I met Terry at a bowling alley. Bowling alleys were big in the sixties, bright, plastic, neon and noisy, they were high-tech and inexpensive ways to while away the hours of my teenage years. My parents were good friends with the owners of Frontier Lanes in San Diego, so I was treated very well there, I could cash a check with no ID and I always got a lane when everybody else had to wait. It was like a second home to me. I was in high school, my junior year, and bowling was my only extra-curricular activity. I was a really good dancer too, so I was always in demand at the dances at school, but there weren't very many of those, at least not enough to keep me involved in the social circle, but bowling was big and I got involved with a school league which met at Frontier Lanes, right in my back yard.

I was not a great bowler. I had very good form, dancers do, but my scores were always pretty bland. My team-mates were a rag-tag bunch of misfits that never placed very high in the rankings, but I was lucky to have assembled them being extremely anti-social and shy and only really knowing kids that were just like me, and usually not even as athletic as I was. When anyone bothered to think of me in these terms, I was called a 'soch', which meant that I came from a good family, the kind of family that had a pool in their back yard, but it also meant that I was not a 'surfer', which was the only group in school that really mattered. Point Loma was a surfer school, soch's were merely tolerated.

I knew all the surfers, everyone did, most of them came from good families too, there are a lot of those in Point Loma, I knew them from the dances, or rather they knew me. If it hadn't been for the dances Terry would not have known my name.

Terry was angularly handsome, with a square-ish Indian face and Chicklet teeth, and a black shock of hair which was always in his face. He was the quarterback of the football team, but that wasn't such a big deal at Point Loma, it was the fact that he was the king of the surfers that distinguished him.

I remember the first time I saw Terry, it was early in the school year at a 'Slave Auction', which was staged to make money for the football team. A slave auction was a big event which was like an assembly outside in the square, and all of the football players were tied up in ropes and led, one at a time, up to a dais where they were put up for sale and eventually bought by the highest bidder. Only the girls bid, of course, and all they really got was a date, but they also got to come up on the dais and remove the blindfold from the boy they had purchased, whereupon the crowd roared it's excitement as a blushing football player was led, hands still tied, off as if to the slaughter.

"My God,", I told my little group of myopic and socially challenged brothers, "that is so humiliating. I would never sell myself like that." "Like anybody'd buy you", stuttered Bobby Fripell (which only he pronounced Fri-PELL), which caused a snorting agreement by the rest. He was right, of course, nobody would have. Even the lesser known members of the team got a little action as they stepped up. I knew that if it had been me, the silence would have been far worse then the humiliation of mere flesh-bartering.

Terry was the last boy sold and his stumbling arrival at the podium caused a huge flurry of wildly frantic bidding by the crowd and which paid, in one fell swoop, for all of the football equipment that was needed that year. His girlfriend, Shanna, the most popular girl in the school, got him for two hundred and fifty dollars, "to keep him to myself", she announced proudly into the microphone and then grabbed his leash and lead him off without removing the blindfold.
I had many fantasies about what it would feel like to find Terry in bondage and lead him blushing off to some private place under the bleachers, but it was the kind of fantasy that shame and fear kept well in the back of my mind. I never expected even to talk to Terry. Boys who were secure enough with themselves to put themselves up for auction, however good the cause, didn't hang around with boys like me, who winced at the very thought of any kind of recognition, especially the kind that occurs when you are left un-sold on the stage, when everyone had left to watch the big game.

I went to the football games sometimes, I was trying to get into the high school experience, and I kept track of Terry, just like everybody else did. I don't think that there is a better time of life to be a hero than in high school, because celebrity can be so completely achieved while still moist with youth, and before the challenges of living dry you up. Terry's shy smile stared down at you from posters and buttons and occasionally wide-screen TV. Terry was undoubtedly the best known boy I have ever known.

