Jeffrey McGowan: Major Conflict

“You fucking hypocrite!” he shouted. It was obvious he’d had a few more beers since the phone call.

“Do you know how ugly hypocrisy is? Do you know how ugly that is? It’s the ugliest thing in the world, Jeff; it’s the ugliest thing you can be. And it’s like a disease, it’s like a cancer, it’s insidious, it’s going to eat you up until you’re empty, until you’re dead!”

I didn’t look at him. I didn’t speak. I tried to act as if he were a crazy homeless person. I couldn’t wait for the light to change. I had to get away from him, so I turned down Fifty-third and starting jogging away. He jogged after me. It started to rain hard—one of those tremendous spring storms. I opened up my umbrella and, realizing I wasn’t going to outrun him, just walked briskly across Fifty-third Street, trying my best to ignore him. But he didn’t have an umbrella of his own, and as he yelled at me he kept trying to get under mine, and I kept hurrying up and pulling away, leaving him stranded in the downpour.

“Christ, Jeff, do you think I’m blind? Do you think I’m an idiot? I see. I know. You keep saying, ‘I’m straight, I’m straight, I’m straight,’ but I see what’s in your eyes when you look at me! Look at me. Look at me! Look at me now, Jeff! You fucking asshole, I can’t believe I ever got involved with you. What am I doing? What am I doing? I can’t believe… it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Do you think I moved from Pittsburgh to New York so I could sneak around with some fucked-up closet case? You’re straight? Straight! Do straight boys hold hands? Do you hold hands with your straight friends on the OTB counter at Grand Central? Do you talk on the phone with your ROTC buddies for hours every night? Go ahead, walk away, I’m soaked, fine, it’s just water, Jeff, it’s only rain, natural, a natural substance, I won’t melt, unlike you. I know you can hear me. You’ll be hearing this voice for the rest of your sad sorry life unless you get your shit together and face up to what’s happening inside you. God, Jeff, you want everything to make so much sense! You want the whole world to make sense! You want structure . Your religion, the military. You need those nice, neat little hiearchies where everyone knows exactly what everything is and precisely where everyone stands. Everything wrapped up in these nice, tight little boxes. Fuck you! Go ahead, just keep walking, just keep walking, dry, stay dry, Jeff, make sure you always stay perfectly dry!”

He reached over and pulled the umbrella away from over my head, and I pulled it back, but even that short amount of exposure left me half drenched, it was raining that hard. “See, Jeff, it’s just water, it’s just rainwater, it won’t hurt you. It’s the most natural thing in the world!” We’d reached the Citicorp Building, and I ran down the steps to the plaza and the entrance to the subway station. When I got out of the rain, I stopped and closed my umbrella and turned around. Greg had stopped midway down the stairs. He stretched open his arms and raised his face directly into the rain, then looked down at me. “You’re not going to stay dry forever, Jeff,” he yelled. I wasn’t sure, there was too much rain, but it looked as if he was starting to cry, the way his head fell and started to shake a little. I turned and quickly fished a token from my pocket, rushed through the turnstile, and, without looking back, hurried down the steep escalator to the trains below.

We didn’t speak to each other for the next month. I managed to focus on school and ROTC and avoid him as much as possible at work. But when the semester was finished, I started full-time at the bookstore for the summer. And slowly, we drifted back together. This time it became more serious. We played on the store softball team together, and after the second game a bunch of us went to a BBQ on the Upper West Side. Halfway through the meal, Greg got up and went to the bathroom. A few minutes later, I followed him, and we kissed for the first time, his back to the bathroom door in case anyone walked in on us. We went to the movies. We saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in Red Sonia in a crowded, smoky Times Square movie theater, the two of us hunched down low in our seats, knees touching the whole time, our fingers occasionally locking together as we passed the Coke and popcorn back and forth between us. Periodically Greg would light up a cigarette and then rest a hand on my knee. Afterward we had dinner at the Beefsteak Charlie’s nearby on Forty-fourth Street and Broadway, where Greg had waited tables for a few years (the space is now used by ABC’s Good Morning America ). The following week we spent a day together up at the Cloisters (Greg lived close by, in Inwood), listening to Gregorian chants in the courtyard, walking through Fort Tryon Park, the Hudson and the Palisades spread out so grandly below us.

For his birthday in July I invited him out to my apartment, and we walked over to Flushing Meadow Park and made out on the ground in front of the Unisphere, the big silver globe left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. I don’t know what came over me. I mean, it was broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon, in a city park. There was a group of Mexicans playing soccer on the dustbowl of a field in front of us. I bought us two Cokes and two hot dogs at a cart, and we sat down on the grass nearby and watched them play. Occasionally the number 7 train, up on its elevated track, would rumble by behind us. A Mets game was in progress, so every now and then we could hear the crowd cheering and the organ playing over at Shea Stadium. It was Greg’s twenty-third birthday, so after finishing our hot dogs we started horsing around, kind of wrestling, and I said I had to give him his birthday punches. I started out softly, just tapping him, really— Greg was thin and somewhat delicate—punching him lightly on the arm. And he was laughing at first and pretending to struggle, but as the numbers grew higher, I don’t know why, the punches grew progressively harder. I began to feel something well up in me, not anger, really, but something else, I’ve never known what to call it, and as I got closer to twenty the punches got even harder and Greg started saying, “Stop, Jeff, stop,” though still laughing, still taking it all goodnaturedly—but then at twenty-one I just let loose and really smacked him hard on the arm, and I saw the look on his face, a little water welled up in his eyes, and then twenty-two, harder, and his laughing stopped, then twenty-three, and I was holding him down now. “And one to grow on,” I said, and hauled off and popped him as hard as I could. “Ow—fuck, Jeff, damn,” he said, crawling away from me on the grass and rubbing his arm. He was trying his best to hold back the tears now, and I looked at his face and suddenly was filled with such regret and longing at having hurt him, and such overwhelming desire, that I crawled over and took him in my arms and kissed him deep on the mouth. We collapsed onto the grass, rolled around, our mouths locked together, our tongues twisting around each other. We both got hard instantly and the rolling around turned into a kind of wrestling, and I feel certain that had we not been interrupted, we would have soon been tearing off our clothes. But “Maricón!” came flying at us from a dozen different sources, like a swarm of flies. The Mexicans were shocked. “Maricón!” again, and laughter, and then the soccer ball came flying toward us, just barely missing Greg in the head, and we stood up and hurried off toward the train and Queens Boulevard.

My grandmother was out when we arrived back at the apartment. I think we both knew what this meant. We went directly to my room. I closed the door, snapped the fan on high, and we fell into the bed together, resuming the kiss that the Mexicans had interrupted, hardly missing a beat. We were sweaty now, and the cool air felt good on our skin. The noise from the fan sealed the room shut, in a way, so that it seemed at that moment that nothing in the whole world existed except Greg and me. We kissed until our lips ached, and then I found myself pushing Greg’s head down to my crotch, and before I knew it he had me in his mouth and I was exploding.