1.
 
 
 

 “Have you got the time?” he asked.  I resented the question.

 His wife – it might have been his girlfriend – looked at me impatiently.  She was wearing
a short black dress.  She had places to go.  Maybe they were running late for a movie, or a show. 
They had other couples, maybe, who were waiting for them, anxiously.

 It was an innocent enough question, but it startled me from my solitude.  I was walking
on 18th Street, near Q; I was a stranger.  The couple had mistaken me for someone who regularly
speaks with people, asks them the time, and might well be walking him to voicemails on my
answering machine and phone calls to make in return.

 But in fact the question interrupted what had been almost a week of silence – apart from
cursory greetings and the requirements of my job as an attorney.  Other than these necessary
communications, no one had spoken at all to me in the past several days, nor I to them.  There
were no voicemails.  When this man startled me by addressing me from out in his world -- a
place which usually leaves me undisturbed and alone – it was as if I had been roused awake by a
noise outside my window, shattering both my sleep and the dream that I was undisturbably alone.

 For a long moment, I really was too startled to respond.  I saw the expectant glare of the
woman, dressed in black.  She seemed to be judging me.  She reminded me of a high school gym
coach I’d had who somehow seemed to know that I wasn’t just bad at sports; wasn’t just a little
feminine.  At the time, I denied to myself that I was gay, and so I treated what I perceived to be
her contempt as an affront to my dignity.  It was not an exposure so much as an insult.  The
woman tapped her shoe noisily on the sidewalk.

 I watched their body language as if looking at creatures in a zoo.  I looked at my watch.  I
processed the information: 8:43.  I hesitated -- wait, you can’t say 8:43 – and made myself say a
quarter of nine instead.  The analog version, the kind used in social conversation.  The man said
thanks, but he had been leaning over too long.  They knew I was not one of them, that they had
made a mistake.  I moved on, shaken.
   
 
 

 2.   
 
 

 When I was younger, small humiliations were disastrous.  I would recall, years later, the
stupid thing I shouted on the soccer field, or the idiotic remark I had made in class.  I hated my
voice saying it.  I would hear its nasally twinge, and think of my father.  

 My father died three years ago, and I am an only child.  My mother lives in Florida, and I
see her on the Jewish holidays.  She is probably very happy for me; to her I lead the life of a
successful Washington attorney.  I am only twenty-nine years old; I expect it will be another
three to five years before my aloneness truly becomes known to her.

 I don’t know why the embarrassment of my voice reminds me of my father.  I think of
him awkwardly trying to maintain social convention, uncomfortable in his skin.  He lived in a
different time; he married young, divorced, married my mother.  He never learned to cook for
himself.  Whereas I have all the skills needed to meet my body’s demands.

 As I walked home, then, I thought of him.  It was alright that I had fumbled; I would
never see these people again.  Telling the time.  A petty humiliation.  

 But it was a reminder of how distant I was from the couple’s world of well-combed
yuppies and their girlfriends, even as we shared a geographical location.  Solitude, for most
people who live alone, is part of life -- but it is temporary, interrupted by relationships.  It is a
state that exists for some hours in the day, some days of the week.  It may even be a pleasure. 
For me, solitude is a tangible, permanent condition, with a structure and a history.  It has become
a sort of screen that hangs between me and the world.  Because it never changes, I don’t dwell on
it, except when reminded.

 I realized, as I entered my apartment, that the disjuncture between me and the couple
disappointed me.  I had always believed that I maintained the ability to translate myself
seamlessly from my solitary space into the more conventional world.   I passed for normal, I
thought.  

 Certainly, in the office, it was important not to be seen as strange, or overly introverted. 
And as far as I knew, none of my colleagues – partners, associates, secretaries – seemed at all to
regard me in that way.  They would stop in and ask how I was doing.  Never more than that, of
course; but those simple gestures at least comforted me with the knowledge (or was it only hope)
that they had no idea.

 I ought to have been pleased that I had tricked the couple on 18th Street.  They thought I
was one of them.  But what I felt most of all was: it’s a lie.
    
 

3.   
 
 

 I had been thinking.  What had I been thinking about?  A magazine article.  Which one?

 I had been mulling over a magazine article; I had been turning over the argument in my
mind.  Seeing its flaws.  I was fantasizing about being the sort of writer whose opinions mattered,
like the author of the article.  I had forgotten the subject of the article; had become lost in the
personal fantasy of it.  

 These thoughts are what gives shape to – no, they are what constitutes – my conscious
life.  Beside them, there is only the emptiness of sound and light.

 And in an instant shattered!  “Do you have the time?”  That is all it takes.

 Of course, the discomfort was probably not mine alone.  It must have shaken them to
learn that I was not one of them at all.  It would have been better if I simply did not speak
English.  Instead, they’d come so close to someone so weird.  I wondered if they could sense the
loneliness, if the sadness really could be perceived, as psychics say it can.

 The article: it was about the personal and the political.  The article had said that between
feminist critiques on the left and moralist critiques on the right, no one really believed in
autonomous political discourse anymore.  The article talked about “character.”  

 I used to dream that I would be a Senator.  That people would listen to my advice,
because I was intelligent, and I would help make policy.  I would help even conservatives see
why equality is important, would save the environment.  Now I live up the street from the White
House, and entirely anonymously.  

 Thanks to the ardent work of liberals, neither my Jewishness nor my sexuality keeps me
from the halls of power.  Only my inability to be comfortable with other people.
.
 Suppose I had applied to think-tanks and regulatory agencies, instead of the firm.  Had I
aimed differently, would I have succeeded?  My area of specialty is a particular subset of
regulatory corporate law.  I have written roughly 800 pages, in the last few years, primarily on the
subject of whether particular transactions would conform with particular regulations; if certain
actions would likely be permissible; etc.  

 My high school English teacher, I remember, told me that one day, I would be a great and
prolific writer, if only I set my mind to it.

 Maybe I could have found myself a job on the Hill.  I didn’t have many connections,
though.  And maybe the article is right; how could my politics have any meaning, if they are
connected to a personality such as mine?  I took philosophy classes in college.  I knew that this
strange, liminal “political” space was an illusion.  Maybe that is what I had been thinking of
when I was brought back into the world, away from ideas, and asked the time. 

 I was pulled in one moment into a place where the cloudy sky glowed orange, and white
neon light streamed out of the supermarket.
 
 And so the sadness crept in.  I do not think of my loneliness; it comes to me.  Sometimes
invited, as by this couple; sometimes seemingly on its own.  I know its texture, its strength, and
its durability.  It is always present, but not always apparent.  My life is quite comfortable, by any
objective standard.  I am not rich in the American sense of the word, but I am well fed, and I
have more possessions than most humans who have ever walked the Earth.  There is no real
cause for complaint.

 Moreover, I am not alone in being alone.  We have no sitcoms to document us, but I think
there are more of us than of “them.” We have infrastructure to serve our desires: video stores,
movie theaters, take-out and delivery restaurants, street fairs, Starbucks.  They are provided to us,
for us. They, silently, understand.  

