by Michael Abraham
Imagine a boy, and then call him Oliver. His eyes are olive, and this is why you will call him Oliver. Oliver is not his real name, but this is no matter. None of the names in a fable are real names. In a fable, characters are named things like Fox and Hare; they have names for reasons, to tell us what they are. Hence, we will name the boy Oliver because of his bright, olive eyes—his eyes which betray so much of the intensity of him.
Oliver has sparks inside him. Sometimes, Oliver thinks that he has these sparks inside him because he is a faggot; he believes, now and again, that faggots know more about the world than other people. He believes in what the scholar Jack Babuscio argues in a 1978 essay titled “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” namely in “the gay sensibility as a creative energy reflecting a consciousness that is different from the mainstream; a heightened awareness of certain human complications of feeling that springs from the fact of social oppression; in short, a perception of the world which is coloured, shaped, directed, and defined by the fact of one’s gayness.” It is very certain that Oliver’s gayness is a spark inside of him, but Oliver has another spark inside of him, a wildness, a sparkling desire for the wideness and the depth of human experience. These twin sparks will inform and shape all of Oliver’s life, and, one day, that other spark will drive him mad. But, right now, Oliver is only sixteen, and the faggot spark is much brighter than the madness spark. Right now, Oliver is desperate for someone to love, for the overwhelm of another boy’s nakedness. In Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson writes that “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition,” and though Oliver has not read Anne Carson yet, and though Oliver has limited experience with being up against another human being (a couple blowjobs, a couple kisses), Oliver intuits this already; intrinsically, Oliver knows that Oliver will not know himself until he is loved by another. It is in the midst of knowing this, in the midst of being quite troubled over it, that Oliver encounters Ezra.
A few years later, when he is in college, Oliver will write a poem about Ezra, and he will read it to his therapist while sitting on her soft, gray couch, and she will look deeply concerned. She will ask Oliver if he has shown the poem to Ezra, and he will say that he hasn’t because how can he after all that’s happened. He will call Ezra later and shoot the shit, but he won’t mention the therapy session or the poem.
This is how the poem will go:
[Epistle to Ezra]
remember the little creek, cobbled in, between the freeway and where the real woods started, hidden from view by ferns and stinging nettles? remember how the mosquitoes took to the creek in summer, buzzing out their worst, doing what they came there to do, coming there to feed, to flail circles through the gathering dusk, while June edged plenty; and there was only the roar of cars to the one side, and the deep quiet of nothing rustles and nothing sleeps to the other?
I went back to the little creek to smoke weed by the coming night, just this year, mid-June, for old times’ sake. and, of course, I went alone, because, of course, there was nobody to accompany. even so, all I found were your traces: colors of you smudged on the leaves and your smut left scattered on the rocks. your ankles in your hands, pulled down near your ears. the heavy breathing and twist of the face when pain became trembling. the bright, perfect pale of your ass; the paling, so unwanted, of the faith I had in your stitching.
I found myself singing a Stevie Nicks song to ward off the gloom, as dusk mounted and the ringlets of smoke disturbed the mosquitoes. they were not lulled by smoke as I have heard sometimes bees are lulled by smoke, lulled to sleep. I did not want to be there as it gathered dark. I did not want to be in the itchy creek, sandwiched between freeway and deep wood, all alone, as never there I was before. there only for the sake of nostalgia anyway. but since I did not leave, I squatted lower in the mud. and you were in the mud: how young you were, and how brave. edge of seventeen, discovering sex; your body, unfurnished.
the mud smelled of oil and rain-water. the mud smelled of sewage and the coming night. I grew bored of smoking the weed, and so I smoked the mud. it clogged the pipe. it clogged my throat. I closed my eyes to hack up phlegm, and behind my eyes there were all the shapes of you, rebounding. you were kaleidoscope, and I was roving flight. I flailed through flashes of you, dancing circles around my own remembering. I took off my pants, and I rolled around in the mud. and I touched myself in the mud. I called out to cars passing on the freeway, do you see him too! he is already failing!
if only we had known that the beginning of sex would be the end of pleasure, perhaps we would never have stung our legs and itched up our arms to make it to the creek in the middle of June. if only we had known that, perhaps we could have remained boys forever, and we would never have become girls, or something stranger than girls: never have become something in-between deafening roar and overbearing silence. perhaps you would still be able to speak, and would not communicate solely by dancing. perhaps is a word I say too much, and I mean nothing by it since we’re here.
remember how the mud got under our fingernails, like the shit did, and remember how we liked that, because it made us feel our bodies like bodies and nothing else? maybe just I liked that, and you lie there, with feet above your forehead, withering in embarrassment. maybe it’s embarrassment that took you so far into yourself that you disappeared for good. I’ve given up trying to parse it. I let it grow wild inside instead. I put neither fence nor hedge nor differing name to what it is that happened to you. if I call it anything, I call it your heavy; or your heavy breathing, in the shallows of nobody’s creek, on the very edge of nighttime.
