"The Missing Years"

That $30,000 preys on my soul, 35 years after we turned it down.

Plus what my parents had saved would have made it maybe $50,000? They did not discuss money with me. I knew it enraged my mother if I made a long distance phone call before 5:00 p.m., especially if to a college friend lfrom a posh bedroiom community in New Jersey, and when I wanted my father to collect me and a friend from a late train she insisted the friend’s family do it: “They’re younger and richer than we are!” She once shut herself in the bathroom sobbing when I let the cuff of a clean shirt brush the floor. That’s not really about money, but it’s too good to leave out. At the time it wasn't good, of course. My father said nothing. My only sibling had left when I was seven. I needed a buffer, but instead I was the buffer.

So let’s call it $50,000. Plus regret compounded daily for 35 years. To wit:

In March 1976, Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, an hour from Manhattan and the home of the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, offered me a full scholarship for four years. That’s the $30,000 that we turned down.

Actually, we forgot about it. The admission director had to call our house at 6:00 p.m. the day my decision was due, and an awkward conversation ensued. I had already accepted Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.

How did we forget a full scholarship? Drew was my “safety school.” If you know anything about either Hamilton or Drew, I doubt you can imagine one being measurably better than the other, except that, with my theater interests, proximity to New York and a prestigious resident theater would make sense. But our college guidance office was touting Hamilton as a best kept secret, a small, stone-and-ivy bastion of excellence. And I bought it. We all bought the tidy, modest, self-satisfied, “better” school, all very WASP-y, the aspirations of us undistinguished New England folks who secretly, desperately wished to be English or maybe even kind of thought we were. And like a pinched, discerning, parsimonious Anglo relative, Hamilton offered just enough money. Drew tackily offered everything (how de trop!), but they were the safety school, so there was no question. Often, then, there were no questions. Nor any answers. So we declined four years at a good school with an acclaimed theater in residence, one hour from Manhattan.

Years later, a friend asked,

Why not take the scholarship, then use the money my parents had saved to let me travel during school vacations (wasn’t there, like, theater in London?) or take unpaid internships with better connections than could be found in the restaurant kitchens and gas stations I worked in summers? Later, during college (Hamilton), when I complained that my theater friends enjoyed such internships, my mother snapped, “Yeah, you can bet their parents are rich doctors!” She made me recite the names of these friends, though she would know none of them; she had visited the campus just once, to drop me off freshman year.

So there was the first reason not to accept Drew’s offer and all that went with it:

1.) One does not go to one’s “safety school.” Hamilton was set up in my mind as a blue chip enclave of excellence, but easy to get into, perfect for conscientious lads of modest promise. Drew was, well, someplace anyone could go. But there were two more reasons:

2.) The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival probably scared me. I was used to the tiny stage at the school I attended because my parents worked there. The usual dearth of boys meant I could be cast in anything I wanted. I probably feared that, if I got anywhere near a real theater, I would be ignored, dismissed or would just slink away of my own accord. And…

3.) The final reason that a smarter financial arrangement did not occur to us is best summarized thus: My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

Before you get all bent out of shape, it is true that she earned that money. My father’s paycheck went to run the household (just barely, but that is another story). My mother’s income from secretarial work was saved for my college. So let us run that reasoning by one more time:

My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

It is not the illogic I wish you to appreciate. It is the logic.

Not that that logic couldn’t have been demolished, had I myself not bought the superiority of Hamilton and the inferiority of Drew. (Drew offered a full scholarship; shows they were desperate. Hamilton offered much less; they must have been better.) My mother might have budged had someone actually put the Drew scenario together and we all had been willing to endure some shouting and door slams. But no one did. Nor did I fight valiantly for Drew or any other place. I wanted Hamilton, too. I liked wanting it. My parents and teachers would applaud me if I went there, but I could tell from having visited that Hamilton would be no challenge. It looked and felt like a slightly bigger version of my high school. I would get through this major life transition with little interruption, little need for re-assessment or readjustment.

Early in April, Hamilton did accept me, and we dumped the “safety school,” not even remembering to tell them they had been dumped, because…

My mother had earned that money, and that money was for me to go to college, not go gallivanting around when I should be working summers.

My duty was to earn money, to learn that there was a work/money ratio and that that money was only so elastic. I was obligated to attend these lessons and abstain from “fancy” internships that the sons of rich doctors took, or from “fancy” trips overseas. My parents abstained from such trips. They drove rusty cars eaten away underneath, and we had musty, threadbare carpets and yellowish-green, worn-through linoleum, making us better than the families of “rich doctors.” In an attempt to get me over myself my acupuncturist once said, “It is as if your mother had no legs, and you wanted her to come play outside with you, but she had no legs. So she couldn’t.”

(To be fair, my father was also legless. He structured his life so that his earnings were both small and unpredictable. My mother says he handed her a check every two weeks and just figured she’d make it work.

My father had never worked summers.

His father was a doctor.

No, really.)

