“”Barlow” painted by my teacher and friend Douglas Maguire

My mother, who had been silent for the past hour, finally spoke as we rolled to a stop in front of the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Hospital.

“How much further Dick?”

“Twenty minutes,” my father said, as if he’d been counting every mile driving me to boarding school.

In comparison to his thick forearms gripping the lambskin steering wheel of his latest BMW, my thin-wristed dexterous hands which resembled my mother’s, who was also a pianist, tapped Bach’s Two-Part Invention in A minor on the back seat leather.

My mother turned around, her eyes narrowing.

“Stop that, would you please. Did you remember your parka?”

Though artistic talents and swimming long distances underwater got me noticed, after one of their friends said I had a future at Weekie Watchie and my parents chuckled, rather than cutting off my arms and handing them to them, I began responding to them with single word answers.

“No.”

“Well, I told you to,” my mother said.

Tapping louder and faster while closing my eyes, I muttered, “Thanksgiving.”

“Your father and I will be in South Africa.”

“We don’t know that yet Rube,” my father said before turning up something about Kent State on NPR and shushing, “Shhh!”

After breathing Bay Rum, Chanel Number 5 and cigarette smoke with my window open only a few inches because my mother didn’t like to feel her hair move, I recalled the angry stops I’d forced them to make on ski trips so I could vomit in the snow before they stopped making me go with them.

My ability to vomit at will was waning. I’d been able imagine galloping or flying animals alongside the car not so long before, but losing the ability to see things that weren’t there made me feel unequipped to grow older.

Surely at fifteen, I was old enough to roll down my window so I could fill my lungs with early autumn air without asking permission.

“What are you doing?” my mother barked, as I snuck a wave at the busload of psychiatric patients emptying onto a sidewalk.

“Close his window will you Dick.”

“For God’s sake, Jed,” my father added. “Stop teasing them.”

“Let me out,” I muttered, as my window rose on its own, and I slumped back beside my duffle bag.

“What?” my father asked.

“Nothing.”

Pressing the relentless hard-on left over from the jolting potholes beneath my wrist and knowing how unlikely my parents were to turn around unless provoked, I leaned forward to see how the bulge looked upside down from a viewpoint nearer my knees.

My voice had just begun to change and emulating a crazy character Sandy Dennis played in an art film my grandparents had taken my sister and I to, I croaked, “Whu-ahh do you send me awa-ay?”

Though a fat woman’s paper bag broke causing “Ring Dings” to drop all over the crosswalk and her to panic, my father calmly said, “Because your mother and I have had it Jed.”

Though I wouldn’t have the courage to tell them for another forty years, I’d had it with them too.

Though the headmaster said I’d fit in well at Barlow, the coed experimental boarding school my parents read about in the New York Times where scraggly hippies lurked in the snow, I knew he was trying to put me at ease. Seeing just a hint of my reflection in the car window, my heart sank at how little I’d grown since my interview.

A friend with a deviated septum got an operation which involved breaking then taping down her nose, so I’d been torturing my own over the summer to make it look less dainty. Though I still bit my nails to the quick, I’d stopped turning my eyelids inside out like eye makeup. I no longer crossed my knees as if wearing a skirt and had even begun using my mother’s eyeliner to draw pubic hair, which made me feel older especially with a boner, but I still looked too pretty so I smoked cigarettes and pot, got drunk as often as I could and said, “shit” as I stared at the misfits crossing the road.

Though I felt ashamed using my arm behind my head to smush my nose against the window glass hoping to finally feel a crack which might swell it to a normal size, my parents had no idea what I was doing so I continued until tears welled up.

We were stuck at the light as a second bus of inmates with shopping bags trudged, shuffled and loop-dee-dood in front of us happily returning to their madhouse.

“Jesus,” my father groaned from behind his Ray-Bans as my mother locked her door and I recalled holding an electric vibrator to my friend Rory’s Jockey’s as he pretended to be too drunk to notice. Within days other kids were calling me fag and my departure for boarding school hadn’t come soon enough.

During my interview when after perusing a few of my drawings, the headmaster said I was an old soul, I knew I had him. I drew crazy things to keep people worried and was disappointed by how easily I’d elicited thje headmaster’s concern. When he said I wouldn’t exactly be following the footsteps of legions of boys heading north to typical prep schools, and Barlow was “a little different,” I gazed at the surrounding woods, figuring it might be an okay place to act tortured.

When my father told me I’d been accepted at two schools, I shrugged my shoulders and when he forced me to choose between the Barlow School and Buxton Academy, I’d mumbled, “Barlow.”