 Letting go of the ruing and wishing and hoping – this is an important step towards the
essential apathy of the solitary life.  Yet now I felt the cursed introspection returning.

     

4.   
 
 

 I observed a few days ago a man wearing a preposterous hat.  The man was in his
twenties, much too young for this to be a leftover style from the days of his youth, and the hat
was a sort of wide-rimmed black hat, almost a fedora, that looked like something Humphrey
Bogart would have worn as Sam Spade.  The thing was not garish, by any means, but certainly
something one had to carry off -- one had to become ‘a person who wears a hat.’  

 In fact, I had just seen a film in which the lead character wore a similar hat; in the film,
the gesture made perfect sense; it was part of the characterization: this individual is the sort of
man who wears a hat.  What, though, had made this real man, on the street, decide that he would
be such a man?  Something in his personality?  Genetics?  Life’s history?  Something had made
the decision to purchase the hat seem appropriate to him, whereas to me it was as far from my
life as fiction.  I couldn’t imagine entering my law firm’s office wearing such a hat -- the drama! 
The pretension!  

 Where had my life taken this turn to where I could not imagine myself as a person who
wears a hat -- and where had this man’s life turned in the opposite way?  Could I change?  Of
course; all I had to do was make a simple purchase.  But it would not be me, it would be me
acting at being someone else, playing a role.  When did this happen?
 
 

     5.   
 
 

 From watching television, it seems as though you get to be a "Loner" through some sort
of Satanic blend of nature and nurture, both of which go horribly wrong.  You “keep to yourself,”
you enjoy certain kinds of music and fantasy as a child.  Then you do something evil, or die in
some random accident, and finally you appear on TV.  In those precious minutes (hardly fifteen
anymore; now more in the vicinity of three and a half), in the insignificant slot before the weather
report on the local news, caring, blond reporters are very careful to report on the loner's parents,
who were actually ordinary Americans (“We had no idea...”), who work hard as plumbers or
schoolteachers.  Everyone is puzzled.  Later, we learn that the loner never left his apartment.  But
his colleagues had no idea.  He could be the clerk who helps you in the dressing room.  Or just
someone you’d pass on the street.  You’d never suspect. 

 I have, if nothing else, dedicated my life to being utterly harmless.  My most prized
possession as a young boy was not a video game or Big Wheel, but my Secret Hide-Out, which, I
assured any visitors, was the largest on Meadow Drive.  To think of it now, the insecurity of not
having proof for the assertion always would gnaw at me, making me nervously change the
subject if anyone called me on it.  But as long as I was not called upon to prove it, the hideout
was a point of pride.  It was not a traditional hideout, as I imagine what that would mean.  It was
less of a single spot than a labyrinth of concealing shrubs, overhanging tree branches - any
possible shield from unwanted visitors, or spies.

 One day I visited my friend Emily, brought to her house by my parents, and she took a
group of seven or eight kids to her secret hideout, which was of the more conventional variety:
one large cavernous tree (by six-year-old standards) which overhung an enclosed area where
Emily had us assemble for the childhood equivalent of a tea party.  I sat there bragging about
how much larger my hideout was, but Emily snapped back that at least in her hideout, people
could sit together.  The remark took me by surprise – what an irrelevant quality for a hideout!  I
was going to ask why you would ever want to sit together in a hideout, but I didn’t.
   
 

 6.    
 
 

  Whenever my family would go out to eat, I would insist on waiting under the table until
the waiter was ready to take our order, and would retreat back under the table until the food
began to arrive.  My mother would always joke about it, especially when we were with other
families.  But I think it disturbed her.

 For my part, nothing was worse than sitting there at the table, waiting, with nothing to do.

 My parents were fairly strict about television, so I didn't watch nearly as much as most
kids do today.  Of course, we didn't have computers or the Internet, or even the old primitive
game systems like Atari and Coleco.  The options for solitude were more limited.  As a result, I
constructed more durable edifices of lonesomeness: entire imaginary worlds with political
intrigue, music, and war.  I wonder if I had simply watched TV, I might have gained a more
conventional balance between outside and inside, between tangible and intangible structures of
living.  As it was, the imaginary cities and people I dreamt up, and talked to, and drew on scraps
of paper, were all-consuming.  I established systems of government, exhaustively catalogued all
the leading players, including their wives (the leaders were all men), places of birth, affiliations
with different parties and groups.  I staged space battles of Lucasian proportions.  While other
children were out -- doing what?  I still don’t know -- I was home, devising new challenges for
galactic republics, drawing them out on every available scrap of paper or building models of the
spacecraft that patrolled the borders. 

 This childhood game endured far longer than one might have expected: the hobby
stretched  from the age of six or so until late in my teens.  Of course, as I grew old enough to
understand shame, I immediately became ashamed of my drawings.  I hid them as carefully as I
could. Yet I can still recite today the leading characters of these interstellar dramas -- or the
made-up pop stars who supplanted them as I grew older.  They all loved me, and I loved them.

 Is it such a linear connection from these childhood fantasies to my empty apartment,
filled with books and half-completed essays, devoid of human companionship?  Is my apartment
now, with its invisible galaxies in books and the computer, is the same as the secret hideaway,
and the playroom in my parents’ suburban house?

 I’m not sure.  To be honest, I really think it might just be luck.
 
 

     7.   
 
 

 When the pain of loneliness rises, I seek the consolation of selective memory.  It has
never been different from this, I tell myself, It doesn't matter what you do, this is who you are,
and who you have always been.  When you were seven, and wanted to play with your Legos by
yourself rather than play a board game with friends you considered stupid -- that is the real you. 
Those friends who spoke about you behind your back, they were never friends at all.  And, don't
you remember, the time you swore never to trust people again after some supposed friends
betrayed you, humiliated you, caused you pain?  

 But I know I played outside, had friends, socialized.  My mother tells me that, as a young
boy, I loved to have my friends over for sleepover parties -- although I can't remember a single
sleepover party I ever hosted.  I don’t really trust my mother.  She is a very social person.  I think
she is afraid of admitting that she gave birth to the likes of me.

 I did go to one sleepover, in third grade.  The rule was you had to invite everybody in
your class.  I remember wondering, as the kids talked on and on and on into the night, if maybe I
could just take my blankets and sleep somewhere else.  At least I could get a good night's rest
while they kept talking about cars and movies and other things I knew nothing about.

 A few years ago, I asked my mother about a fight that she’d had with my father over
twenty years ago, on the way back from a mall.  As a young child, witnessing the fight was
traumatic; it was the only time I saw my parents hit one another.  They were in the front seats,
and I was in the back.  As I remember it, my mother hit first, which makes sense knowing my
parents' personalities.   I clearly remember my father pushing my mother off to the side, to get her
away from him.  He was driving.  I was too young to know what the fight could have been about. 
I remember, and can still easily picture, the scene.  When I asked my mother about it, all I really
wanted to know was the reason, if she remembered -- I had always wondered.  But my mother
stated categorically that such a thing could never have happened.  I wonder if my father would
have denied it as well.

