– My friend, F. said, you mustn’t feel guilty about any of this.
– Any of what?
– Oh, you know, sucking each other, watching the movies, Vaseline, fooling around with the dog, sneaking off during government hours, under the armpits.
– I don’t feel in the least guilty.
– You do. But don’t. You see, F. said, this isn’t homosexuality at all.
– Oh, F., come off it. Homosexuality is a name.
– That’s why I’m telling you this, my friend. You live in a world of names. That’s why I have the charity to tell you this.
– Are you trying to ruin another evening?
– Listen to me, you poor A———!
– It’s you who feel guilty, F. Guilty as hell. You’re the guilty party.
– Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
– I know what you want to do, F. You want to destroy the evening. You’re not satisfied with a couple of simple comes and a nice poke in the hole.
– All right, my friend, you’ve convinced me. I’m perishing with guilt. I’ll keep quiet.
– What were you going to say?
– Some fabrication of my guilty guilt.
– Well, tell me, now that you started the whole thing.
– No.
– Tell me, F., for Christ’s sake, it’s just conversation now.
– No.
– God damn you, F., you are trying to destroy the evening.
– You’re pathetic. That’s why you must not try to connect anything, your connection would be pathetic. The Jews didn’t let young men study the Cabala. Connections should be forbidden citizens under seventy.
– Please tell me.
– You mustn’t feel guilty about any of this because it isn’t strictly homosexual.
– I know it isn’t, I –
– Shut up. It isn’t strictly homosexual because I am not strictly male. The truth is, I had a Swedish operation, I used to be a girl.
– Nobody’s perfect.
– Shut up, shut up. A man tires in his works of charity. I was born a girl, I went to school as a girl in a blue tunic, with a little embroidered crest on the front of it.
– F., you’re not talking to one of your shoeshine boys. I happen to know you very well. We lived on the same street, we went to school together, we were in the same class, I saw you a million times in the shower after gym. You were a boy when you went to school. We played doctor in the woods. What’s the point of all this?
– Thus do the starving refuse sustenance.
– I hate the way you try to end everything off.
But I broke off the argument just then because I noticed that it was almost eight, and we were in danger of missing the entire double feature. How I enjoyed the movies that night. Why did I feel so light? Why did I have so deep a sense of comradeship with F.? Walking home through the snow my future seemed to open me: I resolved to give up work on the A——s, whose disastrous history was not yet clear to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but it didn’t bother me, I knew that the future would be strewn with invitations, like a President’s calendar. The cold, which hitherto froze my balls off every winter, braced me that night, and my brain, for which I have always had little respect, seemed constructed of arrangements of crystal, like a storm of snowflakes, filling my life with rainbow pictures. However, it didn’t work out that way. The A——s found their mouthpiece and the future dried up like an old dug. What was F.’s part in that lovely night? Had he done something which opened doors, doors which I slammed back in their frames? He tried to tell me something. I still don’t understand. Is it fair that I don’t understand? Why did I have to be stuck with such an obtuse friend? My life might have been so gloriously different. I might never have married Edith, who, I now confess, was an A———!
10
I always wanted to be loved by the Communist Party and the Mother Church. I wanted to live in a folk song like Joe Hill. I wanted to weep for the innocent people my bomb would have to maim. I wanted to thank the peasant father who fed us on the run. I wanted to wear my sleeve pinned in half, people smiling while I salute with the wrong hand. I wanted to be against the rich, even though some of them knew Dante: just before his destruction one of them would learn that I knew Dante, too. I wanted my face carried in Peking, a poem written down my shoulder. I wanted to smile at dogma, yet ruin my ego against it. I wanted to confront the machines of Broadway. I wanted Fifth Avenue to remember its Indian trails. I wanted to come out of a mining town with rude manners and convictions given to me by an atheist uncle, barfly disgrace of the family. I wanted to rush across America in a sealed train, the only white man whom the Negroes will accept at the treaty convention. I wanted to attend cocktail parties wearing a machine gun. I wanted to tell an old girl friend who is appalled at my methods that revolutions do not happen on buffet tables, you
