Let me tell you, Provincetown, itself --if you have never been there -- is a pretty unique place. For some reason, there were [& I am sure there must still be] numerous little summer-stock theaters operating there. Four or five, maybe.
The little town is at the tail end of a peninsula, like a scorpion about to sting. There it is, sticking out into the ocean where, to get to it [I mean, back in the '60's, the time I am writing about], a lonely little ribbon of road winds miles and miles, with grey, windy beaches off to your right & numerous little antique villages scattered to your left. A lovely little afternoon drive from Boston, Cape Cod ["the Cape"] certainly was beautiful back in those days, and I bet still is, although I can't say for sure, because I haven't seen it in more than forty years.
David suggested the trip. Obviously he was drawn by word of all the little theaters there. Now let me see: had he been there before? I hesitate to say definitely he had not. But I don't recall him saying, "We should stop by such&such a theater," or anything like that. So I very much doubt it that he had been there before. I certainly had not set foot there before.
We had hitched down. Now did either David or I know where we were? --- that we were in one of the few outposts where homosexuals [as they were called then; there was not yet 'gay' this or that] or queers were. "Queer" was a derogative term often used then to make sure everybody knew he was a creepy/socially ostracized human being: "Man, you're acting like a fucking Queer!" Perfect for the high-school locker room where you snapped butts with a wet towel. That was par in the fifties and early '60's. Strange thing was, "queer" got adopted by gays in the late '60's and became respectable, a mark of distinction.
Did Mamet & I know gays were quite common in "P-town?" Uh, quite honestly, no, we did not. Did Mamet know and just not mention it, it not mattering much to him? Uh, No --- & I'll I tell you why I know that for a fact: We told each other everything! That's why. And, boy if there was one thing we would have talked about, during a tricky hitch thru the maze of different highways we had to take to get there from Vermont [in one day!], it's something like lotsa homosexuals lived in the little town we were headed to.
Unless you grew up 1)in the Midwest in '50's or even earlier & 2)have an intrinsic understanding of what friendship meant in the Sixties [specifically that decade], you will have a pretty hard time understanding the dilemma Mamet & I found ourselves in.
At one level, this is no big deal: we are just two teenagers messing around for a few days; we are tired and gonna go to sleep, no matter what this guy expects from us. I mean, it's like, "dude, that isn't what we're into." would easily solve the problem. If he pressed us we just say: "Just what is it about 'No.' you don't understand?"
But things had not exactly been set up to favor our handling the situation so adroitly as that. For one thing, it's pretty much David's idea that we are in Provincetown at all. For another, David is the gregarious one who has scored this offer of a place to crash. It's not me because I am the quieter one, even though I am a year older --- which is a lot in terms of growth and maturity. If you remember the difference between a freshman and a sophomore in college you know what I am saying is important: normally he would be deferring to me because of the age difference and hard-won battles I had already fought and won and was passing onto him.
And here is where Robert Frost's . . .And I, I took the road less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.would be an appropriate observation to make.
A fellow-classmate from Goddard who I now correspond occasionally with, was able to cut through all the crap of memory. She nailed it down perfectly in how I thought in those days. Perhaps I am like everyone else in the sad fact that, when young, each of us must struggle fiercely to retain even crumbs of maturity and self-esteem. But David was vastly more at ease with his own judgment than I; David made the snap decisions when they had to be made. Well, this Goddard classmate -- who knew Mamet well, too -- wrote the following, which distills perfectly the zero self-worth I had in 1964: I do recall a conversation you and I had once, sitting around --maybe in the coffee shop, trying to make some sense out of something . . .[she names two of our mutual friends] had sided with each other over and against me. I was sitting by myself reading but more staring into space and was, at the time, deeply disturbed over it. . . You just smiled a lot and said in something that was pretty ironic but God, I struggle to think and can't think of what. I remember feeling some real clarity through what you said but when I told you that, you thought that statement was kind of bizarre. I saw it as your not believing you could have/impart such clarity. You told me that none of it would make sense because it involved the two of them.
Perhaps, ultimately, this esteem issue I was blind to became the Great Divide between David & I. Because he had, if nothing else at that time, a huge belief in himself. True, he was remarkably unformed, as even a personality. He was a totally green transplant from the Midwest, testing the waters of the East Coast for depth and temperature. And here we had innocently wandered into what was, more or less, the Capital of the Queers. We were both dramatically out of our depth. But it was Mamet who calmly took the bull by the horns.