 Maybe it didn’t happen.  My early memories are like photographs taken through a
strange, soft lens, with 1970s patterns on the walls and clothes, with everyone mostly consisting
of vast legs stretching up to an indeterminate sky.   The colors and styles, the green trees -- I feel
at once comfortable with them and contemptuous of the person who experienced them.  It is as if
the brown-and-yellow kitchen of my childhood home is only viewable through the eyes of
someone so confused, so incorrect in his understandings of the universe, that I only identify with
him in my lowest moments.  

 And compared with the imaginary universes, the fish tank in my childhood room is very
dim.  The worlds of my fantasy were always more interesting than the boring one of reality.

 When, as a young child, I would interact with other kids, I would always prefer to play
games my way or not at all, yelling at the kids my mother had invited over.  My mother would
sometimes scold me afterwards, saying that if I kept doing that, they wouldn't want to come over
and play.  That was fine with me, what did it matter if they played or not?  The point was the
game, not to play it with other people.

 This error – that Lincoln Logs were about Lincoln Logs, not about playing with Emily or
Darren – lasted for years.  I remember one time,  I was asked out on a date by a girl in one of my
college classes. (I was still hiding my sexuality at the time.)  What amazes me now is that I hadn't
even realized that I had been asked out.  To me, she was simply asking if I wanted to have dinner. 
I didn’t understand that dinner was a pretext, a means to an end, and that end was to get to know
me better.  This is so even though I remember her exact words were "do you want to go to dinner,
sometime, someplace?"  Hardly an interest in a particular cuisine.  It seems to me almost
shocking that, even then, I did not understand that the dinner, the movie, were pretexts, that
events are never about themselves.  

 In the end, we did go out for dinner -- why not, I enjoy going out for dinner.  Afterwards,
back by my dorm, there was an awkward moment as we said goodbye.  I suddenly realized that
she was waiting to see what I would do next -- kiss her, or invite her upstairs, or what.  And then
I understood: this dinner was a "date."  She wasn’t interested in dinner.  And I had mistakenly
conveyed the same impression.  I awkwardly said goodbye, and half-ran home. 

 So all of it was a lie, I realized.  Battleship and Monopoly and Candy Land -- these, too,
were “dates,” in a way.  And I had always played for the sake of the game.  The same probably
goes for music, art, chinese food, martinis -- these are tools for coupling.  It seems unfair: all
these absorbing diversions,  put in the service of something I don't understand.

 
 

   8.   
 
 

  In school, I was not the “quiet kid.”  Everyone in my math class knew who I was,
because I was making obnoxious comments and getting A’s on the tests.  I made jokes.  I talked
in class and at lunch.  It was in school that I finally found a way to gain my parents’ love, and
gain what I thought was what I wanted from my peers: admiration.  As long as I continued to
remind people how smart I was, I would gain the affection of my family and the adoration of my
friends.

 I did not understand, even in high school, that ‘friends’ were people who called you for
no reason, not just because they wanted to discuss the algebra homework.  To me, it seemed that
friends were people who liked you, and if they liked you because you were smart – well, that is
why it was good to be smart, and to make sure people knew it.  I talked to kids in the halls,
occasionally saw a movie with someone.  I thought I was, though a bit of an outsider, hardly
worse off than most of my fellow ‘honors’ students.  This was what friendship meant.

 At the same time, I craved the companionship of a ‘best friend,’ some boy with whom I
share “everything.”  I’m not sure at what point this became a synonym, or substitute, for sex.  I
fantasized about the boys I wanted to be friends with, but I never considered the fantasies to be
sexual.  To me, it was the friendship, the intimacy, that was primary.  As I grew older, I wanted
to sleep with my friends less than I wanted to know them so well that sex wouldn’t have added
anything to our intimacy.  I wanted total knowledge, total closeness.  I viewed the sex act itself as
a form of self-revelation and coming-to-know the other: now, naked, he knows all about me.  

 Actual, physical sex was at the same time never desired and always desired.  In high
school I was so far in what people call the ‘closet’ that I could not actually imagine actually
touching my friends in a sexual way (and never did anything to bring it about), yet I was filled
with an erotically-tinged desire to have an intimate conversation, or to “hold” my friend in my
arms.  I don’t think that I consciously understood this desire to be erotic in nature, but of course it
was.  I yearned for the closeness of an intimate talk, wanted only to put my arms around a boy, to
reassure, to hold.

 But it was not until a few months after I met the couple on the street that I truly
understood this.
 
 


     9.   
 
 

  Once, when I was fifteen, I went on a summer bus tour around America with a group of
forty other teenagers.  I asked out three girls that summer, and had not succeeded with any of
them.  It is easy to analyze this failure in terms of my sexuality – surely they must have picked up
on the fact that, deep down, I was not interested.  But I meant it, each time, as sincerely as I
thought was possible.  And so the rejections were exceedingly painful.  Even on the trip, in its
liminal, almost magical environment, I was failing to be loved.

 My failure was hardly notorious; I’m not sure if the rejections were even known.  But in
the “last will and testament” created at the end of the summer I was left, among other things,
“Someone who’ll say yes.”  An innocent prank that wounded me deeply.  I cried the night the
yearbook came out, and left the hotel we were staying (a huge violation of the rules), walking for
what seemed like miles around Philadelphia.  Of course, it wasn’t really miles, and I was back
soon enough.  But while I walked, I made myself promise to trust no one; to know that no one is
your friend; to know you can count on nothing, and that people will always hate you and not care
for you and hurt you as a result.  They may act as though they like you, you may be tempted to
trust them.  But there will be pain; eventually, there will be pain.

 I passed some convenience stores, cursed the people inside.

 Eventually, I said to myself, no matter how friendly a face they put on, someone will do
something like this, and the rest of them will laugh, and the only person you can count on is
yourself.  Remember this, I told myself; remember this when you are happy and think the world
will never turn mean again.  Remember this, and know.   I was so fervent in my hatred of
whoever had written such a mean-spirited thing about me.  And what made it all the worse was
that I knew that whoever had done it -- they surely had no idea how hurtful it was; they never
would have imagined, I assume, that it would have made me wish I had never been born and
yearn to be away from all my two-faced and hypocritical ‘friends.’

 I spent many more nights laughing and joking than I did walking and cursing.  My life’s
history does not have so neat a trajectory.  Once, I was cast out of the kickball game for being
incompetent and uncoordinated; once, I dropped a softball on my own head; but plenty of times, I
won at tennis.  As I have already said, I grew up in the wealthiest country in the history of the
planet, and never once feared for my life.  But the simple cruelty of adolescents, which all of us
take for granted, and yet which goes on all the time, relentlessly – this taught me a more enduring
lesson.  Teachers and parents have no idea, no matter their proximity to kids.  Those of us who
lived through pain minimize it, call it a phase, as if in saying so we might be free of it.  Those
who never experienced it – are the enemy.

 But the lesson I learned was: People will take your weakest place, and hurt you for it.  If
you are fat, they will hate you for being fat.  If you are gay, they will hate you for being gay.  So,
hide everything.
 
