The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

My school was so private, i.e., more or less 300 students, 5th grade to 12th, all boys, that when it threw us after-hours dances, the janitor and coach would switch the light bulbs in the ceiling of the cafeteria for colored ones and stack the chairs and tables in the corners.

I was 15, which makes it 1968, and at a dance with my brainy stoner friends. Jay was yelling in my ear about his little brother who was freaking out on LSD. He said he was too stoned to deal with that and thought of me because I’d done a lot of LSD but wasn’t high right then, unusually.

I would have helped since I was always sort of knee-jerk worried.

The first time I saw George, he was walking on his tiptoes with his arms straight out and waving them around as if his shoes were balanced on a tightrope and the asphalt was mist.

He had long hair like me, and, even though it was too dark to see more than that hair and what he wore, I knew I’d never seen him at our school before, since I would have seen a boy that young with hair that long, and that was probably because the school kept kids away from teenaged students for our mutual protection.

“This is Dennis,” Jay said to him and then careened away.

“I’ve heard of you,” the boy said.

“What’s happening?” I asked him as I often did instead of saying hi back then.

“My feet are huge,” he said. “I can’t walk.”

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“Of my feet, yes,” he said.

I told him I had taken lots of LSD and maybe understood what he was going through, and that some friends of mine had helped me down to earth when I was losing it, and I thought their scheme could work on him if he would let me try, and I guess that’s when I put my hand out.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“Take it,” I said.

“It’s too small,” he said.

If he’d had shorter hair, or if the acid hadn’t made him seem more me-like than an average kid, I might have done what you’re supposed to do with children, say, grabbed his hand against his will since I knew more than him and thought, He’ll thank me once he isn’t high or young.

“No offense,” I said. I slid my arms beneath his, raising him until his legs were waggling an inch or so above the ground, then trudged to where the ground’s concrete was cast more solidly and had no texture so to speak and brought no imagery to mind. I set him down and started sliding out my arms.

“No,” he said, and clutched my hands before they could escape. “I need them.”

“I’m going to do a thing,” I said, “and you should let me do the thing, and all you have to do is walk or stumble. Is that cool?”

I would say he laughed, but even as a kid, George was always very cautious when he laughed like someone sickly coughing in tight, crowded quarters. “You’re trying to talk to me,” he said.

I started walking us away. His shoes fishtailed between mine, but we gradually made it to the school’s athletic field. I steered him toward the baseball field, then toward its closest base—third, I think—where I lowered us. That left him sitting in my lap, which felt too gay to me, so I tried to slide him off onto the ground. He fought me and kept saying, “No, please don’t,” but between my pushing and his clinging, we wound up in a compromised position wherein his ass was resting on the dirt, and he had two fistfuls of my T-shirt, and his legs were hooked around my waist, and my arm was clamped across his shoulders.

“Now, tilt your head back and look at the stars,” I said, “and try to think of me as boring.”

His eyes checked out the sky. His chin raised, and, after saying “wow” a few times and scrunching up my T-shirt’s chest into two ugly flowers, his face was overridden by an acidheaded look, as unmistakable as Down syndrome, wherein one’s eyes misfired, completely lost their windows-of-the-soul effect, and just looked cretinous to people who were sober.

He stayed weird faced for quite a while, minutes or longer even. I guess I must have looked around the field, and listened to the psychedelic music leaking from the windows of the cafeteria, and tried to give the stars some benefit of the doubt.

At some point, George turned his eyes on me. From straight on, they looked extremely frightened, but a look of fear was also one of LSD’s reliable yet specious decorations. “Am I crazy?” he asked me, or maybe asked somewhere to which he thought I was the doorman.

“No, you’re high,” I said.

“I don’t mean now,” he said. “I mean all the time.”

“I just met you,” I said.

By then his eyes had stalled on mine. I guessed his mind was off investigating some hallucination, and that my eyes were just like buttons on a shirt to him or else seemed very far away and safe like stars. It’s always disconcerting when a little kid stares at you, because you could be doing something un-thought-out that will change his life by accident, so I looked away.

“No, come back, I’ll fall,” he said.

I looked at him again. Not being stoned, I didn’t have the expertise to use his eyes as microscopes to help me solve some mystery about the universe in which I formed particle. I remember thinking, They only look like eyes, they’re just eyes-like on the surface, and, even if they’re eyes, they’re too full of camouflage to see me or tell I’m sentient, at least if I don’t move much.

So, I was stuck exploring what he actually looked like. First his eyes, which, even given they were sitting ducks, let out nothing personal that I could see or riff imaginatively upon. Other than their blue color and dilated pupils, acid had completely padlocked them. I couldn’t see a thing I hadn’t seen in mine in mirrors, and even less, and I remember killing time by trying to assess their corneas and glossiness and lenses like an optometrist.

I checked and multiply rechecked his eyebrows, nose, lips, cheekbones, chin, forehead, their placement, and the minutiae of his face’s pores for what felt to me like hours, but couldn’t have been hours. I must have had so many concepts and hypotheses about his face to keep my eyes fixated there and interested, but all I can remember was deciding he was cute, or maybe just adorable since he was 12.

Now when I concentrate and visualize that face I must have memorized and come to know more thoroughly than any other face that’s ever looked at me not from a photograph, what amazes me is that I don’t think it confused me or attracted me, and that I couldn’t have imagined kissing it or wishing I could script my name with an affectionate inflection into its voice if I’d even wanted to.

Eventually, I saw something crop up in his eyes. A kind of energy that might have formed a plus sign, if it were an image. I guessed it was the starting point of what he thought of me

“Are you back?” I asked.

“You just talked to me,” he said.

“I did,” I said.

“You won’t believe what I just thought,” he said. “It wasn’t even thought.”

“And what was it?” I asked.

He turned his head and looked out at the field. He pried his fingers from my shirt and swung his legs off mine, then crossed them and sat up straight so he could face whatever he was seeing. My arm was still around his shoulders, which felt obnoxious, so I started to remove it until I felt his fingers squeeze and tug my wrist. “No,” he said. “I still need that.”

I think we sat there looking at the grass and making mental hay while I asked him things like “You okay?” and “How’s it going?” now and then.

I heard the music shut off in the cafeteria. Since it had a psychedelic tinge, its loss was more significant to someone stoned than not, and, sure enough, without that sound George seemed to turn off too, or rather turn on, or I mean he either animated and became the slightly nervous seeming little kid I guessed he’d been before he drugged himself and met me, or I saw that. I raised my arm, but instantly his hand reached up and grabbed my forearm in midair and pulled it down again.

“Not yet,” he said.

“The dance is over,” I said. “How normal are you?”

“I’m . . .” he said then waited for a while. “Half.”

I noticed he had stiffened, especially his back and neck, and gripped my arm as if he wanted to say something else and couldn’t, but he kept looking at the field while nothing happened, and I decided he was probably as close to being ready as he would be.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he said finally.

“Like what?” I asked.

“I can’t tell,” he said and looked directly at me.

His eyes were working, and they were hard to meet, like kids’ eyes always are, and I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, or if it was about me, and didn’t realize I’d ever want to know.

I must have been relieved to know a face was back where it belonged, by which I guess I mean a face I didn’t need to take as seriously, or that I didn’t think I could relate to anymore, but I remember feeling disappointed that he was just a kid, or still a kid, and how that feeling frightened me.

“I looked at you for a really long time,” he said, “but I still don’t know you.”