"Listen," he said, after we had stumbled into a separate bedroom, and things just didn't feel quite right yet. "Let me go talk to this guy." He stood up and smiled. David's enjoying thisI wondered to myself.
"Okay," I said, and tried to kick back, lean back, all the while thinking to myself, "Shit. Motherfucker! Shit! This is really goddamn stupid. Cocksucker!."
You couldn't really hear down the hallway, from room-to-room. All I remember is feeling, for a while, it was too quiet. David returned in about five minutes. He plopped down on the floor; there was only one bed.
"Well, what did he say?" I asked.
"It's not easy to explain," he said. "And also, it's funny as hell," he chuckled. "It's funny as hell. . . This poor guy. Hey, I know, lets maybe look around town some." David then looked right at me. Now, Mamet had looked "right at me," hundreds of times. But somehow, like a mirror to this all-too-quiet dump we had found ourselves in, invited into it by a stranger, David's gaze was strangely deeper and more piercing than I had ever seen him capable of. He had aged, in minutes, a year or more.
You could hear a pin drop. You could hear the wind blowing softly outside in the cold, damp night. Something turned in my stomach that felt like both fear and disgust. It was light years from just this morning when we had started this serendipitous journey from "home" in Vermont. But, much worse, it was light years to the next.
"Whady'a mean? We look around, we gotta leave here and who's to say he'll even let us back in?" I observed.
The room was deadly quiet. This wasn't like us. What was it, just road-weariness? I wish!!
Years and years later I would be sitting in a little pocket park next to the library in Pacific Grove, slightly buzzed from the quart of beer I had hidden in my guitar case, lying at my feet. I had been working for an hour or so on a song for my daughter who lived north of San Francisco with her mother, up in the mountains. She was four or five and I missed her terribly. I ran through the chords once again, a little mantra of sound, then took up my pen and wrote, And we're falling, falling, falling./Just falling, falling, falling/We're falling, falling, falling ---without a sound.And the same feeling of falling, I learned that night. David Mamet: my Best Friend.
Some accidental evil, in dead earnest, had been placed between us. It was just a look on his face. Slowly I began to realize I was seeing a side to this Best Friend I'd never seen before. There was a lethal coldness to him that didn't fit the happy-go-lucky guy I knew. Later on, as time went on, he could temper it into a biting sarcasm that was a joy to listen to, as long as you were not on the receiving end.
"Aint you hungry, Eric? This guy's aint offered us any food." If there was a ticking of a clock in the room, it would have sounded like gunshots. I would have had to instinctively duck. But a cool-as-a-cucumber set to Mamet's jaw told me that, somehow, whatever solution I would pose, would be the wrong one.
"Goddamn, fuck it." I said, finally. "Let me go see what's going on with this guy." David just looked at me. It was at once an affirmation of the idea and a rebuke.
"You go talk to him?" he asked, with a smirk on his face.
"Look," I said quite reasonably, "This is no time to be roaming around the town. It's getting late; cold. We got no money; we got to sleep somewhere."
"Talk to him? Do some good?"
I got up slowly, stiff from all the jumping in and out of cars we had dealt with; from the creepty, foggy night, covering the dirty little streets like a shroud.
"Yeah, I'll go talk to him," I said.
There is a jazz song by someone, written around this time, named "Windmills of Your Mind." My head was inside a windmill. The hallway stunk with stale piss. At the threshold of the door I paused and looked back at Mamet. He was staring down at the floor. I wanted to say something to him, get his attention. But suddenly I felt so alone, I was shocked. If things made sense, I would have blamed this sexual predator who was we didn't trust. But, and I'll never forget this, I, at that moment, was furious with David. I knew instantly this was something I would never be able to explain to him. There was no explanation. I just hated him suddenly and wished I were back in Vermont. I may have agreed to hitch down to "the Cape" but this mess wasn't of my making. Mamet had set the destination and look where we found ourselves.
Without looking up from the floor, Mamet mumbled, "Talk to him, then." He might as well have said, "Life's not fair," or some other observation. But, whatever he said then, the die was cast and a sense that he pitied me was in the air. What was it that he never told me this night? I never have figured that out. But, like I say, the die was cast.
I walked down the long, dark hallway on my own. I don't remember much about what I did or did not say to this man. Was I afraid of him? Sure, probably a little & what teen-age, near-sexual-virgin wouldn't have been?