 

     10.  
 

 I had been raised as a bourgeois suburban Jewish child, which chiefly meant that I did not
know I was a bourgeois suburban Jewish child.  As a child, I never questioned that most people
were like me, and (paradoxically) that my tribe was superior to other tribes, because it never
occurred to anyone I know to ask such questions.  I had never had much beyond the compulsory
Jewish education of my bar mitzvah training, and never paid much attention to the stories and
rules which seemed to entrance the gullible.  

 I remember one time asking my mother why it was that Jews should not intermarry.  To
carry on Judaism, she answered.  I asked why it was important to carry on Judaism.  She said, it
is our tradition.  I asked, if I intermarry, then isn’t it obviously not a tradition that is important to
me?  She said it should be.  I asked why.  I can’t remember her response, other than the fact that
it was shouted.

 Other conversations were similar: Judaism was somehow important, but no one could
quite explain why.  It seemed clear to everyone else but obscure to me is why anyone would be
interested in attending synagogue if they were not intent on speaking with God, or at least
understanding the words they were meant to say. Obviously, they were there because their friends
were there, because that is where the community gathered.  But I had no idea that this could be a
real reason for anything. 

 When the time came, having inherited my family’s value structure wholesale, I rejected it
wholesale as well, just as I thought Holden Caulfield and James Dean had before me.  My
rebellion was as inept as my conformity: it was motivated by a vague though irresistible urge to
tear down the phoniness and hypocrisy which I now saw – an image as false as the hypocrisy
itself.  I had no idea what I wanted to replace the hypocrisy with, because I had never been
anywhere else.      
 
 

11.  
 
 

 In eighth grade, I switched from private school into a large public school filled with, so I
imagined, cool kids who listened to alternative music, scary jocks who could beat the shit out of
anyone, hot girls who’d have sex with you just for the fun of it, and black kids who you better not
cross because they were drug dealers and would kill you.  This was the world I thought I was
entering.
 
 I saw it as an opportunity: I could forget the parochial kid that I was, shed the
awkwardness and discomfort, the status I had as a loser, and reinvent myself.  Of course, no one
told me how to do that, exactly.  I suppose I thought that if I were simply exposed to this wide
range of far cooler people, I would learn how to be exactly like them, and hide my former life as
the A student nerd.

 Of course, the reinvention never happened.  I graduated high school without ever learning
the secret rules.  I was tracked into ‘gifted’ classes, which, I thought, was an unfair disadvantage;
how was I ever going to learn to be cool?  And my mimicry was imperfect: everyone had a
certain kind of backpack, which they wore over one shoulder, kind of casually.  But I had a
strange little duffle bag, which hung down from a low strap, and had all kinds of compartments
and zippers.  Or, you had to wear a t-shirt, untucked, or alternatively a plain collared shirt, also
untucked.  But I tucked shirts in all the time, until someone pointed it out to me explicitly. 
“You're such a loser, with your shirt all tucked in like that.”  That's what it took for me to
understand.

 I had a friend in eighth grade named Dave Mernick.  He was a wide receiver on the
football team, and because he had played little league with a kid named Steve (a fellow ‘gifted’
student), he occasionally hung around with us.  We never spent any time after school, and I never
got a phone call from Dave, but in school, we ate lunch together.  One day, after lunch, Dave said
to me, "You know I always get ragged on by everyone for hanging out with you and Steve."

 It broke my heart.  I made some smart reply - "Thanks for that information, Dave" - but I
could only contain myself so long.  Just as my next class was starting, I broke down in tears, the
first time I had ever cried in school.  It was the final proof that I would never be any different
from the person I hated, the kid who was never good at anything that mattered, the kid with the
funny ears and wrong haircut who seemed to have missed getting the handbook on how to live.  I
wasn’t even able to hide properly.

 When I met Jeremy, a few months after the people on the street, on the side of the road in
rural Iowa, I thought to myself: here is someone who had never been told such things.  Here is a
second chance.  Don’t blow it.  Don’t let him find out who you really are.
 
 

     12.  
 
 

 Later that year, Dave said that there was nothing as pathetic as someone who waits until
college to lose his virginity.  I heartily agreed.  One must arrive at frat parties prepared.  

 I didn’t admit to myself that I was gay until I was in college, and even now, I think, most
of my colleagues have no idea of my sexuality.  Why would they?  

 The first reality of my sexuality was its denial.  True denial: not lying, but being unaware
of the truth entirely.  I had no idea that I was “gay” or “queer” until I was already finishing high
school, and at that point I drove the idea so far underground that it would not emerge again until
years later.  In high school, I rarely masturbated; I had no Internet; I had no gay friends; I had no
inkling that this evil fate – this slur – had anything in common with me.  

 I am probably, thankfully part of the last American generation that is likely to hold such
ideas, but at the time it was simply part of the way the world was that to be gay was to be
unspeakably apart from normalcy.  And to be normal, to be thought of as such, was what I most
wanted.  So Dave’s casual comment came to be a categorical imperative.

 I had two girlfriends in high school.  The first one insisted that she was saving her
virginity for marriage.  At that time, the decision seemed hateful; never having been with a man
or a woman, I had no idea what I wanted, and Dave said I had to want sex, so I wanted sex.  In
reality, actual sexual intercourse, the “home run,” seemed as impossible as hitting an actual home
run.  I was someone who was lucky to put the ball in play.  So my girlfriend’s announcement was
ludicrously ahead of its time.  However, her definition of sex was expansive: anything that
involved either of us being naked was beyond the pale, as if in some way our bodies touching one
another would inevitably lead to corruption, or pollution, or both.  And yet my girlfriend
maintained, by means of frequent innuendo on her part, a self-cultivated reputation as a ‘bad
girl.’  We broke up in public, at lunch, by passing notes.

 My second high school girlfriend had no such inhibitions.  Of all the wonderfully
American things to do, I managed to lose my virginity the night of my junior prom.  On a sofa. 

  I was never in love with either of the girls, though I stayed with the first for a year and
the second for eight months.  It wasn’t that I was pretending; I was not aware that there was more
to feel than what I felt.   They were there, and I didn’t dislike them.   They were both friends, in
addition to being girlfriends.  I never felt that either of them actually knew "the real me," but
then, I imagine that if I had been asked to describe who or what that “real me” was, I would have
been unable to do so.  By the time I got to college, I had been properly trained in the arts of
evasion.

 

    13.  
 
 

 The summer before I went to college, I worked in a sleepaway camp as an administrative
assistant.  I had just begun the Nietzschean slave revolt of high school losers: turning from an
outcast geek into a self-styled rebel, from a reject of the dominant society to a critic of it.  I had
slowly, too slowly really, come to the realization that the coolest, most popular kids in my high
school were morons, and that the closer a normal person got to them, the more moronic they got. 
So gradually, I stopped looking up at the quarterbacks and treasurers from my hole in the ground
and started spitting on them from my perch on the roof. 

