Free Sway by Zachary Lazar

neat pile of his own clothes, which he had stacked on the side table by the door. They were old trousers
     and work shirts, a pile of laundered garments that had been reserved for work in the garage.
    “They would have to be taken in,” he went on. “The pants anyway. Do me a favor, Kenneth. Stop wincing.”
    Kenneth looked at him, annoyed not so much at his father’s words but at his own transparent discomfort.
    “Tomorrow, go through the pile,” his father said. “What you don’t want, I’ll take to the Salvation Army. There’s no sense
     wasting it.”
    Kenneth went absently back up the staircase, creasing his brow in feigned consideration. He had forgotten why he’d come down.
     His father was always urging him to go outside, to do something physical, always perplexed by the solemn stacks of books he
     brought home. But the books gave him documentation, proof of other places, other times, that had nothing to do with this one.
    Before long, he no longer wanted to stop, or no longer believed that he would stop. The simple word “men” began to signify
     a hidden world of smells and sensations: men shaving, men perspiring, men tucking in shirts and buckling belts. Eventually,
     he sent away for a bodybuilding course through the mail. When it arrived, he had a few nights of guilty ministrations before
     a series of tiny black-and-white images of a muscleman in dark briefs, lifting chairs or squatting in front of a mirror with
     rigid thighs.
    There was no way to think about any of it except as a developing illness. It was not that it was evil to give up control over
     your own body, or to have a mind so weak that you could not restrain its thoughts for even half a day. What was evil was when
     you stopped resisting, when you began to take a secret pride in the foreign places your body could take you.
    He wanted to make movies, not just short films on a 16mm Bolex, but lavish epics dense with atmosphere and color. His bedroom
     was festooned with dream figures: Isis, Apollo, Bacchus, Orpheus, and also Valentino, Lex Luthor, the Cobra Lady, Plasticman.
    His mother tilted her head back in the lounge chair, eyes closed in feigned magnificence. “The magic of Hollywood,” she said.
     “But it’s such a nuisance, isn’t it? All the other people you’d have to work with?”
    He was angry without knowing why. Then he realized that it was because she was trying to form an alliance with him, an alliance
     based on his own weakness.
    In the fall of 1944, his sister, Jean, joined the WAVES, following his brother, Bob, who had enlisted in the air force. The
     country was still embroiled in the same abstract war, a distant operation conducted by airplanes and tanks and battleships.
     He knew of it only through newsreels: deployments of troops, diagrammed tactics, men in barracks posing in their undershirts.
     It was a struggle of machines and haircuts and uniforms, all of which held for him an implicit, personal threat. He was sixteen
     now, a dark, handsome impostor, thin and broad-shouldered, with a serious cast to his eyebrows, but the effect was ruined
     by his effeminate walk and the high lisp of his voice. The world could see what kind of person he was, could tell just by
     looking at him what his future held. People like him wound up living in residence hotels. They worked as floorwalkers in department
     stores, cooked their meals on a hot plate, spent their nights alone in a bathrobe making up their faces or getting brutalized
     in public toilets. He could not summon up any humor to neutralize these stereotypes, nor was he seduced by fantasies of self-pity:
     the mental ward, the empty pill bottle, the melodramatic farewell note. What made it worse for him was that he had the same
     masculine pride as his father, but with no easy way of expressing it. He would stare at his face in the mirror, the stern
     face of a matinee idol, dark-eyed and gaunt. He wanted to live inside that body, not just to inhabit it