Feudal State of Affairs – Part 2

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“SAM! SAM!” Monty’s mother cried out.

Sam! Sam! is what she always cried out whenever she was upset or frightened, which was often. Earthquakes: Sam! Sam! Monty’s brother away at camp during a polio outbreak in the Fifties: Sam! Sam! Their son has a boy girlfriend: Sam! Sam! A timid, anxious woman, Sarah looked to her stern and quick-tempered husband for her emotional center of gravity.

“How long have you been a homosexual?” Sam asked gravely after coming into the kitchen and hearing Sarah repeat what their son had just said to her. He was as tall as his son, the two of them towering over the woman.

“What do you mean how long have I been a homosexual?” Monty replied, his pulse quickening. “I told you all I was a homosexual when I came home at the end of my freshman year. We had a family meeting and I told you everything. I didn’t hide it from you.”

“We thought you were just acting,” his father said. “You’re always acting.”

“Yeah, and that’s what you always think.”

“And what about that psychologist you saw at UCLA? Did he know?” his father pressed.

In his last year of high school Monty had participated in a research program at the LA campus of the University of California about child-parent relationships. In return he received free counseling. The mother of his best high school friend, Gordon, knew the program’s director and had put Monty in touch with him. Years later he learned that all of the program’s test subjects were gay or thought they might be. Evidently his friend’s mother, a brilliant writer and literary critic, was savvy enough to realize what lay behind Monty’s anxieties.

“Yeah, he knew. He asked me right away the first time I saw him.”

“So why the hell didn’t the bastard tell us,” Sam said, pounding his fist on a flat wooden drawer that served as a cutting board, almost breaking it in half.

“A psychologist can’t reveal what his patients tell him; it’s confidential.”

“I don’t give a shit about confidential. You’re our son.”

“Yeah, yeah. But you don’t own me.”

In a way, of course, they did own Monty. They’d supported him all his life and all through university, a huge expense for them since his father received only a modest salary as a junior college teacher. The tuition at their son’s private college was way beyond what a local university like UCLA would have cost. They even bought a car for him in his senior year, a safe car, a new Saab, when he said he needed one to commute to school from downtown. He’d told them he was moving because he found an inexpensive but clean place to live there, that all the rental houses near his campus were dirty and run-down from years of student use. Safer and cleaner: that was sure to convince them. Of course he didn’t explain that the real reason he’d moved downtown was to live at his boyfriend’s home.

“Look,” Sam said, hunched over a bit like the wrestler he'd been back in his college days. “You always wanted counseling. So, good, we’ll put you in a hospital or something and you can get all the counseling you want and get this damn thing out of your system.”

“This thing? A hospital!” shouted Monty, throwing out his arms. He glared at his parents for several moments, stunned by his father’s threat, and then stormed out of the kitchen. He slammed shut the door to his room, the room he’d had as his own since he was five years old, and flopped down onto his bed, his head facing the faded blue wallpaper that had hung there for as long as he could remember, the one with white lilacs on it.

I’ve got to get out of here right now, he thought, his heart beating heavily. He got up, quickly packed his duffle bag, and went out the side door without telling his parents he was leaving. He drove to his friend Gordon’s house. (He’d been best man at Gordon’s wedding, two days earlier, which was why he was in LA.) Monty asked Gordon’s mother if he could go with them to their cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains. They were leaving the next day. He would stay only a couple of nights, he said, telling them nothing about the scene at home.

Thomas commiserated when Monty called later that evening and told him what had happened, but then quickly changed the subject. “I’ve decided to quit my job and go to Europe,” he announced. “Forever, as far as I’m concerned. I’m fed up with work and this overgrown lumber town.”

Thomas often complained to Monty about how small and parochial Portland was, that one could only have a real career in the theater or as an artist in New York or Europe. “I’m going to Greece,” he added. No suggestion of their going together.

“Wow, I’d love to go with you,” said Monty, not picking up on the possibility that Thomas might want to travel on his own. They were lovers; of course they would travel together. They would share everything in life, together.

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “I haven’t thought about it. I’ve saved up enough money and I’m going to sell my Volkswagen.”

“I could sell my car, too,” said Monty.