 It took me a long time, but slowly I became aware that, in Hesse’s terms, there was an
underworld.  There were subcultures running just below the surface of even as simple a place as
my high school, small crowds of people who had different ways of living than the way the school
presented, there were new wave kids and skaters, skinheads and queers.  None of them were
honored by the principal.  But I slowly began to see that there were multiple ways of defining the
good.

 I had already learned that the adult world was no more in touch with reality than the
adolescent worlds I was forced to inhabit.  They were not smarter because they were older.  They
were just more convinced that their stupidity was correct.

 That summer at camp, I had more spare time than I really had expected.  There was
almost no tv, there were no computers or video games, and I had few friends.  This left music
and books, and walks in the woods.  All three proved to ignite a powerful interest in the
intangible.  I began to read the high school classics -- Salinger, Dostoevsky, Kerouac -- and also
dipped into some books of popular philosophy that had appealed to me in a bookstore.  I spent
hours and hours alone, walking through the woods of the camp, sitting by its lakes.  Whether I
was reading novels, or philosophy, or religion, the world became inhabited with ideas.  They
inhered, it seemed, in the breezes.  

 Ideas began to be realities because they were felt, much more than the distant contacts
with peers who remained aloof, or mystified, or contemptuous.  And here were books -- for they
were my gurus more than any living figure -- which said that true knowledge was an experience,
an ineffable, transcendent experience.  What could be more real than that? 

 I did not see it at the time, but looking back it is clear that my initial attraction to religion,
art, philosophy – anything that had truth – sprang from two simple claims: that this was the real,
and that it was the Good.  These two claims catered to my every intellectual desire; they
promised me that, as I had long suspected, the time I spent alone, reading, was closer to the truth
of the world than the time the jocks spent at parties.  And, religion and philosophy told me, not
only was it true, or real, but it was better than the parties and football games.  Their unexamined
lives were not worth living.  They toiled in the world of illusion.  They sat in the cave,
mesmerized by shadows.  Ah – to read the Bhagavad-Gita again for the first time, with fresh
eyes; to hear side three of the White Album for the first time; to read Notes from the
Underground before coming to live it as a parody.

 Nietzsche was probably right about the slave revolt in morality.  I read Nietzsche to be
told that I was having a better time than the people out playing softball. 
 

     14.  
 
 

 In college, I read that I had been leading a life of “quiet desperation.”  I learned it was
important to “seize the day.”  I ascribed the grey tones of my adolescence to the suburb from
which I had escaped, and plunged into countercultures with greater avenues to “freedom.”

 College had long seemed like paradise -- a place where, finally, the tables would be
turned, the first would be last, and the smart geeks would be venerated at the expense of the
dumb, brutish jocks.  I would like the life of the mind, be surrounded by students who actually
want to learn.  It would be beautiful; the polar opposite of all that I knew.  I suppose other kids
dreamed of frat parties and easy sex.  I dreamed of intellectual conversations about Sartre. 

 My closest friend in college was a bookish boy named Max, who had curly reddish-blond
hair and played acoustic guitar.  Max and I spent many long, curious, wonderful evenings
debating philosophy.  We would sit up late, as is only possible in college, where sleep and friends
are both only a few feet away, talking about Hegel and Kant and Aristotle.  And yet, I was
restless.  I always got the sense around Max that he, too, hadn’t read whatever secrets the cool
kids had; that he would also like to be a poet, but also was ill-equipped to figure out how to do it.
Many of those wonderful evenings with Max, I secretly wondered if this was really it, or if, as I
was sure, the real action was elsewhere.

 Just a week before I met Jeremy on the road in Iowa, I met up with Max for the first time
in years.  He was living in Chicago.  I’d thought that I’d do the cross-country trip all on my own,
but I had lost the nerve, and so I called Max right before I left.  It turned out that he’d gotten
married just six months earlier and was already three months pregnant.  As I calculate it now, she
must have gotten pregnant right around the time I met the couple at 18th and Q.

 “So how are you doing?  Are you seeing anybody?”

 “Not at the moment,” I answered.  My mind flashed back to a night early on, freshman
year in college.  We had just finished orientation; everyone was waiting for classes to begin, if
only to not have to go to another orientation meeting or multiculturalism seminar.  Since coming
to school, we had all been so busy with official programming that none of us had really had a
chance to explore on our own.  So Max and I –  together with two other guys who we already
knew we had nothing in common with, but who the fate of orientation had thrown us together
with -- went off to the park for a few hours, just to sit outside and relax away from campus.  It,
oddly enough, felt like an act of rebellion to actually enjoy our lives away from the programming
of the orienteers.  We brought some beer (college!) and a frisbee, but mostly we just sat around. 
We talked about what we wanted out of college; me, to be a poet; Max, a musician.  He had been
taking jazz guitar in high school, but finally wanted to get serious about it, maybe start a trio,
work his way up.  That and anthropology.  Max was fascinated by obscure cultures and languages
I’d never even heard of -- it was one of the reasons he picked our college to begin with, so he
could learn Uighur and study the Nivkh of the Sakhalin islands.  He was exactly the sort of
person I’d hoped I’d meet at college: interesting, interested in things that I’d never even heard of,
sophisticated, smart.  As we got drunk, the day wearing on into dusk, we started talking about the
girls we’d met over the week, who was hot and who was cool, and some couples that had already
formed.  Everything lay ahead.

 I didn’t come out to him until two years later, and he seemed insulted.
 

 “What’s it like having a wife?” I asked.

 “It’s funny, it feels completely natural.”

 Max was working as a consultant, specializing in accounting software for small to
midsize businesses.

 I wanted to think that Max had gone astray.  But had he?  His life was centered around the
world; mine seemed apart from it.  I wondered if I’d made a mistake calling Max and arranging
the visit.  There would be little to talk about.  I’d said why I was calling within the first minute of
our conversation, as if to explain, as if to say, it’s not that I just wanted to talk to you.
  

  15.  
 
 

 I wanted to meet people interested in poetry, art, and music.  When I did, they saw right
through my pretenses and into the reality that I hadn’t written anything of consequence, hadn’t
said anything that had emotional weight, and hadn’t done anything interesting enough to excuse
the vacuity.  I thought I had raw talent, because my English teachers in high school all thought I
was a talented writer.  But, as I only learned gradually, and mostly too late, I didn’t know
anything.  I knew about Allen Ginsberg and the Beats.  But had I ever heard of Rilke?  Rimbaud? 
It was as if, yet again, I was a step behind.

 Although I imagined myself to have the soul of a poet, I still looked and acted like some
foolish, nerdy, wannabe kid from the suburbs with my polo shirts and longish, messy hair. 
Looking at photographs from my freshman year of college is an embarrassment – how could I
have thought that the con would work, when most of the posing was in my head?  Nor did I
really make the effort to change myself.  Looking back, it is as if I expected that everything
would simply come my way, as if by desert.  I was expecting the most talented, vital artists in my
class not only to accommodate me but to seek me out, invite me in, ask me to join in their wild
revels late into the morning, with drugs and women and verse.  I expected it – I was disappointed
and alienated when it didn’t happen, when I spent vacations alone at my house because no one
would voluntarily spend time with me, or when I spent nights at school hiding in a movie theater
by myself, because I couldn’t bear to have everyone know that I was in my dorm room alone,
uninvited.

