The moment I let loose, he laughs about my hooking him. “No sweat, buddy. Hurts about like a mosquito bite, tops. Just shows how many you’re gonna land ahead. You got some touch on you, know that? You just did what they say do, in the books: ‘Concentrate, then “spot” your trout, then flick ’n’ hook.’”

  Oh God, here comes Mother wobbling on high heels and carrying that clanky glinting tray. “I hurt him,” I apologize, partly bragging. Mom hostesses me aside. Soon I’ve inchwormed up into my tree house. I am coughing with sobs, staring down at my gentle, bloodied trophy.

  Mother, like some comic waiter, keeps the silver tray level at all costs. Kneeling, ministering, she offers Dan his Cutty first.

  (Carolina, 1957, The Golden Age of Silver Trays.)

  I yell down, “I didn’t know it hurt. To fish. Hurt the fish, Dan.”

  “Mustn’t blame yourself, pal. You’ve got the sporting touch…. You’ll land hundreds more ahead, and ‘rainbows’ too. Glad to be the first in line—a great long mess o’ keepers. Your only problem is, your aim’s too good. Every man should have such trouble. Definitely no more crying, umkay, m’buddy-ro? Promise your Dan?”

  “I pwwo-mise,… D-D-Dan.”

  How could you not love such a fellowshiper? Had my big buddy just talked to me in code? Did he even deeply mind or notice as I—leisurely, entranced—felt his dick’s noble heft? And did Dan allow me or prevent me or invite me? Who’d had whom?

  Even today, when I hear the phrase “child molester,” I think, not of One Grown-Up Who Molests Children, but of some kid who diddles unsuspecting innocent adults, grown-ups who glaze over immediately, going child-passive.

  I’m told that the victim-adults—wracked with equal parts guilt and interest—sometimes never get over it.

  Dan? I count on that.

  Inside your right wrist, even with the lights out, can you still touch a little scratchy signature of scarring?

  XIII. Over and Out

  I “came out” in whatever room was left, after Dan—whatever space remained to stand up in. That zone proved no larger than one store’s men’s room, one stall of it, a tree house, one closet door laid horizontal, opening downward, only onto spine-cracking gravity.

  Me? Born guilty as any Calvinist sinner (guilty prior to even getting it up once, much less forcing myself on another male). I struggled past the threat of local arrest. I didn’t even feel safe in Norfolk. I needed four to six state borders between me and Home before I tried anything. It was way out of town, up north in Boston, before I dared unzip for any reason beyond legal peeing (and even after that, I scrubbed these paws but good). I’d been well trained in pain—pleasure was a night course I would have to teach myself. (Not to brag, but I found I had a certain latent talent for it.)

  Alone with my first, I had to know for sure that the person who seemed to want me to reveal my lower body to him was not just doing this to please his dad, one alcoholic copper father, waiting, with a reel-to-reel recorder underneath this very bed.

  Dan R——failed to become what authorities intended—a reason for me to stultify erotic life. Sure proof of why to keep it forever sealed up in your pants. Instead, my Dan—who let a worried nine-year-old boy lightly touch his crotch “for luck”—became a reason not to hesitate sexually, ever. Dan’s real crime wasn’t the one they creamed him for. His true sin was earlier postponement (all the joy a man so splendid, skilled, and energetic might’ve given other men).

  Fear led to his lurching, damning recklessness. He is my hard-on polar north. Hands on hips, he’s innocent even of his own scary magnetic looks, the teeth too white, the face too decent not to have a lot of patsy in it—given a world as mean as ours.

  Sometimes … I believe my artistic aunt was all too correct. Those days, you know what I feel like?

  I am a mechanical cuckoo. Lots of laughs. I got built, a charming Tirolean timepiece that I myself did not design. A clock is both my castle and my cage; I guess you could say I have the penthouse.

  But I’m really just the mechanism’s star-quality Hello, Dolly doodad. My loud, mandatory appearance announces each hour’s timely high points. I never do get over my stage fright. Every quarter-hour of human history, I brace, required again to act cocky and jaunty and artistic, decorative. And yet, what’s weird, I feel completely unprepared, each time. I am both star and target.

  I get popped out anyway, my nose rubbed in the blinding light, I’m terrified even during my most cheerful chirping.