What would his parents think now, when they learned he'd sold his car, the car they’d given him only months before, so he could run away to Europe with Thomas? He didn’t care. It didn’t even occur to him. All he could think of was that he had to go with Thomas wherever he went, however it had to be arranged. He would do whatever Thomas wanted to do.

Soon after the two first met, Monty had joined Thomas’s theater company and hung around with him as much as he could. He almost took up smoking cigarettes, the same filterless brand as his lover smoked, but Thomas decided to quit himself. Good, they would live together in the same lifestyle, healthy, back to nature. Whatever.

Thomas was less certain about his new friend going with him to Europe. He liked Monty. He’d been attracted by the younger man’s intelligence, his freshness, his dramatic appearance. Monty was in his Russian phase when they met. He’d grown a long moustache, wore a Russian fur hat even on temperate days, and added back the Russian ending to his family name, which his grandfather had cut off decades before to shorten it enough so it could be set in tiles on the threshold to the shoe repair shop he opened after he’d been fired at an Ohio steel mill for trying to unionize the workers.

It wasn’t as if Thomas hadn’t thought about forming a relationship with Monty. He was bored with cruising the gay bars. The crowd was so predictable, tiresome, focused on sex and nothing else. He’d had numerous sexual encounters, but he’d lost excitement with the hunt, with sex itself. Maybe it was time to settle down with one guy, at least for awhile. The younger man wasn’t exactly his type; he liked more graceful men, like dancers, not hirsute and gangly like Monty. But he felt comfortable with him, at ease, not pressed to play out the image of the alluring vamp he’d gained a reputation for. Why not let Monty come along with him to Europe? Besides, it was nice to have a warm body in bed next to you every night.

When Monty returned to Portland after the scene with his parents, he spent the months before the departure sunbathing nude with his lover on the small secluded porch of Thomas’s house. It was the “Summer of Love” and the Woodstock Festival and man’s first landing on the moon, which they watched on a tiny TV in Thomas’s living room. They recited passages to each other from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet, which they were reading to prime themselves for their approaching Mediterranean journey. And they played a record of the recent musical hit Hair over and over again: “Sodomy / fellatio / cunnilingus / pederasty / Father, why do these words sound so nasty?”

It was also the summer that, with Monty’s urging, Thomas began to go by his full name instead of the Tom his friends called him or the Tommie his family still used, as if he were still five years old. Monty also started using his full name, Montgomery, a name he’d dreaded being called by his elementary school teachers at the beginning of each semester before he could stop them and prevent his classmates from teasing him about it. If he were British, people would have respected it and assume he’d been named for the war hero. But it was the actor Montgomery Clift whom his mother had insisted on naming him after. She’d loved Clift, not knowing anything back then, of course, about the actor’s secret homosexuality. Monty doubted his parents would appreciate the irony now; he did.

IN EARLY OCTOBER Monty and Thomas were ready to leave for Europe. They’d sold their cars and stored or gotten rid of most of their other possessions. They’d ordered identical pairs of Wallabee walking shoes from the Whole Earth Catalog, which had started publication the year before. Each planned to carry his portable typewriter, weighing down further their backpacks, already heavy with books. After staying a few days in the spare bedroom at the home of Thomas’s parents – who seemed to accept their son’s sexual identity without ever mentioned a word about it – they boarded a bus to Vancouver, British Columbia, and from there a train across Canada. To save on costs, they shared a narrow roomette, sleeping in shifts. Along the way Monty wrote a bitter, rambling eight-page letter to his parents, revealing where he was going and threatening that if they didn’t accept his homosexuality and his relationship with Thomas they would never see him again. Would they think this theatrical as well? Would they be anxious about his running away? He didn’t care. He didn’t care that they were probably worried sick. He was free at last, gay at last.

When the train made a brief stop in Edmonton, they got off to stretch their legs. Strolling in the concourse, they noticed a group of flamboyantly dressed, athletic young men and women huddled together in a circle, evidently waiting to board the same train. “They look like actors,” suggested Monty. “No, they look a little too vapid,” Thomas said as they approached nearer. “They must be dancers.”