 Undeterred, I spent my college life sampling, trying, moving, experimenting.  I was
ignorant of my own foolishness, and that was a sweet ignorance.  I believed in cliches worth
believing in, and was naive at the age when it is good to be naive.

 Eventually, though, I found irony.  I fell in with a smart, heavily ironic group of people,
whose company I enjoyed even as I felt like the real fun was being had somewhere else.  We all
probably felt the same way; that would explain the critical tone we took towards everything of
sincerity.  We mocked the club kids, dazed on ecstasy and raving through factories until 8 in the
morning, although I secretly envied the way they lived their lives.  We mocked the poets and
artists, affecting poses and wearing black while spouting derivative verse or sculpting garbage
out of steel -- and yet, I felt in my heart that these people were surely making more of their lives
than I.  Above all, though, we mocked the jocks, the straights, the suits, the uptight fools whose
control of the world might be unchallenged but whose control of our minds we rebuffed.  We
were ruthless, as we had once been scorned ruthlessly by others.

 Quickly, college became about adopting the stance of an adversary rather than the posture
of a victim.  There was no hope of reconciliation between myself and the “men of action,” as
Dostoevsky called them.  The jocks were unreachable, the successful smart kids (the sort of
people who run the city where I now live) were impeccable and dull, the convivial majority
seemed to enjoy talking about nonsense and bearing sunny dispositions.  I, on the other hand,
thought that I would rather be dead than stand any more conversation.

 Eventually, I thought of was leaving, and somehow escaping the chattering that I loathed.  
I could be in some small college town, I could have a library, I could have a small piece of
property surrounded by impenetrable woods, where I would live alone and protected.  There
would be no chattering small talk about what Brandon said to Tina, no idiotic television about
families I loathed.  There would be peace and quiet, and that would be worth living.
 

     16.  
 

 Unlike the anxious and long-hoped-for sexual experiences with girls, plotted out, worried
over, and delayed, my first encounter with another man came almost by mistake.  It was my
junior year of college, and I was stoned.  I was at a party given by some acquaintances of mine,
packed with bodies and alcohol and sweat.  The only people I found there were people I was not
interested in talking to.  So I began to smoke and drink more.

 I was stumbling towards the punch bowl when I walked into someone I knew from a
poetry class, who immediately started talking excitedly about Byron and Keats.  I couldn’t
remember his name - Daniel, or Donald, or David, or something, I thought.  It was hard even to
focus on his face.  He was clearly as drunk as I was, although probably not as stoned, and I
remember him saying "It's really crowded right here, let's move," and so we squeezed through the
crowd of people in the suite's common room into the hallway and then, to my confusion but not
exactly surprise, into one of the bedrooms.  As soon as I was in the door, Daniel (I think that was
most likely his name) just came at me and kissed me and touched me.  I quickly shut the door.

 My first thought was, approximately, "Excellent – this is another interesting experience."

 I remember enjoyment, but also a sense of disgust; the anatomy of it, the smells.  And I
remember a list of observations I made with almost scientific detachment – what it felt like to do
this, tastes, things Daniel said that I filed away as data.  It was less an encounter than a dissection. 
I think I enjoyed it, but what is available to me now is only a collage of fragments: a bare
sensation, an image.

 Daniel quickly slipped out of my life.  There were no phone calls after the night together
– I didn’t know his last name, and I’m not sure he knew mine.  Then, a week after our night
together, I started an abortive relationship with a nice, Jewish girl -- perfect marriage material, as
if I would ever be interested in ‘perfect marriage material.’  The relationship lasted barely a
month; we had nothing whatsoever in common.  It occurred to me that I had rushed to the this
marriageable girl as an expression of fear, or denial.  So in junior year of college, at the age of
twenty-one, I finally asked myself: Was I gay?

 The first bits of evidence that came to mind were not sexual desires, but cliches: I wasn’t
any good at sports; I wasn’t much good with women; I was always a little uncomfortable with
myself.  Maybe this is who I truly was.  A large part of me wanted to believe it – maybe all the
unhappiness, all the failing to fit in, all of the loneliness was simply because I was gay and hadn’t
realized it; I could have lasting, meaningful emotional relationships with other people, but I
needed other gay people.

  I went to one of the gay students’ association parties, hoping to ‘find my tribe’ and feel at
home.  But instead I felt just as awkward as in every other social setting, only more so, since I
had hoped the discomfort would disappear, and it had not.  Everyone seemed better-adjusted than
me.  They all seemed to know something I did not.

 Beneath the hope that this will explain it all, I was terrified of the prospect of being gay. 
Part of me wanted it to be true, wanted this easy explanation -- but part of me was mortified. 
How would I tell my mother?  What would my life be like?  I still had the notion that, one day, I
would meet someone and fall in love, and we would be married and have children.  That was the
point.  And to imagine that denied was painful.  I didn’t know in those days –  I am speaking of
only a few years ago – that gay people could marry.  It was not as common as it is today, and it
was certainly not as visible.  Now, of course, I recognize that gay people can have as fulfilling
and loving families as straight people, but at the time it seemed like being gay and being in the
kind of fantastic relationship I imagined were mutually exclusive.

 In fact, thinking about it now, I suppose I still entertain the fantasy of settling down and
having children, as ludicrously removed from my current existence as it is.  But now it is a
fantasy on the same plane as my hope to become a successful artist or dreams of winning the
lottery.  I suppose such dreams linger on long past any hope of their realization; we don’t really
pay close attention to them; they are like old clothes in the back of the closet.  They would be
thrown out if you had a reason to go into the back of the closet and sort through them, but since
you don’t, they remain and remain and remain.

 Eventually, I came to terms with my sexuality in the way I was coming to know best -- I
read books.  There was an ample supply of other people’s experience to inform my own, and I
devoured it.  Foucault, Epistemology of the Closet, queer theory - they all convinced me of what
I wanted to hear, that "gay" and "straight" are socially constructed categories, that everyone was
bisexual, that really, and that to think that the sex of your partner defined your essential
orientation was a very ahistorical thing to do.  So I stopped thinking that way.  I rounded out my
philosophical rationales with the classics - Plato, Shakespeare's sonnets, all kinds of embodiment
of bisexual love that just happened to find its object, sometimes, being a young man.  I loved the
idea that one could love both the Dark Lady and the Onlie Begetter, that the boundaries set upon
me were false.  I became quite happy with myself for understanding this fact better than my
deluded gay and straight contemporaries, and for being secure enough to experiment both with
Daniel and with anyone else who might become available.  Of course, I was never quite secure
enough to convert potentiality into actuality, and no one else became available.  Rather than
continued acts, my liberation mostly consisted of ideas.