By the end of eighth grade I knew no matter where I went, I could wind up like the queer in our neighborhood who raised standard poodles if I wasn’t careful. Though the truth lurked in my subconscious like deviants I’d encountered at urinals in Grand Central Station, after eight years at boys school, I’d honed my navigational skills and appeared relatively normal in ways that mattered.

I played soccer, swore and acted like I preferred Camels to Marlboros. I figured I could handle anywhere but Barlow’s five hundred acres beckoned like the salt marshes once had near my neighborhood before they were filled in.. The further north I was exiled, the better the chances of getting lost and that suited my nature just fine.

When I overheard the headmaster, who wanted to speak to my father alone say the eerie vanishing points in all my drawings were concerning, my architect father leaned in.

“He knows perspective. Since seeing the Van Gogh movie, Jed wants everyone to be concerned about his mental health.”

“He’s no Kirk Douglas,” the headmaster quipped, causing my father to chuckle the way he had when his friend suggested I belonged at Weekie Watchie.

My father built me a go-cart I didn’t want, bought me skis I wouldn’t use and a grand piano I wouldn’t play unless he left the room. We betrayed each other so often we were less like father and son than competitive brothers, I’d learn forty years later in therapy.

I resented both my parents, regularly told them I hated them and acted like Helen Keller when they called my name, but sitting naked in the attic wrapped in sheer curtains gazing through a tiny window at how elegant and attractive they were taking tennis lessons from a sexy pro they’d hired, I hated myself for trying to make their lives as miserable as mine and vowed to do better after masturbating.

But holding my knees crouched in the corner of my room, trembling and flinching at my father’s relentless questioning, instead of breaking his heart, he left my room for the last time and within a few days announced I was going to boarding school.

Though smoking pot had taught me during bouts of paranoia to “keep it together,” I’d felt fragile listening to the headmaster discussing “programs for “sensitive teens.” “Personalized curriculums,” made me feel like a freak. I wondered if the teachers might be shrinks heading north as self-loathing returned with a vengeance.

When I’d first seen the snow-covered asylum on my way to interview, Harlem Valley hospital appeared abandoned. I’d imagined demented ghosts within its walls but seeing its fleshy residents up close in the September sun, I was reminded of a hunchback I’d read about in a moldy book I’d discovered in a clearing at the end of a path in a spongy saltmarsh.

Amid beer cans, used rubbers and torn underwear, I’d come across mouse-chewn copy of a paperback called “Candy” in a plastic bag underneath an overturned pan. My first time beating off was beside a falsie impaled on a stick while reading about the promiscuous tart who let looney doctors have their way with her.

Clearly I wasn’t the only one enjoying Candy’s moldy, well-worn pages and I felt my first orgasm imagining another local pervert making his way toward me through the reeds.

Back at the light, trying not to gawk at the freaks, the only way to stop thinking about how the asylum staff managed their resident’s carnal desires was to recall neighborhood kids under the streetlight yelling, “here comes the fag,” when I appeared.

Though masturbation increased my shame, orgasm it seemed was the only way to relieve it so I did it every day. Thinking about it was no help in the backseat so I pulled out my alto recorder which I could make sound like a plaintive mourning dove and began playing “Greensleeves.”

“Jesus Christ,” my mother grumbled, which made me switch to “Ode to Billie Joe” a song they liked, which neither of them had heard me play before.

My mother came from a musical family. My father dabbled and there were all kinds of instruments in our house. Despite refusing to take lessons, I could play any instrument by ear and taught myself my parent’s instruments in secret to make me seem more like a prodigy.

Noticing my boner had dissipated by the second verse, I stopped playing but the fit, dirty blond aid who’d rushed over to clean up the Ring Dings and given the bereft woman a hug reminded me of blue-eyed Rory Halifax.

When my next-door neighbor Rory who I might never see again because he was also being sent to boarding school, would tell me to come over, I’d often find him working out in his underwear.

Though we were the same age, Rory Halifax was way more mature and drank Bovril, for his muscles. Had I not been so distracted by how he filled out his Jockeys, I might’ve learned more about mind control from him because he was also into Norman Vincent Peale. He said he could control his thoughts and though I had no trouble turning good ones into bad, I was unable to do the opposite and though he’d offered to teach me I’d declined.

After years of pretending to ignore his showing off like some temptress in a 007 movie, I finally began to suspect what Rory was up to.

“Attitudes are more important than facts. Think defeat and you’re bound to feel defeated. Life is what we make of it,” he’d groan while doing reps like a cloistered priest until I began to realize it was me watching him that caused him to become turned on.

