The Nonconformist

by Ken Cohen

Chapter 10

Toledo

One day he came home from school, and found a letter in the mail from Ronnie in Toledo, Ohio. Ronnie had been his friend in Greece. At irregular intervals they had been corresponding in the year and a half since the trip ended. Now Danny was invited to come for a visit at the end of March.

He was going to Toledo tomorrow to visit Ronnie Newman. He was nervous.

One good thing came of that summer two years ago. He met Ron after they arrived at the camp and found out they would be roommates. They were both 14. A third boy their age, Jack, also shared the room with them. The three were among the youngest at the camp, and became friends.

After Danny returned home, he didn't hear from Jack, but did get a letter from Ron, and they began writing back and forth. Neither ever mentioned the bullying. Danny had no idea what Ron thought or felt about it. Maybe Danny's silence, a reflection of shame, led Ron to assume he didn't care about it. Danny couldn't be sure about that one way or the other. Ron never raised the subject, not in Greece or later.

In Greece they talked about sports, politics, history, sometimes well into the night. Ronnie liked to kid him about being Canadian, because Canadians are ruled by the queen of England, aren't they?

Ronnie thought the formal role of the British queen was the funniest thing, and loved to poke fun at it. He would tease Danny, calling him a British subject, suggesting he practise the correct way of bowing to the queen in case she ever paid him a visit. Danny argued he was a Canadian citizen with no connection to Britain except through a nominal monarch who just signs whatever papers the politicians put in front of her.

Debating was a lot of fun, Ron was the first friend he ever had who could argue about politics and current events as well as Danny could. They challenged each other intellectually.

One day, Ronnie asked out of curiosity to see Danny's passport, expecting to find it was issued by Great Britain. Danny proudly showed him that it was issued by the government of Canada. But inside the cover at the bottom of the first page, Ron triumphantly discovered in bold letters the words "A Canadian citizen is a British subject."

Danny was astonished! He hadn't noticed that. The joke was on him! He was surprised and delighted. It instantly became the ultimate example of self-deprecating humour, the funniest moment of the summer. He had to accept defeat. He was wrong about the most ridiculous debate point he'd ever encountered. The two became practically hysterical, the joke went back-and-forth between them for days.

It solidified their friendship based on a shared intellect. It was a friendship of a new kind for both. Danny cherished it. He truly liked Ronnie Newman, but definitely not the way he "liked" Kenny. It was pure friendship.

Now, almost two years later, Danny would be staying at Ron's home outside Toledo, a city on Lake Erie about a six hour drive from Toronto.

Danny had misgivings about travelling and meeting new people. Maybe that was a leftover from the trip to Greece. He also had his deep dark secret he could never tell Ron.

But still, I feel adventurous, he thought. I miss Ron. So I'll go to Toledo for a few days. I expect we'll get along well like we always did. And I'll meet his family. They're real nice people from what he told me about them.

Diary, March 30, 1966 - It's a boring bus ride from Toronto to Detroit that takes about five hours. I ate a sandwich in the middle of the morning. I'm also reading a book called Catcher in the Rye for English class.

We went through U.S. customs and filled in a form at the border. Someone said the US-Canadian border is the longest undefended border in the world. Almost 4,000 miles of border between the two countries, and not a single soldier has been stationed there since the middle of the 19th century.

The bus crossed the St. Clair River into Detroit. I changed buses there. The new bus drove for another hour southwest along the western short of Lake Erie to Toledo, a medium sized industrial city.

Ronnie and his father were at the bus station in Toledo to greet me when I arrived. I was happy to see Ronnie again and to meet his dad, who's a doctor. He seems like a real gentleman, reserved, polite and helpful.

When we arrived at his huge home, I met Ron's mother and younger sister. Mrs. Newman prepared delicious food for dinner.

Ron is amazed I'm in much better shape than I was in Greece, and that I'm a starter on my high school football team.

April 3 - I'm back in the bus going home along the highway that stretches from Detroit all the way to Toronto. The trip is finished. It didn't end well.