They turned out to be members of a major Canadian ballet company on tour across the country. Later that evening they invited the two Americans to play canasta with them. Less flamboyant in person, they seemed timid, almost homespun. Several of them, men as well as women, kept themselves busy knitting. They gossiped about people they knew in the dance world and kidded each other about rumored affairs. It was all so artistic, exciting, gay. The next morning the company’s longtime impresario, a notorious figure in Canadian dance, walked into Monty and Thomas's small cabin, sat between them, a hand on each of their knees, and asked, “What’s this I hear about two men sharing a single roomette?” They weren’t in small-town Portland anymore.

In Montreal they left the train and spent several days with Monty’s friend Gordon and his wife, who were living there for a year, attending graduate school. Its streets paved with granite and lined by weighty old brick and stone buildings, Montreal felt distinctly foreign, very unlike America, at least that part of America Monty knew – the West. Montreal seemed clean, polite and peaceful, with no obvious hint of the kidnapping, murder and martial law that would overtake Québec only twelve months later, during the ill-fated October crisis.

They spent the following week in New York, staying at the Brooklyn apartment of an old friend of Thomas’s from Portland who was in the chorus of Martha Graham’s dance company. A tall, high-spirited man with dark shaggy wild hair, he escorted Monty one night to a Puerto Rican gay bar in the East Village, while Thomas was visiting other friends in Brooklyn. In the days before its gentrification, the East Village was rough and run-down. To get to the bar they walked through dark menacing streets, skirting between derelict cars with smashed windows. At the bar the two danced together in a free-form jivey, white sort of way. Immediately after, several dark handsome young Puerto Rican boys with tight-fitting pants and colorful silky shirts came right up to their table and performed their own, more precise and practiced routines, as if offering the white boys a choice of which one to take home. Monty was thrilled with it all: with the blatant sensuality in the bar, with the East Village’s threat of danger, with his lover’s old friend.

That night he tried to get the three of them to have sex together. But Thomas was unresponsive. They’d agreed long before to have an open “modern” relationship. Why imitate an idealized straight marriage, they agreed. Since meeting the year before, each had already had sex outside the relationship, Monty more so. In fact he first had a fling with Thomas’s first lover, a methamphetamine addict the younger man fantasized looked like a crazed character out of a Dostoevsky novel. Thomas hadn’t seemed to mind; he didn’t say anything when Monty told him what had happened. But Monty quickly turned jealous if other men even flirted with Thomas. He knew that his lover was considered exceptionally attractive, a catch. Whereas he always underrated his own striking, more Eastern European look.

Now he felt a compelling urge to play around, to make conquests – as many as possible. But he also felt a twinge of ambivalence. It was as if, only half consciously, the more men he had sex with the more he could catch up to his far more experienced lover and gain power of his own. Power for what? Sex simply had power; the more sex the more powerful, like rams butting heads or chimpanzees biting at each other in the battle to establish position and get the choicest food, fuck the choicest mate. Thomas had had enough experiences that he was confident in his own sexuality and didn’t mind his younger boyfriend’s need for exploration. Or so he told himself as he grew less and less interested in their sex play as a couple.

The next day the two toured the Museum of Modern Art. Turning a corner in a hallway they came face-to-face with a giant Jackson Pollock painting. In that instant Monty’s entire conception of art changed. Before he’d always preferred Impressionist painters – Renoir, Monet, Degas – and thought Pollock’s paintings looked like heaps of colored spaghetti. Suddenly now he felt the dynamic vibrancy and flow of the work. It excited him, and from then on he would favor abstract art over Impressionist, realist or even the trendy conceptual art of later years. Monty’s aesthetic, his whole life, was transforming forever.

The experience at the museum added to the first-time thrill of visiting New York. He’d hated growing up in LA, finding the city too spread out, diffuse and suburban in character, at least in the years he grew up there. On the last night of their stay in the city, he gazed out at the view from the 102-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. In the distance he could see the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then under construction and totally dark except for airplane warning lights at the top. The towers looked like two giant eerie ghosts in the night standing at the far end of a canyon of hundreds of skyscrapers blazing with thousands of lights. The city pulsated with energy and he pulsated with it. This was the world he’d longed for, and standing next to him was the man he wanted to share it with.

GO TO PART 3

© G S Sirotnik 2010. All rights reserved.