  Otherwise, rocked back on the governing coil, my beak tip rests against two round shut swinging doors, I feel most grateful for usual darkness. They named this whole clock for my carefree two-note song.

  But, truth is, I am usually “in.” My tree-house closet is shut. Then I don’t have to think of how I look, or which latent assassin is waiting out there this go-round. I prefer not thinking of it much each day. But, four times hourly, I’m totally and publicly “out,” outed. It feels self-conscious and short-lived as someone sticking his own tongue out. You can’t ever really say much that way, can you?

  Even when you hear me sing, tweet-twitty-twit, even when you set your watch by me (and do, by all means, ’cause I’m so reliable), even as you smile over your shoulder on hearing my musical comedy again, even when I seem all charm, pure velvety buttery goodwill—truth is, I’m not singing.

  It’s a shaped scream.

  Thanks to Dan, I can’t afford ever to comfortably abstain. Not—with a two-hour layover between trains in Milan, and after meeting somebody kind and at least half attractive, someone whispery and nodding, with a borrowed apartment just a three-minute walk from this terminal, some guy so visibly willing—not to let time go, not to let this pleasure pass. I remember Dan. I go with him.

  I expect eventual arrest. I am never fully safe in this, my country. Times, I seem to live scot-free, I’m healthy, I’m allowed against all odds to exist in my own way, and to write this toward you, fellow innocent. If I were not gay, I would be supporting Alice and Kyle and meeting at this moment with the Search Committee at the college—afterward, stopping by a busy but dangerous rest area on the interstate—and I would not have written this, and therefore, for whatever it’s worth, you would not be reading it.

  XIV. Last

  Coming out I managed. Staying out is hard.

  A day in the life?

  I came out at 7 a.m. today—I did so just by tucking one cream-colored silk hanky in my blazer pocket. To me, it didn’t look fey, it just looked right, manly, necessary. By three this afternoon, I was having a late lunch with two co-workers. Who told a gay-bashing “Hear about the pitbull with AIDS?” joke, one I really might’ve/should’ve protested. The lunch had been so heavy, and I’m getting over a hellacious summer cold, and I just couldn’t find the energy to make a scene, to force the point again, to act so nunnishly doctrinaire. Didn’t want to make another dreary plea for tolerance, yet again, Killjoy.

  Walking back to work alone, I saw a truly great-looking boy. And—before I quite censored myself properly—I’d tossed an appreciative stare at this blond, aproned clerk. He stood spraying down the eggplants displayed before our corner greengrocer. And he offered me some visual encouragement—top lip curling back, a toughening of his flippant stance—but then, three seconds later, reverse, he flipped me the finger and muttered, “You fuckin’ wish.”

  I crossed the street, my face neutral, spirits silenced. I now felt sure he’d holler an insult (the actual name of what I am). I felt sure he’d aim his rubber hose at me. The Trojan Hose. At the very least, he’d ruin my best suede shoes.

  See, friend, I came out at 7 a.m. today. And, at around 2:48 p.m., I went back in.

  Tentative, I re-emerged around 3:43, until that aproned blond flipped me the bird and threatened me at 3:44, till he drove me to tiptoe boldly back in yet again where many men have gone before. By 5:10, feeling stronger, I risked it again … but then …

  In the dream I am still nine. Not “out,” but up my tree house. There’s been a lynching or some act of piracy in Falls. It’s late, just before dawn. Our neighborhood echoes with men shouting, “Not in here. He over there? Found yet?” Manhunt.

  I’m huddled, flannel pajamas, on my closet door. When I notice torchlight, I discover you, Dan, tied to the tree above me.

  In the filmic way of dreams, a voice announces, “Women look finest in candlelight. Men are best seen by torch.”

  Torches smoke all around us up here, the maple leaves sizzle. Somebody has bound you fast. Your chest is glazed as a Viking ham, drenched in salt spray or blood or honey. Varnish shows ribs’ every perfect fold, the bulk and hollow. But there are hooks in you. Lures with wet feathers, savage broken lines from years ago. Your hands are tied behind you around the tree’s main trunk. I fight to release you. Your eyes are aimed up, sainted, lost. My fingers prove too small. The knots seem permanent, grown barky as the tree.