The lost opportunity of Drew preyed on my mind for years, alternating exquisite pain and mournful pleasure as I imagined what could have happened and who I could have been. I felt a thrilling pang when I told a therapist I was 40% of the man I could have been had I not consigned myself to the cold hillside in upstate New York. The Lost Opportunity became The Explanation, The Excuse. (Hamilton, I should note, offered an annual London theater trip called “Twenty Plays in Twenty Days.” I never considered it. It was for rich, thoughtless kids. Were there scholarships? I never thought to ask. Just to imagine going, to desire to go was out of bounds; it would have been understood as a critique of my parents’ choices, showing them as choices, when they were terribly unjust facts my parents bore dutifully day after day, with only the occasional outburst over a long distance call. And I was deeply invested in the idea of one’s life as inevitable and immutable. Mine was. I couldn’t have sex. I couldn’t go to London. Sad but intractable. I just had to hang around God’s outer office looking pitiful, hoping someday He would finally feel sorry for me and let whatever it was happen. But if instead I refused to believe those limits were imposed on us all from outside, who would take care of me then? Often over the years I also mourned the lack of mentors when I was young, and wrote it off to my being gay. In fact, it was more my submission to "fate" and my refusal to improve or believe in improvement that discouraged anyone from taking me under their wing.)

And then self-realization through regret stopped working. Because I realized that…

Though I was firmly closeted, even to myself, in 1976, a powerful part of me wanted out. So… Manhattan. Utica. Where would you more likely come out? In Utica I fretted and ached away four years not having sex with anyone, head bowed to the macho ethos of the chilly wilderness. What would have happened at Drew, an hour’s train ride from Manhattan?

Of course that’s what would have happened, helped along by how much I liked to compartmentalize my sex life back then. On breaks in New York or Boston, I slipped into male peep shows, and then, post-orgasm, as I fled Times Square or the Combat Zone, I went right on hoping and pretending I was or would soon be straight. Drew’s access to Manhattan would have tipped the balance, making it easy for me to come out by making it easy for me to come half out: fuck buddies in the City; a nice, bucolic campus to scamper back to. Running for my train, my secret flying behind me in the wind. “How’s college?” “Boring.” “Well, let’s get you excited.” “Yeah, let’s!” Coming home to clueless suburban roommates: “How was The City?” “Great.” “What did you do?” “Oh…nothing.”

Meanwhile:

July 4, 1976, two months before I entered college: Tall ships crowded New York Harbor, and strangers embraced in the street. I spent the day in my hometown washing dishes in a restaurant kitchen. But that is not how Gaeton Dugas spent it. Gaeton Dugas, a flight attendant from Montreal, spent Independence Day 1976 having sex with men all over New York, as did thousands of other men from around the world. But Gaeton Dugas was special. In his blood he carried what would later be dubbed the human immunodeficiency virus. And on that Independence Day he passed it to dozens of other men, each of whom passed it to dozens of other men, and it did not stop on the fifth of July. The band played on.

So what might I have been, had I taken that scholarship and taken advantage of all New York City had to offer, circa 1976-1980? “Wanna swallow?” “[Unintelligible]” “Bet they don’t have this in New Jersey.” “[Unintelligible]”

Dead is what I might have been.

With this thought, the bundle of regret I was nursing died. My longing for an alternate past, for what should have been mine, for someone I could have been, my warm, pulsing regret over wanting the college they wanted me to want because I feared making choices and could not face slammed doors – all dead. It turned out for the best, so I could stop worrying and move on. To what? Acceptance that I deliberately chose frozen wilderness and thus defused four critical, never-to-be-come-again years of my life?  Would I have to accept that “mistakes” work out, a “diminished” life is for the best, I should be grateful for what I have, and there is nothing else? I hate accepting. I hate opening up and taking in. I hate surrendering cherished beliefs.

Then my friend, who knows a thing or two about public health, added this:

Among healthy people, only one in 300 instances of receptive anal sex with an HIV-positive partner leads to infection. With oral sex, the odds are even longer. And especially then, I would not have let anyone put…you know…into my…you know anyway. I was a dumpy, dopey, unsophisticated kid who, according to the laws of nature, would have found another dumpy, dopey unsophisticated kid, and we would have jacked off one another and that would have been that. I would have found the same guy I would have found back home, or in Utica. And even if I had found a dumpy, dopey, unsophisticated, infected kid, I was almost unnaturally healthy. I didn’t even get colds. So back to scenario one: What woulda coulda shoulda been if only blah-blah-blah Drew, blah-blah-blah…

But my friend made a further point, and this I find remarkable:

What if I had gone to Drew and had come to Manhattan one fall Saturday in 1976 and many Saturdays after? What if, along with art and culture, I had swallowed semen and become infected? What if it all had happened: Drew scholarship, coming out, Shakespeare Festival, parental money freed up for trips to Europe. And HIV. Might I not have ended up leading a life worth dying for?

