Shortly after I find out what the act of sex is I realize this is something I am not going to be able to accomplish with a woman. At ten years old I was already like “oh, no, no, no, that’s not for me, thank you.” I think, I’m ten, I’m not certain. Probably younger, probably nine. I find out what it is the same time my sister does. She is two and a half years older and immediately tells me after she hears it at school. So I must have been younger. In the bombshell department, it’s right up there with finding out there is no Santa Claus.
“There’s no fucking way that can be true!” I say once she tells me the specifics. And yet it was. We didn’t learn about sex from our parents. No one did then. You caught bits and pieces at school or from friends. It was like someone telling you the plot of Game of Thrones before you’ve actually seen any of it. It all just sounds like a confusing mishmash of nonsense. How our parents expected us to learn about it was beyond me. I didn’t ask them then and I’m not asking them now. The whole thing had a science fiction–like quality to it. It’s all unsettling information. Once you know what it is, your childhood is officially over.
I had always assumed I was going to have a family, I just never took a hard look at what that was going to look like. The actual knowledge of what the act of sex consists of pretty much sends my life into a tailspin. “THIS is what you have to do when you’re married?”
When I’m ten Charlie’s Angels premieres. I am obsessed. Three beautiful women (well, two beautiful women and one smart one) solve crimes by posing as bikini models and beauty contestants. If I noticed the writing was stilted and hackneyed at ten, it must’ve been really fucking horrible. But I still loved it. Farrah Fawcett had a very famous swimsuit poster that hung in every boy’s bedroom (one word, “nipple”) but it was Jaclyn Smith’s poster that hung in mine. Farrah Fawcett’s sexuality was too overt for ten-year-old closeted Gary, but Jaclyn Smith had just the right touch of elegance and midlevel sophistication. In her poster, Jaclyn wore a peignoir (a negligee with a light robe over it. Jesus. I shouldn’t have to explain everything to you). Very coy and demure. Right up my alley. With the poster hanging in my room I might as well have spray painted STRAIGHT across the wall. I mean, what gay boy would have a poster of Jaclyn Smith in a peignoir on his bedroom wall? (Turns out all of them.)
In my mind, that Jaclyn Smith poster was my ticket to a normal family. I had it all planned out almost from the first time I saw her holding a gun in her white two-piece. She would make the perfect wife I decided. Beautiful and kind, we would one day marry. And on our wedding night we would have sex. Now this was the most difficult part of my fantasy to pull off. But if I really put my mind to it I could do it, I tell myself. If only just once. I would use drugs and drink and mind control and anything else at my disposal to just jam it in there one time. And the day after our wedding I would be called away for work (something that involved a slim-fitting Italian suit and a briefcase and a first-class flight with lowball glasses and clinking ice cubes) and when I would return Jaclyn, my wife, would be pregnant from our one night together (which, again, I wasn’t sure I could pull off but was determined to make happen at any cost), and we wouldn’t have sex again because, well, she was pregnant and I didn’t know that was a thing you did when you were pregnant. I’m only ten for Christ’s sake! She would give birth to a beautiful baby (boy or girl, didn’t matter, as long as it was healthy, blah blah) that we would bring home from the hospital together. Our perfect family.
And the next day Jaclyn would die in a car accident. I pictured it going off a cliff, we live in LA. Now I had a child and no wife. And I would never love anyone again. (Which was totally understandable, being that I was married to Jaclyn Smith, the most beautiful woman in the world.) And I would never have to date or pretend or be the object of rumor or innuendo. I would be above reproach. Forever bemoaning my lost love. Like Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Only not insane. I would be pitied but I would soldier on for my baby boy (I guess it’s a boy) and everyone would say, “There goes Gary and little Matthew (his name is Matthew), doesn’t the baby look just like his mother. Or his father. They’re both so gorgeous. There was never a love stronger than that of Gary and Jaclyn Smith. So sad. He’s so young and beautiful. But obviously he’s never going to be with another woman again.”
This is how I decided nobody would ever suspect me of being gay and I would still get to have kids (the only glitch, again, having to have straight sex one time, which was not an inconsiderable fly in the ointment). Looking back now it was an idea not without its flaws, but I was committed to it. (To this day I still think of Jaclyn Smith as the one who got away. Sorry, Brad.) Now, of course, today gays can have kids any number of ways. Surrogates, adoption, some other combination or another. They typically have twins or triplets at the drop of a hat now. But then, in the ’70s, I felt my only option was marrying Jaclyn Smith, having sex with her once (somehow), and then sending her off a cliff to her fiery death. As plans go, it’s not great.
Today, though, the thought of having a child is terrifying. I don’t want a teenager when I’m seventy. I don’t have the resources of an Elton John. The child will no doubt grow into a teen who will lie and do drugs and leave me at home confused at an age where I am unable to use any of the future technology. I’ve seen Euphoria. And teenagers will only get worse as time goes on. No, thanks, I’m not equipped to deal with whatever the fuck is coming down the road after TikTok. Teenagers frighten me. I will cross the street to avoid a gathering of more than two. Head down as I quickly shuffle by. My time to have a child is past. They came out with all this shit a little too late for me. I mean it would be nice to have one for Instagram, but otherwise, I’m good. Sometimes I think perhaps I’ve made an awful mistake and I’m missing out on the most extraordinary experience in life, but then I read about a drug-addicted celebrity’s child and feel much better. Besides, things don’t always work out the way you think they’re going to when you’re young. They usually don’t.
