I’d forgotten that my first conversation with Alice had been about the draft. When I got summoned for a physical—I can’t remember exactly when this was, or many other details, because I had a terrible hangover that day—I checked the box that said something along the lines of “homosexual tendencies,” which I vaguely recall whispering to myself in an Austrian accent, as if Herr Doktor Grau were still alive and speaking to me.
The army psychiatrist was a tight-assed lieutenant; I remember him. He kept his office door open while he interrogated me—so that the recruits who were waiting their turn could overhear us—but I’d lived through earlier and vastly smarter intimidation tactics. (Think of Kittredge.)
“And then what?” Alice had asked, when I was telling her the story. She was a great person to tell a story to; Alice always gave me the impression that she couldn’t wait to hear what happened next. But Alice was impatient with the vagueness of my draft story.
“You don’t like girls?” the lieutenant had asked me.
“Yes, I do—I do like girls,” I told him.
“Then what are your ‘homosexual tendencies,’ exactly?” the army psychiatrist asked.
“I like guys, too,” I told him.
“You do?” he asked. “Do you like guys better than you like girls?” the psychiatrist continued loudly.
“Oh, it’s just so hard to choose,” I said, a little breathlessly. “I really, really like them both!”
“Uh-huh,” the lieutenant said. “And do you see this tendency continuing?”
“Well, I certainly hope so!” I said—as enthusiastically as I could manage. (Alice loved this story; at least she said she did. She thought it would make a funny scene in a movie.)
“The funny word should have warned you, Bill,” Larry would tell me much later, when I was back in New York. “Or the movie word, maybe.”
What might have warned me about Alice was that she took notes when we were talking. “Who takes notes on conversations?” Larry had asked me; not waiting for an answer, he’d also asked, “And which of you likes it that she doesn’t shave her armpits?”
About two weeks after I’d checked the box for “homosexual tendencies,” or whatever the stupid form said, I received my classification notice—or maybe it was my reclassification notice. I think it was a 4-F; I was found “not qualified”; there was something about the “established physical, mental, or moral standards.”
“But exactly what did the notification say—what was your actual classification?” Alice had asked me. “You can’t just think it was a Four-F.”
“I don’t remember—I don’t care,” I told her.
“But that’s just so vague!” Alice said.
Of course the vague word should have warned me, too.
There’d been a follow-up letter, perhaps from the Selective Service, but maybe not, telling me to see a shrink—not just any shrink, but a particular one.
I’d sent the letter to Grandpa Harry; he and Nils knew a lawyer, for their logging and lumber business. The lawyer said that I couldn’t be forced to see a shrink; I didn’t, and I never heard from the draft again. The problem was that I’d written about this—albeit in passing—in my first novel. I didn’t realize it was my novel Alice was interested in; I thought she was interested in every little thing about me.
“Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy,” I wrote in that novel. (Alice had told me how much she loved that line.) The first-person narrator is an out-of-the-closet gay man who’s in love with the protagonist, who refuses to check the “homosexual tendencies” box; the protagonist, who is an in-the-closet gay man, will die in Vietnam. You might say it is a story about how not coming out can kill you.
One day, I could tell that Alice was really agitated. She seemed to be working on so many projects at the same time—I never knew which screenplay she was writing, at any given moment. I just assumed that one of these scripts-in-progress was causing her agitation, but she confessed to me that one of the studio execs she knew had been “bugging” her about me and my first novel.
He was a guy she regularly made a point of putting down. “Mr. Sharpie,” she sometimes called him—or “Mr. Pastel,” more recently. I had the impression of an immaculate dresser, but a guy who wore golfing clothes—light-colored clothes, anyway. (You know: lime-green pants, pink polo shirts—pastel colors.)
Alice told me that Mr. Pastel had asked her if I would try to “interfere” with a film based on my novel—if there ever were a movie made. Mr. Sharpie must have known she lived with me; he’d asked her if I would be “compliant” to changes in my story.
“Just the usual novel-to-screenplay sort of changes, I guess,” Alice said vaguely. “The guy just has a lot of questions.”
“Like what?” I asked her.
“Where does the service-to-my-country part come into the story?” the studio exec in the light-colored clothing had asked Alice. I was a little confused by the question; I thought I’d written an anti-Vietnam novel.
But in the exec’s opinion, the reason the closeted gay protagonist doesn’t check the “homosexual tendencies” box is that he feels an obligation to serve his country—not that he’s so afraid to come out, he would rather risk dying in an unjust war!
In this studio exec’s opinion, “our voice-over character” (he meant my first-person narrator) admits to homosexual tendencies because he’s a coward; the exec even said, “We should get the idea that he’s faking it.” The faking-it idea was Mr. Sharpie’s substitute for my idea, in the novel—namely, that my first-person narrator is being brave to come out!
“Who is this guy?” I asked Alice. No one had made me an offer for the film rights to my novel; I still owned those rights. “It sounds like someone is writing a script,” I said.
Alice’s back was to me. “There’s no script,” she mumbled. “This guy just has a lot of questions about what you’re like to deal with,” Alice said.
“I don’t know the guy,” I told her. “What’s he like to ‘deal with,’ Alice?”
“I was trying to spare you meeting this guy, Bill,” was all Alice said. We were living in Santa Monica; she was always the driver, so she was sparing me the driving, too. I just stayed in the apartment and wrote. I could walk to Ocean Avenue and see the homeless people—I could run on the beach.
What was it Herm Hoyt had said to me about the duck-under? “You hit it and run—you know how to run, don’tcha?” the old coach had said.
I started to run in Santa Monica, in ’69. I would soon be twenty-seven; I was already writing my second novel. It had been eight years since Miss Frost and Herm Hoyt had showed me how to hit a duck-under; I was probably a little rusty. The running suddenly seemed like a good idea.
Alice drove me to the meeting. There were four or five studio execs gathered around an egg-shaped table in a glassy building in Beverly Hills, with near-blinding sunlight pouring through the windows, but only Mr. Sharpie spoke.
“This is William Abbott, the novelist,” Mr. Sharpie said, introducing me; it was probably my extreme self-consciousness, but I thought the novelist word made all the execs uneasy. To my surprise, Mr. Sharpie was a slob. The Sharpie word wasn’t a compliment to how the guy dressed; it referred to the brand of waterproof pen he twirled in his hand. I hate those permanent markers. You can’t really write with them—they bleed through the page; they make a mess. They’re only good for making short remarks in the wide margins of screenplays—you know, manageable words like “This is shit!” or “Fuck this!”