. Then I look up, and see B.Z.’s replacement regarding me, steadily. The clerk is in his mid-thirties and wears a hole-ridden, oversized cardigan that signals defeat. His hair is thinning. His eyes are big and sunken. Despite his gauntness, I recognize him instantly.
In my teens, I’d done a lot of low-key sex work, much of it facilitated by a man named Earl, a fellow habitué of the parks where I’d cruised. Through Earl, I’d met dozens of men willing to offer good money and a comfortable bed for an hour or two of the same services I’d been offering on my knees among the pines, gratis.
Earl had helped me open my first savings account for the money I was earning between other men’s sheets. I’d hung out at his Northside home throughout high school; for a handful of years he seemed like the only man who really saw me for what I was. When I had anxieties about college and my future, it wasn’t to my parents that I turned, but to Earl. His doors were always open when I needed refuge. I recognized from the start that his motives were never entirely pure, but neither were mine. His agenda of pimping out boys when it was convenient for his business interests aligned with the acquisitive ambitions of a kid whose family had little money to spare. Our use of the other was mutual and agreeable.
My time in Eden came to an end courtesy of Earl’s younger boyfriend, Jim. Jim occupied a renovated attic in Jim’s house. Much of the time, when he was home and I’d be visiting, he’d manifest only as the muffled choruses of Fleetwood Mac on his turntable and the acrid smell of weed. Other times, he’d make his disapproval of me known with vicious put-downs—remarks about my gangly limbs, or my bony body.
Jim’s dislike of me came to a head when he blamed me for a vicious falling-out he’d had with Earl. When he found an opportunity, he locked me into a closet in his garret, unsuccessfully attempted to phone my parents to tell them their son was a cocksucker, and then left me me imprisoned for the better part of a day. That night, Earl returned to find a feral beast screaming and trying to beat down the bolted door. I’d lunged at Earl full of fury and eager to draw blood, and Earl had sent me away. I’d never returned to the house nor seen either man, since.
Now, sitting on a stool behind the counter that was usually B.Z.’s throne, Jim glowers at me. During his best days he had always been unkempt and rawboned—thirty dressed for sixteen in graphic tees too tight and short for him, his clothing and uncut hair smelling of pot. I’m shocked to see him in this state, in that threadbare cardigan and an plaid shirt two sizes too large. He looks like a boy dressing in his daddy’s castoffs. The malice in those eyes is all that remains of the Jim I used to know.
Rand is still talking to himself behind me, as he flicks through the bins. Jim sneers, then twists my friend’s endearment into what sounds like a curse. “Well hello, babyface,” he says.
(Continued in Babyface: Part 2.)
