The Best Little Boy in the World by John Reid; Andrew Tobias Page A

somebody, playing with somebody's, beating each other off, maybe a few other things. Just the same stuff that has been going on at camps and all-male prep schools and British boarding schools for centuries, he said.
    He told me that Tommy and Tommy's counselor used to mess around a lot and that Tommy would sometimes wake up to find his counselor in the same bed. He told me that the counselors who came back year after year, some of them in their forties and fifties, were gay. The camp bus driver was gay. Dan the Dishwasher was gay. Hell, my own counselor, Jack Simmons, for all his fancy dribbling and dating, would not exactly require all my fingers to count where he was on the scale, Jimmy said, though he wasn't sure just how many fingers I would have left over.
    Jimmy himself hadn't messed around since camp, which was a long time ago. And he wasn't going to either. He wanted to become comfortably wealthy, belong to all the right clubs, throw the right kind of cocktail party at the right kind of Westchester estate, and be a trustee of the University of Wisconsin and the Museum of Modern Art. Fiduciary was written all over the gold watch chain that ran from the vest of his charcoal gray 36-extra-long suit to the suit pocket. And he was not going to let the urgings and stirrings of anything down around that pocket get in the way of a solid career in banking. It just took willpower.
    Thus, for all intents and purposes, Jimmy was just as ten as anyone else, and I saw no reason not to room with him. On the contrary, besides enjoying his remarkable intelligence and wit, which were really out of character for a banker, I was glad to live with someone who wouldn't always be asking me why I wasn't out screwing. (I assumed he would not throw the first stone, right?) Someone, frankly, over whom I knew I had a certain power. His confessed desire for my athletic young body, despite his straight-arrow life plan, and my staunch refusal to let him come anywhere near it, somehow made me feel all the straighter. I guess I enjoyed the irony. It made my martyrdom more cosmic, if you see what I mean: his wanting to be ten but admitting he was five and wishing that I, ten, were five also, when I really was as one as I could possibly be.
    Though I had asked Jimmy, I secretly thought he was weak for having told me about himself. That, too, reinforced my BLBITW feelings: I was so strong, such a martyr, I could keep my problems to myself. Granted, if I had somehow known that Rick, my friend in the office, was the same place on the scale as I was, it might have been worth spoiling my perfect record to open up to him. But maybe not. Knowing that he was gay just might have ruined my image of him, and opening up just might have ruined my image of myself.
     
    Despite my involvement in my work and my good relationship with Jimmy, I was lonely in New York. I realized that most of my friends, maybe even Jimmy, would be getting married. And that pretty soon I would run out of college friends or camp friends to room with and would have to live alone. And that, while ostensibly everything was going great, the future was as bleak as ever, and getting closer fast.
    I tried to take refuge in the past. When I took weekends off, it would be to go up to Yale and stay with Brook, my friend from Tulsa, and his roommate, Fred, who sat stoned in the lotus position.
    This was my first year working in New York and Brook's junior year at Yale. Brook was in love with a freshman at Conn College named Debbie who liked to wear Yale T-shirts and jeans. She wore a size X-L T-shirt. In fact, if Debbie had wanted to, I'm sure she could have carried one of the dining-room trays on her chest without spilling a thing. Brook liked that.
    Debbie would hitch down from New London every weekend to sleep with Brook. The dress and sex rules had fallen apart even faster than the economy the year after I left Yale. Cohabitation was the order of the day. I had made it through just in time.
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