But this is a long time after. This is after much has happened. For now, Oliver has just met Ezra. They are boys in Catholic school, and there is not yet so much affect between them, not yet so many turns of fate, not yet so much pain. They are just boys in Catholic school, just friends. They are friends, and Ezra is in love with a girl named Laura.
***
O, Ezra is all fine angles, all lanky and lean and terribly boyish! Ezra is everything Oliver has ever dreamed of. Ezra loves drugs, and Oliver doesn’t (Oliver will when he gets to college and the madness spark turns into a conflagration, but that is another fable). The druggishness appeals to Oliver. Ezra is a wild boy, wild enough to take the night like a peach and suck all the juice and all the pulp until there is naught but the pit. This speaks to something deep inside Oliver, something brimming just then, at the edge of seventeen, though not yet fully present. Ezra is more than just wildness however. He is kind, and he is gentle. There is something in Ezra which Oliver does not recognize, a careful and measured disposition which is so at odds with Oliver’s fire. But Ezra is aloof from Oliver, always a little bit distant, despite the fact that he and Laura and Oliver spend so many days and nights together. Oliver swallows his little, inchoate love, and he pretends at nothing with Ezra, just as Ezra is pretending at nothing with him.
Meanwhile, Oliver and Laura become fast friends. Laura is a dream. (Oliver and Laura will remain friends long after this fable is ended.) She is gentle and measured like Ezra but without the wildness, though this lack of a drive toward the wild side of life does not keep her from being loads of fun, perhaps more fun than anyone Oliver has yet met. She throws wonderful ragers, and she loves to go swimming and on long drives to nowhere. Oliver can understand why she and Ezra love one another. For Oliver, the experience of knowing Laura is the experience of being seen totally, in all his many facets. She is piercing, Laura, but she does not know it. She sees deeper than other people, like a faggot does, but she doesn’t claim that. She is much too humble to notice that she sees deeper than others. Wrapped up in this humility is a psychological turmoil for which she won’t have a name for many years and a queerness she won’t speak until her twenties. She is at once broken in on herself and radically open to the world, and this fascinates Oliver. He comes to love her very deeply and very easily. She comes to love him the same. But also, always, at the same time, they love Ezra.
Eventually, Ezra and Laura break up, as often happens with teenage lovers. Oliver never knows precisely the reason why; he never asks. By now, he has forgotten his brief infatuation with Ezra. He has dated another boy, whom we will call William, and he feels himself solidly to be a faggot. It helps that he is the only faggot in Catholic school; it makes him feel special to be so, and he wears it well. Most everyone celebrates his faggotry, and if they don’t—like the semi-closeted lesbian Spanish teacher who hates him for his limp wrist and long, drawling syllables—he tells them exactly what he thinks about them. Oliver has become quite strong in himself in his sixteenth year. He has no idea what is about to happen to that strength, no notion of how it will be tested, how much of it will be sapped and will have to be found all over again years and years later—how, at twenty-seven, he will sit down to write the Fable of the Faggot Children, how he will still ponder it all even after a marriage and a divorce and seemingly a whole life lived.
***
Oliver will never quite remember how it occurred. But one night Ezra kisses him. And then more happens with Ezra. And then Ezra is naked, and his body is exquisite; his body is a temple, and Oliver is but a thirsty pilgrim, come to drink the holy tears of Christ from the reliquary between the thighs. Ezra has had much of penetrating, and he begs Oliver to penetrate him. And so Oliver does, though he never has before, and he has no idea what he is doing. They reach a sweet ecstasy together, and then they collapse into each other, left breathless and exhausted by this, this moment which is both of their entries into the true life of faggotry, into what it really is to be a boy in the grip of another boy. What happens, quite simply, is that they fall in love in a single, impossible moment, and it tears Oliver to pieces. Oliver is warped forever by it. He is taken apart and made over again in a different shape. Ezra is everything now. Ezra is the deep hum the blood makes as it pumps through the system. Ezra is the fire in the gut when something good or something terrible is about to happen. Ezra is the total experience of touch and of taste; he is the locus of feeling and of being and of wanting and of needing. There is nothing but Ezra.