I came to Manhattan eventually anyway, right out of Hamilton – so what matter if I was held up just four years? The parental money was gone, that is what matter. I had worked five summers in restaurants and gas stations, that is what matter. I came to Manhattan poor, that is what matter, and I stayed poor. I clung to the idea that I was some kind of artist, and I embodied that idea less by making art than by refusing any but temp or part-time jobs. I came out, and they promptly announced AIDS. The thing I had desired half my life, the thing I had longingly observed in peep shows suddenly could kill. Penniless, adrift, not ambitious or talented at anything in particular, I entered an unsatisfying relationship with an older man who had less money even than I. I witnessed his painful calls for money to his mother, a Houston real estate agent with whom he resumed the Texas twang he had banished to become an actor in New York. Sheltered and tormented by that relationship, I waited out eleven years of plague. I also continued visiting those peep shows, sometimes spending hours there, though never showing up late for the part time job I had to have because I was a writer. When I started bringing guys home, always playing safely but always playing dangerously because you never know who will end up smoking crack in your living room (February 1992) or stealing your credit cards (the following August). At this point I sought help, which came in the form of, quite fittingly, an HIV-positive man with a penchant for helping and, if one got closer, abusive psychosocial games. Then, after several years of learning how many people who are not interested in you will still date you, I entered a new, more productive, more functional and secure relationship.

But money issues persisted. People younger than me spoke of second and third trips to Paris, Madrid, and, yes, London. Then it became people much younger than me. I still had not been to Europe. Whether it was financially impossible or not (I had a flush year or two), it felt impossible. Poverty of spirit as much as of pocketbook. The pop psychology tongue twister is “undeservingness.”

In the fall of 2005, a chance e-mail to a former employer led to a permanent job. I was 47 and nothing else had worked out. I said yes. And I stopped writing. I was a director of development now, as it happened, in a suit (my first in years) and tie. No more art. I got off a little on being Mr. Businessman. Mr. Biggest-Salary-I’d-Ever-Had-in-my-Life-by-Far. Mr. Take-a-Cab-Whenever-I-Feel Like It. And frankly I had gotten tired of writing for little or no audience, for little or no appreciation, for little or no money.

One day I sat at lunch with some of the junior staff and interns. They were comparing notes on Rome versus Paris versus Madrid. One young woman, about 26, contrasted her appreciation of Rome the first time she went with her increased appreciation the second time.

Thanks to income from that job, though, I, too, made it to Europe. At dawn on October 19, 2006, I watched the flat, bright green fields of Holland rise through scraps of mist.

I looked at Rembrandts and Vermeers, I stood a moment alone in the kitchen of Anne Frank’s “Secret Annex,” and at night I watched solitary bicycle headlamps jiggle home in the dark, and I imagined being the people on those bicycles and I imagined what their homes were.

And I did make it to London, on March 9, 2007, when the daffodils were coming up in Regents’ Park. The next afternoon, while my partner napped, I strolled to the West End, looped past St. James’s Park, and walked back to Trafalgar Square, nearly empty at that hour on a winter Sunday.

There are four plinths in the four corners of Trafalgar Square. Three hold up various British warriors on horseback. The fourth is reserved for works of contemporary art. In late winter 2007, that fourth plinth held Marc Quinn’s white marble sculpture of the British painter Alison Lapper, nude and pregnant. What makes Lapper, her pregnancy and her artistry remarkable is that she was born with no arms and foreshortened legs. That evening she sat atop the plinth, head turned, blazing eyes and jutting chin set against the western sky.

In the fading winter light I sat by Wellington’s column and looked up at Lapper, white, naked, pregnant, with no arms and stubs for legs, and my own eyes teared up – because I was finally there; and because I realized that, no matter how hard you lean on the gas, you can not get back the years from 18 to 48. The gestures you buy thereafter are symbolic – French classes, Christmas bells from Amsterdam, tickets to an avant-garde Fledermaus in Vienna. So many refrigerator magnets. Well, not entirely. Your mind really does expand when, for example, you learn a language, and there was one scene in that Fledermaus that makes me smile whenever I think back.

But at 53 one’s mind becomes as inelastic as one’s money once was. I have not solved the problem of what to think about missed opportunities. Instead I keep remembering more: the college writing course I dropped after one session; the novel I stopped at 23, just pages from the end. (It was typewritten; where is it now?) Maybe there is nothing to solve. Must this story lack an ending?

Not quite.

They have recently told us that, theoretically, time travel is possible. It involves wormholes, perhaps as in Contact, that Jodie Foster movie of a dozen or so years ago. But real, regular time travel, as in Back to the Future, must, I think, remain impossible. Everyone would go around changing everything and creating multiple overlapping realities that can not possibly co-exist. Regret is a form of time travel. Or of positing parallel universes with which to comfort oneself: it may not have happened, but I can gain back my power by becoming an authority on how it should have happened. But all regret dramas will git the wall of impossibility, the impossibility of time travel. If that had happened, that would not have happened and then this and then that and then that and who is to say it even could have, let alone that it would have been better. Could I have died of AIDS without regret. That does not sound like me. That sounds like another person that, regardless of what college I attended where, I could never have been. I was me. That I suppose I could be proud of: just going on being me. Maybe I have beautiful restraints to work with. My faults are my own rare jewels. And maybe every now and then, a real virtue shows up. And I laugh.