 In the end, it wasn’t shame, I don’t think, that kept me in the closet, so much as an
inability to commit to any particular identity at all.  I wasn’t being repressed, I thought – I was
being ‘intelligent.’  And besides, I wasn’t really gay – I was ‘queer.’  Queer in the sense that you
didn’t have to tell your mother.  Or, really, your friends either.  That kind of queer.

 I never told my parents, so I sometimes wonder if my father went to his grave ‘knowing’
or ‘not knowing.’  It wasn’t that it was a secret so much as a non-truth, an omission.  The
evasions around my sexuality were no different from the growing set of evasions I constructed
around everything that was personal.  I told my parents nothing, told my friends very little –
eventually shared nothing about myself with anyone, presuming it all to be of as little interest to
them as their personal travails were to me.   
 

  17.  
 

 I don’t know when it was, precisely, that I started exploring ideas, rather than community,
as a mode of self-creation.  I do know, with some precision, that right before my 21st birthday I
realized that I actually was coming to possess opinions, that some of the issues I had struggled
with over the previous three years were actually being resolved in my mind, not in the sense of
choosing one side, but in the sense of seeing all possible ones.  I even remember the trivial,
particular idea itself -- something about the nature of art, a rejection of ‘art as imitation of
nature;’ a subsequent embrace of a more Romantic conception of one spirit struggling to soar
higher and become whole like the perfect circle; and eventually moving past that, to see art as (in
series, and all at once) an expression of economy, as a mode of class oppression, as an
Autonomous Object opposed to kitsch, as a pastiche of kitsch opposed to dominant narratives of
‘autonomous objects’ insulated from injustice and culture, as a witty piss-take on the flaws of
human natures, as an epic record of communal formation, as overvalued junk, as the most
sublime of our vocations.  

 I had learned that all of these views had merit -- and that was the key to everything. 
These theories of art, like types of music, or social groups, or even styles of food – they weren’t
mere styles.  They were religions.  Dance and mathematics, painting and carpentry – all were
theories of the One and expressions of its meaning.  There was nothing that could not be
interpreted, and these interpretations, I thought, made us human.

 I remember going out one night, with some college acquaintances whose names I do not
remember, to a salsa show, and then later going to a techno bar for some drinks.  Most of my
friends were talking about something or other, but I was paying attention to where we were, and
to the shifting environments of meaning all around us.  The transition was shocking.  The salsa
band seemed to be igniting themselves in a vibrant, organic pulse of celebration; the colors are
red; the temperature is hot.  They said: life is about vitality, and food and drink and sex.  I
imagined the trumpeter to have had a series of passionate romances; he has seen a man die; he
understands that true living is, as the music proclaims, viva.  Vivifying, life-affirming.

 And then, to the cool, anti-Romantic techno progressivism, rejecting not just the primitive
analog music of the salsa player but the whole naivete and banality of its ethos.  Sophistication,
cosmopolitanism, crossing boundaries; black and grey, not red.
 
 And I could move freely, I believed, from the opera house to the blues bar by way of the
gamelan.  My friends seemed to treat all of these as backgrounds for their conversations, but for
me, they were samples of lives. I myself became a sort of cosmopolitan, forever removed from
really experiencing the salsa dance, or the joy of klezmer, or the laziness of reggae, but always
ready and able to sample, to learn.  I was an insider to nothing, and yet I was always looking in
from various outsides.  This remains true today, every day of my life that I am doing something
other than reporting to the law office and going home to bed.  I wonder if it would have been
better for me to have chosen one of these styles of life, rather than have chosen a path that only
learns about them.

 The life of the ideas and the mind is more engaged with the world than we might think --
my ideas are comprised of realities, art, lifestyles.  The only trouble is that they are all reduced to
points for analysis.  Analysis by whom?
  
  
     19.   
 

 I wanted to come out of the closet – at least, to anyone but my parents – and yet, there
never seemed to be the right opportunity.  I wanted to believe that by coming out, the veil of my
growing solitude would be lifted.  I read in books that coming out would provide me with a
liberation far greater than sexuality.  Thinking once more in cliche, I imagined how transformed I
would be by honesty, openness, and the ‘gay aesthetic’ - paying better attention to how I dress,
drinking expensive wine, and so on. 

 I wanted there to be an answer to why it was that no one called me on the phone, and why
I was more comfortable with the dead authors of books than with the living people around me. 
This could be all I would need!

 But there never seemed to be the opportunity.  I thought of telling my acquaintances in
school, but we never seemed to be close enough to make that worthwhile.  Once, I wore a ‘pride
pin’ to school – but no one seemed to notice.  My clothes did not match any better than before. 
So, if people in school or summer jobs made remarks about good-looking girls, I went along with
it.  When I heard homophobic jokes, I laughed.  Quickly, rather than providing an escape from
my solitude, being gay added another aspect to it.  

 My attempts to meet men were awkward, reluctant, and almost furtive.  I never knew the
right appearance to take on, the right language to use, and the right poses to affect.  It was always
a matter of posing; without the posing, there was only... what? 

 I had thought it would be easy.  If everyone were as repressed as I imagined myself to be,
meeting one should be simple.  But the only men who approached me in bars were much older
than I, and there was something vaguely repulsive about them.  On occasion, I did go with these
men, who were looking only for quick sex.  The sex was restricting, not liberating, and was
always alienating and sleazy. Often it was simply embarrassing.

 I felt as though I was acting the part in a bad movie, unable to risk lines not already
scripted.  I didn’t expect the men I met in bars or clubs to be Foucault or Eve Sedgwick.  They
were just out to get laid.  But the cliche of it all was surprising.   The dominant gay culture
(which few men said they liked, but which they nonetheless upheld) seemed to be one, ironically,
of denial –  a kind of dancing-in-spite-of that, rather than real affirmation.  It was either too
happy -- filled with some sort of natural or artificially stimulated excitement -- or too longing to
be happy.  And the desperate vapidity: Everyone seemed to be trying to convince themselves of
something.  Even the fading spectre of AIDS didn't seem to lend gravitas to the silly rituals, the
bland claims of self-affirmation that seemed cribbed from self-help books, the fake laughter and
superficiality.  In bars and in bed, I felt I had to conceal my feelings and wit, flatten myself into
someone no better than this.  

 

    20.  
 
 

 While the dozens of alternative subcultures within the gay community were interesting,
none was personally involving, certainly not the deviant sexual ones (which seemed silly) or the
odd cultural ones (which seemed even sillier).  I tried meeting men for more than just sex, but the
men I encountered were either too well-adjusted to date someone like me, or were too much like
me to date.   

 I also stayed in the closet because, when I admitted it to myself, I never stopped thinking
that this life, for me, was only a substitute for women; that I was here not because it felt right but
because everything else felt wrong.  I didn’t feel at home in this community; I was only here
because I wanted to feel at home somewhere.  I desired men sexually, so I belonged here – or did
I only desire men in order to belong?  I began to feel that flirting in the gay universe, and having
encounters which generally were not even pleasurable for me, was just a way of avoiding being
alone.    I was convinced by Sartre, and everyone else who denies essential identity.  I could no
more imagine myself “gay” or “straight” than a football player or a lawyer or a person who wears
a hat.  These were activities; sex, sports, law.  My lust was directed at that which was beautiful,
wherever it was.  

