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

least once each visit, I would ask Brook how all his friends were, including Jon Martin. The news about Jon usually included little stories about others and evoked conversations about homosexuality. I got the impression that Brook, a psych major, knew a good bit about the subject and that Jon was not the only one of Brook's friends in the college who liked other guys.
    In terms of maintaining my cover, I should never have asked about Jon or engaged in these discussions. Sure, I always professed amazement and mild revulsion at the thought of one boy's liking another sexually. But I have no doubt that this ruse began to wear thin when time after time I would lead the discussion around to Jon and homosexuality.
    It was a risk I had decided to take. I would never admit to Brook that I was every bit as gay as Jon. But if he wanted to suspect, I would just have to let him. Because if we kept discussing this stuff, I just might find out who else besides Jon was gay. And that someone else just might be straight-looking, straight-acting, and straight-talking, like me. Hell, Brook knew so much about all this, he might want to play cowboys, Debbie's tray table notwithstanding. He seemed to like wrestling around with me. I had read one of his psych papers where he talked about having been the shortest one in his elementary-school class and how it had made him feel inferior. For all I knew, though Brook was now of normal height and apparent self-confidence, his sexual inclinations might have been molded in early childhood, as mine were. Of course, he was obviously not one on the scale of one to ten, or he wouldn't have been hunting for rubbers all the time. But that was fine with me. I was just hoping—it really was too much to hope for—that he might have been far enough down the scale to want to go off to Wyoming with me. Figuratively, of course: All I really know about Wyoming is that you can draw it with a ruler.
    I was forever bringing Brook little gifts—birthday gifts, Christmas gifts, or gifts just because he was putting me up at his place, which made gifts allowable—and one day, my twenty-second birthday, he gave me one. It was the rock opera Tommy , performed by the Who. Brook said he knew how much I liked pinball, so he thought I would like Tommy. Tommy is "The Pinball Wizard, the Bally Table King." He is also deaf, dumb, and blind. He has no contact with the outside world, except a sense of touch. "Deaf, dumb, and blind boy, he's in a quiet vibration land." The doctors find that there is no physical explanation for his lack of sight, speech, and hearing. It's a mental block. "There is no chance, no untried operation," says the doctor; "all hope lies with him and none with me. Imagine, though, the shock from isolation, when he suddenly can hear and speak and see!" Tommy's refrain is "see me, feel me, touch me, heal me!" He is desperately trying to break out of his shell. Midway through the opera Tommy is sitting in front of the mirror, gazing at his own reflection, but unable to see or hear his mother, who, becoming increasingly frustrated, smashes the mirror. Tommy is cured! His shell is broken! He is no longer alone!
     
    I'm free! I'm free! And freedom tastes of reality.
    I'm free! I'm free! And I'm waiting for you to follow me.
     
    There is much more to it than that, of course. This is the part of the plot I choose to remember. See me, feel me, touch me, heal me. I have to think Brook had more in mind than pinball when he gave me Tommy.
     
    In New York I was, as ever, thinking cosmic thoughts. One of the best times to do this was as I walked back home from work in the late evenings. I was certainly aware that there were hundreds of thousands of gay men in the city. Anyone knows that. But the men I could identify as being gay looked gay, and I wanted no part of them. I stared icily ahead and ignored every one of them.
    Each time I passed Fifty-fourth Street and Third Avenue (and I made a point of passing that block