I realize when I get to high school that marrying Jaclyn Smith is not going to be the free pass that I had previously thought. I adopt a new plan. My best chance to avoid any suspicion, any unwanted attention, is to talk to as few people as possible. To blend in. Disappear. In four years I don’t eat lunch in the cafeteria once. I read Stephen King novels in the library, my friends are Carrie and vampires and a killer Plymouth Fury. I wander out of the building and go for walks to nearby Bagel Nosh or Bloomingdale’s. Studying people. Preparing myself for a life that I am not yet living. Taking notes. Information that I tuck away for future use. I bide my time. I wait. And I wait. And I wait.
My senior year arrives and I am in art class. Our teacher is a lay teacher. This is what we call the teachers in a Catholic school who are not nuns or brothers but just regular people. And now, thinking about it, I’m pretty sure she was a lesbian. Not just because she had very short hair, but that does heavily factor into it. We are working on a project, the class is comprised of juniors and seniors, and there is an announcement over the PA for all the seniors to gather on the football field to have their senior photo taken. The seniors in my art class get up to leave and I remain behind with the juniors, continuing to work on my shitty art project.
And this teacher (the one I’m pretty sure now was a lesbian) comes up to me, I no longer remember her name but I remember this moment, and she says “Aren’t you going to have your picture taken?” And I tell her “No.” She is very kind now. And speaks to me softly so the others can’t hear.
“I think if you don’t have your picture taken with the class you’re going to regret it one day.” And I look at her and say with certainty, “I promise you, I won’t.”
And with that she walks away. I wonder sometimes if she was right after all. But I don’t have my yearbook anyway. It’s gone, I don’t know where. So what does it really matter?
A few weeks before graduation, my parents talk to me. My dad tells me he and my mom have an opportunity to go on a cruise to Alaska but it falls during the day of my graduation ceremony. The cruise line my dad works for often only lets us know last minute when there is available space on a trip. My parents tell me they won’t go if I’d rather they attend my graduation. But this somehow feels right to me. I don’t need witnesses to the nothing I’ve made of these last four years. This is something I need to see through on my own. Like signing divorce papers. It’s all too fitting, really. My happiest moments of the last years have all taken place on cruise ships anyway. The most perfect nights always the second-to-last ones. When they turn the lights off in the dining room and all the waiters enter with Baked Alaskas held high over their heads, each one filled with sparklers. The reggae song “You Can Get It If You Really Want” plays over the sound system. The mood is nothing short of total bliss. My sister and I always looking to single out our waiter until he arrives at our table and shows off the Baked Alaska to us like a Fabergé egg as everyone sings along.
“You can get it if you really want/ but you must try/ try and try/ try and try/ You succeed at last.”
It is exhilarating and magical and everything my life in Queens is not.
And now my parents get to go to the actual Alaska. Yes, please go to the birthplace of the dessert that has given me so many happy memories while I wrap things up here. My mother makes me promise not to use her car while she’s away. It is a Mustang and she fucking loves that car. So on the day of my high school graduation I take a taxi with my sister to St. Francis Prep. Both of us dressed nicely. I am glad to have her with me. It is okay that she sees I have no friends. But she is my friend and we are going together. The driver tells us he has to make one stop on our way to pick up two more people also going to the ceremony. And he pulls up to a house, not unlike our own, and a classmate of mine, Geraldine Eidenwanger and her brother, Wallace, get in. Geraldine had gone to grammar school with me as well, and we were friendly, and her older brother, Wallace, had gone to school with my sister and now they were both in the same taxi as we were.
I’m embarrassed for Geraldine to see me going to graduation alone with my sister and it doesn’t occur to me that she is doing the exact same thing with her brother. What her circumstances were that also brought the two of them together with us in this taxi I have no idea. Too concerned always with how I appeared to other people. All four of us were quiet. Like we knew this was strange but didn’t know why. I wish we could have laughed about it. Been silly. Something. Instead we exchange congratulations and go our separate ways as soon as we step out of the car. I never see Geraldine again. Not even later on that day. We share a silent taxi ride and nothing else.
I don’t remember any of the ceremony. I couldn’t tell you if it was inside or outside. I remember considering not even going at the last minute, but my sister, Maria, helps convince me, and yes she is right, I need to finish this. Cross every t, dot every i. Only by graduating can I finally close this chapter and move on. I don’t know why I feel this way but I know it to be true. After it’s over I find my sister. I can still see the dress she is wearing. There are flowers on it. We have no pictures from this day. Maria leaves from the ceremony to go to work, or meet friends, I don’t remember where, but I am alone. That I know. I walk to the bus stop that is across the street from the school and wait for the Q76, the bus I have boarded every day the last four years at exactly 2:37, the time of the final bell.
But there are no other kids on the bus this day. They are with their families and friends. Off to parties and lunches. I don’t want to be with them, though. Don’t feel like I’m missing anything. I want to be here on this bus alone, pulling away from this school for one last time. I sit in the empty bus thinking, now my life will begin.
The lights go out and the waiters enter with Baked Alaskas held high over their heads. The dining room lit by hundreds of sparklers. My heart is racing.