The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Poetry - 12. …the roughneck asked me to dance…

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Once when I was coming from art class they surprised me

On Zulu Island where there was no place to hide.

Although I could see their bicycles in the offing,

I would not run away, vainly detained by pride,

Or greeting as inevitable this encounter—

Besides, I could not run as fast as they could ride.

Soon enough they surrounded me, some half-a-dozen

Youths my senior, as well as my superiors

In strength and a certain sort of sophistication,

Impatient to settle imaginary scores.

"Whaddya got there?" I handed over my sketchbook

(Without much expectation of getting it back)

To him I had identified as the leader,

Assuming there must be one in every pack, […]

Balanced astride his bicycle among his cohorts,

Apparently poised for either attack or flight.

"What do you want?" I asked. Amid sarcastic laughter

The young ring-leader superciliously smiled, […]

Riffling quickly through the smudged and disfigured pages

My precocious critic, who had a German name,

paused at the portrait of a mysterious woman,

Draped. "What’s the matter? Can’t you draw a naked dame?"

The others crowding to ogle over his shoulder

In their disappointment found plenty to deride

In my drawing, some making indecent suggestions

Regarding the probable upshot had I tried.

The first time I confronted sexual fascism,

Tongue-tied I was saved by not knowing what to say.

My tormentors assumed I shared their predilections,

And I could not have disabused them anyway.

Hitler’s victims who wore the lavender triangle

Are dishonoured by silence even to this day. […]

Their very arrogant, animalistic poses

Had all the unconscious grace of a Grecian frieze,

So that, as they bestrode their metal steeds, I envied

The unfeeling machinery between their knees.

Their straightforward prurience presently grew weary

Of my water-colours, preferring other sport,

And, after playing half-hearted catch with my sketchbook,

Off they rode triumphant: their triumph would be short.

In half a mile I retrieved my discarded art work.

But could not so quickly retrieve myself. Escaped

Physically unhurt, merely humiliated,

I had the queer sensation of having been raped

Gregariously, without putting up a struggle.

I made my way home in a post-traumatic trance,

Bedevilled by regret and resentment, as shaken

And naked as if they had taken off my pants.

Imagine my discomfiture a few weeks later

Meeting one of the gang at an informal dance.

I had been invited to a small birthday party

By a girl I had known ever since the first grade; […]

Present company, although presumably better

Informed, appeared at first glance improbably prim.

Our hostess did her best to dispell this impression

With low music and lights irreligiously dim.

Too old for games (we thought), and too shy for flirtation,

Too dumb for conversation, and too young to drink,

We sat about like strangers in a railway station—

As easily break the ice in a skating rink!

The greedy gravitated to a groaning sideboard

Laden with the makings of a rather late lunch:

Hot dogs, cold slaw, potato chips, potato salad

As well as a tasteless kind of Temperance Punch.

The background music, anodyne and sentimental,

On the eve of the eruption of rock and roll,

Was diversified by an old, upright piano

Pounding out hits like "In the Mood," and "Heart and Soul,"

To which some of the more brazen girls began dancing

With one another, selfconsciously, two by two,

While their intended partners gazed on from the sidelines,

Uneasily aware they should be dancing too.

In similar but more coercive circumstances

At school the sexes tended to stay separate,

Most boys looking on the young female of their species

As the male praying mantis might look on his mate.

But what was he doing here with these well-dressed children?

Clad in turtleneck sweater and corduroy pants,

The roughneck whom I recognized from Zulu Island,

Stepped up and without preamble asked me to dance.

Astounded, I accepted. It seemed not to matter

That I did not really know how: neither did he,

So our exaggeratedly clumsy performance

Was applauded as a plausible parody.

Till I realized with a thrill of recognition

The point of this hitherto footling exercise:

If dancing with girls had always felt like a duty,

Dancing with my own sex was a pleasant surprise.

Being older, more masculine-looking and bigger,

My impetuous partner masterfully led,

While servile but inefficient I tried to follow,

Two beats behind the music or two steps ahead.

Galvanized by our unconventional example,

The embarrassed waxworks began to move about.

Soon the living-room was filled with gyrating couples.

My vis-a-vis whispered, "Want to sit this one out?"

Our inauspicious first encounter unforgotten

But unmentioned, we shyly confided first names—

His was Dick—and biographical information.

