We (1984)

Lamb ♣ 05 | LGBTQ+ Serial Fiction

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We (1984)

♣ ♣ ♣ 05 ♣ ♣ ♣

Tall as he was, Lamb’s limbs did not fit together especially well at fifteen, a lost cause for almost every sport. Lamb in motion looked like that early silent movie of a horse galloping—more lollop than hustle, like he was catching air. The cross-country coach, Mr. Hanna, could barely contain his irritation that Lamb’s legs just would not move faster.

Meanwhile, I had a nasty broken arm from skateboarding over the summer, and had to sit out lacrosse and baseball my first year at Wolcott. I got stuck in intramurals, jogging mostly, weight training and swimming once the cast came off. That’s how we first hung out: Mr. Hanna sent Lamb to run on his own, building his endurance for long-distance events supposedly, but really just abandoning him to jog along with the only intramural conditioning student that autumn, me.

On that first day of the season, we fell in together doing laps around the old track off at the far side of campus while everyone else trained on the new track. Around we jogged endlessly—I don’t recall any verbal agreement, not even a nod that meant “together,” it just happened. I was shorter and took two quick strides for every one of Lamb’s slow motion galumphs. We didn’t run directly beside each other at first, more like two lanes apart, but this narrowed over the next lap as we realized we were pacing ourselves against each other. Come to think of it, Lamb huffing and getting all sweaty next to me was the first time I noticed that faint grassy smell of his. By the third lap, I stopped wondering if my extra-tall shadow would suddenly break ahead or fall behind—I realize now we were already forming what would become an enduring friendship.

I remember it was my first chance to really look around at the vistas surrounding campus. They don’t really give you a natural history tour of the Central California Coast when you’re applying to Wolcott Academy, it’s all about academics and athletics. I guess it’s worth painting a little picture for you—they didn’t call it The Country Club for nothing.

To the north of the track, a big grove of gray-green eucalyptus traced the far edge of campus, and past that, a canyon with a winding road to the backcountry—state land, scrubby hills—unused except for the occasional run of county vehicles to assess the threat of wildfire, or maneuvering practice with the big engines. Up the other side of the canyon and beyond, deep green avocado orchards and dry chaparral.

Around the bend, school buildings, dorms and auditorium—all Mission-style adobe and cedar shingles—and mature coastal oaks crowded the front western edge of our hill looking toward the Pacific. We were up on top of a high flattened mesa, so there were fantastic views of the ocean from the balconies of all the dorm rooms. We were only about two miles from the beach, but the moisture and cool breezes mostly never made it up to the plateau of the school and Wolcott Ranch.

Down the homestretch, southward, the coast widened into a hazy lowland, and then, strangely, more Pacific, owing to the odd jutting geography of the area. Along the inner rim of the Santa Lucia range, ritzy communities perched above the expanse of farmland and pristine views.

A lot of the boys’ families lived on estates in these enclaves, as far away from the squalor of Malibu and Beverly Hills as possible—a couple of celebrity kids, though mostly the sorts of names buried deep in Hollywood and Wall Street balance sheets. Some of these legacies—sons of senators, trustees, and Fortune 500 board members who had also gone to Wolcott—would return not too many years after graduation for bougie weddings (think seersucker, straw hats and flip flops) in the stately Mission Revival chapel perched at the south edge of campus overlooking their elite empire.

And finally, rounding that last bend of the old track, Wolcott Ranch itself, and the Wolcott family home where the headmaster lived, grandson of the founder, Scot Prentiss Wolcott. The Wolcott avocado orchards surrounded the borders of school property and swept out, down and up again over ridges in three directions.  

Squarely between School and Ranch, from a time when there was a student riding program and the Wolcott family’s farm workers still got around on horseback, what was once a shared barn had been converted into teacher housing. The Bachelor Barn had a few decent studios for the newest teachers, overflow mostly—the married ones either had comfortable houses, or larger apartments connected to the dorms for a calming adult presence.

But I wouldn’t find out a lot of this until later. That day, I was just soaking it in, a stage set.

This was how our conversation went—me, chatty new sophomore, and Lamb, second year sophomore, enduring my patter:

“What's out past the trees? 

Reservoir.

Have you been there?

Freshman hiking trip.

Can you swim in it? 

I wouldn't.

What's down there? 

Fire road. 

What's that? 

It's for trucks to get up into the hills if there's a wildfire. 

Does anyone use it? 

Not that I know of. 

Has there ever been a fire?

I don’t know.

[... More, much more of this—I was always a talker…]

Do you surf? 

No. 

Good, those surfer boys are pretty full of themselves. Great tans, though. Nice tan lines.

(No reply.)

Do you ever go down to LA? 

No.

I used to go with my brother, his first year at USC, we'd go down to Pico and Alvarado, there was this gas station, like a fucking drive through for drugs, you'd pull up and all these Mexicans would come running up to your window and say “What you want, chico?” and we'd buy weed, usually, but he bought coke once. 

You've done coke? (That got his attention.)

Yeah, well, just with him, that one time…”

There was a short pause.

“You ask a lot of questions,” Lamb said. That shut me up for a bit.

Back around, we kept time with each other on the satisfying crunch of red gravel, comfortable in our silence, until I decided to poke him, just to see.

“Dude, you should get a jockstrap.”

Lamb would later write in his journal how I nettled him that first day of our friendship—how he was surprised by my fearlessness. (“He’s a wiseass, but not mean like some of them,” he wrote. “He was right though, I was flopping around. But why would he even notice?” etc.)

“What the fuck?” he wheezed out with a chuckle, stuttering to a stop and bending over to catch his breath and adjust himself discreetly (I noticed that, too.) I slowed and jogged around him.

“It’s cool dude, no one cares—unless you’re trying to show off—big man, big and tall,” I teased.

Lamb laughed even harder then, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. We started back up and fell into stride—we had about ten more laps to go. We banked around to the bench for water, and then settled in for the long-haul. It was still warm in the middle of September, up on the mesa.

As we pounded down the homestretch again, Mr. Perez, the Spanish teacher, swam into view beside the track on his way to the Barn, giving us the ol’ thumbs-up-with-arm-pistons. Perez was barely older than the seniors, just a year out of college himself. The soccer coach had that burnt caramel skin I love, and those blond surfer streaks in his hair from a summer in Baja.

“And then there’s Mr. Perez,” I intoned, somehow instantly forgiving the surfer clique and the fact that he was the only teacher who took the early surf shuttle down to the beach before classes with the cocky Newport and Laguna boys. “Here’s the real question,” I said as we waved back and left him behind, though I snuck a glance back. “Do you think Perez is cut?”

“Cut?”

“Circumcised,” I said matter-of-factly.  “A lot of Europeans don’t circumcise their sons, not like here—all of the pricks in the showers are cut—well, almost all.” (I gave him a knowing look, and he definitely struggled not to look back, ha!) “Isn’t Perez from Spain? He’s not Mexican.”

Lamb said nothing, all self-conscious about his own uncircumcised wiener, probably. The open showers were a big problem for me—some of the guys wanted it to be social time, chatting and joking around while I just tried to keep my eyes on the tile and get it over with as quickly as possible. But still, it was hard not to check out who had the weenies and who had the meat.

“I’ll bet he’s uncut,” I continued.  “I wonder how we could find out?”

“We?” Lamb laughed again in spite of himself, and clumped to a stop. “Dude. What the fuck?” I just shrugged and kept going, and he quickly caught back up.

I dropped the subject at that point, but that laugh though, his nervous giggle—I got him, I already knew.

♣ ♣ ♣

Episode 6: Death and the Bird

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