Michael Thomas Ford - Full Circle Read online

  It never occurred to me at 17 that I might one day marry Jack. Our identity as a couple was sketched only in the broadest of strokes, confined as it was to the privacy of our own bedrooms. We were not free to walk down the street holding hands. I could not wear the letterman jacket he received after his winning season or his class ring on a chain around my neck. Still we took girls to the movies and dances. I sat in the stands, holding hands with Melania Brewster, watching Jack carry a football down the field. Afterward, I kissed the sweat from his skin as we celebrated his victory. We were invisible to the world, which made it impossible to imagine a life together beyond the moment. In 1968, the shock of John F. Kennedy's assassination repeated itself in the twin murders of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy within two months of one another, further bringing into focus the divisions threatening to splinter America. That fall, Jack and I entered our final year of high school. For the first time, we were forced to think about what would happen when we graduated. As the country faced its own uncertain future, we looked forward and saw that we, too, could be torn apart. It was my idea to apply to college. On the surface, this would seem like the perfect solution. There were, however, obstacles. First there was my father, who I discovered had been assuming that I would join him in the insurance industry. His plan was to get me a job at his office, where I could learn the business, and to then open our own shop, Brummel & Son. The fact that I'd never displayed the slightest interest in his profession apparently had passed him by, and my announcement that I intended to go to school was met with mute disappointment.

  Jack's father, being a scientist, was more open to the idea of further education for his son. Unfortunately, Jack's academic success had been far eclipsed by his performance on the field of play. A fair student, he'd gotten by largely because of my assistance and his ability to win the affections of his teachers. As we investigated the possibilities for advanced study, however, it became apparent that he would need more than that to earn him acceptance at a university.

  While I worried, Jack was as unconcerned as ever, telling me whenever I started to express my fears that "something would happen." This being Jack, of course it did. It came in the form of a baseball scholarship offered by Pennsylvania State University. My academic achievements were enough to get me a full ride, thereby negating my father's concerns over the cost and neatly settling our dilemma. So as the final year of the decade dawned, Jack and I looked forward to our future. With the pressure off, we were free to enjoy the blissful last months of our high school lives, culminating in the spring formal, which we attended with two girls whose hearts we would break soon after when we told them that preparing for college would prevent us from dating on an ongoing basis. That night, though, we danced with them in the crepe-paper-bedecked gymnasium as the Fifth Dimension serenaded us with

  "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In." Afterward, we took the girls to a party, where we made sure they drank enough strawberry wine that they wouldn't notice when we dropped them off at home far earlier than they had probably planned. Then Jack and I drove in his car to a spot we'd discovered in a nearby park, where we quickly shed our polyester prom tuxes and made love in the backseat. We thought we were almost men. At 18, we certainly looked the part. Our bodies had filled out. We had both allowed our sideburns to grow long in imitation of Jim Morrison, whose brooding sexuality aroused us and whose songs were frequently the background music to our sexual encounters. We carried packets of Lucky Strike cigarettes in our jacket pockets (although we were careful to hide them from our parents) and had once or twice tried marijuana.

  Graduation was a relief. As I tossed my cap into the air along with those of my classmates, I was overcome with a sense of having made it to the end of a very long, very tedious race. It occurred to me that I would no longer have to see the same faces every day of my life, or move robotlike through the routine of class upon class. There would be no more dreary sessions of calculus, with Mr. Larson droning on about implicit differentiations while the afternoon sun made me struggle to stay awake, no more essays to write for Mrs. Peabody aboutBabbit orOf Mice and Men . High school and its petty obsessions with rules and schedules was finally behind me, and the open road of college awaited. Jack and I did not go to Treasure Island that final summer, having grown too old for tents and campfire songs. Instead, we took jobs to save some money for our first year at Penn State. Jack worked for a landscaping company, putting his muscles to use, while I, in a peacemaking gesture to my father, toiled in air-conditioned boredom at the office of the Quaker State Insurance Company, filing claim forms and being flirted with by the middle-aged secretaries. At night we escaped, as our mothers before us, to the movie theater, where we saw a string of films seemingly designed to inflame our gay sensibilities. Midnight Cowboy ,Easy Rider , and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all provided us with emotional kindling, and I still recall giving Jack a hand job in the balcony of the Milgram Theatre while watching Jon Voigt's Joe ply his trade on the streets of Manhattan.

