It was a lot of knowledge to carry around by himself. Sometimes he spent time with his sister, Jean, playing Chutes and Ladders in her bedroom, listening to Frank Sinatra records, watching her try on makeup. He kept going to the movies with his grandmother and Meg. He fell in love with actresses who were elegant and strong, brought down in the end by loneliness or jealousy or age, but always wittier and dressed with more flair than their rivals. He daydreamed that he was a girl himself, leaving home for an uncertain career, embarking on a life of struggle and tribulation.
What it amounted to at first was a certain preoccupation he had with photographs of men, particularly well-dressed, capable men who seemed at ease in their own skin. The sight of their faces would strike him in the center of his chest with a feeling of both menace and safety, as if they could see inside him but were somehow protective of what they found there. Executives who carried briefcases, combat pilots standing before their airplanes, their eyes screened by sunglasses — for a long time, he wasn’t aware of what drew him to these men, only that they made him alert and still. He found them in movie magazines, in fashion ads, in recruitment propaganda for the armed services. They hailed cabs in raincoats, or twisted at the waist to meet his gaze. When he finally understood how important they were to him, how much they cost him in guilt, it was like discovering a new birthmark in the crook of his leg, a stain that had to be studied carefully in order to be assimilated. It was like the feeling of spying or eavesdropping, a practice that became harder to resist once you had started doing it, no matter how appalled you were, until the loathing itself became a part of the fascination.
In dreams, a hive of bees would push itself slowly through the skin of his mother’s face. The family would appear as monkeys, crashing over the dinner table with inflamed genitals, their hands full of food. In the blue glow of a city covered in ice, a young girl with a dog’s slender body would drag a cart full of glowing coals through empty streets. The dreams were full of irrational feelings — a sudden urge to eat rotten fruit, a calm fascination with snipping off the ends of his own fingers — fears that modulated into a cocooned sense of safety. His father would appear as a fat man with a few strands of oily hair and an old-fashioned pin-striped suit. When Kenneth began unbuttoning his father’s vest, he nestled Kenneth’s face against his chest, and Kenneth felt two long rows of nipples beneath his undershirt.
One night, he came downstairs to find his father still awake, reading the newspaper in his armchair. He looked at Kenneth for a moment in openmouthed uncertainty, as if on the verge of sleep. His glasses were slightly crooked on the bridge of his nose, his hair a disheveled spray of dark fronds.
“I want you to look at something,” his father said. Then he rested his paper on the ottoman before him and stood up slowly in his slippers and robe. “I want you to see if there’s anything over here that you can salvage.”
He was indicating a neat pile of his own clothes, which he had stacked on the side table by the door. They were old trousers and work shirts, a pile of laundered garments that had been reserved for work in the garage.
“They would have to be taken in,” he went on. “The pants anyway. Do me a favor, Kenneth. Stop wincing.”
Kenneth looked at him, annoyed not so much at his father’s words but at his own transparent discomfort.
“Tomorrow, go through the pile,” his father said. “What you don’t want, I’ll take to the Salvation Army. There’s no sense wasting it.”
Kenneth went absently back up the staircase, creasing his brow in feigned consideration. He had forgotten why he’d come down. His father was always urging him to go outside, to do something physical, always perplexed by the solemn stacks of books he brought home. But the books gave him documentation, proof of other places, other times, that had nothing to do with this one.
Before long, he no longer wanted to stop, or no longer believed that he would stop. The simple word “men” began to signify a hidden world of smells and sensations: men shaving, men perspiring, men tucking in shirts and buckling belts. Eventually, he sent away for a bodybuilding course through the mail. When it arrived, he had a few nights of guilty ministrations before a series of tiny black-and-white images of a muscleman in dark briefs, lifting chairs or squatting in front of a mirror with rigid thighs.
There was no way to think about any of it except as a developing illness. It was not that it was evil to give up control over your own body, or to have a mind so weak that you could not restrain its thoughts for even half a day. What was evil was when you stopped resisting, when you began to take a secret pride in the foreign places your body could take you.
He wanted to make movies, not just short films on a 16mm Bolex, but lavish epics dense with atmosphere and color. His bedroom was festooned with dream figures: Isis, Apollo, Bacchus, Orpheus, and also Valentino, Lex Luthor, the Cobra Lady, Plasticman.
His mother tilted her head back in the lounge chair, eyes closed in feigned magnificence. “The magic of Hollywood,” she said. “But it’s such a nuisance, isn’t it? All the other people you’d have to work with?”
He was angry without knowing why. Then he realized that it was because she was trying to form an alliance with him, an alliance based on his own weakness.
In the fall of 1944, his sister, Jean, joined the WAVES, following his brother, Bob, who had enlisted in the air force. The country was still embroiled in the same abstract war, a distant operation conducted by airplanes and tanks and battleships. He knew of it only through newsreels: deployments of troops, diagrammed tactics, men in barracks posing in their undershirts. It was a struggle of machines and haircuts and uniforms, all of which held for him an implicit, personal threat. He was sixteen now, a dark, handsome impostor, thin and broad-shouldered, with a serious cast to his eyebrows, but the effect was ruined by his effeminate walk and the high lisp of his voice. The world could see what kind of person he was, could tell just by looking at him what his future held. People like him wound up living in residence hotels. They worked as floorwalkers in department stores, cooked their meals on a hot plate, spent their nights alone in a bathrobe making up their faces or getting brutalized in public toilets. He could not summon up any humor to neutralize these stereotypes, nor was he seduced by fantasies of self-pity: the mental ward, the empty pill bottle, the melodramatic farewell note. What made it worse for him was that he had the same masculine pride as his father, but with no easy way of expressing it. He would stare at his face in the mirror, the stern face of a matinee idol, dark-eyed and gaunt. He wanted to live inside that body, not just to inhabit it awkwardly, without awareness or intention. It led to all kinds of affected postures, placements of the hands, exercises in carriage and comportment that only made things worse.
He had to go to out-of-the-way places to find what he needed now, rare-book stores in downtown L.A. where he bought pictures of musclemen, their brows shadowed by sailor caps, their groins covered by dark G-strings called “posing straps.” At night, he would sometimes sneak out of the house to walk the pier, never approaching the men there but watching from a distance, looking for the secret signals of canted wristwatches or lit cigarettes. After a while it became an exercise in hopelessness, until finally he was surprised by a sudden craving for the initial feeling of wrongness, a feeling that no longer existed.
He made a film of himself in his grandmother’s apartment one weekend when she and Meg were on vacation. He sneaked into the closet in Meg’s bedroom, where she kept a collection of old costumes she had taken from the MGM lot, castaway gowns once worn by actresses. There were only a few that he could get himself into: a red-and-white-sequined gown and an aqua silk dress with silver panels above the hips. It was important to get them all the way on, carefully working his arms into the tight sleeves and then feeling the fragile zipper between his shoulder blades as he painfully edged it up his back. Encased in these second skins, he filmed himself before the full-length bedroom mirror, not preening or posing, but glaring at himself with solemn incomprehension. He did not look feminine at all. He looked like an angry boy, someone completely other and apart.