Though he acted oblivious, and I was being manipulated, I didn’t dare burst the bubble fearing a confrontation between us might seal our fate as homos. Ironically, rather than saying or doing anything, my ability to act nonplussed taught me a form of control that would come in handy my entire life.

But my mind was no match for bumpy roads and hard-ons were impossible to get rid of thinking about Rory so I reassembled my recorder and began playing the love theme from “Romeo and Juliet.” Staring out the window, wondering if life in the asylum renowned for its groundbreaking lobotomies would be any easier, my plaintive vibrato caused my annoyed mother to exhale.

After my father told me to, “Stop,” I put away my recorder and began biting loose hangnails and pulling them ’till they bled. When he turned the radio to a Bach violin sonata he’d heard me saw at in the attic, I knew he hadn’t completely given up on me. Though I politely asked my mother for a Kleenex for the blood, which forced her to dig around her purse and toss one back, unlike my father, I knew she had.

Three busloads of craven-looking residents with stained shirts and pants crossed before the light turned green but no mention of them pierced the deafening purr inside my father’s lacquered burlwood-trimmed Beemer as we resumed rocketing north.

I’d seen plenty of farmland each summer while being shipped off to vacation with other families. Though I didn’t like meeting strangers, I needed a break from my parents as much as they needed one from me. There were always field guides at vacation homes and matriarchs seemed to enjoy being asked where they were. I’d preferred identifying tree species and native vegetation to making awkward conversation and kept my knowledge to myself for fear of sounding like a nerd.

Technically no longer New England, Dutchess County, New York lacked the dense forests and stately colonial architecture of Connecticut and Massachusetts. There weren’t nearly as many Victorian farmhouses and leaning barns in New England. The Catskills were unlike the mountains of Vermont or New Hampshire and spruce forests of the Adirondacks were not the same as in Maine.

Familiar beech, birch, hickories, and maples surrounded working dairy farms in a way I couldn’t put my finger on until hitchhiking to California a year later, waiting for rides I could feel climactic influences the further west I got. Hours in any direction made a huge difference in vegetation and differences in architecture seemed equally influenced by old modes of travel.

The area west of the Connecticut Massachusetts border expressed in early maroon hedgerows of sassafras and blazing sumac. Boulder strewn woods separated stubbly cornfields between irregular hills. There were more shabby buildings and abandoned cars than I recalled from the winter before, and to the west higher mountain-like hills peeking in the distance reminded me of how miserable I must have been not to notice them.

The rising and falling irregular patchwork of farmland arranged around rivers and natural features reminded me of landscapes I’d seen in Europe.

There was much to see in the openness as we raced due north speeding past muddy cow pastures, verdant hayfields past mobile homes and rusted out vehicles while listening to Glen Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, I imagined Rory Halifax heading towards Boston with his enthusiastic parents in their Rolls discussing his bright future at Phillips Academy and Bovril.

“By 1955, the Christian Science-based Viewpoint School’s admissions began to flag, so it was re-named Barlow in honor of its beloved founder, Sunny Barlow,” Mr. Halifax read to my father while Rory and I were in their pool diving with masks and flippers like mermaids.

“Without spiritual inuendo to depress enrollment, Barlow’s open-minded legacy makes it an innovative leader among progressive schools in this country,” we heard while catching our breath.

My heart raced as my father announced, “Here we are,” before veering off route 22. Not remembering how remote Barlow was, we’d been winding slowly along a lovely back road for ten minutes when we passed a barefoot hippie girl picking wildflowers just like in the school catalogue. Reminded of the picture of Phillips Academy Rory showed me, other than its single columned tower, the rest of his unimpressive brick prep school planted within a scattering of manicured lawns resembled Harlem Valley. Wondering if Barlow might be too remote, I noticed myself retracing our way there in case I had to escape when I stopped.

With dark lush woods and goldenrod billowing beside the dirt road, it was hard to panic. I’d no longer be forced to wear ties and I was on the verge of counting my blessings when an enormous pastel hillside framed by shadowy blue forests rose from of the surrounding landscape like a giant green wave. I swooned as if watching the opening credits of a Million Dollar Movie until not knowing what else to do, I felt my jaw drop.

“My God,” my mother said. “Is that it?”

“Yep,” I heard my father say, between the pulsing in my ears.

Near the bottom of the hill, various colonial structures surrounding a huge arched-roof barn would’ve resembled a dairy farm. If not for an imposing modern structure in the foreground, the whole thing looked like exaggerated landscape paintings I’d seen in museums.