 This, I imagined even then, would prove to be my undoing.  But it wasn’t until I met
Jeremy that I truly understood my mistake.

 
 

     21.  
 
 

 Gradually, any pretensions that my life of irony and wit was due to some kind of
intellectual superiority disappeared.  It was loneliness, and I knew it.  Once it had seemed that 
loneliness was a temporary condition, caused by being in the wrong high school, or the wrong
town, or the wrong dorm.  But as it repeated itself in every new context, I came to see it as
permanent.

 I suppose I had an infinity of choices at 22, which now seems absurdly young.  I might’ve
pursued graduate school, or writing.  But this seemed to me too serious a choice to be made – too
real a commitment.  So I went to law school.

 My years in law school had very little to do with the law.  There were papers to write and
doctrines to learn, but what I learned most was how to be alone.  How to evade, and present well;
how to rent videos and go to films without being detected; how to understand that childish
dreams are best left behind.

 There are children who dream of being lawyers - I met them in law school - but they are
the minority.  Most of the law students I met during my three years at school were, like me, there
for lack of anything more compelling to do.  I came to see law school as a place of cowardice:
inside the stone buildings with their lofty ceilings and loftier ideals, there were hundreds of
meandering souls.  Some seemed to know how they were slowly but inexorably leaving behind
what they once valued; others didn’t notice; still others were only too happy to find, at last, a
profession that demanded so little of the heart.

 I felt as though someone had imperceptibly altered my life’s trajectory, and that I had not
been informed.

 Though I maintained dreams that I would someday be a poet (or be recognized as a poet),
I knew from the moment I sat down in my very first class that law school was a place where a
certain kind of thinking was taught, and other kinds were extinguished.  Poetry was foolish.  Still,
I tried to maintain some semblance of myself as an artist -- a figure I never really was, but always
wanted to be.   I went through my second semester identity crisis, a time when a certain
percentage of law students realize what they are becoming and panic.  Some dye their hair and
start wearing ripped-up jeans and t-shirts to school.  Some actually drop out.  I took classes
outside of law school, in subjects like religion and sociology.  I read novelists who I'd never read
before.  I went to plays.  

 Yet despite these protestations, I think part of me must have been quite content to become
a lawyer.  I could have left – but I didn’t.  And eventually, it became too tiring to maintain a dual
existence.  Really, why try?  If this was what I was going to be, this lawyer who developed
distinctions and closely scrutinized minutiae of documents and promises, then what was the use
of pretending to be something else?  

 Law school was the first time that I had the geography of my present life, with an empty
apartment, and people I saw at "work" or school but not anywhere else.  It was the first time that I
was in the position of having to pursue and work at friendships, despite the various attempts at
social programming that went on at school.  Unlike college, where people were always around, at
law school, there was the cafeteria, the library, and a few minutes before and after every class.  
Suddenly, it took effort to maintain friendships, and planning just to be in the same room.

 I did work at it.  I tried to call people up and go to movies or dinner with them. But I
gatherings of lawyers or law students yield conversations about the law, and these conversations
filled me with loathing, both for these people for being interested in what I considered to be
highly mundane questions, and for myself for being one of them.  Sure, I could carry on the
conversation just like anyone else.  Many of the topics interested me, and I remember several
animated debates about points of health care policy, or affirmative action, or welfare, or
environmental law, or whatever was the legal-political issue of the day.  When I got home to my
empty apartment after such interchanges, however, it felt like time wasted.
 
 

     22.  
 
 

 Now, it has been four years since I finished law school, and I have given up making
phone calls and trying to arrange get-togethers.  I'm twenty-nine years old, still quite young in the
absolute scheme of things, but a different sort of young nonetheless: no longer "young" and
irresponsible, or young in the sense of unformed possibility.  As I near thirty, I begin to recognize
that what I am, I am.

 Some might say that to accept my solitude is cowardly and defeatist, or foolish, when
there are fifty years left to live and so many ample opportunities to alter my conditions.  For a
time, I still believed that I was like Superman in disguise; my true nature -- artistic, beloved,
happy -- would soon be revealed.  And yet, how long does it take before such aspirations become
delusions? 

 At a certain point, one learns that there are voices on both sides of defeatism: those who 
urge one to “never give up hope,” and those who recommend “being happy with who you are.”  
(One saying I remember from my minimal Jewish education is some rabbi's aphorism: "Who is
rich?  He who is happy with his share.")  Both sides may express themselves in cliche, or in
profundity, but at some point, never giving up hope begins to sound naive, or exhausting, or both.

 Three months after I met the couple on the street, I set out on a trip across the country, a
vacation I was practically forced to take.  I think part of me still believed that a change in my
circumstances was possible, despite all my claims to the contrary.  But now I know that the only
change that we really undergo is the sort of change we do not control.     
 

23.  

 “Well, you know, it’s just that, vacation days are there to be taken.  Take some time off –
don’t you have somewhere you’ve always wanted to be?  Your work on the Brookstone matter
was outstanding.  The deal closed.  Why not take some time off?”

 The partner had asked me into his office.  I thought he was going to assign me some new
work.  It was February.

 “Well, I feel fine,” I said.

 “I’m sure you do,” he answered.  “That’s not it.  It’s just that, you know, you’ve
accumulated almost two months of vacation – if you don’t use it, you might lose it.”

 The partner’s use of the word “might” was very instructive.  Since he knew as well as I
did that it was his and his partners’ decision.  The firm had probably not encountered this
particular problem before, someone going four years without an interest in taking some time off. 
But it was within their power to effectively force me to take my vacation, right there in the
employee handbook.

 I’d taken a few long weekends now and then, to visit my family or to relax on a beach for
a short time, but perhaps they were suspicious that I had taken no real vacation.  I noticed I was
sweating. 
 
 I would have to capitulate.   And yet, to take a vacation – what would I do?

 “Well, I had been thinking about visiting my cousin in Oregon,” I said meekly.  A lie, of
course.  I hadn’t seen my cousin in over five years, and we had lost touch almost completely.  We
made the appropriate remarks that we really should get together more often, you know, you
should come out to visit us in Portland -- or, Washington is so beautiful around the cherry
blossom season.  But we never meant it.

 “That sounds terrific,” the partner said, interrupting me. “That’s exactly what I mean, take
a little time, visit the family.”

 As a child, I would always interrupt.  I am certain I learned it from my mother, who
throughout her adult life maintains the same practice.  Indeed, it wasn't until my early twenties
that I even recognized how rude I was in ordinary conversation, not only because I would
interrupt -- rude in itself -- but because my comments invariably reflected on my experience, my
opinion, my understanding of a situation.  I would speak less about a topic than about how a
topic had influenced me. 

 “I suppose that would be nice,” I answered in total duplicitousness.

 And then, without a pause: “Well, don’t take any new projects, you should be ready to go
in a month or so.”

 And so, I didn’t.  And so I was.