  Far below, voices keep mapping the search for you. You wear only a white towel around your waist. As I stare past it, toward your face, I see that something immense bulks up underneath the terry cloth. I say, “Dad, are you okay, can I help here?” but I mean “Dan.” I give you many chances to object as, slow, I touch your thighs. Finally, with you in such pain and beauty, I don’t await invitation. I tell myself that what I do is just First Aid, I reach under your towel, unfasten it.

  Lit by orange light in my tree, I understand that they have hurt you. Where I expected your manhood waiting, springy, perfectly cheerfully complete, they’ve slid a giant fishhook. It has been stuck all the way between your legs and I see its barbed tip gleaming in the flame. It’s perfectly down-curved. I see how cleverly it’s made, so it will go right through but never get back out.

  And, looking up at you, I touch the hook they’ve hooked you with, so cruelly, Dan. Depriving you of such a right. Kneeling in a state of worship, sobbing, kinship, lust, I find it’s warm under my palm. Now, finally unshy, I kiss your thighs and crane up nearer it. I am your fellow fellow. I place my mouth to it. I find the taste is ketchup, metal, Milk Duds, bitter money, milk, and salt and sugar mixed.

  … The taste is equal pleasure, equal pain. I wake. The first thing I know is: I am no longer nine. You’re still gone. They caught you out.

  Dan, are you alive? Might you really read this? If so, please, please drop me a line care of the publisher. I’m older. I’ve learned what to do—for pleasure, after pain. I’ve got questions. About that kid, the cop’s yellow-haired son, how good did he look? How much did he do to draw you those few urinals closer (into camera range)? I think I know a lot about you. But it’s just based on those first nine years, when you honked at me. And paid attention. And sent bills on strings up my tree. Did you suspect I was one, too? Did you know that you were? Was I funny then, or somewhat sweet? Or even pretty, in my longing looks both up and down? Listen to me, this old, still fishing for compliments! Jailbait. I just want to check in.

  You didn’t seem to mind a fellow’s drawing close against you, even as you bled. His little mitt nested on worn pants just above your crank. Your grin was relaxed, secure, if fairly tired. (Did you already guess what it would cost us?) Still Ideal Captain of My Fellow Ship, my first “rainbow,” “big one,” at times I feel so sound and lucky. I myself never got caught, never did get sick. My very occupation is to tell the truth—as much as will still sell.

  I feel I owe you everything, Dan. Times, it seems they did my damage all to You.

  I bet you’re still in the world. Your youngest kid finished college—what?—twenty years ago. You are barely seventy. That, increasingly, is not so old. I’m forty-eight already. The hair on your arms must be mostly silver now, not unattractive. I sense you ended up in Arizona, maybe Colorado, somewhere dry out there.

  Are you still her husband? Or by now splitting house payments with another guy? But, no, I picture you as living alone. I picture a blue car, your climbing into it, driving to some modest restaurant, heading home, stretching, putting hands on hips, going back inside.

  Despite my therapy and the wish to think well of myself, I am still a subdivision of desire. And here I choose to end it.

  I am the horny guilty husband, noticing one sullen blond boy slouched at the urinal three down; I move his way, beckoned by his head wave, the one slow wink, and something that he shows me.

  I am the blond boy, aware of my poisonous beauty, ready for Dad to pop out of that green stall with a black camera in lieu of his pink face. For now, I’m mostly a youngster enjoying the weight of my blood-stocked dick. I am feeling the full power of being male, which means, in an odd way, being fatal for others.

  And, alas, I am also, alas, the tortured ex-Marine cop, forty pounds over his Parris Island weight, a major smoker, rifle collector, registered Republican, with fifteen long years till retirement, a disappointed man who—having built rabbit-catching boxes as a boy—finds entrapment lots more fun than giving speeding tickets. He is also a guy whose own sexual fantasies let him display his son (nearly as pretty as he once was). He does it in order to catch the vermin he sees swarming everywhere, the shameless weirdos who’ll be the death of this Great Land, the queers that he knows want, most obsessively of all, him.