Why he was showing up for Wednesday afternoon bowling, was a mystery to me. His parents were bowlers, just like mine, in fact they knew each other, although not well. Terry's father was a huge Italian stud, just recently gone to fat, and his mother was a prim fussy woman who seemed to me always to be ignoring her husbands attention to some other woman. My parent's didn't like them very much, I think that Terry's father had a reputation as a womanizer. In any case, to my amazement, when I showed up for the first night of team bowling, Terry was there with a group of popular boys determined to sweep the league with the same bravado that they had stamped out the competition with on the field.

I would see him, week in and week out, always in another lane, always laughing and palling around. Sometimes our eyes would cross, inadvertently, and it always seemed to me that Terry smiled at me. I'm sure that I didn't smile at him, it would have been audacious to assume that his smile could possibly be meant for me, so I was always arrogant in my refusal to meet his smile with mine.

The sixth week of the league we finally played his team. I was so intimidated that I almost didn't make it to the bowling alley. If my mother had not been in charge of the carpool that week, I probably wouldn't have been there, but my friends wouldn't ride with my mother alone, her car was a hopped up Chevy with a high-lift cam, dual carburetors, and flaming dual exhausts, and she frightened everybody when she jumped the curb upon arrival at the front of the school.

Not everyone on my team felt as I did about facing off with the 'King Pins'. They were just mostly hoping not to be made fun of, which I was too, but I don't think that Terry held any particular place in their fears. Terry was known to be very nice. I never heard him swear, or fight, or demean anyone else, ever, and that was a rare thing amongst the popular people, who could be pitiless they were usually putting someone else down. The other guys on the team were sloppy with their superiority and could easily have made our lives a living hell for those endless three games. I remember that I was very glad that my mother didn't stay to watch us, which she sometimes did, because I didn't want her to know what her son looked like when he was made fun of....I thought that no mother should have to see that.

As it turned out, we had nothing to fear from Terry's team at all. We bowled well over our heads the first game, and won. Terry was the first one to congratulate us, and I think he shook my hand. You'd think that I would remember something like that, but I found the whole situation far too intoxicating to be detailing specifics, which were building with the force of destiny. Our second game we also won, and I took the high score. Our opponents were less enthusiastic this time, and could have leaned in the direction of the kind of bitterness that brings out making fun of you, but Terry was the team captain, and he was, by the end of the second game, sitting on our side of the lane, talking to me. At that time, although this would change, you didn't make fun of someone Terry was talking to.

A Miracle happened in the third game. After two spares, I got a strike. Marking in three frames right off the bat, sets up a kind of impetus. In the fourth frame I got another strike. When you get a lot of marks your score goes up very fast, people start watching and yelling and, well, it is kind of like a football game on a much smaller scale. Feeling intense pressure from the gathering crowd, I marched up to the fifth frame and got another strike.

This is called a Turkey, for some reason. It means that they don't add up your score at all, because the final tally is based on the first ball of the next frame....scores compound that way. The next thing that happened, I do remember clearly, I came back up the alley and Terry greeted me and put his arm over my shoulder and grinned into my face, "You're hot", he smiled at me. At that time of my life I did not have a fantasy of the proportions of what had just happened.

I would get two more strikes in a row, and my score would not only win us the game and series, but also a very large trophy for the best game of the year. Terry had stood behind me the whole time, jumping in the air with delight, shouting encouragement and greeting me with his hugely masculine gesture of intimacy, which was merely an arm over my shoulder.

"You want to celebrate?", Terry asks me ignoring my friends and his, "maybe a hamburger at Oscars....my treat?". For those of you who have never experienced hero worship, let me tell you how extraordinary that little exchange is. Firstly, Terry was a star and you don't usually meet the stars unless you are one, so to meet Terry was an estimable thing. Secondly, to excel in front of a hero, which he was, whether I would ever have admitted it, is as much as you can hope to get physiologically out of any athletic activity, especially coming out of left field, as it did with me. Thirdly, to feel the thrill of knowing that someone special is interested in knowing you is about as romantic a things as can occur, gay, straight, or "questioning."

