When the Everglades returned to the States, my days fell back into their usual cycle of secret rotors and water welcomes and cheerleaders on the dock. I felt listless and empty, a sorry impersonator of whatever it was I was trying to be.
Something had to change, and fast.
And I knew what it was.
SEVEN
IN THE SUMMER OF 1969, SOMEWHERE in the month between the Stonewall Rebellion and the moon landing, I finally lost my virginity. The truth is, I didn’t so much lose it as dispose of it. I was twenty-five years old, woefully late by anyone’s reckoning, a bargain bin of overripe produce rapidly approaching its sell-by date.
I was renting a carriage house that summer down at the tippy-end of Charleston, where, as the locals enjoyed saying, the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers flowed together to form the Atlantic Ocean. There were tall, narrow houses down there with widow’s walks overlooking secret gardens. The bruised white-velvet scent of magnolia blossoms could arise out of nowhere to make me stumbling drunk in the dark. I loved all the things Charlestonians are supposed to love—the sweet-rotten stink of pluff mud, the creamy tidal taste of she-crab soup, hoppin’ John on New Year’s Day. I even grew accustomed to “palmetto bugs,” the creepy-crawlies that skittered ahead of me down the sidewalk at night, looking a lot like common cockroaches. The neighborhood invited moonlight walks, and my carriage house, as it happened, was only steps away from a wooded waterfront park called the Battery, where, a century or so earlier, the first shots of the Civil War had been fired.
On the night in question, I was sitting on a bench by the water, probably wearing Bermuda shorts and a short-sleeved madras shirt, as I tended to do when I was off duty. I swear I had no idea about the reputation of that park. Not until then, not until that very night. The Everglades’ Order of the Day informed us daily that a local bar called—as I remember—the Starlight Lounge was off limits to all naval personnel, but there was no mention whatsoever of the Battery. I was there for the scenery alone, the silvery spectacle of moonlight on the water.
Then a man came down the path by the seawall, stopped in front of the bench, and asked me if I had the time.
I told him no, sorry.
He shifted his weight to his other hip and asked if I had a light.
I told him no, sorry.
I had never played this game, but I knew what he was up to. His voice sounded country, a little fey, frightened; he was not especially handsome. He was wearing aftershave, but not one of the permissible manly ones like Old Spice or English Leather. He was probably new at this himself, since he seemed at a loss for what to say next. He just stood there, waiting for me to make the next move.
After a moment, I said, “Listen, I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for.”
My impersonation of a politely affronted frat boy must have been convincing, since he looked mortified and hurried away.
I sat there on the bench for several minutes, berating myself for all the time I’d wasted running scared, the long, anemic nothingness of my youth.
Who was I kidding? I was exactly what he was looking for.
I left the bench and headed into the park, where I found him on a bench near the Confederate monument. He was already actively hitting on another man, so I interrupted them when I spoke: “I’m sorry I was so rude back there. Would you like to have a drink at my house? It’s right over there. A carriage house. Not far.”
He followed me without a word, leaving the other guy dumbfounded on the bench. We did not have drinks, of course. We were on each other as soon as the door was closed. I would love to make this vivid for posterity, but I recall little beyond the fact that it was poorly choreographed and lasted less than five minutes. There was no kissing, and certainly no fucking. I’m pretty sure I got a dick in my mouth, and that he did, too, but the episode was lackluster for something widely advertised as both a crime and a mental disorder. And I know it was my fault as much as his.
After he was gone, I lay there, sticky with disillusionment, and wondered if I was gay after all. I imagined Peggy Lee in the corner of the room singing her new hit single “Is That All There Is?” Then I glanced over and saw my white officer’s cap on the dresser and realized this total stranger must have seen it there, too, and I was sure he was a blackmailer, or a naval investigator who would come to my ship the next morning to say that Ensign Maupin should get ready for his court-martial.
But the next morning, I felt no such panic. As I drove to the base with the top down on my Sunbeam Alpine, I felt like a freshly minted human being. I had finally held another man’s naked body against mine and the world had not come to an end. Yes, I had passed the point of no return, but it was not at all what I’d imagined, not the death of innocence, but the birth of a giddy, wide-eyed adolescence. Even the car radio was celebrating this with a brand-new song by the Neon Philharmonic called “Morning Girl,” about a no-longer-virginal young woman jubilantly greeting the day after her first night of lovemaking.
