“I can’t believe George Michael has a song called ‘Father Figure.’ I think I just died and went to heaven,” CJ said.

  “I think it’s kinda creepy,” I said. “Do you have repeat customers? And what do those customers get, exactly, for the tips?”

  “I’m gonna dance to this one. It’s slow but sexy. I’ll wear a leather jacket and aviator glasses.”

  I flashed back to the outfit he’d worn to the Lortel and considered encouraging him to try a different look. I decided not to do that.

  “Repeat customers,” I repeated. “Tips get them …”

  “I think this is where George Michael goes from teenybopper to full-on icon. This song is uh-MAZE-ing. I just orgasmed three times while listening to it. Oh, hi, Jack. No, nothing to see here. Get me a tissue.”

  “Is he really there?” I asked.

  He snorted. “I’m crazy, but I’m not CRAZY. I think he’s out drinking with his cop buddies.”

  “So this would be a good time to bring a trick home, right?”

  “I don’t bring tricks home, and anyway, youngster, tricks are for kids. You really want to know?”

  “I do!”

  “Fine, I’ll tell you … after this next song. Or maybe the song after that. Or side B. I haven’t decided. There’s a track called ‘Look at Your Hands.’ Do you think it’s about someone who winds up with hairy palms from masturbating? God, I hope that doesn’t happen.”

  Was he protecting me by avoiding the subject, or protecting himself?

  I couldn’t be sure.

  November 1987

  Operation Closet Extraction went into overdrive when my mother gave me the news that Rick was going to stay over for a night while his house in Greenwich, Connecticut, was being fumigated for termites.

  “He’s going to be sleeping in my bed,” I told Felicia as we sat in her office after the curtain went up on a Tuesday night. “Friday.”

  “Whoa,” she said.

  “Oh, no, no. God no. I’ll be in the living room on the extremely scratchy couch.”

  She smiled.

  “So what exactly is it that you think he’ll do?” she asked. “Why tell him, and not your parents?”

  “I figure he can soften the landing,” I said. “They trust him.”

  “News flash: They also trust you.”

  Felicia had met my parents over the summer, when we’d comped them tickets to the show on a slowish Thursday night. After the curtain, she’d pulled me into her office and said, “That’s who you’re scared of? Good grief, kid. Tell your parents. They’re like future poster children for PFLAG.”

  Even though I’d nodded then, I knew she wasn’t quite right. They still assumed I was straight, even when I’d never even once said anything about girls, and was into theater, and was hardly John Wayne to begin with.

  I ignored her comment and stuck with the Rick plan. “I just have to figure out how to tell him.”

  “Just let him know you want him there when you tell them. Rip off the Band-Aid, fast. You’ll be glad you did.”

  That advice made me shiver. Maybe for her, coming out wasn’t a big deal anymore. But for me? It was the number one fear in my life.

  Walter walked in and gave Felicia a kiss on the top of her head.

  Well, number two.

  “Hey, dear,” Felicia said. “How you feelin’?”

  “Good,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Our prodigal child is trying to come out to his parents.”

  He turned and looked at me, then cocked his head and smiled. “Aw,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “They’re gonna be fine,” Felicia said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Tell them who you are,” Walter said. “In the long run? They’ll be glad you did.”

  I assured him I would get right on that. “When did you come out to your parents?”

  He cackled. “I didn’t so much come out to them as my pop walked in on me with a magazine.”

  “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Yeah. And we’re the most Waspy family out there, so we’re all about not dealing with the problem, so my father said, ‘Excuse me,’ and closed the door, and when I went downstairs for dinner, the conversation was all about my sister’s swim meet. I knew he told my mom, because I heard them talking later that night through their door. I didn’t hear the words, but I heard the tone, and it wasn’t mentioned again for years. Gay apparently hasn’t made its way to New Hampshire yet.”

  Felicia rubbed his shoulder. “But they’re here now,” she said.