When they see each other the next day, Oliver is full of hope, hope bright and glittering like sunlight caught by water. He knows for sure that Ezra will come up to him in the hallway of Catholic school, will touch his face, will kiss him, will pronounce to everyone that something miraculous has happened. Instead, however, Ezra pretends as though there has never been a tryst. All is ordinary with Ezra. He remains rather distant with Oliver, as he always has been, but this time his distance is cold. The distance is not trepidatious, flirtatious, charged, as it had been before; there is something like disdain in his face. He will not meet Oliver’s searching gaze. Oliver’s eyes, his piercing, green eyes, beg that angled, angelic face for some sign of recognition, and they receive none. All in Ezra is as stone is. And all in a moment, Oliver feels real horror for the first time in his life. Something truly terrible has happened, he realizes: a love has blossomed, and yet one of the lovers dare not speak its name. Oliver, who is so loud and so fiery, who is such a bright faggot at such a young age, cannot comprehend this. It is a tragedy for which life has not prepared him. A crush settles upon him. When we say crush here, we mean it in more ways than one. There is a crush, a roaring desire, a teenage love. But there is also a crush, an absolute destruction wreaked by the weight of something falling upon something else. Ezra has crushed Oliver in this moment, in the middle of the hallway in Catholic school. Oliver tries to hold himself in one piece, but he is spilling everywhere; he is falling to bits. He feels his face twist into an expression of absolute abjection, and then, with an exertion of the will like none he has ever attempted, he pulls himself together. He smiles. He laughs. He moves off to Chemistry and English and History and Math. But, all day long, he hurts; he hurts tremendously. He hurts as he has never hurt before.
***
It becomes regular.
After school, Ezra and Oliver run away to each other, and nobody knows. They fuck in their cars and the woods, and nobody knows. Nobody knows except Laura and her mother. Neither Ezra nor Oliver lives in a home where faggotry is tolerated. So, Laura offers her home for them to fuck. Sit with this a moment. You see, Laura loves them both. Oliver can see it in her face, how strange and painful and noble of a thing it is that she is doing, how she knows the strangeness and the pain and the nobility of it distinctly. Laura is one of the faggot children too; she is the accomplice, the godsend, the ex-girlfriend. Together, these three become an odd—one might say queer—little family for a precious space in time.
And through it, Oliver falls more and more deeply in love with Ezra. Ezra insists that it is just sex, that it will never be anything more, but Oliver can see how Ezra looks at him. Oliver is no fool. He is no fool, but he is becoming desperate. He is beginning to yearn in a manner so huge and tremendous that it frightens him. He is consumed by Ezra, more and more every day. And he wants everyone to know how vibrant is this thing that hangs between them. He wants to give the world a chance to celebrate it. But Ezra is straight still; Ezra must be for so many different reasons, all of which Oliver understands. Ezra is a boy’s boy. And worse, Ezra loves someone more than he loves Oliver. He loves Oliver too, but his great love is his best friend, James. James truly is straight, and just as Oliver’s love for Ezra is fast becoming the great agon of Oliver’s life, so Ezra’s love for James is the great agon of his. In the midst of it all, there is Laura, doing her best to hold these two lovestruck, now-seventeen-year-old faggots together.
***
Oliver wakes up, covered in his own vomit, in Laura’s mother’s guest room. Both Laura and her mother are gazing at him with troubled expressions on their faces. They begin to tell him the story of the night, slowly, deliberately, with much care. And panic like he has never known sets in.