I didn’t make that up. That was really playing on the radio on the first morning of my new life. It’s odd to think that I was already prepared to greet the song with a sense of camp that made me chuckle on the way to the ship. Maybe that’s how it works for queers. Maybe the camp comes first so we can cope more gracefully with the inevitable deed. Or maybe that’s just how it worked for me.
For the record, I did not feel like a girl that morning.
As I strode up the gangway of the Everglades to receive my usual morning salute from the boatswain’s mate on duty, I felt like a man for the very first time.
I WASN’T AN idiot about this. I knew what the consequences could be. As a junior officer I had already been required to sit in on the general-discharge proceedings for a gay sailor who’d been caught in the act. That was what they offered you: a week or so in the brig followed by a general discharge, which wasn’t the full-blown disgrace of a dishonorable discharge, but wasn’t an honorable one either. You were piped off the ship with a boatswain’s whistle and never heard from again. It was quick and clean, so no one, including the Navy itself, suffered prolonged embarrassment.
I made up my mind to keep my sex strictly confined to the shore. There may have been off-duty sailors among the men I picked up at the Battery—there almost certainly were—but I was never aware of it. This was not the advent of unbridled bliss. Most of my trysts, in fact, qualified more as catastrophes than adventures.
A man I once followed home to his apartment fell into a violent epileptic fit as soon as we were in bed. He peed all over himself, then shooed me away in his postictal humiliation, pretending not to recognize me at all the next day when he checked my groceries at a corner market. Another trick, a married man, was blowing me in my Sunbeam behind a warehouse when the flashing lights of a cop car appeared in the rearview window. The guy was completely plastered, so I yanked my pants up and I told him to keep quiet and let me handle this. Climbing from the car, I approached the cop with an air of cool confidence, telling him that my friend was too drunk to drive, so I had told him to pull off the street. The cop gave me a slow once-over as he checked my ID. “Well, Ensign, make sure that you’re the one who drives out of here.” After he had returned to his patrol car, I saw the telltale evidence he had chosen to overlook—my long madras shirttail stuck straight out of my fly.
On another disturbing occasion I went home with a guy who had gay porn magazines scattered across his living room floor, where anyone who entered could easily have seen them. If that weren’t brazen enough, he turned on his stereo to play me a song about sodomy and fellatio from a new Broadway musical in which the cast got completely naked onstage. I had never met anyone like him. He was dangerously without shame. I figured he was the one who gave me the crabs.
I had heard about crabs from the sailors in my division, who called them “skivvy crickets,” but I had always thought of them as some sort of rash, not an actual living creature. When I picked one off my scrotum and watched its legs flailing wildl
y in the air, I realized the complexity of the situation. When my men got crabs, they made a joke about it and went to the infirmary for treatment. That wasn’t an option for me. What if there was a difference between gay crabs and straight crabs? What if the medical officer, a guy I dined with daily in the wardroom, could tell that my crabs had previously resided on the balls of another man?
I decided to begin my own course of treatment. I soaked in a bathtub, thinking the little bastards would begin to drown and swim to the surface for air. They loved the hot water, as it turned out, just as much as they loved a splash of Mennen’s Skin Bracer, an aptly named product if ever there was one. My crotch became a green inferno, and the crabs just got drunk and rowdy. I had no choice but to visit a drugstore far from my neighborhood. There I bought something called A-200 for the treatment of body lice and crabs, including, presumably, the gay ones.
I MIGHT HAVE played out the remainder of my naval obligation in Charleston had Captain Tidd not received an unexpected reassignment to Saigon. He’d been tapped to be the new chief of staff to the Commander of Naval Forces in Vietnam. It took me less than a day to visit him in his cabin to ask if I could serve with him. I had seen my future in a flash: a staff job in an admiral’s office, the adventure of living abroad, some pretty great new uniforms. Plus, Captain Tidd liked me and wouldn’t let me get killed. When I called my parents to tell them the news, that I’d decided to “ship out” to Vietnam, my mother whimpered, “Oh, darling,” and my father tried to sound blustery and skeptical. I wasn’t fooled in the least; he was bursting with pride, just as I had hoped he would be. He had always said that God created a war for every generation of men in our family, and this one, after all, was mine.
