I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (12 page)

When we got to Edward’s he was busy in the kitchen pureeing most of the food we were to eat, because of his mother’s digestive problems. She was in the bathroom tending to such problems, I presumed, and, as Howard and Elaine and Joanna caught up with one another, Frankie emerged, all six feet of her, from the bathroom in her Halston Ultrasuede dress. She eyed me up and down. “You look like you’re good with a zipper,” she said, and turned around so I could zip up her Halston for her.

I then went into the kitchen to see if I could help Edward with the dinner. He was already mumbling to himself over by the blender. “Can you believe she is making me do this?” he asked, pointing to the pureed dishes he had prepared.

During the dinner everyone decided to pretend that nothing was pureed—at least no one mentioned it. Elaine Steinbeck, who still had the gruff charm of the stage manager about her—she was one of the first females to ever have such a job on Broadway (Howard had prepped me in the car about her) when she took the backstage reins of
Oklahoma!
and then ran Paul Robeson’s national tour of
Othello
—took it upon herself to keep the conversation going until the curtain could fall on this rarified bit of dinner theater.

A violent summer thunderstorm erupted by dinner’s end and blew over a Henry Moore sculpture that was on the bluff outside the dining room’s picture window. I volunteered to go outside to right it. As I stood it back up in the pouring rain I turned and saw Howard and Edward standing at the window with their backs to the women. Howard said something to Edward, something droll no doubt, something dear, and made him laugh. Edward then rejoined the women, but Howard stayed right there at the window. He stared at me where I had found my place that night there outside. He waved at me. I waved back. I am waving still.

*   *   *

“Did you know Henry Geldzahler?” I asked Edward that day down at his loft.

“Yes,” he said, chuckling. “My most vivid memory of Henry is a look of utter terror on his face. For some reason, we decided to take a hot-air balloon ride together out in the Hamptons. As we rose higher and higher, Henry became more and more terrified. I remember laughing at his terror, which I shouldn’t have done. He ended up sitting on the floor of the balloon’s gondola. He held on to my leg. He would not look. One should always look.”

“Did you look?” I asked.

“I looked.”

*   *   *

My first mentor, a minister down in Mississippi, molested me. I was thirteen years old and he, in his sixties then, was preaching at a revival service in the Mississippi hamlet of Harperville, which had been the hometown of my grandparents. I had never felt the pull of an altar call before. Usually on a Sunday night by the end of a sermon I was still pouting about the guests I was missing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. But his sermon that night seemed aimed directly at me. It was, I know now, a form of seduction as he saw me on the pew and upped his performance. Yet I, in my innocence, thought he was being divinely inspired as he threw down the typed pages of his sermon and proclaimed, “I feel moved to tell my own story tonight about how lost I was as a boy. And how the Lord found me in my loneliness.”

I hung on his every word after that. At the close of his sermon, when the congregation began to sing, “Just as I am, without one plea, / But that thou blood was shed for me. And that thou bidst me come to thee. / Oh, lamb of God, I come, I come,” I didn’t hesitate. I walked down the aisle. I knelt at the altar and, sobbing, gave my life to Christ. The minister came to the altar and gathered me in his old arms and let me know I too had been found in my loneliness. “You are no longer lost,” he whispered, his face so close to mine that I felt for the first time the scratch of a strange man’s whiskers.

From that moment on, he began to mentor me. It is, in fact, the first time I had ever heard the word when he and my grandmother were talking and she was thanking him for all the time he was spending with me. He told her it was important for a parentless boy like me “to have a mentor in his life.” But soon his mentoring gave way to the warped intimacy of molestation and that moment of my giving my life to Christ became so blurred with it that I could no longer tell them apart.

I have lived with that blur—a kind of second shadow—all my life. It is the shadow of my thirteen-year-old self that I see when I turn my head to watch it where it flickers by another nameless naked stranger’s bed in the utter darkness so far from those Mississippi country nights when I would try to discern my parents in it. Such darkness I know now holds not the dead, but the deadened. Sex, in the moment of my molestation, became a violation of both my body and my spirit. Violation—not love, not intimacy—would be what I would come to seek sexually the rest of my life.

