Gary Janetti - Start Without Me: (Ill Be There in a Minute)

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For Brad

and for

Mom, Dad and Maria

Im nine years old. I live in Queens. (A place I wanted to get out of so badly but now revisit in my mind almost daily.) It is summer and it is hot and it is sticky and the basement is where I spend most of my day. Watching TV in the underground coolness. My mother desperate for me to go outside. Leave the house, it is summer. Im supposed to be outside. I pray each morning for it to rain. It never does. (Ironically, in later life I become fixated every summer on it not raining, each vacation destination planned for optimal sunshine probability. A trip in my thirties to Provincetown with five straight days of rain is something that still makes me sick to my stomach. Gay people are obsessed with the summer. Preparing for it with the kind of ferocious dedication usually reserved for Olympians.)

I was sent to day camp when I was seven. Getting on a bus with other kids and taken to some local park that was five minutes away but might as well have been South Dakota. Sickly sweet orange drinks handed out from cardboard boxes. And kids would take one and then waltz right up to each other and start talking. Just like that. Like the most nightmarish tiny cocktail party you could imagine. And then they would run or jump or throw a ball or some other terrible thing. I wouldve sooner walked out into the middle of the Long Island Expressway and opened a lawn chair before I joined them.

There was one counselor that I liked, though. She was the wife of a man my father knew from his job as a salesman for Cunard Cruise Line. Rose had black hair she wore to her shoulders and seemed impossibly cosmopolitan to me because she carried a PBS tote bag. In the 70s that was as close as I was going to come to a safe space. Each day I would take my orange drink and walk up to Rose, who was usually reading a paperback while infrequently glancing up at the kids, and sit with her. I was never more relaxed than when I was with a woman over thirty reading a book. Dont you want to play with the other kids? shed ask. I dont, Id respond. Eventually she stopped asking.

So whats new? What are you reading? Id say as I sidled up next to her on the picnic table bench. (I was good at making small talk with anyone twenty-five-years or more older than me. A fellow child was like something from another planet. But a married woman with sunglasses and a cigarette was my kind of company.)

Rose and I would chat each day. She would tell me what she was cooking for dinner that night, what she was watching on TV, small things that maybe she told nobody else. (My little gay seven-year-old self already practicing for what would be years of listening to women talk about their problems, until I got to the age when I was able to have my own relationships and then would inevitably force them to listen to my much more embellished, overly dramatic ones. These tables turn usually overnight for all gay men and their closest female friend. We learn from them and then we take what we learn and we raise the stakes exponentially.)

I would look forward to seeing Rose. I suddenly wasnt going to day camp but rather was taking a bus to meet with my dearest girlfriend. In a kinder world, one that didnt frown on relationships between seven-year-old gay boys and thirty-year-old married women, wed be getting coffees on our way to yoga instead of sitting on damp grass watching fat kids play Wiffle ball.

My mother was happy that I now seemed to enjoy camp. She would quiz me on what I was doing there and I would respond noncommittally, Stuff. She never pressed too hard, so relieved was she that I would finally leave the house without a meltdown that could rival Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit.

Weeks pass uneventfully until one day my mother asks me why I spend all my time with Rose and wont play with the other kids. Rose is concerned, my mother tells me. And this is my first taste of betrayal. Here I was thinking we were having a lovely summer together, Rose and I, only to find out that she saw me as nothing more than some child. Some friendless kid who didnt know how to throw a ball. Some nobody. Gay people, even at the tender age of seven, know how to turn against someone in the most chilling of fashions. Damien in The Omen didnt give as dead-eyed a stare as I did the next time I saw her. Good morning, I said, with the inflection of a corpse. I think she might have even gasped, so bitchy was my demeanor. A stark contrast from the chummy Laverne & Shirley roles Id previously cast us in. My carefree smiles and easy laugh now replaced with the expressionless mask of a sociopath. Ill take my juice now, please, was the last thing I ever said to Rose.

The following summer, when Im eight, on the first day of camp, I hide my bus pass in a jar of peanut butter. My mother scrambling to find it as I casually leaf through TV Guide, planning my day. It was right here! she says, frustrated as she scans our compact kitchen again. Well, I guess I cant go, I say. What did you do with it? she asks, suddenly on to me. Nothing. Now if youll excuse me, Ill be in the basement watching Double Indemnity.

But she insists, I must have done something with it. I shrug. Ill go to my grave buried with that jar of peanut butter before I confess. Well, come on, were going! I cant go without a bus pass! Yes, you can, Ill explain it to the driver. What the fuck was this womans fixation on sending me to camp? The only way she was going to get me onto that bus was in a straitjacket. Im not going. She looked at me, almost pleading, Dont you want to play with the other kids outside? Its summer. Was I not the same child that she had had for the previous eight years? Had I ever once played outside? I want to watch TV downstairs. And she let me go. This was the hill I was willing to die on, and she knew it.

I thought that was going to be the end of it. But it wasnt. The following year, as Im almost finished suffering through the countless humiliations of third grade, two months alone in front of the basement TV now so close I can taste it, my parents tell me they have a proposition for me.

What? I ask, suspicious.

How about if we send you to sleepaway camp this summer? If they had snapped our cats neck in front of me I wouldve been less horrified. At first my ears dont even quite know how to process what theyre hearing. Its in the Catskills, my mother continues, and you can ride horses.

Horses? I repeat uncomprehendingly and have to steady myself on a chair back as my knees start to buckle.

They have all kinds of activities. Three-legged races, cookouts, canoeing Each word more hideous than the one preceding it. Yes, tell me more about how my life is going to end. I think at this point I depart my body and float above the room, looking down on the now empty shell of my nine-year-old self with complete detachment. How peaceful he looks.

My parents, while trying to entice me with their idea of a childs idyllic summer had instead conjured a hellscape worse than anything Dante could have imagined. If we had smelling salts this would have been the perfect opportunity to use them.