So, even if I was queer, I could still be the man he wanted me to be.
SHIP OUT WASN’T the right term for it. The plane that flew me to Saigon was a military charter, a Braniff airliner with a canary-yellow body and stewardesses who were grotesquely festive in their hot-pink Pucci uniforms. Everyone on board was headed for the war, so the air was charged with bursts of nervous laughter for most of the sixteen-hour flight. A lot of the guys had gotten shitfaced in the bar at Travis Air Force Base, a few hours north of San Francisco, where other servicemen, having just returned from Vietnam, had pummeled us with horror stories about what we could expect from Charlie. You don’t know, man. You got no fucking idea. Even one of our chirpy stewardesses was working our nerves as we landed at Tan Son Nhut Air Base. “I hope you will enjoy your stay in Vietnam . . . and that I can be your stewardess again a year from now.”
That’s how long your war would take in those days, exactly one year.
The bus ride into Saigon had a similar flavor of grim, jocular initiation. Our military driver, whose job must have been boringly repetitive, had found his own way to spice things up. “Sit back and enjoy, folks, but stay alert. If someone on a bicycle sticks something on the side of the bus, pull it off and throw it away from the bus as hard as you can.” There were bicycles everywhere, of course, jostling for space with canopied pedicabs and people toting things on poles and Dinky Toy cars that had been there since the days of the French. The low, concrete buildings along the leafy boulevards were hung with a hodgepodge of signs, some of them painted and flaking, others plastic and shiny red or gold. The familiar roman alphabet might have soothed me somewhat had it not been bristling with accents and alien squiggles.
The Navy’s headquarters was on a small city block ringed with barbed wire and sandbags. It was almost bucolic once you got past the gate, a dusty courtyard made shady with lush banana plants and dau trees. On one side lay a nondescript staff building; on the other, the admiral’s quarters, an old stucco villa with ceiling fans straight out of a Bogart movie. My office was on the second floor of the staff building. I shared it with the protocol officer and a plump yeoman named Cloud, whose name I remember all these years later because Judy Collins was all over the Armed Forces Vietnam Network that summer. A month after I reported for duty, the protocol officer came down with a rash that required treatment stateside, so I was able to take his desk and serenade my yeoman: “I’ve looked at Cloud from both sides now . . .”
Cloud and I were basically travel agents for the Navy’s war effort. We booked chopper flights across South Vietnam for visiting dignitaries: assorted military brass and congressmen, both prowar and anti-, who wanted to be able to claim firsthand knowledge of the wonderful/terrible state of things in Vietnam when they made their cases back in Washington. Though I could never have found my way on a surface road, I could tell you exactly how long it took for a Huey to fly between Binh Thuy and Cam Ranh Bay and back to the Mekong Delta, or how many generals you could comfortably fit into a “Jolly Green Giant.” It was exacting, headachey work, since you did not want to piss these people off. How exactly I did this before the age of cell phones and the Internet, I can no longer remember, but I did it. I worked well past dark sometimes, finally trudging home to my sandbagged officers’ hotel, four or five blocks away. I ate a late dinner for a dollar on the rooftop terrace, where, alone, with a gin and tonic, I could watch flares bleeding into the sky above the Delta.
I DID NOT see much of Captain Tidd in those early days because he worked even harder than I did. Our leader, Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr. (understandably known as “Bud” to his intimates), was a striking, square-jawed figure with bristly caterpillar eyebrows that were almost menacing. He was not a hardass, though. At his weekly staff cocktail party he sported an embroidered white barong from the Philippines, through which the dark doormat of his chest was always dimly visible, like a surfacing submarine. His wife, Mouza, a willowy French-Russian brunette who resembled the actress Patricia Neal, was living in Manila for the duration but made conjugal visits to the villa in Saigon. On those occasions it was my job as assistant protocol officer to take her shopping. She called me “Ahmstodt.”
