The day the letter of acceptance arrived, my torment over Adelle began to disappear. I half thought it might be good for creativity, so I tried for a few weeks to keep the drama in my head alive. Every time I felt the tears start anew, I'd hear a contrapuntal voice offering a future of fame and fortune. Actually applying to the school involved some work for both me and my parents. My parents, it must be said, supported my choice even as they worried about the wisdom of it. Their sacrifice was real: tuition had to be paid. They took out loans. At last a package arrived with orientation instructions. Among the questions about Freshman life in the dorms on the Fens was, "could I eat institutional food?" I supposed that I could, not really understanding the meaning of the term. I had, because of Linda's parents' cooking, developed an antipathy towards the term gourmet.
There was another gourmand to be reckoned with. Professor Goode, my music teacher, that former Dean of the BCM, was as worldly as the Litmans. By the time I'd gone to Boston to audition, Goode's campaign to bring me along had gotten to exquisite lengths. He had started the year before with Creme de Menthe. Among the scattered remnants of my memory were two expressions that still nauseate: "my little love," and "not ready for Davis." I was split down the middle. I was not enthusiastic about being anyone's 'little love.' I was quite enthusiastic about entering the world of famous musicians whose ranks I surely belonged among. The more I heard about Don Davis and his doings on 'the Cape,' the more I thought I was more than ready. Since Goode didn't drive, (and how was it possible to be a human male in America and not drive?), a plan was concocted whereby I'd drive the two of us in my little shitbox of a car up to "P Town." There, we'd stay a few days with Davis and take in the haunts of Beantown. I had to endure some coaching first.
"Don is not going to want to hear about your women or your sexual exploits with them."
"OK. Do I have to let him suck my dick?"
"I begin to think you're almost ready for Davis."
"Well...do I?"
"Up to you. But you'll be known as my..."
"Squeeze?"
"Little love."
"Yuck."
"I love it when you say 'yuck.'
"Rhymes with fuck."
"Now that isn't Don worthy."
"They don't fuck or suck?"
"They don't use profanity all that much. You tend to talk like a sailor."
"You'd think Provincetown would be full of sailors."
"It's full of..."
"Queers like you?"
"No. Queers like you've never seen."
On this topic Herr Professor John Goode was an expert, as it turned out. I drove, he paid. For everything. We stopped along the way at family restaurants along the turnpike. Appearing as father and son, on an odd-ish odyssey, we sat opposite one another at some tavern, he with his Burgundy and I with my coke.
"Are you tired of driving? Do you want to stop at a motel?"
Despite my joking and attempts at deflective pseudo sophistication, I wasn't that keen on becoming, in fact, Goode's little whatever. I was not afraid of being a homo. Quite the opposite. I found the idea of it enchanting. Ah, to be one of the Platonic tribe! Ah, to be a youth corrupted by the Socratic truth. I had no conception of either the reality or the mechanics. Another slight problem, which I would only discover after a few actual attempts, was that I was actually a kinky heterosexual. Though I believed that all orgasms were the same in the dark, I was proven wrong. Homosexuality didn't work as an aphrodisiac for me. It only worked as an intellectual construct based on the impression that many great artists were gay. On the Isle of Lesbos, Sappho stroked her silver lyre.
"Stroked her what?"
The ramshackle beach house had so many shellac records in the attic, that metal trusses had been installed to prevent a collapse. Don Davis, whispy-haired, Woolcott-esque, corpulent self, was telling me a story about the one time a female had actually been on the premises. Having been lectured about the impropriety of so much as mentioning the unfair sex, here I was hearing an anecdote on the topic from the Master himself. A woman had seen the 'boys' (so...they called themselves boys) sunbathing nude on Don's deck. She'd asked if she might join. Not to be uncivilized, she was permitted. She took off her clothes and took a spot, covering her face with a novel. Of course, the nude female form did nothing for them. Ha. And she repeated the stunt daily the whole Summer that year. 'Summer that year,' made me hear an echo of Hemmingway, that other old closet case. Eventually 'the boys' learned that she was a dyke. A lesbian. Isle of Lesbos. Sappho...
"Her silver lyre."
"By the temple, in the moonlight..."
I quoted Fireside Theater to be urbane.
"John, I like this boy."
"Yes. I knew you two would hit it off."
Evenings were spent in a delicious pursuit. A small pile of 78s were fished down from the attic. A single work of Chopin (Or Grainger. Or Grieg. Or Beethoven. Or anybody with a piano output) was selected and a half dozen recordings of the work would be played. The records were listened to in silence, except for the occasional sigh of pleasure. We heard de Pachmann, Friedman, Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein, Cortot, Paderewski (rarely), and of course, occasionally Grainger. Percy played his own pieces and those of others. As the tone arm was raised, the talk turned to the glories of the past. The few days I was a guest, there was a steady stream of visitors. I did not know a single one of them, but I was informed by my guide that these were the leading lights of our day. No one would dare argue with Don Davis. He told his stories with relish, putting on quite a show. I was utterly enchanted. I tried to keep up the repartee with all the wit I could muster. The musical education was wide and deep. I was already being shaped by the aura of Boston.
"It's astounding how much information you have about the great pianists!"
"Here's what I have to say about that."
He took out a dime from his pants pocket and threw it on the floor.
"Music as a whole is represented by the floor and beyond, out to the beach, the harbor, and the sea beyond. What I know is what's underneath that dime."
"Don, that's dramatic. But if I had a handy grain of sand, I could throw that down next to your dime and say, 'what I know lies beneath that grain."
"Have I said before how much I like this boy?"
I improvised for an hour on the battered upright.
"That's quite a workout. A lot of harmony for one so young."
"Do you still play, Don? The piano's tuned..."
"I keep it tuned as well as I can for the greats, like yourself, that come through my doors. But I myself gave my youth to the box. It took my best days, when I could've been...doing nothing well."
"Doing..."
"Nothing...well."
"Doesn't doing nothing have its limitations?"
"It takes a lot of practice. To really do...nothing...well."
In the morning, having been out on the beach early after the sunrise and seen the lesbians sunning nude, and having had a raging boner that had to be relieved, and having been observed in the act by the lesbians who began to give me the thumbs up and squint through fashionable shades, I felt magnanimous and decided I would cook fried eggs for anybody else up at that hour. Unfortunately, I didn't know shit about cooking. I had my fire too low and the eggs stuck to the pan, turning them into nothing anyone would want to eat. Except me.
"I see you don't like eggs."
Dish, dish, dish.
I ate my butchered eggs alone while all the 'boys' went out for breakfast.
I had learned my first hard lesson about the queer world. It was not all Sappho stroking lyres. When in a few days, I got ditched in the Combat Zone with cab fare by Professor Johnny Bee Goode who wanted to get his dick sucked in a bar bathroom by some hunk of rough trade, I had seen more than was comprehensible of the world I was flirting with. I took any chance I could to get out of Goode's grip, stopping short of ditching the whole self-serving enterprise. I had seen enough of Boston to know I had made a very good choice however that choice had come to be made.