I ever-so-lightly knocked on the door: I remember he opened the door when I knocked and put out his hand and told me his name. He had that kinda feverish look horny people have that don't know where they stand but are hell-bent on trying. He was not old or repulsive. He was just one of those "all the lonely people/where do they all belong(s)" going bonkers alone in tourist-trap America. Just some schmuck who's fate had led me and David to collide with and now was like the genie who would not return to his bottle.
"Like I told you guys when I met you, we could get it on. It's fun." He kind of smirked when he smiled.
"Don't you feel like it?"" he asked. He walked directly up to me and rubbed my cock thru my pants. He closed the door quietly. We were alone. Boy this nightmare will never end. I felt danger and was really was afraid now.
I didn't move. I didn't encourage him and I didn't ask him to stop. He squeezed a little as he rubbed my cock, testing to see if it was getting hard. His hand pleaded. He needed a shave. There was quite of bit of alcohol on his breath but he didn't slur his words at all.
My father had warned me in his office once about queers. He said they couldn't be trusted and to stay away from them because they were sick. I had never known anyone to be that forward sexually with me. Certainly no girl or woman had ever done that. I desperately wanted to have an orgasm with a girl, where she came at the same time. My father had told me about that, or hinted at it. It had never happened, in my few brief heavy petting sprees in high-school. But I had real healthy sexual appetite and had made love to a girl at Goddard but it hadn't gotten real serious. I had "had sex" with a girl. Never with a man. For me, personally, the Sexual Revolution --- as it has been called a million times --- began in that moment this total stranger in a wierd moment came onto me.
"Nah," I finally said. It wasn't that I knew before that split second I would say that. Some part of me didn't even know if I could turn him down. The risk I was running in getting us thrown out of there was unknown. Everything about the guy was unpredictable. Including what the fuck I would say, now that he had come onto me and rubbed my cock.
"Well you want some wine, right?" he asked and turned away. He went to a little side-board and pulled a glass from a shelf and poured me some wine.
"Sit down over there," he gestured after the few steps to hand me the glass. "You're tired, right?" he asked.
There was music in the room, or somewhere. In my head? It was jazz. Some ugly chick --- "Just Another Whore" as Heminway would call her --- hovered in the atmosphere. It pervaded the room like a menstrual stain.
. . .a lonely corner of the world, two strangers meet/and hope that the sun that sets, will bring no regrets . . . the purr of a car prowling the neighborhood. This room is close to the street & to think of an escapade/a fly-by-night-affair/became an interlude/that I pursue everywhere . . . do,dah,do,do,do,dah
I sip the wine and feel sick but safe, too. He hasn't gotten angry with me, just more and more needy, like I would throw him out of his own room or something. I think of Mamet, probably still staring at the floor. No doubt he is wondering what's up. What's up is the end of something. And the exhaustion that comes from having to makes me want to puke.
"Nah," I say, more to the music and the singer, rather than to the guy who thinks sucking a dick is exciting sex. My dick? I think of how, during the Gold Rush, young children were kept alive by being fed the arms and butts of their dead parents by strangers; children who would have otherwise frozen to death because the leader of the expedition stupidly tried to wait out a storm as they approached a mountain pass in the Sierras.
"How come you live in this little place?" I ask the wish-he-was-sucking-my-dick-sucker.
"I work here. In the theater," he responds.
This room sure is spinning. The windmills? Must be the windmills of your mind problem. God I hate this guy. I expect him to whip it out and just start jerking off for me. I am numb and the most response you could get from me would be, "Interesting."
Two years later I would be hitching back to Chicago from a brief visit to see my mother. I am living in Chicago with a wonderful family [I think, then] who Mamet has introduced me to.
My mother has been to Las Vegas; divorice granted, parents gone their separate ways; Dad's ready to marry a woman from China who works for the UN. My father is now strictly East Coast again --- raised in Staten Island, he faked it for years that the Midwest was home. Now he's back where he belongs, he thinks. He has nothing but contempt for my mother and made damn sure she got as little of his money as possible.
I live nowhere, in some limbo; my mother has driven me to the Mississippi River bridge in Dubuque where I will proceed by my thumb back to Chicago.
"Now, Ricky," she asks me, "Are you going to be alright?"
"Oh, Mom, Ill be fine. I have a lot of friends. I'm looking for a job."
"Well, that's good," she says and then a lost and lonely look suddenly came into her eyes that I was shocked by & without any warning, she started weeping. There on the highway, cars whizzing by dangerously. She was oblvious. Some sorrow I never wanted to see I was witnessing. She wept. For a long time I was afraid she would fall on the ground she was so overcome. I had to hold her and try, vainly, to comfort her from a sadness about a past I was hating to know about.
