I HAD AN AWFUL RECURRING NIGHTMARE as a child. Nothing with a narrative of any kind, just a crushing, bone-gray weight that roared in my ears like a jet engine and sent me running down the hallway in the dark to the refuge of my parents’ big Sears & Roebuck French provincial bed. There was nothing I could articulate that they could dispel on the spot, so sometimes I would sleep between them all night. Or I would wake up in my own bed in the morning without quite knowing how I got there. This nightmare didn’t happen often, but the feeling of it was recognizable when it returned, an amorphous terror without a plot or a cast of characters.

As I grew older I learned about self-hypnosis and began putting myself to sleep with stories. They were serials, actually, each one taking up where I had left off the night before. There was one I called “The Secret Crossroads,” a mystery in the woods inspired by the Hardy Boys, and another took place under the sea, like the movies I loved at the time where strong Greek sponge fishermen bubbled around in diving helmets and got the bends if they came up too fast. I still play with stories just before sleep, believing, I suppose, that the unconscious mind will offer assistance.

So storytelling came first; writing more or less crept up on me. When I was nine I kept a diary with a green vinyl cover and a little lock with a key. I’m pretty sure I got the idea from Little Lulu, but I didn’t stick with it longer than a few months, no longer than I’ve ever stuck with a diary. I didn’t exactly pour my heart out. I wrote about movies I had seen, and stuff I ate for lunch, and a murder case that Bobby Ballance and I were solving on the bus on the way home from school. There were several cases, so we rotated them as we saw fit, reciting the clues into a reel-to-reel tape recorder at Bobby’s house, the first device of its kind I had ever seen. The diary refers to the Skippy Goldston Case, and since I have no idea what or who it involved, I’ll have to ask Bobby about it the next time we connect on Facebook.

At roughly the same time—or was it earlier?—I was allowed to take shirt cardboards from Daddy’s dresser to serve as storyboards for my “Little Tallulah” comics. I had updated my favorite comic heroine by merging her with my favorite radio star, a funny lady with a voice like a man, who soothed me every week on The Big Show with her closing rendition of “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You.” Her benediction meant everything to me, since she seemed so warm and forgiving.

I had begun to mouth off to my parents as soon as I started going to school, and Daddy got so mad sometimes he would haul off and slap me hard. I knew how to handle this. I would whimper very softly in my room, keeping it pitiful until my mother sent my father in to make amends. He never apologized, just sat on the edge of the bed and called me “Sport” and talked about buying me the bullwhip I wanted so badly, or about the little shelf he would build for my radio once we got the bunk beds. Once, after another slapping, I punished him in a different way by smashing an ashtray I had made for him in school. It was a plaster handprint of my hand, painted shiny pink, and Daddy’s cigarette ashes were supposed to go in the indentations. The destruction of this keepsake really hurt him, I believed, and I felt bad for days, since it was not an action I could take back, even if I made him another ashtray.

In fifth grade at Ravenscroft School, where children of Old Raleigh families attended class in a war-surplus Quonset hut, Mrs. Robertson encouraged us to write by giving us picture postcards with paintings from art museums. She called this exercise Word Pictures. I chose a postcard from the Old West, a night scene with a dark-blue sky above a main street saloon that glowed like a lantern. I wrote about the tinkling of the piano and the boots clomping on the wooden sidewalk and the shadow of a stranger coming into town. Mrs. Robertson went nuts over it, reading it aloud, very slowly, to the class. I had never before felt so good about anything.

There were two short pieces in the seventh grade, both of which were mimeographed and distributed. One was an autumnal mood piece, just a paragraph, but heavy on the scenery, using words like myriad and azure that no one uses after the seventh grade. The piece came to a halt, rather rhythmically, I thought, with two short sentences: “All is calm. Tranquility reigns.” The other piece was a poem, even shorter than the paragraph, about a boy who worships a girl as a goddess until he sees a vaccination mark on her arm and realizes she is not immortal. Three guesses what was going on there. I needed credible excuses, and fast, for why I didn’t have a girlfriend yet, and perfectionism seemed as good as any. I loved girls too much to actually go steady with one. Privately, I assured myself that I would fall in love when I met a girl who looked like Kim Novak in Vertigo. Good one, since no one looked like Kim Novak in Vertigo; though, as of this writing, Miss Novak still makes a valiant effort.