  Sure, he might have drinking probs and the so-so marriage and no further prospect of promotion anywhere near even assistant chief, but at least he’s not that far gone. He is the detective about to detect. Sick behavior like …

  Mine. Like Dan’s. And I keep silent, in a stall already unlatched for kicking open at lethal speed. I unpocket the necessary flashbulb I’m about to insert into its reflector socket. I hear whispering. Good boy, my son is waving the perpetrator closer. I prepare the flashbulb. The glass sphere’s metal tip I dampen with my tongue. I am ready, now, I breathe, I kick toward desire illegal. The blast in a tile space this small sounds like a cannon going off. I holler “FRee-eeze!” at heat. As I capture, for eternity, the Older Me just as I touch the healthy prong of Me Young. And, armed with pictures of me molesting myself, I am going to have to turn me in. Otherwise, admit it—I’d be less than a whole man.

  Hey, Dan? Missed you.

  Find me, sir.

  SAINT

  MONSTER

  In Loving Memory—

  Mac Dancy (1888?–1979)

  and

  Ardelia Smith (1930–1966)

  1. OLD TESTAMENT

  Expulsion

  I. Genesis

  “The Expulsion to the Garden”

  And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy Voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked….

  Genesis 3:9–10

  Dad screams I mustn’t see them at it but I race across our backyard toward the darkened house. Under me, short legs are stunted flippers spinning. My old tricycle on its side, I hop. Lagging, Daddy bellows, “Come back, son. Leave them be. Don’t go in and look. Let sleeping dogs. She loves us anyways….”

  Three lawns behind, he waves the white sling of his newly broken arm. He’s a smoker and is stumbling and keeps hacking, the old sweetie. Daddy begs me not to catch the two of them at it, at some deed. But I clamp palms over my ears, I must not obey Dad, I am only doing this for him.

  Our rear screen door is latched. I make such a fist. Knuckles break through rusted wire, a fry of brown powder. I jump then chin myself on the door’s crossbar. Reaching in, I unhook everything.

  “Don’t looook,” Dad’s voice smears. But I am through our kitchen and clear into the shadowed living room. I’ve run five paces past already seeing them, joined. My elbows out, I slide to a car-brake-screeching halt.

  • • •

  My mother, so pale and beautiful, is so beneath him. The couch’s many printed roses look cactus-sized, thirstier, as smothered as my Mom. The man’s back is tanned and stretches longer than three of me. His bare bottom is vanilla, rocking like Mom’s foot-treadle Singer. But somehow into Mom, a derrick over/into over/into her. Her fists hold hair behind his ears, hair gold as coins of my play money. White summer pants bunch around his ankle planted on our rug.

  Though he twists and sees this woman’s eight-year-old standing right beside the couch, the man’s lower back sneaks continually on, letting Momma have it, blam, there, blam, there. Letting her have what? I’d like to know.

  I cannot figure how I understand what I am partly seeing. I simply know he’s giving Mom a major one of those. Pinned under such thudding, her knees have risen not that far from Mom’s own ears. She now turns slow, notices me whole here, screams, “Can’t beee!”

  “What say, pal?” Doc’s tone comes casual. Bugs Bunny. He talks right over at me. He’s naked so happily. Dead level with my frown, he crunches one dry wink my way. “Wha’s up?”

  My chest quaking, I point to him, “Bad bad baaad man!”

  Then, for reasons past anything merely sayable, I jump onto a fellow facedown in Mom.

  I have mounted him like that bucking dime-horse downtown. I am riding the long spine of the veterinarian, who seems someway out of, then too IN my mom. Out of, in. Out in. In in. Innie.

  “Baby,” she speaks through him to me, “your weight’s too much, it’s hurting me.”

  “My weight? MY dern weight?!”

  These fists of mine are really slamming hard the back of a man so accustomed to being caught, that he is finishing. He is going to. I feel a tally mounting in him and now sledding quite unstoppable downhill.

  I understand this payoff without knowing what it means or where it goes or how it feels to them. I’ll just keep trying stopping him. I cling around his tree-ringed neck. I yank his yellow hair way back, I scratch under one braced arm. A dark sliding voice says, “Bite that ear, you’re dead, you little mongrel bastard….” I am kicking his bare butt so. “Go away from off my Mom, Mister. Go on off from us, get … off of her, you … HURT-ER!”