The screeching made Mama feel awful guilty, but it only served to annoy the hell out of Poppa. From the first, Poppa’s opinion of his son was thin and hostile-—yeah, hostile, man, hostile. For one thing the little bugger, skinny nothing as he was, had worked some changes on Mama by getting born, and little Poppa felt as lost as if he’d dipped it into the Grand Canyon when he made love to Mama after Richie popped onto the scene. For another thing, the little bugger was Oedipally uninhibited from the first, and every time Poppa watched him grabbing for Mama’s breast, it would bug him. Still, a man’s supposed to love his son, so Poppa tried to pretend he did and only despised him way deep down where the Freuds nibble.
Mama, on the other hand, didn’t have to pretend. She loved Richie like crazy. And, unbugged by the warning theories of the shrinks—of which she’d never heard—she demonstrated her love uninhibitedly.
Richie lapped it up and came back for more. And there was always more. Except sometimes when Poppa was around. Richie learned early to squelch his demands then, lest he fall under the whiplash of his old man’s tongue. Still, he wasn’t always successful in avoiding it.
Like when he was four or five years old and he was rubbing Mama’s back. It felt good getting his little hands under her nightie and massaging the warm flesh. And he liked the little sighs Mama made when he squeezed her tooshie. That’s what he was doing when Poppa walked in one day.
“What the hell do you call this?” Poppa wanted to know.
“Richie’s giving me a massage,” Mama told him. “And it feels so good. He really has wonderful hands.”
“I’ll just bet! Listen, Madge, you shouldn’t do that. It’s not-—healthy. I mean, him squeezing your bare behind like that and all.”
“Are you crazy, George? I’m his mother. What’s wrong with it?”
“I dunno,” Poppa said weakly, unable to put his real feelings into words. “It’s just that he’s too damn attached to you. You’re making a sissy out of him.”
“Sissy” was a word that Richie heard a lot during the years of his growing up. When he showed a preference for staying home and toodling on his kazoo over going out and playing ball with the other boys his age, Poppa would often speak the word to Mama with a worried sigh. Mama, of course, would always defend him and point out that he was much more “sensitive” and “frail” than the other boys. And she would hug him and kiss him and smother him in her big, dangly bosom.
“Sissy!” That’s what Poppa grunted when Richie took up his music in earnest and showed no interest in sports at all. “Sissy!” Poppa said it when he came upon Richie backing away from a fight with some boys who’d been taunting him one afternoon. “Sissy.” It was in the way Poppa looked at him when he reached his teens and showed no inclination to go out with girls the way the other boys did.
Mama, naturally, was delighted that Richie showed no adolescent sex impulses. “It’s all right, George,” she reassured her husband. “He’s particular, that’s all. It’s just that none of these girls can measure up to his very own mother.”
“He’s a Mama’s boy all right,” Poppa said dryly.
“Now you stop talking about him that way.” Mama hugged Richie’s head to her bosom. “I know you’re kidding, but it hurts Richie’s feelings.”
“Who’s kidding?” Poppa asked. But he said it very quietly, to himself, so Mama wouldn't hear.
But Richie read his father’s lips and winced inside. He wondered what his father would say if he knew about him and Vic. And then he forgot about his father and just enjoyed remembering what it had been like with Vic all alone in the locker room of the high school that afternoon while the other boys were out playing baseball. The memory excited Richie, and his mother, still holding him to her, felt the evidence of his excitement and denied it to herself even as she subconsciously enjoyed it and took the credit for it.
Richie didn’t notice the rapt expression on her face, but his father did. Poppa snorted disgustedly and left them. Mama continued holding Richie and he continued remembering.
His lips formed an O with the memory, for Richie had never lost the oral orientation stemming from his early weaning and it had found its outlet with Vic that afternoon. Vic hadn’t wanted to let him, but Richie had talked him into it. Later, Richie had tried to get Vic to do the same to him, but Vic had drawn the line there. “I’m no fairy,” he’d said. Now Richie winced at that part of the memory and went back to concentrating on what it had been like.
A week later Richie repeated his seduction of Vic. This time they were caught at it by a teacher with an anger so great as to mark him suspect. There was hell to pay.
Poppa was summoned to school. He came back and told Mama. Mama cried. Poppa was coldly angry. The upshot of it was that Richie was packed off to military school where they would “make a man of him”. Of course, what really happened was that he learned more homosexual refinements than he’d ever dreamed possible. He learned many of them from a drill instructor with bulging muscles, a hairy chest and a quick eye for neophyte fairies. The drill instructor was fired when he was discovered en flagrante with Richie one night.
Richie was packed off for home. But he never got there. Even with Mama waiting, he couldn’t bring himself to face Poppa again. So he ran away and got himself a job in a band as a clarinetist—that being one of the few non-homosexual skills he’d perfected at the military school.
He had a natural talent. While it didn’t make his fame and fortune, it did gain him some recognition, and he floated easily from one job to another. He wrote to his parents occasionally, but he made no effort to see them. Lately his letters had been filled with mentions of Cliff, his friend and roommate, who played drums in the band Richie had joined.
Mama thought it was fine that Richie had made a friend. But Poppa had his doubts. True, one adolescent experience didn’t make a fairy—-even two experiences didn’t-- but Poppa would have felt a helluva lot better about things if Richie were shacking up with a girl. He didn’t mention this to Mama. Let sleeping dogs lie, he told himself. And anyway, at least the little bugger wasn’t crawling all over Mama the way he used to any more.
Poppa was right. Richie was really ape over Cliff. He was mad about the boy. And now, when he wailed up a storm on the licorice stick, he was sounding a woeful mating call to the drummer as much as he was bemoaning the parental influences that had made him what he was. The call was woeful because of the kind of cat Cliff was.
For one thing, Cliff was a switch-hitter. He really preferred girls, but he’d found it profitable to let himself be seduced into the boy-boy game. He’d found it profitable long before he met Richie, and he continued to make it work for him after he and Richie embarked on their affair.
Richie bought him things. Richie took care of his laundry and lots of other annoying tasks that a man usually has to do for himself when he’s on the road; Richie played slave to Cliff’s king, and Cliff maintained the relationship by periodically throwing Richie off balance. The way he did this usually involved a girl. Richie was very jealous, and he couldn’t stand the idea of Cliff making love to a woman. It made Richie feel insecure—-which was exactly how Cliff wanted him to feel since when Richie was insecure he knocked himself out even more than usual doing things for Cliff and buying him gifts. First Richie would scream the rage of jealousy; then, after Cliff would threaten to leave him, he’d apologize and beg and plead and buy Cliff some special gift. And then Cliff would allow Richie to make love to him.
That was the pattern, and it had reached the love-making stage this night as the two of them lay in their bed in the pitch-black room at the Marlowe Hotel. They were very quiet about it because Richie took a double enjoyment in the furtiveness of silence during sex—probably because in some way of which he was unaware it made him feel subconsciously that he was putting one over on Poppa. Cliff was going along with Richie’s preference because Richie had just bought him a beautiful new vicuna sports jacket.