When I’m ten years old we join the Village Bath Club in Manhasset. It’s a pool and tennis courts, snack bar and a restaurant. (A restaurant we never go to. Never even step foot inside. It is expensive and costs extra.) This is prompted mostly by the fact that I won’t leave the house in summer. Preferring to sit in the dark cool of the basement and watch TV for those brief months of relief between school years. But my mother was insistent that I enjoy the outdoors, so, during the week, while she was at work in the city, my father would drive me and my sister to the Village Bath Club and drop us off for the day.
I would spend most of the time wandering the shopping center that was across the street, getting an ice cream at Swensen’s, picking over the racks at B. Altman, poking in and out of shops like a bored housewife while my sister swam and did summer stuff. I had never heard of the Village Bath Club before we started going. Never even been much to Manhasset. But I can tell shortly after we join, by the way we’re treated by everyone else, that we don’t quite belong. That we’re not one of them. We are from Queens and this is Manhasset, Long Island. I hadn’t ever given much thought to people who might have had more than we did. Everyone we knew had roughly the same. It’s not like these people in Manhasset were Kennedys or Rockefellers. But they had nicer houses, and bigger yards, and well, more money. We never discussed this either. This odd thing, this place we went every summer where we were outsiders.
They all talked to each other. All knew each other. Socialized together. These are the people who go to the restaurant. Order bottles of wine for lunch. I see them through the large dining room windows that face the pool. We only talked to the two other families we knew there who were also from Queens. My sister, always more outgoing, chatted with some of the other girls, but even she, after a while, kept her distance. I am always happy to avoid any unnecessary social interaction anyway. There could be no social anxiety if there were no social. I saw everything a little bit differently from then on, though. Did I want more? Did I want something I didn’t have and hadn’t realized it until I saw it? Maybe. There isn’t a gay kid alive who, not unlike Belle, wants much more than this provincial life. I guess now with Instagram and Facebook people are immediately aware of those with more. Those who have seemingly everything. They see it all the time. But I wasn’t, not really, up until that point. After that, it was always in the back of my mind: “They don’t think we belong here.”
I learn how to swim at the Village Bath Club our first summer as members. Up until now I have resisted any attempt to teach me. My mother was taught by being tossed into the water as a toddler, which, fortunately for me, has fallen out of fashion by the time I’m born. I am afforded swim lessons with an instructor who is missing one nipple and wears a Speedo. His name is Bill, and it is hard for me to concentrate on the lesson due to the two aforementioned descriptors. He was very patient and kind and held me up by the waist as I kicked and stared down intensely into the water, focusing solely on not looking at his crotch or missing nipple. A nipple had been there at one point, though, there was a small scar indicating where it had been. I had so many questions. None of them about swimming.
I take lessons with Bill once a week and it’s slow going. Helen Keller learned to talk in less time. I couldn’t quite grasp the coming-up-for-air part. I did all right while Bill was holding me up by the waist I would kill to still have and basically walking me across the pool. But the second he lets go I flop around like a very flamboyant fish. My parents tell me that if I can swim the length of the pool by the end of the summer they’ll give me fifty dollars. This was the ’70s, and for fifty dollars you could practically buy a house. And it was not like my parents to bribe me with money to do things that most typical boys did as a matter of course, so I needed to cash in while I could. Suddenly I started to focus. Divorcing myself from all of the distractions on Bill. (It didn’t help that my head came directly up to his missing nipple. Although by this point I’d already spent so much time looking at it I was starting to think two looked weird.)
I get a little better and instantly develop a lifelong fixation on having a swimmer’s build that only intensifies as I grow older. Some might also refer to this as body dysmorphia. This was given to all gay men in 1982 by Calvin Klein when his first underwear ad appears. (Today there are many examples of body positivity. Rightfully celebrating all different shapes and sizes. Had this happened years earlier it would have saved me many thousands of hours at the gym.) By the end of the summer it’s time for my cash grab performance. My parents watch from their loungers as Bill encourages me. I take several dramatic deep breaths summoning Shelley Winters diving to save Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure. (“In the water I’m a very skinny lady!” Another of the most iconic lines in cinema history.) I swim for what feels like an eternity, the pool suddenly the length of the English Channel, until finally … applause. My parents, my sister, Bill, all clapping. I made it. And, unlike Shelly Winters, I don’t die either. The other club members unaware of my victory, I am invisible. I don’t see Bill again after this. Nor do I ever find out what happened to his other nipple. He’s either old or dead now, but in my mind he’s ageless, always in a Speedo, smiling, patient, showing me how to kick.
The following summer I take tennis lessons. I’m discovering this isn’t so much a swim club as it is a boot camp. A Long Island Trojan horse, if you will. Forcing me out of the house and learning things I had never previously given a thought to. But I’m not bad at tennis. I grow up with a Ping-Pong table and this is just a larger version of that, I realize. I still can’t throw a ball but I can hit one with a racquet, that’s progress of some sort. You have to wear white tennis shorts to play on the courts. (There are only three contained in a large cage-like structure not far from the parking lot, but they treated it like it was Wimbledon.) I liked wearing white shorts, so I didn’t mind tennis. My parents wanted me to be able to play one sport, so the least I could do was give them that. In the grand scheme of things it didn’t seem too much to ask for. I would never admit I liked it though, I treated it more as a favor I was doing them. “You’re welcome,” I said with my eyes after every lesson.
I still swim and play tennis with the same level of competence I had then, but I’ll take it.
Most of my time there, though, I spend wandering the adjacent shopping center named Miracle Mile. I roam up and down the length of it, killing the meat of the day (the hours between eleven and four are always the most brutal to get through). There’s nothing more refreshing than stepping into an air-conditioned store on a New York August afternoon.
