Wavelength

Reason for Being in the World, Chapter 7

In the summer of my fifteenth year, our parents moved us for the third time in five years, this time, again, to New York City’s distant southern underbelly, the Rockaway Peninsula, into a trio of twelve-story apartment buildings, a new, subsidized middle income, cooperative apartment development right at the beach facing the Atlantic Ocean. The children of the initial owners got busy looking for first friends. The first friend I made was Michael, and we were very good friends for nearly a dozen years.

I remember very soon after we made each other’s acquaintance sitting on some benches facing the beach, near the swimming pool, when Michael, a blond pimply boy of my height and build, confided in me that he was gay. He wouldn’t have said gay in 1967 – probably homosexual – but he offered the revelation, and I received it, as a special confidence. I learned then that Mike was a foster child. The last name I knew him by was not his real last name, and he had been moved among multiple foster…