Over the last few days, I played pickup basketball with other guys Ron knew. We went out after dinner to visit Ron's friends every night, and went for hamburgers at a new drive-in restaurant called McDonald's that Ron said opened recently in his town outside Toledo. Everyone really likes it there, and we met up with more of his friends. We also went to see movies a couple of times. We went bowling too. The first three days of the trip were just great, I had a really good time.

Yesterday, on the last afternoon I was there, Ron organized a two hand touch football game with 14 guys. Last night we would be going to a party at the home of Ron's friend.

At Ron's home after playing football, I found out he has a girlfriend, a sweet, pretty girl named Lois. She came over and spent some time with us, then went home for dinner. We would be picking her up on the way to the party.

Ron told me when we were alone before the party that they had been dating for over a year, which was okay with me. Then he said he had been having sex with Lois.

What he actually said was, "I'm fucking Lois."

I should have congratulated him, asked him questions. I couldn't. I felt as though, if I said more than a couple of words, I was going to choke.

In part it was simply what he said. It seemed wrong to me. Not if you look at it logically, of course there's nothing wrong with it. But I can't look at it just logically. He's 16 years old, still in high school, this is all wrong. My brain isn't ready for it. It's upside down, inside out, immoral, maybe even illegal.

That's how I felt about it. I don't understand why. I haven't had time to think it through. No friend of mine, and there aren't many of them, has ever told me something so personal.

But, I had the feeling he was bragging. Why else would he tell me that? "I'm fucking Lois." There's the simple fact he said it, and there's the exact words he used. It sounded like he didn't care. She seems to be a very likeable girl. How can you say it that way? So nonchalantly, like you don't really care. You don't care about her, or about the private stuff you're telling me. Why are you telling me about something so personal?

Would you say those words in front of her? Why didn't you say "I'm fucking Lois" right in front of her, if it's really okay to say stuff like that?

Are you showing off to me? Is this some kind of one-upmanship? So you can feel superior to me?

Why do I care about this? Why does it still bother me? I don't know. I guess it's like, if you're going to have sex with her, at least ha

You're not a wild animal that just found an anonymous female to rut with.

Or am I rationalizing? pretending to be superior? feeling left out?

Am I jealous? Yes, for sure.

Why haven't I done something like this yet? Well, maybe I have. Maybe what I do with Kenny is just as bad. No it's not, we have feelings and neither of us has told anyone else because it's private. What Kenny and I do is no doubt illegal, but fuck the law, it's an ass.

I didn't know what to say to Ron about him "fucking" his girlfriend. I didn't say much of anything.

My feelings about it are mixed up. It wasn't cool at all, in my mind, to feel the way I do. But it wasn't cool for him to say it that way.

I realized, immediately after he told me, that I had to at least look cool with it, so I just sat there saying practically nothing. I just nodded. I don't know why, but I can't feel like a cool guy who takes everything in stride without caring. And I can't feel how I should with my friend who has lost his virginity. I should be happy for him, join with him in celebrating his first conquest.

But my life is full of rules, I guess. Maybe that's it, everything has to be orderly. That's how I see it. Without structure, I feel uncomfortable. He broke one of my mom's big rules, and it's a rule in my head too even though it shouldn't be.

I was taught that sex before marriage is wrong. I guess I really … believe it? Do I really believe that? Why?

It's like, the feeling, and the associated fear, all of that exists in me. And so I think it's something I believe in. It's a feeling, a fear, that somehow became engrained in my brain when I was a kid and isn't going away.

And maybe it's stuck there, because everything my mom told me, I take as the absolute truth. I shouldn't, but I can't help it. It's written in ink in my brain, can't be erased, that's how it feels.

Fear. Maybe that's part of it. What am I afraid of? I guess I'm afraid of the possibility of having sex with a girl. With any girl, any woman. I'm terrified of that. Breasts, vaginas? The thought doesn't excite me. Boys are way more enjoyable to look at, without all that weird, unknown girl stuff.

Even if there's a logical reason for the rules, suppose I found a girl willing to do it with me. And I had a condom to use. I guess I would be willing to try. As long as my mother doesn't find out.

Man oh man, am I ever messed up! Pardon the pun, but I'm fucked up. What a way for someone's mind to work.