And another summer passes. And another. And now I’m a teenager. And my sister, Maria, has a boyfriend, Marco, who comes with us as our guest on some days. He plays on the football team at our high school, St. Francis Prep. He is fit and handsome and has the easy charisma of a movie star (which is basically what he is in our high school, instantly elevating the social status of my sister, and by proxy, briefly, me). Marco treats me like an equal, a peer, he questions nothing about me. Does not act as if there is anything other at all about me. He is everything that I am not. And yet doesn’t seem to notice.
(The first time we meet Marco, my sister has him over to our house for dinner. During this period of time we have a Persian cat, Checkers. Checkers is an indoor cat and does not leave the house under any circumstance. Our mother drills this into our heads repeatedly, Clockwork Orange–like, until finally the thought of Checkers walking on the grass was as absurd a thought as him piloting a helicopter. One time we thought he got out. I have still never seen my mother more upset than that day. I was scared for us more than for the cat.
Checkers has an odd habit of shitting in our basement bathroom sink. The basement bathroom is where we keep his litter box. Which I have to change, because my mother reads about toxoplasmosis, which is a disease women can get from cat feces that makes them unable to bear children or something. At least that’s what I remember her telling me. In any case, the upshot is that I have to change the litter box every day for fifteen years. Checkers, for some reason, will only shit in the basement bathroom sink. Eventually, like anything after a long period of time, the sight becomes commonplace (see Bill’s missing nipple). It was a happy surprise when I walked up to a sink that didn’t have shit in it. This is my sister’s first boyfriend, so her bringing him home for dinner is a big deal. We all like Marco instantly. It was as if she had brought a sixteen-year-old JFK Jr. home. There was no way you weren’t going to like him. The three of us were instantly charmed, already being more solicitous of him than we ever were of Maria.
After dinner, I go to the basement with my sister and Marco to watch TV. A while later Marco excuses himself to use the bathroom. When he comes out he says he should be going. (He has his own car, which he drove here. Of course he does.) My sister walks him upstairs and I go into the bathroom, where I see Checkers’ shit in the sink. I clasp my hands to my mouth and gasp as if I just stumbled upon a corpse. By the time I clean it up and get back upstairs Marco is already gone.
“Checkers shit in the sink and Marco saw it,” I state simply to the three of them.
“Oh, God,” my mother says going pale. Our family secret revealed to the one person we were trying to be our best selves for. But the strangest part is that he didn’t say anything. Had he seen so much shit in other people’s sinks that it wasn’t worth commenting on? And whose shit did he think it was? There were so many unanswered questions. In truth, it was only further testament to what a gentleman he was that he would use our bathroom, come across a load of shit in the sink, and be too polite to mention it. I can’t say I would’ve done the same if I were in his shoes.)
The summer Maria and Marco are dating he comes with us often to the Village Bath Club. We play tennis, swim, hang out. Let me say right now that this is not the tale of a closeted young jock who comes out in later years. This is a 100 percent straight guy. Which, of course, makes it all the more thrilling. I remember once being in the locker room there together and becoming paralyzed with fear. I did not know how to behave normally in a locker room, especially when in the company of a teenage Adonis. I didn’t want to sully our relationship by even allowing myself to have a crush on him. We were above that, Marco and I, our brotherly bond transcending any sort of physical attraction I tell myself. He takes me to the movies once when my sister is working late at McDonald’s. We see a double feature of The Kentucky Fried Movie and The Groove Tube and pass a bucket of popcorn between us. This is what it’s like to have a friend, I think. He never asks me about sports or girls or anything that you’d think he would.
And all summer my sister and Marco let me hang out with them. Maria never seems bothered by the fact that I’m always around. It’s almost as if she’s happy for me. Isn’t that lovely, I think now all this time later. When their relationship inevitably ends I take it harder than she does. “What did I do wrong?!”
But to have one summer where I am outdoors, not in the basement alone watching TV, and to have a friend who accepted me so simply, was enough to get me through much of what was to come. The fact that he was incredibly attractive only makes this story that much more touching.
We stay members of the Village Bath Club just a year or two longer, I think. We start going less and then Maria goes to college and money is needed for tuition. I go to college three years after her to Hofstra University on Long Island. And at the end of my senior year, when I’m twenty-two, I get a job at Hirshleifers Men’s on the Miracle Mile in Manhasset. The shopping center across from the Village Bath Club. Hirshleifers Men’s is a small, overpriced designer clothing store that one person would come into a day. I would sit reading a book behind the register. The owner tells me he prefers if I don’t read. I have never in my life had eight hours go by more slowly. Each day would drag on like a prison sentence. Sometimes, the owner would bring by trash bags filled with his old designer clothing and I got to pick through it to see if I wanted anything, so that part was okay. But otherwise I was going slowly insane with nothing to engage my mind aside from folding the same five sweaters over and over again.
I stay a few months, saving money for my eventual move into the city. And on my lunch breaks that summer I would walk the length of Miracle Mile and pass all the stores I passed as a boy. But the Village Bath Club is now closed. The restaurant I still had never been inside remains standing, abandoned (until eventually the whole thing is demolished and replaced with more, larger stores). And as I look at it that summer, empty, forgotten, it just seems ordinary. And all those people who made me feel like we didn’t belong didn’t have that much more than we did, I realize. And one town over there are those who have more than they do and make them feel like shit. And on and on it goes. But I don’t want to work here anymore, now selling clothes to these same people. I don’t want to be on the outside anymore.