To this day I do not quite understand his aims.

He had come honestly by his fisherman’s jersey

Working weekends on the family fishing boat,

An old trawler which he offered to show me over

And described as "the leakiest bugger afloat."

His language, like his looks and his dress and his manners,

Vigorous, virile, and disconcertingly coarse,

However out of place in such polite surroundings,

Had a crude but undeniably telling force.

At the same time he was unexpectedly gentle

As he threw his arms about my shoulders and pressed

Me unprepared, not unflattered but flabbergasted,

Feebly protesting against his broad, woolly chest.

"Pretend," he whispered in my tingling ear, "We’re necking,"

(A decade later he might have said, "making out." )

A joke conceived in the same satyrical spirit

As his first invitation to the dance, no doubt.

As he embraced me with exaggerated ardour

I exaggerated my struggles to resist,

But amid the nervous, apotropaic laughter

Felt for the first time what it was to be kissed,

Even facetiously in public, by a stranger,

Squarely or rather orotundly on the lips,

Mortified by my rapidity of reaction

To many of the tongue’s inarticulate slips;

No less puzzled in retrospect by the reception

Of our misconduct by innocent girls and boys

Who saluted our embrace with vocal amusement,

So naughtiness was made innocuous by noise. […]

This time our audience, abjuring imitation,

Continued childishly to chat and snack and dance.

Discovering the dilemma of the performer

Who overidentifies with his or her part,

My performance, which owed everything to nature,

I tried to attribute, transparently, to art.

I had never experienced, nor yet imagined,

Such, in the phrase from Fidelio, nameless joy.

The absurd antics, on the screen, of men and women,

Acquiring undreamt-of dimensions with a boy— […]

In addition to the venereal excitement

Mere proximity was sufficient to provoke,

Suffused by a novel sensation of connivance

As a participant in the amorous joke

Which like all such jokes became less and less amusing

With every delicious moment it was prolonged,

I reluctantly forsook our ludicrous posture

And the arms in which I made believe I belonged.

The whole business lasted no more than a few minutes.

We stopped our fooling as soon as the laughter died.

The episode seemed immediately forgotten

But for my agitation, which was hard to hide.

For the rest of the evening we kept our distance

Till it was time to go, when gruffly he proposed

Seeing me home: although in different directions,

Our routes lay closer together than I supposed.

Soon, as if to short-circuit our mutual shyness,

He unexpectedly reached out and grabbed my hand,

Scratching my palm—this was "the electrician’s handshake"

Which, while shocked, I pretended not to understand.

At his insistence we took the sinister short-cut

Through the ill-illumined labyrinth of the park,

Which I had been expressly forbidden to enter,

For mysterious reasons, ever after dark. […]

Holding hands, as innocuous and comforting as

Holding someone or being held in someone’s arms,

Gave me perhaps unrealistic reassurance

Of protection from all supernatural harms.

That my protector was himself perfectly harmless

In spite of or because of his frightening size,

His uncouth yet diffident and courteous courtship

Led me at once hopeful and helpless to surmise.

Whistling in the dark, a figurative expression

For a cheerful pretense that effectively cheers,

Might have heartened me, except that I could not whistle

Any more than I could have quite defined my fears.

At that age the slightest difference in our ages

Gapped larger than it was ever to do again:

From the perspective of fourteen, overgrown children

Of fifteen and sixteen already looked like men.

Though only chronologically my senior

By a year or two, he seemed of another sphere,

Like an inhabitant of an alien planet—

But what, I kept wondering, was he doing here?

He saw me home unenlightened and unmolested,

Whatever that means: it is one transitive verb

That loses a lot of its menace in translation:

In Spanish, No Molestar means, Do Not Disturb.

Bidding me goodnight at the door to my apartment

He asked if he could see me again the next day.

The prospect of tomorrow filled me with misgiving,

But I nodded my acquiescence anyway.

"O.K." he mumbled, "I’ll pick you up at eleven

And show you over my old man’s effing boat."

I figured that F stood for fishing, but could not fathom

The implications of his promissory note.

I went to bed in a fog of diffuse excitement

Which took solidity in an erotic dream,

A naked masquerade of stationary leap-frog

And similar variations of the same theme.

—Daryl Hine,[i]

concerning events of 1949