"Mom. Mom. Don't cry. You'll be alright. You have to be strong. You have to drive home," I said. I had never, ever seen her like that. Never. Ever. Or did I ever again. She was trembling when she got behind the wheel and turned around and drove away, tires squealing, raising dust.
The first car to pick me up was a faggot. It was early afternoon and he immediately got to the point. He wanted to drive to a secluded spot, off a dirt road. "It's right on the way to where you need to be so you can catch a good ride. You wouldn't have to do anything. Just let me suck your cock. You'll love it," he pleaded. That fever was racing through the front seat of the car. "Just let me suck it. Your dick?"
I thought of my mother headed back to Cedar Falls, alone. I wondered if she was still crying.
I looked right at the guy. He could barely drive he was so horny. I just shook my head.
"No?" he asked, in a small, little-boy disappointed voice.
The Viet Nam war was starting to really rage and I was planning to earn enough money in Chicago so I could escape to Canada. So help me God. This little creep is lucky its not a few years later. I feel just threatened enough grab the wheel and smash his car into a tree.
"Nah," I say. He is silent the rest of the way and in about ten minutes drops me off and I put out my thumb.
Meanwhile, two years before, David has fallen asleep [apparently] when I finish the glass of wine that Mr. Lonely Hearts has plied me with. There's no bad feeling in the air because it never occurred to me that he was the predator seeking a life that was beneath contempt. It would take the United States Army to teach me that.
The next morning I do remember we hit the road but I do not remember one single moment of our trip back to Vermont.
By the end of the school "year" -- i.e. by June of '65, I had been propositioned often at school to get my dick sucked. But that wasn't where I was headed. Nope: it was all about pussy for me. And I had fallen deeply in love with a woman who, given just enough time and determination and LSD, would kill herself. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy died that year, too. And I had gotten out of the US Army flying into a true moment inspiration.
"Sir?" I asked the officer who had lined us all up on first morning at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. It was just dawn, light was just filtering into the sickening clearing of pine.
"Sir?" I asked again, stepping forward and raising my hand, hail-friend-fariy-well-met.
The poor officer, filled with hatred, shot a glance directly at me. A furious bright light had suddenly ambushed him. There was dead silence for a second. Now was my chance. Before the big black Sargeant behind him moved. The black guy, with the billy club, his whole posture tensed, stiffened.
"Shut the fuck up!!" said another observer from somewhere [officer?]; there was the electricity of a sudden riot in the air -- us orphans, we despised draftees, still in our street clothes. As Dylan had sung, now it was ingrained: "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose."
For all that we faced in the war ahead, an insane question suddenly occured to me: & in a very clear voice, I asked this officer suddenly: "Sir!? Are you a homoSEXual?" Too many witnesses. The screaming cat was out of the bag! And, shit: The thug with the club may have been there to threaten, but the officer instinctively restrained him. WE all watched him shrink bodily as he shook his head. Then his lily-white face was suddenly beet red. We, all 45 or 50 of us watched his face. My question was an indictment; it was ringing like a thunder clap in the already hot, humid air. The stench of the war was everywhere. And I had fired the lethal weapon, that even the United States Army feared in their ranks: I knew the war was a fraud: & I had nothing left to lose now by shaming them for all these men to see.
I was placed on "Medical Hold" after I ran all over the base and found the psychitrist's office. By that evening the Adjutant-General had interviewed me and told me to "keep your mouth shut and your head down." That night I was sleeping in private officer's quarters and could lock my door. Three weeks later I was honorably discharged from "the Service."
I flew back to New York City and quickly found a cheap, cozy apartment, rent-controlled, near Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Oh, yeah, The Villiage is what I knew. What we all knew. But too many stinking speed freaks for me. The Haight had made it crystal clear that those fuckers were nothing but trouble.
I wish I could know whatever happened to that officer. Wonder if they sent him back into combat. I've never before that, or since, seen any one man turn so many shades of red and purple in front of 45 men watching him. All the circle-jerks he had partaken in as a stupid kid came back to him, in full view of all who watched him that morning. If he did die in Viet Nam, then one of the Enemy died there. He was a pimp for the whore of the war. He deserved it.
Well, I hope he reads this. If he's still alive. I wonder if he is still alive.
And why didn't I go to Canada? Does it matter?
******************************TO BE CONTINUED******************************
Note: Copyright 2009: All Rights Reserved. You are encouraged to forward this column to your friends. Permission required to quote from this material. Email me: justliketomthumb@gmail.com
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