Maybe believing premarital sex is wrong is a way for me to rationalize away my fears. An excuse for being afraid. But, I still feel like it's wrong.

And now, sitting here on this awful noisy bus going home, and thinking about all this, I suddenly realize something.

He kept it a secret for all this time. Maybe if I had known, if he had said in his last letter, 'I'm fucking Lois,' I wouldn't have gone there. It would change everything about Ron Newman in my mind. Suddenly he seems like an ugly-minded guy, with no feelings, who's used that pretty, sweet girl for his own needs. Just like all those boys at the camp in Greece did with their so-called girlfriends.

"I'm fucking Lois." He said it in such a matter of fact way. So, who exactly is he? He's someone I really don't know. I thought I did. I was with him for two months. But I don't know him at all.

But I feel something else too, a feeling I've had before and absolutely hate. I'm jealous.

I hate feeling jealous. Jealousy leaves me feeling like a failure. Like I'm in a serious competition involving my whole life, and I've lost.

And on top of that, I'm angry because he ambushed me. I don't know how he felt about telling me, or why he didn't tell me earlier. Why did he have to tell me at all? Why did he even bother inviting me? He doesn't need me, he has a girlfriend. Why the hell did I come?

I wish he had told me this before I came all the way here. Now I have to hold in these jealous, upset, angry feelings like I hold in everything, and keep my ignorant stupid feelings to myself. Anything else would be unacceptable, as uncool as you can get. He trusted me with this ugly thing, and all I can do is accept what he said and wish him the best. Try to be a good sport. But I'm very uncomfortable with it.

I hate being a good sport about stuff like this.

If I told him how I felt, shocked, disillusioned, jealous, he wouldn't have understood and it would have created an unbearable tension between us. Of course, that ended up happening anyway.

So I'm innocent, naive, all that stuff. So what? It's how I feel.

But if I told him those things, I'd have had to spend the rest of yesterday and this morning with him, with us mad at each other, not talking, bad feelings zinging back and forth through the silence. It would have been horrible. But that's what ended up happening anyway, except it was all left unspoken.

There it was last night, Saturday night. We went to this party at the house of one of his friends, another girl he knows from school. It's a huge house, the biggest I think I've ever been to, way bigger than anything I've seen in Toronto, two stories, full of bedrooms and dens and stuff, on a giant piece of land, probably an acre or more, surrounded by huge lawns and gardens.

The girl, the host, herself was petite, lively, short straight brown hair, red lipstick, whatever skin-coloured stuff they put on their faces, large round eyes that look like question marks, eye shadow, all that sort of thing. The girl's parents weren't there. Just teenage kids I don't know. And beer, lots of it, and guys drinking plenty and so were some girls. Many cars parked on the driveway and the street. People don't seem to worry about drinking and driving there. Everyone seemed loose and happy. Except me. Some were paired off and making out. In front of everyone. I felt jealous and lost. Ronnie and Lois disappeared upstairs with another couple and left me to their friends.

I felt like I felt in Greece. I watched them like a misplaced homo boy lost in a crowd of strangers. Like an outsider. I pretended I was okay, pasted a smile on my face, said hi to people. Introduced myself to be sociable, then sat with my plastered grin and stared at the ceiling or my hands because I didn't know what to say. Walked around eating and drinking. Smiled at people I didn't know. I talked for a few minutes with a couple of the guys we played basketball with, but we ran out of things to say and each of them found an excuse to drift off.

Thinking and feeling that way left me feeling like a dork. When it comes to strangers my own age who I should be sociable with, I freeze up. When people do stuff I'm uncomfortable with, like making out in front of other people, I get jealous.

The one sort of comradeship I could never share with Ron was the sexual side of life that I guess provides the core of some male friendships.

Maybe that's why I suddenly froze up. Not just with Ron, but with everyone there.

So there I was last night at the party, sitting like a dork watching them all talking, having fun, making out. My jealousy of these kids rose like the foaming water in a boiling pot until it reached a breaking point when it was about to boil over. I felt like screaming or running away. I couldn't handle it. Ran out of room for unwanted feelings in the trash bin in my brain. I was willing to do anything to get out of there.