Mrs. Peacock—Mrs. Phyllis Peacock—was that teacher writers write about, the one who singled them out in class and heaped praise upon them and predicted a great career to the everlasting eye-rolling annoyance of everyone else in class. Two of her previous graduates of Senior English, Reynolds Price and Anne Tyler, had already received this anointment; all three of us eulogized Mrs. Peacock to the press when she died at ninety-four, in 1998, after half a century of teaching. She was a tiny dynamo, more hummingbird than peacock, really, and she flitted about the room with goofy histrionic flair, sometimes jumping onto chairs to make her point. A lot of kids giggled at her behind her back, but they weren’t the ones getting “Orchids to You” written on their essays, complete with a drawing of an orchid.

I wonder now if Mrs. Peacock sensed what a wallflower I was, despite my efforts at sophisticated banter in class. She once asked me to research the origins of the maypole and report back to the class the next day. I knew nothing at all—only that debutantes danced around a maypole at the Terpsichorean Ball, as did the girls at St. Mary’s Junior College, where my sister, Jane, was expected to go. When I asked my parents about maypoles at dinner, my father snorted, and my mother blushed and giggled. That night, when I went to my room, I found that Mummie had left a volume of the Encyclopædia Britannica on my bed, opened to an entry titled “Phallic Symbols.” We never spoke about it after that. And the next morning, when I made my report to Mrs. Peacock, she listened, wide-eyed and seemingly enthralled by my account of pagans and penises, as if she had never imagined such a thing.

Her big finale for the year was to assign us literary-themed performance pieces at the school auditorium. I was already comfortable onstage, thanks to the Raleigh Little Theatre, where, at thirteen, I had been cast in their production of The Desperate Hours. I had played a suburban boy who was kidnapped by thugs and, all too briefly for my taste, manhandled by them. For Mrs. Peacock’s assignment, I paired off with my friend Sarah Pierce, a smart girl known for her large breasts, and we created a stage piece about Sleep in Literature. We dressed all in white, and made Doric columns by covering Pine State Ice Cream cartons with marble Con-Tact paper and stacking them on volleyball poles from the gym. We recited everything about sleep that I could find in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and ended with a passage from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” which I had committed to memory. The poem was about narcotic blossoms that made stranded sailors forgetful of home; according to Mrs. Peacock, Tennyson had chosen his words for their lulling, soporific quality.

“There is sweet music here that softer falls / Than petals from blown roses on the grass, / Or night-dews on still waters between walls / Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass; . . .”

When I was done, I looked into the audience to see Mrs. Peacock feigning sleep in the front row, her head tilted to one side. After a moment or two, she “woke” theatrically, like a storybook princess shaking off a spell, and began to applaud.

I used that poem when I wrote Tales of the City, almost fifteen years later. Mrs. Madrigal, the landlady at 28 Barbary Lane, recites it to her baffled new tenant, Mary Ann Singleton. Several years after that book was published, I did my first Raleigh book signing at a downtown bookstore. To my amazement there was something of a line, thanks to the publicity in The Front Page, North Carolina’s first gay newspaper. Even more amazingly, Mrs. Peacock was there. She twiddled her fingers at me but insisted on waiting her turn when the two men ahead of her, both dressed head-to-toe in black leather, graciously offered her their place in line.

I WAS BLESSED with women like that in my youth, fairy godmothers who taught me how to nourish my incipient fairy heart. My mother’s mother, the English suffragist, was an elegant, fey spirit from a time when past lives were all the rage. I was the oldest of Grannie’s nineteen grandchildren, the first of us to fall under her seductive spell. She took me to see the first run of Singin’ in the Rain, and had even let me go back twice on my own so I could master the lyrics of all my favorite songs. Since that time she had often theorized that I was the reincarnation of her beloved cousin Curtis back in England. Her bachelor cousin Curtis. Her extremely artistic bachelor cousin Curtis.

At six I had watched Grannie rise like a genie from a trapdoor in the stage of the Raleigh Little Theatre. (She had driven all the way from Virginia in her beige Ford to visit her daughter’s family and take the lead in The Madwoman of Chaillot. I remember her huge aluminum suitcase with its sharp corners and uncomfortable wire handle that always made Daddy cuss when he hauled it into the house.) She was this stately little partridge of a woman, but there she was on opening night levitating from a cellar in Paris and playing to the kid in the third row. I was no stranger to theater—I had played a nonspeaking role on that very stage the year before as one of the murdered children in Medea—but Grannie’s booming melodramatic delivery, coupled with my first whiff of stage smoke, came as a revelation to a boy already starved for enchantment. I was beside myself.

