Boy Rejects Invitation to a Gay World
By: Laurence Best
Tags: Coming Of Age, LGBTQ, Memoir, Creative Non Fiction, Sexuality

My high school fraternity brother Rossi lived in what we now call a mid-century modern home. Then it was just new and luxurious. We had senior-year gym class together and hung out sometimes in the spring of 1967.

His glamorous mother was usually home. I remember her gliding through high-ceilinged rooms in pastel Capri pants and perfectly fashionable dark hair with Elizabeth Taylor make-up. I couldn’t decide if she looked more like Jackie Kennedy or Taylor herself. The effect was particularly dramatic against the white grand piano in her glass-walled living room that looked out on tropical gardens.

She was pleasant but preoccupied. Her level of polish no doubt required more than a little self-absorption.

Rossi too was always well turned out. He was a bodybuilder and took care of his appearance, which usually involved tight jeans and madras shirts, at least out of school. In class, he followed the dress code with khakis about a size too small. He must have gone to a gym at night instead of studying, because he always seemed free in the afternoons. I don’t think classes interest him much.

His curated affect extended to an always gleaming late-model Ford Falcon. The 289 cubic inch, four-speed coupe was outfitted with jacked-up rear suspension, oversized tires, chrome magnesium wheels, and rumbling dual exhausts. Despite its drag-racing look, Rossi babied it, always driving carefully.

The source of all this prosperity was elusive. Rossi never talked about it, but he never lorded his good fortune over the rest of us. He acted as it were invisible and pedestrian, which perhaps it was to him. In those days public schools offered economic diversity. White flight to private schools following racial integration changed all that.

One spring day after school I saw Rossi and Mike Kerlec talking in front of our school with a well-dressed older guy, late twenties maybe, who was leaning casually on the polished fender of a gorgeous Corvette Sting Ray. I got into my car and watched.

Eventually, my friends stepped back and the guy got behind the wheel. The engine roared a time or two until he dropped into first gear and and smoked his tires with a howling squeal. He drifted to the right before rubber finally bit asphalt and rocketed the car away in a blur.

I caught up with Rossi and asked who owned the hot Vette.

“Oh, that’s just Charles.”

As if that answered my question. “But who’s Charles?”

“Just this guy who likes to hang sometimes and lets us drive his car.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“You know … owns a couple of bars.”

“How did you meet him?”

“Somebody met him in his bar and introduced us.”

“I don’t get it. Why does he let y’all drive his car?”

“Look … he’s queer, okay? He likes young guys, and if we spend time with him, he takes us to dinner someplace nice and lets us drive his car. It’s a trade-off. That’s all.”

“So Mike does this too?”

“Sure.”

I found this more than curious. It was a revelation and something I would never have suspected of any of them. Kids spoke of queers abstractly, but I had never known one. Since Rossi had not been forthcoming, I let it go, but I felt left out. I’d have given anything just to sit in that car, but no one had invited scrawny me.

Stephan Price/Trusdale Estates

Rossi invited me home to hang out, so I felt a bit included after all. His cork-floored room was furnished with two twin beds that met in a corner under a low table with a modern lamp, all imported from Sweden. The beds had fitted upholstery covers and cushions leaning against the walls. Across the room was a comfortable desk unit with bookshelves. A sliding pocket door led to his private bathroom.

I picked up a car magazines from his desk and sat down on a bed.

“While you’re looking, let me show you what I want,” he said, leafing through another. “Here! A ’67 Firebird 400.”

“Wow! That’s fine. But your car isn’t that old.”

“Yeah, but I want this one! Maybe I’ll get lucky and someone will steal the Falcon so I can get a Firebird. Then he started to undress. “But now I need a shower.”

“But we just had a shower after fifth-period gym.”

“Yeah, but I still sweat after and now I need another.” In all fairness, that was probably true. I was sticky too.

He peeled off his clothes standing in front of the door to the bathroom. I could tell he enjoyed pulling his V-neck undershirt over his head as an excuse to flex his muscles. Why else be a bodybuilder? Next, he pulled off his pants followed by his burgundy low rise Y-fronts trimmed in white.

Pausing there, completely nude, he said, “You can take one too if you want. I have plenty of towels. You’ll feel a lot better.”

I nervously dodged the offer. “No thanks. I’ll just start sweating again as soon as I get in my car.” I would have loved another cool shower, but …

My nerves weren’t about fear of being naked. We were naked together twice daily in the locker room and school showers. I knew I was at least adequate in that department, if not as big as Rossi, but I feared the minute air hit my dick it would get hard, like it always did when I showered at home.

I managed to avoid this in gym only with with intense distraction. Even then, I sometimes barely managed to get my pants back on before disaster struck. I was not taking unnecessary chances, especially here where I just knew an erection would be inevitable.