  “Thank God,” he said. “I truly don’t know what I’d do without my mom. Even if the apartment does get a little crowded with her there, she’s like my rock.” He turned to me. “Tell them. I mean, life is short. Nothing is guaranteed. If they don’t know it, they don’t know you.”

  I rolled their advice around in my head for the rest of the night and most of the next day. When I asked Deena about it, she concurred with Felicia and Walter. She knew my parents well, and she thought they knew but were in denial. To my innermost self, I disagreed. If they truly knew, why would they keep acting as if they didn’t? Wasn’t that bad parenting?

  “Just show them how you walk,” she said. “That oughta do it.”

  I gave her the middle finger, and she cracked up.

  “How’s your insane, slutty friend?”

  “Stop it,” I said. “Seriously.”

  She shrugged me off. “If you don’t want to be called a slut, don’t act slutty.”

  I wanted to stand up to her for CJ, but it was like I didn’t have the energy. Life was too crazy and unpredictable to pick a fight with Deena right now.

  “He’s fine. He’s trying to get me to dance.”

  She guffawed and her eyes lit up. “At the club? What?”

  “In general. Like in my room. I told him no way. Or more like I told him no way and then when he played his music I did try a little. I was very, very bad at it.”

  “Well, that’s some improvement, I guess. The first step in becoming a good dancer is knowing that you suck at it.”

  * * *

  Luckily CJ understood the gravity of these things. On the phone the next night, he was all about OCE, which he officially coined to make Operation Closet Extraction seem more important.

  “As you can see, NOT all seemingly liberal New York parents do great with their kids coming out as gay. As the spokesperson for Gays Whose Vaguely Liberal Parents Totally Snubbed Them, or GWVLPTST, I can tell you that this is a key moment in your life, and how you do this matters. Trust me.”

  “I think OCE is more catchy than GWV-whatever.”

  “Agreed,” he said.

  “How did you tell your mom?”

  “Skywriting.”

  “CJ.”

  “I rented a plane and had them write, ‘Just because your son likes football, don’t think for a second he doesn’t also like cock.’ It was a lot of words, and hence very expensive.”

  “CJ.”

  “Fine. About a year before she died. At the dinner table one night, after a meal. Jack was out with his police officer buddies, and my mom was telling me about this girl in college, way back in the sixties, who had a crush on her. Yeah, I know, my mom used to say weird things to me at the dinner table. I took it as a cue. I said, ‘Mom? I’m that girl in college.’

  “She laughed and said, ‘You have a crush on me?’

  “ ‘I have a crush on Tom Selleck,’ I said. I figured she’d laugh. It was a funny line, and I chose Tom because my mom clearly had a thing for him from watching Magnum, P.I. Also, Jack has that Selleck mustache. She did not laugh. She got all tense and stiff and mumbled something about needing to check the laundry, and that was the extent of my coming out to my mother. And then a year later she died of ovarian cancer, so there’s that.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Yeah, well, so I tried to come out, anyway. Unsuccessfully.”

  I was quiet for a moment. I wanted to ask him more about his mom, but he’d changed the subject. “That sucks.”

  “Yup.”

  “That’s why I’m scared. Why don’t they get that? Felicia is like, ‘It’s gonna be fine,’ but how does she know? Deena said I should show them how I walk and they’ll just know.”

  That made him guffaw.

  “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  “Sorry. Just joking,” he said. “You need to come out. That’s the truth.”

  “But in one moment, everything is gonna change.”

  “Yes,” he said. “One way or another, your old relationship with your parents will be gone in a second. Good or bad, that’s guaranteed. Once you tell your folks you like your sandwich with a pickle, the rest of their lives they will be picturing the boy whose diaper they used to change doing stuff with boys’ pickles.”

  “Ugh. You have a way with words and images.”

  “I am special, yes. Speaking of pickles, I’ve made a decision. I’m going pickle free.”

  “You are not,” I said.

  “But yes I am. First of all, guys are garbage. Second of all, a thing happened.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  I expected him to laugh but he didn’t. “Did I ever tell you about Mike?”