So, surrounded by chattering teenagers talking, laughing, drinking, smoking, I knew I didn't belong. I had to leave. I stood. I told myself, find Ron, tell him I'm walking home. I didn't exactly know the way home but thought, maybe someone can show me. I'll tell them I'm not feeling well and need to go back to his house. I have to lie.

I hate lying. I hate not knowing anyone, hiding my feelings, being among kids I have nothing in common with. Faking it for two hours. Having to lie about leaving. All part of the torment.

I couldn't find Ron, I guess he and Lois were off somewhere. Someone said he might be upstairs. I went up, found quite a few bedrooms. One was closed. Locked. I heard sounds from inside, moaning and shit.

Downstairs I found the girl, the party host with too much makeup. I didn't feel well, wanted to leave, did she know the way to Ron's home. She found someone who knew the address, drew me a map, said it's probably a couple miles, maybe someone could drive me.

I looked into her large, curious eyes. "No, I don't need a ride, that's fine, maybe I'll feel better after I walk. Thank you, this is a great party, sorry to be leaving. Tell Ron I've gone home." What a liar.

A last glance at her, I saw something there. Pity? Please let out of here, I thought. I found my jacket and stepped out the front door onto a large illuminated patio and into the cold night. It was 10:45 p.m.

Across the huge front lawn and down the driveway. The house must be set back a hundred feet or more. The sounds of the party receded as I approached the street.

The roads had no sidewalks or street lights. I crossed and started walking home following the instructions on the map she drew for me. Without street lights it was hard to read the map, but I pretty well memorized the simple route before I left the house, and somehow I managed. Ditches I could barely make out along the roadsides. The road passed through mostly empty land, even farmland. Kind of a connector road between isolated subdivisions built on random farmland well beyond the city that lay to the north next to Lake Erie.

A dark, quiet, shivery cold night, cloudless with no moon. Utterly silent but for an occasional passing car.

I looked up and the night was transformed. Thousands of stars, like the sparkling fruit of the universe I guess you could say, hung in the black sky, glittering points of light trillions of miles away, aloof and unheeding, mysterious, inscrutable. I remembered Haliburton in the hours before sunrise, the Milky Way in its brilliance splashed over the lake. I walked on, awestruck, thinking of God. In the universe I'm a tiny speck of nothing, here a short time, then gone leaving no trace. Come back in a hundred or a thousand years and it will be as though I never existed. Yet here I am, at this moment, adrift on the edge of infinity.

There are people, millions, with no idea what or who they are, who cannot see themselves as they are. Life has many mysteries but few answers. The night sky poses ultimate questions about life and existence. Simple as we are, we puzzle over ourselves and what we feel, searching for answers within ourselves and up in the sky. Some of us hide throughout our lives, fearing the person within, unable even to wonder. Many will do so until the moment we die. Maybe, if there really is a God, we will find answers in the next world. I just don't know.

After I walked half a mile, I realized I was cold and needed to be warm, so I began jogging and ran the rest of the way. Arriving at Ronnie's house, I knocked a couple of times. Mrs. Newman dutifully came to the door and let me in. It was 11:30. I lied to her that I wasn't feeling well. I showered quickly, then fell into bed and a dreamless sleep.

I was up early this morning to get the 9:15 bus to Detroit. Ron was already up and asked how I felt. I told him I felt better. We didn't say much else to each other. He must have been unhappy with me for being a jerk at the party but he wasn't talking so I didn't really know.

Not that I would have blamed him. He had every right to be. I'm unsociable. I never disclosed to him my real feelings, so how was he supposed to know what's wrong with Danny? Danny's a coward all tied up inside with his problems. That's the fact. Not a good friend, not fun to be with. Not cool. I could offer no reason or excuse, I only wanted to return home.

I don't expect to see Ron or Lois ever again. I won't be writing him any more letters.

Some 30 or so years later, Dr. Ronald N. would commit suicide by firing a bullet through his own head after a failed attempt to murder his business partner in southern California. Ron had demons too, Danny just never saw them. Ron wouldn't let him see.

But Danny would encounter Lois again. Sooner than he knew.

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