I would strap on a .45 and escort her through the Chinese markets of Cholon, or out to a warehouse on the road to Tan Son Nhut for ceramic elephant coffee tables. The enlisted men who had to ship these fragile enormities back to the States referred to them as “buffies,” a term Mrs. Zumwalt found endearing and promptly made her own. Ahmstodt, I’m afraid I told Ambassador Bunker’s wife about the buffies and now she wants some for herself. I’m not sure whether Mrs. Z ever learned that the acronymic origin of that term, BUFE, stood for Big Ugly Fucking Elephant. I certainly never told her. If you’re lucky enough to be assigned Patricia Neal in a war zone, you don’t want to mess with it.
I adored Mrs. Z in her grace and tenderness, and she reminded me of my mother. When I told her that I would miss my little sister’s wedding back in North Carolina during my tour in-country, she offered to help me have Jane’s dress made in the Philippines, “where the lace is quite beautiful and not very dear,” so I could feel part of the ritual. She was a strong and loving woman, so I hope I don’t make her sound frivolous in this account. Her resilience as a wife and mother (her son was on a river patrol boat in the Delta) would be tested in a way she could never have imagined, long after the war was over.
MOST OF THE guys on Admiral Z’s staff had something called a short-timer’s calendar on their bulletin boards. Here’s how it worked: each of your 365 days in country was numbered on the calendar, an outlined rendering of a naked woman usually traced off a Playboy centerfold. You colored in her body parts day by day, finally darkening her pubic region at the end of your tour. They did this, mind you; I never did. Nothing racier than an advent calendar ever crossed my bulletin board at COMNAVFORV. My efforts at looking straight were subtler and shrewder than that.
A few months into my tour, at the invitation of a fellow staffer, I went to a brothel called Mimi’s Scientific Steam Bath, where a fully dressed middle-aged woman with a mouth full of gold teeth was putting two daughters through the Sorbonne by sucking off American servicemen, one right after the other. I don’t know what I thought was going to happen with me, but it didn’t. My buddy from th
e compound was in the neighboring cubicle, so I hoped he couldn’t hear when Mimi’s 14-karat labors proved futile and I murmured the pidgin word for drunk to explain my flaccid state. I had to say something; Mimi was looking very exasperated.
On another occasion I took a delicate Tudo Street tea girl to a Dracula movie, because I had genuinely enjoyed her company and she reminded me of Liat, the pretty Polynesian girl on Bali Hai in South Pacific. And, yes, I could also send home a snapshot of me and my date, knowing it would prompt a rough chuckle and an attaboy from my father. Daddy had once told me, man to man, about someone he called the Blue Gook, a blue-eyed Fijian girl who had serviced the sailors during his war. So here, with very little fuss on my part, was one more way the old man’s codependent son could appear to be following in his footsteps. My tea girl had her own price, though; after our completely chaste afternoon at the movies, during which time I did my damnedest to explain why crucifixes repel bloodsuckers, the ungrateful little thing led me to a street market and demanded that I buy her a dress.
I WROTE LETTERS home on a regular basis—a few by hand on flimsy blue airmail paper, most of them on the typewriter in the protocol office. I often included personalized messages to the whole family, including Mimi and my siblings and Camilla. I had a captive audience, and I worked it a bit, being as vivid as possible in my descriptions of Saigon. I wrote about the smell of pho cooking at the curb, the lemonade made with fresh lemons and huge chucks of ice, the rainy night I felt so deliciously cozy, riding home drunk in the mildewed canvas cocoon of a pedicab. I told them about learning to use chopsticks in a floating restaurant on the Saigon River. And buying orange cellophane candle lanterns for the Vietnamese kids in the compound at the onset of Tet Trung Thu, the colorful mid-autumn festival I had mistaken for Halloween. And having my plastic name tag transliterated into Vietnamese so that the people whose country we were saving could pronounce my name properly. Our driver, the tactful Mr. Thuy, who had once assured me that Saigon would fall without the continued American presence, was the one who finally informed me that MOP-PIEN meant “crash-rim” in his language, so that the gesture of good will I wore so proudly on my uniform was not only puzzling but a little disturbing to the locals.