AS YOUR BODY AGES it acquires new sensations, very few of which are actually pleasant. Frederick’s body worsened from year to year, to the point that at least once a day when he noticed a pain, almost a burning, along the line where his belly sagged over his belt. When he was younger, he had no belly to speak of, his stomach’s tautness barely touching a shirt’s fabric back then. These days, he was conscious of how every part of his stomach ached, from belly button to love handles to coarse happy trail. Meanwhile, all of the other parts could ache, too. Every knuckle contained a universe of hurt. He could feel every bone of his foot when he climbed steps. His lower back felt like someone was pushing it all the time. The older he got, the more flesh he had, and that flesh was full of nerves, and those nerves were conspiring to tell him this: Just because there is more of you doesn’t mean that there is more of you to love.
Most of the time, he wasn’t as gloomy as all that. Even during his darkest moments, when he sat on the couch with a book sliding from his fingers and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he knew that there was some part of him—a part that true depressives didn’t have—that felt hopeful and resilient. Honestly, if it weren’t for that inexorable optimism, he probably would have killed himself years ago. He’d lost three—four?—friends to suicide, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel such despair in any legitimate way.
He spent most of his life convincing himself that he was young, and for many years, certain aspects of his appearance allowed this delusion to persist. As a blond, he skirted the presence of gray hairs because they played hide-and-seek so furtively among their flaxen peers. He had oddly healthy skin, so smooth that people always asked him what moisturizer he used. For a long time, he looked younger than his age; at forty, he still looked as if he were thirty.
Something changed during his late forties. Because he had always been blessed with natural youth, he didn’t know what to do to create the illusion of it. He refused to get plastic surgery. He had seen his share of men whose faces were pulled into masks; the only thing he detested more than a woman who penciled in her eyebrows was a man who did the same thing. He had always assumed that his body would continue to be spry if he kept the right attitude. But in recent years, no matter how happy a demeanor he effected, his body charged ahead, finally accepting its deterioration even though he would never have agreed to such a thing. And so, in short stabs to his underbelly, in the pregnant flicker of a vein in his arm, in the heat of indigestion that felt increasingly like heart trouble, he came to see that he was getting permanently, irreversibly older—even though he had accomplished very little of what, in his youth, he thought he would accomplish.
*
He had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, which his own father referred to as a “shithole” even though both his father and mother had been born and raised in the city. At least his father had refused to join the hordes of people working in the steel industry and opted to become a car salesman. He worked at a Ford dealership where he had a facility for selling vehicles but also for spending his earnings on copious amounts of booze. Frederick’s mother had taken a job at a jewelry store but seemed to have no great sense of style, always choosing the gaudy beaded necklace over the carefully appointed brooch. The great irony was that she, who spent her time among women who couldn’t afford Hollywood luxury but tried to evoke it, had no real understanding of that world herself. Frederick, on the contrary, had a firmer sense of style; he was the one who snuck out to catch screenings of old movies, Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn.
Frederick had the innate sense that he was going to get away from this place and go to New York City. This was why he took the other boys’ insults and punches and the teachers who gave him lower grades when he wrote too passionately about Lady Macbeth or Daisy Buchanan: because he knew that this was all a means to an end.
His parents never expected him to go to college. His older brother, Simon, on whom they had used up all of their energy, had graduated high school and become the manager of the local Big Boy, which he ran amiably and proudly, white apron tight over his chest and his hair closely cropped. Frederick’s whole family knew that he was different—their eyes followed his elaborate hand gestures when he spoke like they were watching a pilot do a loop-de-loop in the sky—but they didn’t address it, nor did he say anything. He was handsome, better-looking than any of them, but there was a grace in his movements that prevented people from commenting on it, afraid that merely acknowledging beauty would make them queer, too. Many years later, he would be reminded of this when supermodels talked about their gangly period, those clumsy days before a scout happened upon their otherworldly beauty in a mall and told them that their bony ankles, sunken cheeks, crooked teeth, and frightening height were, in fact, assets. There was no such scout in Youngstown. Frederick was never approached about his supple skin, the patches on his cheeks like liquid rouge, the mount of his thick hair, or the grace of his gait. Instead, Frederick, ever aware that he deserved something besides his hometown, was his own scout.
His parents did not object when he told them that he was going to New York, as if they had always assumed that he would leave them after high school and that the city would be his only destination. In 1980, he packed two duffel bags and took three trains, each filled with more and more people of color, something that he had experienced only tangentially, however racially charged Youngstown had been. It was on the last of these trains that he saw a lanky black man, no older than twenty-five, board the train and plop himself onto a nearby seat, his tight clothes highlighting the bulges in his chest and crotch. Frederick had never allowed himself to think of a black man as attractive. He had known, even then, that his idea of black men was as fetishistic as his parents’ was narrow-minded. So when he saw this man, undoubtedly beautiful but not a disco boy or a model, he realized that he could make his desires concrete.
This was the first confirmation that, unlike the bleach-blond, lithe things that he saw on porn tapes—their groins crossed by tan lines—he had a predilection for men of color. He knew that this would be the most upsetting thing to his parents—that if they knew that he was leaving not just to be gay but also to be a gay man sleeping with these men, they would seize him by the collar and throw him back in his room until he assumed his role as assistant manager at Big Boy or toiled in the spitballed silence of being a substitute teacher.