  While we found Cowboy 's Joe and his seamy sexuality erotic, we saw ourselves more as Butch and Sundance. We were living in our own buddy movie, an idyllic place where two 18-year-old boys could be in love with one another and it was okay. In a short time we would be off to the beautiful town of State College and the campus of Penn State. We would be far enough away from our families that we would have our freedom. What this meant, exactly, we didn't know. We knew only that we were about to fly.

  We weren't the only ones ready for change. In the early morning hours of June 28, the patrons of New York's Stonewall Inn gay bar fought back after the latest in a series of raids by the city's police department. The resulting skirmishes, taking place over several days and since given the somewhat mythological name of the Stonewall Riots, signaled a change in attitude on the part of the gay community. In Philadelphia, however, demonstrations for gay rights had been going on since 1965 in the form of the Annual Reminder, a protest held in front of Independence Hall each Fourth of July. Less theatrical but arguably much more political, the Annual Reminder following the events of Stonewall was the largest yet. (It would also be the last, as in 1970 gay pride parades took center stage and became the event of choice for proclaiming gay power.)

  Jack and I, in Philadelphia to see the fireworks, witnessed the 1969 Annual Reminder in person. We watched from across the street as protesters stood in front of Independence Hall holding signs proclaiming messages such as 15MILLION U .S.HOMOSEXUALS ASK FOR EQUALITY , OPPORTUNITY ,AND DIGNITY andHOMOSEXUALS ARE AMERICAN CITIZENS TOO . We had heard about the incidents in New York, but only through newspaper articles. This was real. The neatly-dressed men and women standing not 100 feet away from us were real. When they saw us watching them, some smiled. These were not faceless people; they were like us. We watched them for a long time, listening to the speakers who talked of equal rights and the importance of community. When the crowd began to disperse, we followed several of the men as they made their way west through the city, finally coming to The Spot, a small bar on Chancellor Street. I don't know why we followed them, except that we were curious to know what real homosexuals did and where they went. For all we knew, they were ghosts, appearing for a moment to shock and frighten unsuspecting humans and then returning to some mystical place unknown to mortals. There they were, though, going into a very real place. Jack and I watched the door to The Spot for some time, watching men (and a few women) come and go as if it were the most natural thing in the world for homosexuals to gather in the middle of Philadelphia.

  Neither of us suggested that we go in. We were still not quite gay, despite the fact that we regularly sodomized one another and thought nothing of it. To actually go into The Spot, though, to join the people inside, would have been to count ourselves among their numbers, and we were unprepared for that. Instead, we hurried back to Independence Hall to see the fireworks explode in all their patriotic glory, raining red, white, and blue stars down on our heads as we clapped and cheered. In August, o
ur parents threw us our annual birthday party. We toasted the end of our eighteenth years with the traditional barbeque, this time accompanied by bottles of Duke beer presented to us by our fathers like royal scepters being handed down to the next in line for the throne. We pretended they were our first ones, clinking them against our fathers' and manfully overseeing the grilling of the hamburgers. It had long been a sore point with Jack and myself that we had been born in August and not been allowed to start kindergarten until we were six, resulting in our always seeming to be a year older than everyone else in our class. Now, though, the additional year gave us a certain cachet, and we looked forward to perhaps being mistaken for sophomores at our new school.

  It's no great revelation to say that it sometimes takes leaving a place to make you truly see it for the first time. In those last weeks of August, I felt that keenly. Not only did the people and places I'd known for nineteen years suddenly seem alien to me, but so did my life as a whole. I no longer fit, as if I'd grown too large for our house, our street, our town. Everything felt confining, designed to keep me trapped forever in that one, small place.