Just sitting across from Rossi’s nakedness, I struggled not to let my eyes settle on his crotch. If I stared at his dick or took my clothes off and got hard, he would think I was queer, which was not true but would ruin my life if he told anyone.

He shifted his weight from one hip to the other. “Aw, come on. You’ll be sorry you didn’t.”

He loved displaying his body, and I was his captive audience. I tried to stare at my magazine. “No thanks.”

He finally turned and walked slowly into his bathroom, offering a view of his perfectly muscled butt, leaving the door open while showering behind steamed glass. When he finished, he stepped into the bedroom to languorously dry himself, spending most of his time on his face, ears, and hair.

I had no doubt he was enjoying this, maybe teasing me in some way I could not understand. He asked again if I was sure I didn’t want to shower. I declined again, imagining him watching me shower with a hard-on. And then what? I made myself think of something else.

Weeks later, Rossi announced his Falcon had been stolen and found stripped on the edge of the woods in New Orleans East. He and his dad were already car shopping. But he was effectively grounded temporarily, so sometimes he bummed a ride from me.

I was dropping him off one afternoon when I got up the nerve to ask “So, have you seen Charles lately?”

“Yeah, he took me to Friendship House in Biloxi for dinner last week and let me drive both ways. It was a blast.”

Friendship House restaurant, from the John Stachura Collection

How I envied Rossi. That was a favorite restaurant, right on the beach with a long row of picture windows looking out on the Gulf of Mexico. I had been only once on a visit with relatives and had never forgotten the buttery hot biscuits and heaps of crisp fried seafood. I thought how cool it would be to go there and order a bourbon and seven with Charles.

Driving a Corvette to get there was unimaginable. “That must have been something. How fast did you get to go?”

“Only up to a hundred, because of traffic on Highway 90, but it really jumped when I had to pass. I didn’t want to scare Charles and not get to go again. For having a car like that, he’s not much of a hot rodder. I even had to teach him how to pop the clutch to peel out.”

“Sounds like an expensive night just for company. Did it cost anything else?

“Well, only the usual… I let him blow me.”

“Wow!” I blurted, my eyes bulging. “What was that like? Did you come?”

“Sure, right in his mouth and it was great, but it’s not like I care or anything. That’s just his deal.”

The truth was out, and I had been left out again. What puzzled me was why anyone would want to suck a dick. How could even a queer get off on that? It wasn’t like he even got to come. I was afraid to ask more questions and look too interested. But I wondered what else might be going on that Rossi hadn’t mentioned.

Finally, I had seen and heard something about a real gay man!

But it added little to my paltry knowledge store. All I saw was a man living alone on the fringes of society bribing teenage boys to put their penises in his mouth. He did not have the regular working hours of adult men I knew, nor did he wear suits and ties. I saw nothing of love, commitment, decency or dignity, let alone acceptance and respectable success.

I was not looking for that kind of life and did not remotely identify with it. Charles and I had nothing in common. Those events made an impression, though. I have never forgotten them, hanging on to the images as if to pieces of a puzzle, like an untranslatable fragment of my own Rosetta Stone.

Before long, Rossi had his new Firebird, outfitted with Red Line Wide Oval tires and flat grey mag wheels. He took me on a long drive on Lakeshore Drive where he could show it off.

It completely blew away my family’s boring 1967 four-door Tempest, but that did not diminish the fun of riding in Rossi’s dream car. Mom’s Dodge had just died of a burnt valve, and she had somehow finagled our first new car since the divorce eleven years earlier.

It was a stripped-down model with no power or air, but it was a beauty to me. Mom said I looked like some great white bird when I flew down the street in it. I knew how happy she was to be able to do this for me and that meant a lot. It was parked at the curb in front of Rossi’s house when we got back from our drive.

As we got out, he looked over at the Tempest and said, “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you take my Firebird wheel covers for your car? I don’t need ’em now that I have the mag wheels.”

“Gee Rossi, you are so nice to offer, but I don’t know …”

“Come on. Let’s put one on and see how they look.”

I couldn’t refuse, especially when I saw all that chrome surrounding red disc centers. Rossi had to beat them into place with his fists since I didn’t know how. They changed the whole look of the car.

“Rossi, I don’t know how to thank you. I mean those are not cheap and you could have sold them for sure.”

“I’d rather see them on your car. They really do make it look sharp.”

I was touched. I liked Rossi and never could figure what it was about me that interested him. I was proud to have him as a friend, and now with his generosity, I felt like he liked me too, maybe more than I thought.

He went away to college at the end of the summer, and I stayed home attending the University of New Orleans. We saw each other a few times during college, but after that, not again for decades. Before school ended, he signed my Kennedy yearbook in handwriting so tiny you could barely read about our senior year “broads and sex,” which was mostly wishful thinking.