The only way to heal myself I decided was to mentor a young boy myself and prove to him—and to me—that it could be an act of purity even if sex no longer ever would be again for me. That is how, fourteen years ago, I came to meet Brandon Gonzalez through an organization called The Family Center. After an interview with the woman who ran its “buddy program” I was put through a weekend workshop with other volunteers and then an attempt was made to match me up with a child who would be compatible based on my interview and by observing me in the workshop.

After several weeks, however, I still was not matched up with a child. The woman told me not to lose heart, that she was trying to find just the right child for me. “It has to be someone bright and artistic,” she said when I went in to talk to her again. Was this just more proof that I was supposed to be alone in life, that there wasn’t even a needy child in all of New York City who could match my own neediness? “I want this to be a good experience for both of you,” she said, reassuring me. “We’re having a Christmas party tomorrow night up in Harlem. Many of our families will be there. Would you like to volunteer for that?”

I said yes and took a long walk home.

*   *   *

Three hours later I sat, naked, waiting for the whore to arrive. I knew even on that walk home that I was going to hire him and buy the cocaine he also sold me when he came over. He and it were the forms that violation had taken at that point in my life.

Cocaine came first. Then the whores. But once I met this particular one he was the only one I ever hired because he dealt coke as well. He was from Prague and claimed to be straight. I would straddle him and ease myself down on his uncircumcised cock and he would touch my nipples, which opened me wider, and call me a faggot, the word sounding like “figgit” in his accent. That night he brought not only coke with him for me to buy along with himself but also something he called crystal. I had never heard of it before.

He pulled out a pipe and a funny-looking lighter and started to explain how we could smoke it. He said this first time he would let me do it for free. But bringing such apparatuses into the act of taking drugs seemed like crossing a line to me and I asked if I could just snort it like the cocaine. He said I could but that it would burn. He made two lines on my glass tabletop and for the first time I did crystal meth. He was right. It was burning my nostrils, but it also seemed to be burning everything away, any sense of myself, all memory, any thought. All that was left was my racing pulse. I lay on my stomach on my bed. I raised my butt higher in the air in both surrender and defiance. Without asking, he stuck a fingerful of the crystal up my ass and the burning was intense until the wetness it also caused helped it to cease. He rammed himself into me, whispering “figgit figgit figgit” over and over. He hadn’t shaved and his whiskers scraped my cheek. I thought of the minister and his whiskers and that altar and the first time I heard the word “mentor” and heard his whisper “you are no longer lost” and felt his old arms around me. I thought of the stubble on the ridge of my father’s cheek I would always long to reach for when I was a child. I struggled to free myself, but the whore pushed me back down and fastened his hands around my neck. “Stop. Please,” I begged. “No … no … please … no…” I thought of another Prague and Heath Ledger’s face circled in the marijuana smoke we were inhaling together on the Charles Bridge. The whore choked me now. “Stop. No. You’re hurting … it hurts … no … please.…” He choked me harder. I could barely breathe. Was I passing out? “Figgit,’ he no longer whispered but growled the word until, when I shut my eyes, it and my pulse and his pounding all became one. “Forget it,” I began to hear instead. “Forget it.” And for the first time I did. I forgot it all. My dead parents. The race back home my brother could always win. Heath’s stoned handsome face. Howard. Henry. Miss’sippi. A minister making me feel loved in order to molest me. That second shadow of my younger self had even deserted me. There was nothing left to discern in the utter darkness now descending upon me. A new memory—“… forget it, forget it…”—was being formed. This was no longer—“… figgit, figgit…”—the result of molestation in my life. This newest violation—“… you fucking faggot piece of shit…”—had taken molestation’s place.