  When the long-awaited day came, my bags and boxes were packed and ready. On Saturday, September 6, I packed it all into the 1966 Ford Fairlane station wagon Jack's father had given him as a graduation gift. All four of our parents stood on the porch of the Graces' house as we said our good-byes. Our mothers cried and our fathers shook our hands, telling us to drive carefully. We promised, hugging first our own mothers and then each other's. Then we got into the Ford, gave a final honk of the horn, and started the 200-mile journey to our new life.

  CHAPTER 10

  A college dorm on the first day of a new term resembles nothing so much as a sea lion rookery during the winter birthing season. Upperclassmen, appointed to oversee the operations, herd the newcomers with a practiced, weary air, while the freshmen pups tumble over one another in their hurry, all wide-eyed excitement mixed with fear of the unknown. An infectious madness surrounds the proceedings, and it's impossible not to be swept up in it. Soon things will settle into a more sedate routine, but those first few days are pure bedlam. If you are one of the fresh arrivals, you feel half-explorer, half-clown, vulnerable in your newness but determined to make your way in this unfamiliar world. As Jack and I carried our belongings into Pinchot Hall and up to our room on the third floor, we passed through a circus of sights, sounds, and smells. The voices of the Grateful Dead mingled with Janis Joplin's as Jimi Hendrix's guitar wailed behind them. Men of all kinds moved in and out of doorways, enthusiastically greeting old friends and nodding curtly at new faces. Most had hair longer than that of Jack and myself, and it appeared that growing a beard would be one of our first priorities. Peace sign posters and images of Che Guevara graced many dorm room walls, and the scent of pot was ever-present, in bold defiance of the numerous warnings we'd received in our new-student packets about the university's no-tolerance policy on drugs.

  Our room was number 308. It was a double, as we'd requested on our applications, and it was completely unremarkable in every way. To the left of the door was a closet, then a long L-shaped desk, the shorter leg of which extended into the room and separated the work space from the sleeping area, which featured a twin bed situated against the wall. The right-hand side of the room was a mirror image of the left, as if the entire building had been rolled from an assembly line. Not that we much cared what it looked like. Pinchot (named after two-time Pennsylvania governor and avid conservationist Gifford Pinchot) was the newest of what were called the East Halls, built in 1967 and therefore mostly free from the wear and tear inflicted by previous occupants. Rising ten stories above the green lawns, it felt to us like our very own castle.

  As we unpacked, we discovered that our mothers had followed the packing list sent by the school's office of student housing to the letter. They had also apparently done their shopping together. Opening a box marked BEDDING , we found inside two corduroy bedspreads, both blue, as well as two sets of sheets in the same hue. Matching towels waited for us at the bottom of the carton. We stacked it all on our beds in two tidy little blue pyramids.

  "Are you guys brothers or something?" We turned around to see Andy Kowalski regarding us with an amused smile. We didn't know it was Andy, of course, never having seen him before. What we saw was a big, broad boy wearing bluejeans and no shirt. His light brown hair was shaggy but not overly long, his cheeks were covered in stubble, and around his neck was a leather thong on which were threaded three ceramic beads the color of fire. Against his tanned skin they shone like rubies. His chest was patterned with hair, which trickled down his stomach and disappeared into the top of his jeans. His feet were bare.

  "I'm Andy," he said, giving us a name to put with his face. He then repeated the question, "So, are you two brothers? All your stuff matches. That's why I asked."

  "No," Jack answered, as usual speaking for both of us. "Not really. I'm Jack, and this is Ned. We're neighbors. From back home, I mean. Philadelphia."

