defending his best friend Darwin’s ideas against ridicule and slander.
Grandfather was a man born into the wonders of The Mechanical World.
Anything could be built.
Anything was possible.
And so it came to be so.
He’d saunter into Nxn’s Oval and kick his feet up on the desk and grin and grin and grin recalling one of the last traveling versions of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley that he’d seen when he was 7 years old.
Pops and his siblings never did shake their terror and amazement of hard-drinking Grandfather, 6’4”, looming over them with vigilant judgment.
Grandma denied his binges, insisted that the children were not seeing what they knew they were seeing.
And this lesson in denying Reality went a long way in shaping Family policy.
The secret of Grandfather’s alcoholism made Pops pathologically phobic of personal examination.
And this profound fear of analysis, coupled with his inherited reverence for public image, honed some fundamental spy skills.
Secrecy itself became a fetish.
That constant pressure, the sustained grip like a vice, such tightly coiled control takes endurance.
Such repression couldn’t possibly lead to any other outcome than the logorrhea Pops suffered when his man undressed and sponged him.
And Pops’s one real power—that blank, prolonged eye contact—that’s simple after a childhood too afraid to look at your own father above his neck.
CHAPTER 5 My Diana
As the years accrue, increasingly I think about nothing at all except fucking with The Act of Love, while at the same time, I never feel like actually fucking with it.
Still, most nights crescendo the same: grinding my King Charles up against the flimsy closet door at The Other Greek Place.
I’d grunt and throw my head back and howl, biting at O’Malley over my shoulder while he spanked me.
It was all a wild performative ritual for my posse’s sake to wedge the slimmest gap between my flushed and fleshy self and my self-awareness of my ridiculous irrepressible impulses.
The Greek hooted gruff kudos from a few steps back.
Aaron guarded the door.
That spinning was always the last I remember before Aaron and That Mike would drag me to the backseat of my minivan.
And then the window cold against my forehead, the streets all tilting down on me, rushing at me.
Like some clueless, stuttering, cartoon pig Casanova flirting with a spiked hedgehog, I wrecked myself into completion for that woman.
That was her simple command.
Like how fire cultivates a forest’s floor, she just appeared.
My Diana.
One night, all at once, radiating her weaponized beauty in profile, she was hanging on that flimsy closet door, a sweaty beer bottle dangling from her grip, her slick skin stiff and thick as if she’d gotten a chill in her patriotic bikini, the moon low and huge behind her.
When I was 5 years old, I saw her face in my mind.
When I was 13, I was so confused that I couldn’t find her.
I was sick on my wedding day cuz it wasn’t her.
Trusted Reader, imagine a public touch between two men, strangers, nothing big, just a glancing touch on a bare forearm.
It’s impossible to translate even something so simple as that into language, to filter the charged ping of bone thru the troubled scrim of wordage.
But, I let someone in.
You ever been touched inappropriately, Scrupulous Reader, an unwanted touch?
It tears you in two.
You partition.
You set that touch moment aside and get on with the moil of your cycling days. It’s always Ash Wednesday or Tax Day or something.
But you never can integrate that touch moment into your smiley ho-hum, and all your impulses and habits bloom in response to it—everything.
That touch defines you.
Let The Barbarians drool.
My Diana was as real as anything’s ever been real to me.
CHAPTER 6 I Got Tapped, But Bolted
As a boy, I’d always found a way to linger at Pops’s door.
And every night as his man sponged him, Pops erupted, ranting, disgorging and heaving his nefarious admissions— a spastic logorrhea.
Proud of his hidden work, he needed someone to commend his cleverness.
But every few months, Pops’d get paranoid and slit his man’s throat.
And again, he’d muzzle his pride best he could after hiring a new man, but inevitably, when the relentless endurance of constant appearance came to be too much, undressing, in transition to nakedness, Pops gushed.
And each new man needed context, so Pops’d retell the old stories.
And my ear to his door, over and over, I’d hear these same stories repeated.
Everyone always forgets, I do also have one good ear.
I completed my long string of C’s 10 years ago, Yale Class of ’77.
The frat mixers were awfully formal for parties thrown in thick-walled old houses with couches on the porch.
Dozens of people splendiferous with restaurant recommendations packed in elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, wobbling cups of punch, and plates of carefully prepared knuckle-sized bites.
The chatter, reflecting back on itself, would aggregate into a dense shriek.
I’d like to buy the world a Coke.
Have a Pepsi Day.
Harrowing social times for me, my cool and self-conscious years, obsessed with underground rock legend Cy Franklin.
The squares all pumped their fists in crowded stadiums, seduced by lasers and smoke, battlefield metaphors to suppress
