Hall of Mirrors, Part I

Here's that unfinished essay I started about twelve years ago that I referred to in a previous post. I've long had a sense of what it needs to make it cohere: additional sections that I've never been able to write. I worked on the sections I'm reprinting here so much that I finally reached the point where I couldn't see the story as anything other than what it was. It became frozen in amber, in way, with all of its imperfections. That's one of the biggest hazards of writing: working on the fine points so obsessively that the overall structure becomes locked in your mind.

In any case, I long ago let go of this work-in-progress and moved on to other things -- with, it should be noted, no bitterness or hard feelings toward its fragmentary and incomplete nature (not anymore anyway!), a good amount of affection for the story (or stories) I'm telling, and compassion for the period in my life that it depicts.

I'm going to present it in several installments over the next few days. "Hall of Mirrors" is its working title from when I last worked on it.

***

Hall of Mirrors

One icy afternoon in 1974, as I dressed after seventh grade gym class -- two dozen prepubescent boys around me talking basketball and hooker jokes and the Fonz -- a picture I’d seen in Newsweek lurched into my head: a river of naked men running down Route 1 in College Park, Maryland, at night. The simple, daring fact of it -- milky buttocks, cold-tightened backs, the microscopically discernible suggestion of pubic hair above a lifted thigh -- made me falter in my movements. My foot caught on the waistband of my pants as I stepped into them, my fingers stiffened trying to button my shirt, my breath clumped in my throat, as if the musty locker-room air itself were jelling in the cold.

That winter and spring, streaking was the craze. Crowds of students would assemble, strip down, and dash nude across campus or through town. Every couple of days, it seemed, in the Washington Post or on the evening news, there was a story, of shorter and shorter length, describing undergraduates streaking in the subfreezing cold or a lone freelancer breaking through the checkout lines at Safeway. At that year’s Academy Awards, I heard after the fact, a naked man ran across the stage, his fingers flashing a peace sign.

My physical vocabulary at twelve years old, the language to which my body responded, was rooted solely in image. Photographs, faces observed from afar and in solitude, fluttered down my mind’s stairwell. I stood at the bottom, looking up the impossible, dizzying height. With barely the knowledge of what was happening, much less what to do about it, I watched the body -- the male body -- enter my field of vision from all sides.

(To be continued.)