  Andy nodded and smiled again, as if everything was now perfectly clear to him. "Got it," he said. "City boys. I'm from Crawford County." The part he didn't say—and didn't need to—was that he was a farm boy. I could tell by his way of talking. Like many people from Western Pennsylvania, he identified himself by his county, not his city. It was a holdover from the days when farm boards, and not the government, were the principal holders of power in a region. Although that had changed, many in the farming communities still saw themselves as being united against the threat of bureaucracy. Since many small towns had similar or identical names, or had yet to even make it onto maps, a person's county of residence made for the most easily-recognized form of identification. To Andy, hailing from Crawford County was akin to being part of a clan.

  "We don't live in Philly exactly," I said, correcting myself. "We live a little outside it." I don't know why I felt the need to de-citify myself and Jack. I suppose I feared that Andy would think us snobs, and for some reason I wanted him to like us. He was the first person we'd met since arriving at Penn, the first person, really, we'd met outside of our old lives. I wanted it to go well.

  "Well, how would you not-quite-city boys like to share a joint with me?" Andy asked. I hesitated, but Jack immediately said, "Sure."

  "Come on," Andy directed. "Let's go to my room." His room was on Pinchot's seventh floor. A double like ours, the right side was Andy's space. The bed was covered with an actual quilt made of hand-pieced squares in the traditional Jacob's Ladder pattern favored by the Amish. On the desk was a photograph of Andy with two people I assumed to be his parents, although they seemed a little old to hold those positions in his life. A poster of Jane Fonda in her Barbarella getup was taped on the wall beside the bed, and a dog-eared copy of Timothy Leary's The Psychedelic Experience lay on the floor.

  Andy shut the door and sat down on the edge of the bed. Reaching beneath it, he pulled out a wooden box about six inches long by four inches wide. Like the quilt, it too looked handmade, the wood rubbed to a soft glow. Andy removed the lid from the box and took from inside it a small bag of pot and some rolling papers. Taking a paper, he folded one edge over to form a vee, into which he poured some of the marijuana. Then, with what looked like practiced hands, he rolled the cigarette using his thumbs, gave the edge a quick lick, and sealed everything shut by running a finger along the resulting seam.

  The whole process took less than a minute. It reminded me of a scene in True Grit , which Jack and I had seen back in June the weekend it opened, where Kim Darby as Mattie Ross, the feisty teenage tomboy hunting down her father's killer, rolled a cigarette for John Wayne's sheriff Rooster Cogburn and placed it in his mouth. Mattie's brazen action said a lot about who she was—independent, free, and nobody's fool. Andy's said something similar. By inviting us to share a joint with him, he was welcoming us in. By showing us how well he could roll one, he was displaying a sophistication and bravado that set him apart as someone willing to court danger. It was
his first attempt at seduction, as far as Jack and I were concerned, and it worked.

  "What about your roommate?" I asked as Andy lit the joint and inhaled deeply. He held the toke for a long time, finally releasing the smoke in a gentle stream. It curled up from his mouth, like the dying breath of a dragon. "What about him?" he asked, passing the cigarette to Jack.

  "Will he mind?" I said. "About, you know, this?" I waved at the joint, which Jack was inexpertly sucking on.

  Andy laughed. "Shit, no," he said. "He won't mind. He's a Negro." He laughed again, as if this explanation was complete in itself. Jack held the joint out to me. I took it from him, pinching it between my thumb and forefinger. Andy was watching me, and I wanted him to think I knew what I was doing. Putting the joint to my lips, I inhaled deeply. My lungs inflated, filled with the acrid smoke. The burn was intense, much more than anything I'd experienced the few times Jack and I had smoked pot before. I wanted badly to cough, but I forced myself not to. I held the breath as long as I could, then let it out. My lungs, still afire, sucked in clean air.

  "Good shit, isn't it?" said Andy as I returned the joint to him. Already the potent THC was coursing through my blood. My mind was being tickled by teasing fingers, my thoughts slowing as I sank into the warm glow. Jack, too, was feeling it. He settled onto a chair and leaned back, grinning. I looked from him to Andy, suddenly happy beyond words.