Green （1978） #2
I sighed and stepped out into the reception area to watch the familiar drama. I busied myself misting the plastic plants—best way to fight dust—and eavesdrop. Jon, from the depths of his chair, muttered, “No, no. I’m not talking to them again.”
The “Ning” sisters—I’ve yet to learn their real names—are freshmen like me.
They are Jewish sisters, twins who come in at least thrice weekly to complain.
Their complaints range from the slowness of their high-rise dorm’s elevators to the absence of name badges on the work-study students who staff the security desk, to the temperature of the hot water in their room.
Their biggest complaint is about some unspecified defect in the construction of their dorm that is causing them to be sick; the symptoms of the alleged illness are as vague as its alleged cause.
Months ago, they’d stopped by late on a Friday afternoon, as was their wont, to insist that some action be taken.
Frustrated, Noel had dragged out Jon, the director of student living, who was already half shrugged into his coat.
I watched him from my position beside the plastic plants.
He, with his balding pate, bowed legs and flat behind, tried desperately to find out what was wrong.
“We’re sick,” they insisted repeatedly. Each time they said “sick,” I added, perhaps a trifle too loudly, “ning.” The name stuck and henceforth they were known as the “Ning” sisters.
Jon and Noel were still in Jon’s office furiously whispering. I sidled up to the counter, misting bottle in hand. “Listen,” I said addressing the sisters, “I’ve been here for a while, so I know you’ve been having symptoms.”
They nodded rigorously. Finally, someone is listening.
“Well, I’m not sure folks here can help you. But I remember my granny—God rest her soul—always recommended having an enema whenever you were feeling unwell for a period of time. ‘Flushes out the system,’ she used to say.”
The sisters nodded vigorously and, chattering excitedly among themselves, turned to leave. “Thank you,” they called out over their shoulders.
“Let me know if it works.”
When Noel finally reemerged—sans Jon, I noticed—he asked, “Where’d they go?”
I shrugged. “Guess they got tired of waiting.”
Tuesday, April 4, 1978, University City—We were working on our presentations for our Gender in Media course, which examines media representations of femininity, masculinity, and orientation, the impact of that messaging on consumers of media, and the role and responsibility media reporters play in shaping public opinion, when MJ said, “I’ve never met anyone like you.
At school, there were girls who were suspect and whispered about—teachers too—but they were all so uncomfortable, it was as if they were wearing wool sweaters in the dead of summer.
” MJ had attended one of the most exclusive girls’ boarding schools on the East Coast.
“That’s because they were trying to meet parental expectations and fit into social norms, and by the way, when people say something like heterosexuality is normal, what they really mean is ‘common,’ but we tend to accept their definition of normal and let that shape us into believing we are abnormal, deviant and as such, less than everyone else.
That’s the thing that struck me immediately about Jackson.
He wasn’t interested in being what everyone thought he should be—even if he was a preacher’s kid.
He was defiantly himself. At sixteen, he asked me out on a date—”
“But that’s just it. You seem to go beyond defiance. You seem so…comfortable in your skin.”
“I have eczema,” I said. “I am uncomfortable in my literal skin. I can’t imagine being uncomfortable in my metaphorical skin as well.”
Friday, April 28, 1978, University City—In my Romance in Fiction class today—I’ve decided to minor in English Lit—our professor asked us to name great romantic couples.
The usual was offered up: Romeo and Juliet; Antony and Cleopatra.
When she called on me, perhaps because I was tired from working and classes and studying and loving Jackson, I blurted, “Batman and Robin.” There was initial silence, then the not-unexpected twittering and giggling.
The professor rapped on her podium. “I don’t understand this reaction.
If two people love each other, the fact that they are of the same sex does not negate that love. ”
I was stunned. I’d never heard anyone make such a statement before.
I didn’t feel validated, for from the moment I first kissed Jackson, I have been of the school of If loving you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
But I felt seen, worthy of acknowledgment.
If Jackson and I hadn’t stumbled into a new world, it was certainly an unimagined territory.
“Batman and Robin weren’t gay. They weren’t a couple,” said one pale, effeminate, long-haired student who I thought of as the “reluctant gay.”
“Who’s to say they weren’t?” I asked.
“You just want them to be gay because you are,” he accused.