  “Is he the one who gave you crabs?”

  “No. He’s the clingy one.”

  “Oh yes, Mike.” I remembered something about a weekly rendezvous CJ had with a married guy twice his age.

  “So yesterday afternoon, I’m leaving for work and as I walk up Franklin toward the subway, I notice there’s a car inching along behind me. I speed up, it speeds up. I slow down, it slows down. Finally, it pulls up next to me, and a hand reaches out the window and hands me an envelope.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. So the background is that a week before, we were in a hotel near Times Square, and after schtupping, he got all sentimental, and he said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to my kids.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds, um, grreeat!’ And he said he was serious and I said that I, too, was in fact serious, that it didn’t make a lot of sense to me to do that, given that he has a wife, and kids, and he said that knowing me had made him understand what he wanted, and what he wanted was a house in the country with me, and to write poetry to me, and to teach me to fish, and to have horses and maybe some dogs, and I tried to lighten the moment by asking whether the dogs might spook the horses or if the poetry would be in iambic pentameter, and he said, ‘Don’t joke, CJ. I’m serious,’ and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll think about it,’ and then, like three seconds later, I said, ‘Done.’ And he started crying, and I said, ‘Please don’t cry. I think you’re swell and you have a dynamite pecker and a reasonably nice ass for an old guy, but this isn’t … I mean, we can keep doing this if we keep it just like this, but if suddenly you think you can become my lover and my father, that’s not gonna happen.’ And he sobbed like a little girl, and it was AWFUL.”

  “CJ!” I said. “That’s … did that happen?”

  “Yes! And then he handed me a note through an open window, where I couldn’t even see his eyes or face, and he drove off. The note said his wife doesn’t know what’s happened but she knows something’s happened, and this is it, and he’s willing to go talk to my parents for me, and to tell them how special I am, and how he wishes to show me the world, and even though I’m eighteen, it seems like the polite thing to do, so that everyone’s on the same page, and did I know that when I walk I have a subtle limp, and how tasty I look from behind, and he wonders what my bedroom looks like. I honestly didn’t know how he knew where I lived!”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Yeah. So. No more older guys. Seriously. I’ll dance for them, I’ll take their money at the club, but no more giving out my number or going to Uncle Charlie’s to find true love with some thirty-five-year-old stockbroker who shops at All American Boy.”

  I didn’t know where to start, and it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t start. That story might be true, and it might not be. And what was sheltered Micah Strauss gonna tell CJ about dealing with a stalker?

  I changed the subject.

  “So Rick is coming tomorrow. He’s sleeping over. Like, in my room. I’ll be on the couch in the living room, I should explain, for those listening with dirty minds.”

  “Ooh,” he said. “So hot. Could you, like, walk in on him when he’s changing?”

  “CJ. This is not conduct becoming a person who has just given up pickles.”

  He cracked up. “True. So you’re gonna tell him?”

  “I think so!”

  “Do you have any gay books?”

  “I don’t think so? No?”

  “Nothing Edmund White? Dancer from the Dance? Faggots by Larry Kramer? The Color Purple, even?”

  “No.”

  “How do you even survive?”

  “I have some porn, I mean. I hide it behind my bed.”

  “Okay! Now we’re talking. Take one of the magazines and put it under your pillow.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because that way he’ll know. You won’t even have to tell him!”

  “Okay, but …”

  “Micah. Do you have any idea of how awkward it is to come out to a person you barely know for the first time? You said you, like, barely have ever talked to the guy.”

  “True.”

  “So circumvent. Leave the magazine. He’ll find you and talk to you. If he’s a good guy, he’ll do it as a mentor. If he’s a bad guy, he’ll do it in a naughty nurse outfit.”

  “You’re so weird.”

  “I’m not not weird.”

  I was shivering with nervousness when we got off the phone, but I knew he was right. And with CJ behind me, I was going to be able to do this.

  I was eating pepperoni pizza delivered from Big Nick’s alone at the dining table when Rick arrived on Friday night.

