“
My room was at the end of a carpeted hall and over the garage. How many times I would psychoanalyze the moonlit branches outside my window and imagine an adult lover whose lust-o-meter could detect even at a distance that behind that precise window was a thirteen-year-old boy with a hard dick and a yearning to be abducted. In one of James Merrill’s poems, he hears as a child about rich kids being kidnapped and he hopes he’ll be taken away by “Floyd.” I had the same desire and wrote a sonnet that began, “Because I loved you before I met you …” Although I was worried about the inconvenient trochees, the verse expressed a real sentiment I had. I’d discovered masturbation (which will always be associated with the smell of a mildewed washcloth in my mind, since I must have first jerked off in my bathroom, the only room with a door that locked) and my fantasies were all about a lord, an English lord, not a backcountry Floyd with a cigarette behind his ear, a lord whose heart would guide him up the branches and into my waiting arms and then spirit me away in the waiting Rolls. My fantasies were all prologue, as if even then I suspected the third act would inevitably be a disappointment and need not be imagined.
”
”