I don’t know if she was anything more than a dedicated amateur. She must have been good at playing “the Madwoman,” because she had played it once before at the Alexandria Little Theatre. When she came to visit us in Raleigh, she and my mother, also a little theater actress, referred to “the Madwoman” so off-handedly that it might have been someone they knew. When my mother played Eliza Doolittle, Grannie helped her with her Cockney accent. They could be actresses together, those two—that was their bond—and I’m sure it had offered them both, at different times, blessed relief from bombastic husbands. An actress had rehearsals, after all. An actress could be away from home for reasons other than the Junior League and the Piggly Wiggly. I can remember my father’s growly discontent as he served up the chicken divan casserole our mother had left behind on one of her rehearsal nights. “Your mama’s down at the theater with the goddamn fairies.”

The summer I turned ten my parents put me on a train to Virginia so I could stay with Grannie for several weeks. Looking back, that strikes me as out of the ordinary. Had Grannie actually requested this visit, or had there been a crisis at home, some unmentionable “female operation” that necessitated a long-term child-sitter? I had already figured out that ladies kept family secrets even theater-loving boys were not allowed to hear. Whatever the reason, I was thrilled about it, since I would have the Madwoman all to myself. It would be just the two of us when we went to the Smithsonian or down to the Hot Shoppe in Shirlington for roast young tom turkey with all the trimmin’s, and hot dogs in exotic rectangular buns.

Virginia was just as steaming hot as North Carolina, but Grannie built a nest out of old mattresses in her cool basement laundry room where I could curl up with my “Uncle Scrooge” comics and feast on buttered bread and iced tea, addictions that have followed me down the years. It was there that Grannie first began reading my palm, gently interrogating me about all my lives, past and present. As much as anything, palmistry was her excuse for offering tactful wisdom. When I grew older and Grannie visited Raleigh more frequently, I watched with pride as she read the palms of many others: my school friends, our maid Camilla, and once, during one of my parents’ parties, the governor of North Carolina. Sometimes she dispensed with personal contact altogether and cruised for palms in public places, sneaking a peek on the fly. I was with her once on a crosstown bus when she nearly fell out of her seat in her effort to eavesdrop on an interesting hand on the other side of the aisle.

My own readings became a regular affair, the equivalent of a semiannual checkup. I’m sure that was because Grannie wasn’t getting the answers she really wanted. When she studied my lifeline and asked me about career choices, my reply would be the same for many years: “I want to be a lawyer like Daddy.” Whereupon, she would manage a feeble smile and close my fingers like a book she was done with for the evening. She rarely interceded in family matters, especially ones that might challenge my father’s game plan, but she knew about me. She knew.

By the time I was thirteen I knew about me, too. I had begun to have dreams about kissing grown-up gas-station attendants, a development that disturbed me since it wasn’t just messing around the way boys did on camping trips; it was flat-out romance. I learned the hard way to put a towel behind the toilet tank to keep it from banging against the wall when I jerked off in the morning. My father had called me on this over breakfast: “What was that thumping I heard this morning, son? You spent an awful long time in the crapper.” He must have been thinking, with some degree of relief, that this was the advent of Girls for me. At the time, it was unimaginable to me that he could have known what was going on, much less tease me about it, but I was mortified just the same. Five years later I saw him inflict similar torment on my thirteen-year-old sister when he found a box of Kotex in her suitcase on a family trip. Such matters were never discussed in our family, but as soon as one of us arrived at a scary new rite of passage, the old man was there to greet us with a knowing leer. He seemed to enjoy making us uncomfortable. He was a pissed-off, shut-down guy, but I never stopped to think about why. All I knew—all I thought about, really—was that sooner or later I was bound to disappoint him.

Thus Grannie became a comfort in the minefield of my adolescence. Alone among my family and friends, she made no assumptions (and held no expectations) about my blossoming masculinity. When my father referred to Reverend Sapp as a “fairy nice fellow,” Grannie registered disproval with a scolding glance and a soft “Oh, Armistead, must you?” Once, when she and I attended a garden party at Mount Vernon (not George Washington’s house but a slightly smaller replica in a fancy Raleigh neighborhood), we spotted a woman in spike heels tottering ahead of us on a perfect green lawn. She was a pale-pink hallucination, a tipsy flamingo on the run, perfumed and powdered to the nth degree. As soon as she was out of earshot, Grannie turned to me with a sly smile and murmured, “Any woman who is all woman or any man who is all man is a complete monster unfit for human company.”

This was the South in 1958, and I had never heard such a thing.