“You may have a valid point,” our professor said, “but don’t we all interpret the world and thus literature through lenses formed by our individual beliefs, desires, and perception of the world? Why is Oren’s interpretation less valid than yours?”
“Batman aired from 1966 to 1968, before ‘gay’ was a thing—”
“Gay has always been a ‘thing,’” I snapped.
“Oren is interpreting this in a post-Stonewall era,” the reluctant gay insisted.
“Isn’t all art, including literature, viewed through a contemporary lens?” our professor shot back.
I turned to the reluctant gay. “Batman the TV show may not have been explicitly gay, but it was certainly informed by a not-so-subtle gay sensibility. Look at the Joker with his face full of pancake makeup and lipstick, and the Riddler flitting around in what was essentially a green catsuit with question marks all over it. What is he doing if not questioning the heteronormative narrative that was meant to be the perceived default for the series?”
I floated through the rest of my classes on a cloud. Tonight, we were lying on the couch when I told Jackson what happened in class. He laughed. “Wait,” he said, “Which one of us is Batman? Who’s Robin?”
“You’ll always be my Batman,” I told him. He lay back down, and I settled my head on his stomach. “I’m hungry,” I said.
He sat up abruptly. “Alfred,” he shouted, “we’re hungry. When’s dinner?”
Monday, May 8, 1978, University City—Today, crossing the Quad, I ran into the reluctant gay whose name is Jeremy. He pulled me onto a bench and sat beside me. “I’m gay,” he said simply.
I struggled with an appropriate response: How nice for you. Welcome to the club. Oh, I’m shocked. Yes, I know. I settled on murmuring noncommittally.
“Except,” he confided, “I don’t like anal sex.”
“Oh,” I said, promptly filing the information in the part of my brain where I put things I never intend to think about ever again, like the farm, my grandfather, my parents’ death.
“Well,” he said brightly, “I’m off to student health. I’m pretty sure I have gonorrhea.”
I pulled open the dusty file cabinet in my brain once again.
Saturday, October 14, 1978, University City—MJ and I were studying for midterms. She sat at the tiny desk in my and Jackson’s bedroom, and I sprawled on the bed. She pulled my parents’ wedding album off the shelf above the desk and began looking through it. Again.
She paused at a photo that showed my parents standing in front of a mantel; seated in front of them in a frothy lace dress and a modest hat was my grandmother. “Tell me again. Who’s the gentleman next to your dad?”
“That’s his father, my grandfather, Grampy Eddie.”
“You called him Grampy Eddie?”
“Everyone did,” I said. I did not tell her that Grampy Eddie was known as the “king of numbers” back in Springfield.
The illegal gambling operation had made him wealthy, which paid for the new Buick every two years and an endless string of girlfriends, not always his alone.
For all the kids in the neighborhood, he was an endless source of quarters and penny candies.
MJ turned to a page on which my mother’s maid-of-honor was setting the headpiece that held her veil onto her head as they gazed at their joint reflection in an enormous shadowbox mirror. “Your mom was so beautiful,” MJ said.
“Yeah, and Dad was handsome. I used to wonder if I’d look like him when I grew up. He used to call me ‘little man,’” I suddenly recalled.
“Do you miss them?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really remember them.”
“You don’t have any baggage, do you?” MJ asked.
“Sorry?”
“Emotional baggage, I mean. After all you’ve been through—losing your parents so young, growing up gay… Did someone used to hit you?”
“What?” I asked, startled, trying not to think of my grandfather, of the bullies at school…
“I’m sorry. It’s just that if anyone makes a sudden move towards you—even me—to, like, hug you, you wince. And your whole body stiffens as if you expect a blow.”
And just like that, memories I’d thought long forgotten returned. I remembered black eyes and bruised ribs and hands heavy with prayer-like fists raining down.
I sat up and tried to collect my thoughts. From the stereo in the living room, Donna Summer lamented about the melting of a cake left out in the rain and a recipe lost from memory to a throbbing disco beat.
“Sorry,” MJ said. “I didn’t mean to pry, or embarrass you—”
“You didn’t.” And she hadn’t. I wasn’t aware that I did that wincing thing, though I’m not surprised. I guess I am surprised that anyone cared enough to notice.
“I just meant to point out that despite what’s happened to you, none of it seems to have left you with baggage.”
“I travel light,” I said. “I carry no baggage that can’t be checked curbside or stuffed in an overhead compartment.”