Free Best-Kept Boy in the World by Arthur Vanderbilt

they were talking about the
other week at lunch. The two start debating eastern philosophy,
Christopher explaining it, Paul challenging it, at times seeming to
heckle Christopher, at other times seeming sincerely interested.
(“What makes you think it’s [life] for anything?” Paul
questions: “Why can’t it just be a filthy mess of meaningless
shit?”) 23 In the course of the conversation, Christopher
reveals that he’s begun mediating, which fascinates Paul and leads
to further questioning. (“So you just sit there? I know I’d start
thinking about all the people I’d had in my entire life. I’d end by
jacking myself off.”) 24 Christopher patiently described
how “you sit there, and, all of a sudden, you know you’re face to
face with something. You can’t see it, but it’s right there.” Paul
is curious, but skeptical. “Well, personally, I’ve always stuck to
what I can see and touch and smell and grope and screw. That’s all
you can really trust. The rest’s just playing around with words
until you talk yourself into something. I don’t say these mystics
of yours are deliberate fakes. But they can’t prove to me that
they’re not kidding themselves.” 25
    Here continues the debate—both explicit and
implicit—that runs through this story, a debate between the
spiritual side of life, represented by the new world Christopher is
discovering, and the earthy side of the world, represented by
Paul’s past, a past of groping and screwing. Why, Christopher
questions, had Paul asked him to come that afternoon: “What was it
you wanted to talk to me about?” “Nothing,” Paul
answers. 26
    But several nights later, long after he is asleep,
Christopher’s telephone rings. It is Paul, sounding distraught,
telling him he will be there in fifteen minutes. He arrives,
disheveled, dirty, with one eye blackened. He has been in a fight
with one of the Marines Christopher had seen around the pool the
afternoon he visited; Paul says he has fallen out with Ruthie and
Ronny and realizes “they simply hate my guts. So I told them I was
getting out. And I got out.” 27 Paul has with him a
bottle of sleeping pills he has stolen from Ronny, and is making
references to killing himself. “Until yesterday evening,” Paul
explains, “there was always something left to stop me from being
certain—some tiny little things, like feeling curious about a movie
we were going to see, or about what I’d eat for dinner, or just
what was going to happen next. Well, yesterday I suddenly found I’d
come to the end of all that.” 28 Pretty thin reeds to
keep oneself alive, and Christopher, not at all sure that Paul’s
declaration is anything more than late night theatrics, asks why he
doesn’t just take the pills, asking him if he is too scared to do
it. “Hell, no! Not that. Scared of what’s going to happen
afterwards.” 29 He is concerned that what is after death
might be worse than the present. Christopher tests him: “Then don’t
risk it. Stay alive.” Paul reveals the depth of his emptiness:
     
    “I used to be good for something—for sex. I was really good for that. All kinds of people used to get hot
pants for me, and that excited me—even when I found them totally
unattractive, which I usually did. I got a terrific kick out of
giving them pleasure, and was proud that I nearly always could. But
then, by degrees, the whole thing got more and more frantic. I
began to feel I’d got to go on and on and on having sex, even when
I was exhausted. And then I realized I loathed sex. I was trying to
screw it right out of my system.” 30
     
    Paul admits that he has been impotent for several
months. “I mean absolutely impotent. I can’t even get it
hard.” 31 He had tried to cover up his condition, but
Ruthie and Ronny had found out. Christopher taunts him, assuming
that this midnight confession is simply another of Paul’s cries for
attention. “We’re all supposed to fall down on our asses with
amazement