Free Faggots by Larry Kramer, Reynolds Price Page A

jock, take off same, and you later bent to smell, no one was looking, you can smell, take a heady sniff of brother Ben, and there’s the corner where, under the rug, you hid a forbidden treasure, a picture of an erect penis, bartered for three packs of Luckies and ten pink diet pills, yes, a diet even then, and there’s the same Venetian blind you pulled down and closed tightly so you could have your first experiences with another boy’s body, his name was Fred, too, your fellow eighth-grader, once a month or so, allowing sufficient time for guilt to subside and hunger to return, always during the day, when no one was at home, ah, memories are made of this.
    In the hospital room, he re-arranged into their nighttime array, at Algonqua’s request, the twenty-three vases of flowers. Ben’s office had certainly sent flowers. They didn’t know her but they sent flowers. Ben was important to them, senior partner in Washington’s top firm of accountants. Where were the flowers to her from his friends in New York, who didn’t know her either but to whom he was important?
    There was a strange closeness coming upon them, something Fred had not allowed for on this visit, nor allowed, indeed, since he’d gone into that Outside World, nor allowed, come to think of it, since those couplings with his fellow eighth-grader, Fred. If he’d inherited her determination that “my boy can do anything!” (“as long as she’s Jewish”), he had also inherited Lester’s fears and tremblings. Drs. Isaiah Cult, Clive Nerdley, Tracy Fallinger, M. R. Dridge—these had been his substitute nutrition, the Metrecal of his life. He’d told them everything, his system, he hoped, now purged, the colonic irrigations of his mind, psyche, brain, id, ego, superego, unconscious, subconscious kishkas (where did one become another, or were they each the same, and how connected were they with the heart, and how did any of them become the Staff of Life, that crooked crutch with which to creak along?). No, he had not planned to tell her this evening. After such radical surgery.
    He was helping her to walk, up and down long corridors, past other wards and wings and basket cases, her arm through his, leaning on him, getting her exercise. Yes, he felt close to her for a change, and she felt it, and it was this closeness, for the nonce overcoming his temerity in the presence of her usual Tower-of-Power routine, which encouraged his voiding of the beans, true confessional, tonight the night, Susan Hayward letting it all hang out, radical surgery indeed.
    How to phrase it? Ma, I want to fall in love with a fella. Beat step step kick kick over out jump fall down dead. Please tell me it’s all right to fall in love. With a fellow fellow. whyamisoafraid? Ah, yes, Lester had been right. Lester had always called him a sissy.
    “Ma, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you. Did you know that I’m a homosexual?”
    Thirty-ninth floor, Fred! JUMP!
    She did not take it well. Was he expecting a trumpet voluntary, a huge welcoming round of applause, kisses to the balcony, and grateful recognition from the star? Well, the old lady looked sad. Yes, she did.
    And this made Fred, growing so fast his pants were getting shorter by the second, miffed. He wanted more courage and support from this woman of gargantuan strength. Madam, if you thus elect to choose weakness, hurt, injury, frosted with self-pity, then I, at this belated bar mitzvah of growth, do not approve, he thought, being careful not to consider that he’d been choosing similar weak-necked stratagems for years, like some overgrown pansy in the garden that can’t quite keep its head from bending low. No, he did not think this. But he did think: You can’t make the rules forever.
    Finally the sibyl spoke. “I always knew there was something.”
    “What do you mean, you always knew?”
    “That professor of yours at Harvard, I always suspected there was something. He invited you to Europe and you