The night before had been a house party at Laura’s. A good fourth of the high school class had been there. It was Oliver’s first time drinking vodka. (He had drank with his older cousins since he was twelve, but only ever beer.) He took shots; he ate vodka gummy bears; he was, for a while, the life of the party. Everyone was a little surprised at Oliver. He felt, for the first time in his life, like a cool kid. A few hours in, Oliver was out back by the fire pit when James offered him weed, which he’d never smoked before. He was untouchable, Oliver was, so he gladly accepted. He ended up lying on the grass listening to Led Zeppelin and talking about stars and magic and the great, terrible size of the universe with a girl named Tracy. It goes fuzzy after that, but the last thing Oliver remembers is standing in the driveway with Ezra. Oliver was near tears, begging Ezra through a haze of liquor and pot to love him, to need him, to hold and keep him, and to tell the world that he meant it, that he meant every touch and every kiss and every blowjob and every fuck, that he was as proud of Oliver as Oliver was of him. Ezra looked tortured, but he politely, even delicately, refused. He refused on two grounds. First, he refused because the world could not know these things about him. And second, he refused because of James. Oliver stumbled away, vomited in the side yard, slipped in it, and then blacked out for the first time in his life.
The rest of the story comes to him from Laura and her mother. After confronting Ezra on the driveway and falling into his own vomit, Oliver dusted himself off and went back into the party. He proceeded to sit down with each of Ezra’s closest friends and to tell them, in lurid detail, how he and Ezra were fucking and had been for almost a year. He told them all; he told Ron and Kenneth and Jason and Matt and Jordan and Tracy. And worst of all, most damning of all, he told James. Laura had tried to stop him, but there was no stopping him. For the first time in his life, the little spark of madness inside him had kindled to a flame, and he did the most destructive thing that was available to him to do.
As he listens to Laura and her mother, Oliver feels two very contradictory emotions simultaneously. The first is a mixture of horror and panic. He must reach Ezra; he must make it right. He grabs his phone immediately and begins to text furiously. The second emotion, though, which dawns on him more slowly, is a powerful upswell of compassion for himself. Oliver understands what Oliver wanted at that party. While he can’t excuse himself for outing Ezra—while he never has—he understands in the moment of his shock and dismay that he is a fragile thing, a fragile thing that is beginning to break under the weight of love and secrecy and deceit.
***
It takes almost exactly three months for Ezra to forgive Oliver, about the same period of time that it takes Ezra to settle into his newly out life. They resume their trysts, but the fire is all gone out from them. They graduate from high school, and they go off to colleges on opposite sides of the country, and it seems that it is over.
But it isn’t over. For the next three years, they lean heavily on one another, constantly on the phone, meeting up when they are home from school. They both develop drug problems and become truly troubled. They build something between themselves that drips with need, with affect and need. Ezra does worse than Oliver and comes to want so much from Oliver. Oliver writes that poem. His eyes grow dim and sad. His brother remarks on this.
One day, Oliver calls Ezra. Something has changed for him. He has decided he is tired of brokenness, tired of drugs, tired of the shards that he and Ezra have made of one another throughout their five year affair. Oliver is decidedly indelicate, a real straight-shooter, and he cuts to the chase very quickly. There will be no more of Oliver and Ezra: no romance, no friendship, no need.
They see each other just one more time. A year later, Oliver gets into a terrible fight with his parents while on a trip home from his senior year of college. By this time, Oliver has already met and begun to date the man he will eventually marry and then later divorce. He stands in the driveway shouting down his mother. She shouts back. She demands to know where he is going. He replies that he is going to see Ezra, and she begs him not to for the sake of his relationship back in New York. He climbs into the car anyway, buys a twelve-pack of beer, and arrives at Ezra’s house. Ezra watches him drink all the beer, getting sloppier and sloppier, hornier and hornier. For a moment, Oliver sees himself from the outside, sees himself mirrored in Ezra’s face, and he does not like what he sees. So, he continues to drink. They cuddle that night, but they do not fuck, and, in the morning, when Oliver leaves, he knows it is final. A story has at last reached its end.
***
To be a faggot child is not easy. It is not only difficult because the world oppresses the faggot child—though certainly that is part of the difficulty. But it is mostly difficult because the faggot child has no roadmap, no sense of what they are becoming and how. Love is so much a part of how we become ourselves. “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.” But love, for the faggot child, is such a conundrum, such a quagmire, such a trial and a journey.
Oliver and Ezra ended up alright in the end, but they do not speak. There is too much there there, and, at the same time, there is no there there. It wouldn’t be putting too fine a point on it, however, to say that, in some very intense ways, Oliver and Ezra became themselves through one another. And for that, they have their fable to thank.
***
Citations: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Jack Babuscio, “The Cinema of Camp (AKA Camp and the Gay Sensibility)” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999).