I was not openly gay, in fact I was pretty sure that I was nothing. Homosexuality in the sixties was still a mental illness and the kind of thing that families went to great lengths to hide if they discovered it in the family tree. My mother told me when I was a kid that she actually knew a Homo, when she was in school, evidently there was only one in her school, and she felt very sorry for his family. Not for him, I noticed, but for his family, the shame of it.

That is how I learned how not to be a homosexual, and everyone but the extremely rare bird that would suicidally set himself up for ridicule, knew and respected those rules. If you gave the slightest hint of effeminacy, or sensitivity, or creativity, you would be routed out and you would be stamped a 'fag', which was even worse than a coward, because since you weren't a boy, you weren't brave and all the other good things that boys were. When I say that I was not openly gay, what I really mean is that I was successfully following the rules, and my parents were not living with the shame of me yet.

I should have stayed away from Terry. I should have let myself have the thrill of my amazing evening at the bowling alley with the quarterback of the football team, and then let myself slip back into anonymity. Living a life in the spotlight burns, and I knew that I had been successful in the hiding of my probable 'queerness' because I had kept a low profile, so walking into that light was such act of such bravery that I thought that I might actually not be gay, and that I could have a friend I adored, just like anybody else. Until Terry came along, I never thought I'd ever have a real friend who was just a boy.

It's a moot point though, because it was never up to me. I didn't go out for the celebration dinner at Oscars with him, I went with my team in my eccentric mother's flaming red hot-rod to the beach were we celebrated with a bonfire and hot-dogs. It was a great time, maybe the best day I ever had in high school, because I knew that something important, finally, was happening to me, but it hadn't yet. And, so I was in the 'eve' stage, before the 'Christmas' stage, which I have always found a happier and less complicated time. I remember that all night, no matter what I was talking about, or who I was talking to, all I could see was Terry's face, and I could still feel his arm around my neck.

It would be several days before I saw Terry again. I was walking on air and I wasn't looking down, or I probably would have seen him, he was everywhere, but I didn't, and don't think I wanted to. The things you want the most you will put off having, as long as you can believe that they still will. "Rick!", I heard behind me on the stairs, "Wait up, Rick". It was Terry.

The thing I remember best about that moment, the one I had waited for, was that everyone was looking to see who "Rick" was, and no one thought that it was me, why would it be? only a handful of people had ever seen us together, and the bowling team triumphs never made it into the school newspaper. "The guys and I are going to the Strand tonight to watch Endless Summer, it's a really boss surfing film, you want to come?"

I wasn't ready yet. I could have faced Terry alone, but Terry in a crowd of jocks sounded like it was way over my head. "I can't tonight ....I ... um..... well...the guys and I are racing our model cars tonight...so.. but thanks for asking, I'd really love to see that film". Both of these statements were lies. I did build and occasionally race miniature stock cars, that was another fad of the sixties, but I wasn't that night, and I had never seen a surfing film in my life. "You surf?", he asks. "Oh sure...of course, I love surfing", lie number three. "Really?, well we'll have to get together sometime then...funny I've never seen you at the beach."

There were two things about his comment that upset me, although in different ways. Firstly, it meant that he was looking for me at the beach, and secondly, it meant that I was going to have to learn how to surf very quickly if this went any further. "Maybe this weekend....OK?", and he was gone. For a moment I was the only clear sight in a sea of blurred humanity, running in different directions. People were looking at me for the first time. I actually took up space in the hallway of my school, and all that had happened is that I had been invited to meet someone at the beach.....but it was Terry.

In the ensuing days I kept myself even more invisible than before. I scurried in and out of school and between classes like a self-important rat, starring straight ahead and buried, as much as I could be, in the masses. The funny thing is that, although I never ran into Terry, my invisibility was impossible to maintain. I was conscious of the fact that eyes were upon me all the time, especially Terry's friends who either waved or smiled whenever they saw me, or they huddled together in discussion with one or another of them pointing me out as if they didn't mind being seen focusing so much attention on a no-body.

 

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