You ask what am I muttering, stupefied. It is a prayer of thanks that there is such a thing as you in the world.
Paul Goodman, "Such Beauty As Hurts to Behold"
i.
He held himself more proudly than anyone else I had ever seen, and was nevertheless an open and winning person. He had a smile that went deep and looks that were worth looking at. There was a gentleness to his intelligence, curiosity in his gaze, an awareness that other people existed in his conversation and behavior. His pride was simply animal awareness of animal health. He was the embodiment of good spirits.
He was on the swimming team, so his body was smooth and his head was shaven nearly hairless. But it only brought out the beauty of his face.
I looked at him every chance I could get and went to watch the swim meets just to see him in his little black speedo bikini diving into the pale clear blue water that even in the bleachers smelled of chlorine. I daydreamed about him all the time.
That made me feel really small, to be daydreaming about a guy, making him a character in my fantasies. That was pathetic. I would have been ashamed if anyone knew, but it, nevertheless, really excited me to think of him, to picture him, to imagine being pals with him. He was a puppet in my theater of hopeless longing.
I was beyond desiring him. I was obsessed with, possessed by my fantasy of him.
ii.
I walked to school every day by myself, and it was a time for major daydreaming.
His name was David, not Brian, or Red, or Rich, but David. Like there was a world of thought in his head. Me, I knew I was filling up my head with movies, with wishes, with fantasies of having power and being loved. I knew that my intelligence would get stopped at a border that other people could get across. I knew that I slouched when I walked, that in gym I got worn out before I got excited. David lived in a world I envied. He wasn't blocked by boundaries, by weakness, by uncertainty.
I knew his house; I passed it every morning passing along the wide suburban street. There were trees everywhere along the street, extending branches to meet the branches of trees on the other side of the street. Arches formed a perfect world for walking through the mind.
His house was a small Tudor mansion. I'd seen him enter and leave several times, and I imagined there were wonders inside, luxurious furniture, gorgeous carpets, glamorous clothes in walk-in closets, bathrooms like Turkish baths, and rooms for parties where great intimacies occurred.
iii.
If you weren't alive and at least in your early teens in the late nineteen-fifties, you missed something. It was a time when marvelous cultural changes were taking place, and it was clear that they were. Signs of an old way cracking and a new one establishing itself were everywhere. Changes in conventional consciousness, in patterns of behavior and thought, in values, in ways of dressing, appeared in every quarter.
I started hanging around Greenwich Village, and it was down in the Village, not in Forest Hills, that I met David and found out who he really was.
I was walking through Washington Square Park, the old, woodsy Washington Square Park that existed before Bob Nichols redesigned it, suburbanized it, in the early sixties. It was an overcast day in November with brittle leaves carpeting the ground. It felt like it was going to snow.
There was David sitting on a park bench beside a lamppost. He was smoking a pipe, wearing an Ezra Pound fedora, and writing in a notebook.
Perhaps the shock of recognizing him that I experienced set up a disturbance in him and broke his concentration, signaling something was around that needed to be noticed.
For whatever reason, he looked up, saw me, and I was surprised when he said hello using my name.
Of course, he knew it, he said, when I asked him how he knew my name. He saw me nearly every day after eighth period in the library where I worked, and he often heard Mrs. Ferguson, the head librarian, use it.
So he had noticed me. I hadn't thought that he had all the times I'd noticed him.
Gray, he said, rising from the bench, waving his hand at the sky. Snow.
I never thought I'd see you here, I said before I had the sense not to.
Why not?
I was stupidly without an answer.
I like to come down here and write, he said, coming to my rescue. There's a feeling around that I like. I know; you figured I was a dumb-ass jock.
I tried to deny it, but he started rough-housing with me. Maybe a wrestler, he said, who could get you in a head lock.
I squirmed and he finally released me, pressing a kiss like lightening upon the back of my neck, and saying into my ear before loosening his hold, See, I know you better than you know me.
I was entirely at a loss. Was he making fun of me?
Do you drink coffee? he asked. Do you wanna go have a coffee? It was friendly.
Sure, I said.
We crossed out of the park onto University Place, and stopped to read the plaque commemorating the deaths of the sewing machine girls in the 1911 Triangle fire.
Do you know about that?
I didn't, and I said so, and he described the conditions that people worked under when they could be locked in a room from morning till night. He told me about how a fire had started and how the girls had no way out of the burning building except by jumping out the windows.
And working conditions like that still are common, even in America, he said.
He told me his dad was a labor lawyer and that he had plans to be one, too, but sometimes he thought he just wanted to be a poet and lead a bohemian life.
I want to explore consciousness, the process of being aware, independent of what you're aware of.
How you see things, I suggested.
Or how the things you see aren't really there, and things that you can't see are.
And then without missing a beat the rhythm of his speech changed. His face was bright. His voice was light. Intensity was in his eyes.
iii.
We sat for hours in the Figaro, it began to snow, and if I wasn't in love with him already, I fell in love with him then.
It was after ten when we left the Figaro.
David had keys to a friend's apartment at number fifty on MacDougal, and he was staying there tonight because Michael was visiting his girlfriend who lived in Trenton where she went to school. He asked me if I wanted to sleep over.
It was five flights up. You entered a kitchen and there were several small rooms off it.
It was hot in the apartment from steam heat, and David took off his shirt and told me to take off mine, too. So I did.
Not bad, David said. You could pass for a jock, too, if you didn't slump, and if you didn't wear your pants so high.
Me? I said. I'm too skinny.
He opened a closet in the bedroom, pulled out a pair of jeans and told me to try them on.
I blushed. I was shaking. I tried to look at David like nothing was on my mind, but all I wanted to do was touch him.
Come on, he said.
So I stripped, but when he saw my baggy boxers, he laughed.
I don't ever want to see you wearing such a monstrosity again. Try these, he said, giving me a pair of black bikini briefs that I had looked at many times with longing as I daydreamed in front of the window of The Shed House on West Fourth Street.
I went into the bathroom to change.
I felt nervously erotic when I emerged.
You want to play a game? He said.
Sure I said, hoping maybe it would relieve some of the tension I felt in trying to fight off obsessive feelings of desire.
Ok, he said. Let's see who can not touch the other one longer.
I looked at him puzzled.
That way we can hang out all night and do nothing interesting.
And then I got it, but before I could say anything, David leaned over and took my nipples between his thumbs and forefingers and kissed me on the lips and said, I guess I lose.
I looked at him and a light came on in his eyes and I fell into his arms and was devoured by his kisses, and twisted under him, transformed by his grace into something graceful myself..
In the morning, the transformation was still there. There was a circle of gold surrounding us.
We walked through Greenwich Village in the very early morning, astonished by what had happened.
But nothing really was important, because we had done something to each other that made us gravitate towards each other in the flesh. And for us, then, that became a very serious argument for the legitimacy of our passion.
Queer, I was queer. I should care. I was rhapsodic. I wanted everyone to know I had given myself to David. The definition of heaven was that he wanted me.
The snow began again to tumble through the sky. We wanted to be back in the apartment, and we left the snowy streets of Sixth Avenue for an old Village tenement and a bed, candle light, a joint and each other. The world was changing, and we were the change.
Creator spirit, come.
[When you write me, please put the name of the story in the subject line. Thanks.]