  A whirlwind of greetings, hugs, and “you look great”s spun between my mother and Rick, and then my dad slapped him on the shoulder and said “Hey,” like someone my age embarrassed to be having a sleepover. He approached me in the dining room with a kind, slightly asymmetrical smile on his face. Rick was a nice-looking older guy with a slight paunch like my dad. A prominent nose, round face, light brown hair neatly parted on the side. Aging yuppie, maybe. His Lacoste shirts looked appropriate on him as opposed to mine on me, and he wore a brown leather jacket—not the gay wardrobe but maybe gay-wardrobe adjacent.

  “Hi, Micah,” he said while I was between chews. I covered my mouth and said “Hey” back. Then my mother dragged my father out of the room for who knows what, and we were left alone.

  My heartbeat quickened, because this was my chance. Or it would have been, had I not, just fifteen minutes earlier, put a Playgirl magazine under his pillow. A Playgirl magazine with Mel Gibson on the cover that I’d purchased in the Village over the summer. One that I’d come to depend upon, as it introduced me to Greg Louganis, who was even sexier than CJ, if that was possible.

  That magazine had been pulsing loudly, like the lewd version of the Telltale Heart, every second since I’d left it there. Bud-ump ump, bud-ump ump, lou-ganis, lou-ganis.

  What was I thinking, listening to CJ rather than Felicia?

  You listened to CJ if you wanted to know the best way to create a fake passport, or seduce your English teacher. Anything else, Felicia, obviously. Dang it.

  “Do you like pizza?” Rick asked, breaking the awkward silence by making it weirder.

  He wasn’t the most exciting person in the world.

  “Yes,” I said. “I do like pizza.”

  And in that moment, I understood fully what a terrible idea I’d followed.

  * * *

  We four sat in the living room, watching Dallas. Rick definitely made it funnier, interspersing witticisms about what the various characters should say. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out how to sneak back into my room, as OCE had morphed to OME (Operation Magazine Extraction). Of course, leave it to my mother, who had planted her flag on not going into my room, as it would be “very rude to our guest.”

  I was beginning to be afraid that not sneaking in would wind up being ruder.

  “Ugh,” Rick said. “None of this matters. It’s all going to turn out to be Victoria Principal having another damn dream, thereby negating everything.”

  My dad snorted. “Why are we watching this crapola?”

  “Bite your tongue,” Rick deadpanned. “This is the best.”

  “I’ll be right back. Need to get something,” I said, standing up.

  “Honey,” my mother responded. She turned to Rick. “Sorry. I’ve told him. That’s your room while you’re here. Off-limits to forgetful children.”

  I tentatively sat down. I stayed fastened to the couch, trying to figure out a way around this. I excused myself to use the bathroom, but the bathroom was within view, and for some reason my mother was very serious about this odd rule she’d made. When I stepped out, I glanced over, hoping she’d be enraptured in Dallas, but she was staring straight at me. I walked the plank back to the couch.

  “I’m getting tired,” my father said as Falcon Crest began.

  Rick raised his arms over his head in a mock stretch and said, “If we’re gonna hit the links early tomorrow, better get some shut-eye.” He stood up. “Micah, thanks for the use of your room. I hate to put you out.”

  “No problem. Could I—”

  “Micah!” my mother nearly shouted. Why this one thing had become her obsession, I’ll never know. But it was clear: On her watch, I wasn’t getting back into my room tonight.

  “Okay,” I said, trying to figure out how to deal with the awkwardness that was bound to ensue. Was it possible the magazine wouldn’t make noise under the pillow? What if it did? Would he think I was making fun of him? Would he tell my parents—and if so, how much worse would it be for them to find out that way than me just telling them?

  Damned CJ and his hypnotic ways.

  Had I not quite obviously tried to get back into my room twice, the easy time to extricate the magazine would have been when Rick went to brush his teeth in the hall bathroom after my mother excused herself for the night. But because I’d been so weird about it, suddenly my mother was playing warden. Could she know? How?