*   *   *

I arrived at that church basement in Harlem for The Family Center’s Christmas party the next night hungover and bleary-eyed, having had no sleep whatsoever because of the crystal and cocaine and violence the whore had doled out. I did not want to show up, but as long as I kept my commitment I convinced myself that I was okay. I was informed when I arrived there that I was assigned to the bead-stringing table, where a rowdy bunch of children were already making necklaces for their mothers and aunts and sisters. I pulled up the turtleneck I was wearing around my neck to hide the bruises left there from the night before and gingerly took my position on the stool at the table. There had been a bit of blood from inside me flowing down my leg when I finally showered after the whore left, telling me not to move until I heard the door shut behind him.

I tried to block out what had happened and pretended to enjoy being there as my head began to pound with the noise of the children surrounding me and the pain from the night before continued to throb inside me. Beside me I felt a flicker of a presence. I turned and saw a small six-year-old Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn as he sidled up to me. “Hey, man, I’m Brandon,” he said. “Whatcha doin’? Beads are stupid.”

I explained the jewelry-making process to him while keeping an eye on the other children and tried not to focus too much on the dichotomy of the last two nights in my life. “You want to join us?” I asked.

“Are you crazy?” he answered with his own question. I wanted to say, Yes, I am, Brandon, yes, I am crazy, if you only knew what I had been doing twenty-four hours earlier. But the kid just stared into my bleary eyes as if he’d stared into the eyes of too many adults in his life with just my lost look. “I’m already bored at this party, but so what. I’m always bored,” he said. “Come on. You’re bored too, right?”

“I certainly am,” I said, though I had to offer a slight smile at his blunt assessment of our situation. “So why don’t you pull up a chair, Brandon. Let’s find a way together not to be bored.”

Brandon and I ended up talking for a long time that night. He even made a necklace or two for his sister and his aunt. I had found the child I would mentor. He would become a new kind of second shadow in my life.

*   *   *

Over the last fourteen years boredom has never been a part of the relationship that I have developed with Brandon. Empathy has been a part of it, as has anger at times. But a hard-earned love for each other is finally the basis of it all. In January of 2012 he graduated from high school, the first male in his family ever to do so.

In the fourteen years we’ve known each other, Brandon and I have gone to museums and movies, played basketball, and ridden miles and miles of bike trails. During the early years I ate more fast food than I’d ever eaten before until he learned his new favorite word: “brunch.” Now he’d rather eat eggs Benedict than an Egg McMuffin.

Brandon’s own story is his to tell. I can say it is quite a complicated one. At fourteen, when he was the age his mother was when she gave birth to him, I mentioned that to him—he really hadn’t thought about it before—and it prompted our first grown-up conversation about forgiveness and understanding. The little boy with the tough-guy act I’d met so many Christmases ago in that basement of a Harlem church had matured into a young man who had begun to realize that toughness can be a shell that protects the tenderness inside.

Parade
magazine at one point asked me to write a story about my mentoring of Brandon and I asked his permission while we were having dinner on our way to see Daniel Radcliffe in
Equus
. Brandon gave it to me and I began to interview him a bit that night. I was curious about what his favorite memory was of all the years we had been spending together. Would it be the time in my role as a celebrity interviewer I’d persuaded Mariah Carey to sing “Happy Birthday” to him on my tape recorder? Or when I introduced him to Marisa Tomei at my local flea market in Chelsea? How about the first time I took him on an airplane? The first time he beat me at bowling? His first horseback ride on Cape Cod, where he came to visit me for a week each summer at my cottage in Provincetown?

“I think it was the first time we played that board game Clue when I was a little kid and I suddenly had an accident in my pants,” he said. “You didn’t make fun of me. I had really bad diarrhea. And you took care of me.” He paused, knowing he had surprised me with that answer. “I tell you things I don’t tell nobody else,” he said softly. “I’d have a lot more pain inside me if you hadn’t been around.”

I would have had a lot more pain inside of me too if Brandon hadn’t been around. As we walked toward the theater that night where
Equus
was playing, I pointed out the place where we had seen
The Lion King
so many years before. It was the first Broadway show we had seen together, when he was six years old. He’d even held my hand that day, frightened of the matinee throng in Times Square. Now he’s always careful to walk a few steps ahead of me with that sweetly thuggish swagger of a New York City teenager.