“There’s the library,” my father said, having met the architect of the modern structure. A single path led between steep fields on either side to the hill’s peak where Andrew Wyeth-like buildings dwarfed in distance looked like they might be part of a separate farm.

My face flushed with every turn my father made on the way to my dormitory. I’d hated the word “dorm” ever since reading about them in Catcher in the Rye and unlike Holden Caufield, I felt like an embarrassed little boy being chauffeured by my parents to Woodstock.

With all the hair and colorful ripped clothing, it made me extremely uncomfortable not being able to tell males from females so I pretended to be searching for something near my feet in order not to see or be seen.

I thought I might throw up when my father said, “Here we are,” as the car came to a stop. I felt myself welling up until my mother added, “At last,” causing me to regain my composure. I’d need all the steel I had after dealing with her all these years. I’d use it to get by and for once I was glad she’d toughened me up.

Despite my resolve, all I could focus on was how embarrassed and immature I looked compared to the shirtless teenage boys and bra-less girls in peasant-blouses we’d seen driving up, so I fixed my gaze on the school pond until imagining everyone skinny dipping I re-closed my eyes, imagining what persona I’d use to keep anyone from getting to know me.

Looking tough, even if I could pull it off wouldn’t work to keep all these hippies at arm’s length, but acting like a tortured artist might, I thought, parked outside something called, “The New Dorm.”

Just like everywhere designed for boys, I imagined its bathrooms wouldn’t lock. I considered never taking a shower again until remembering, I played the piano and could draw a little when I wasn’t hiding my bitten nails or random boners and was already rehearsing a poetic persona when my father who was stretching his legs motioned for me to get out of the car like I was his dog.

Only a few years old, the weathered façade of the “New Dorm,” as it was called, looked as worn out as I felt at fourteen. The depressing grey structure also appeared oddly displaced which was hard to achieve tucked in among the hodgepodge of architectural styles on the twelve-hundred-foot hill. Scanning its woodpeckered trim and peeling paint, I doubted the school was too busy being progressive to paint or even name it. As an architect, my father was an astute judge of functionality. He was admired for his taste and talent for making others’ choices seem wrong and like him, I was right about most things.

He liked the New Dorm in grainy photographs, but up close after saying, “Jesus,” rather than criticizing its aroma, oppressive interior paneling, and depressing narrow rooms, he said, “It’s a dorm for God’s sake,” as if addressing a roomful of investors who’d totally missed the point.

My mother, who was used to her rare opinions being squelched stood unevenly on the well-worn stairs.

“This is,” she said.

“Fine,” my father said, because when it came to the hierarchical importance of things, he always had the final word.

“It’s a dorm for God’s sake,” he insisted, not meaning to yank down a shower curtain before wandering the claustrophobic quads searching for my numbered cell.

Though my mother said she hated him finishing her sentences, she used getting steamrolled as an excuse to drink. They probably should have split up long before, but they were raised immune to basic family life, to each other’s company. Though their war was between them, I was sympathetic to both sides and assured my petty parents I’d be fine.

“Dick,” a voice said incredulously.

When my father answered, “Fish” and the two men embraced laughing, I got nervous. The only hug I remember from my father was when he’d crack my rib squeezing me the following summer before dropping me off on I-80 to hitchhike across the country, and that hadn’t happened yet, so I was wondering why the two appeared so amorous when I recognized the man’s laugh.

Wondering what my father had seen in him the summer before, I remember him telling my mother not to drink too much while preparing tumblers to saunter over to the party with.

“Don’t talk too much,” my mother jabbed back at his tendency to take over.

“Fuck you, Dick,” my mother slurred, stumbling back to the party through the dewy 2:00 am yard.

“For Christ’s sake Ruby, he was the most interesting guy I’ve met in years. What are you insinuating?”

The following day, even Rory who’d overheard the party and wasn’t crass or cruel, mentioned how everyone had been whispering about Peter Fish and my father who were ignoring everyone else the entire night.

And now by “kismet,” Peter Fish kept insisting, he wound up not only the head of my dorm but “we would be writing,” he said, announcing he’d be at my service as my English teacher. As an undiagnosed dyslexic, I’d become used to cheating and plagiarized a few of the fancier sentences on my application. Peter Fish’s delight to reunite with my father and meet me was so nearly hysterical, I had to stare at the floor when he talked about my writing.

With his corduroys, rakish mustache, and slicked back hair, he could’ve passed for a standard academic if not for the vein of brilliance bulging down his forehead when he said, “A cosmic enterprise, this Barlow experiment,” motioning as if he was conducting the world around him. “Have you seen the Art Barn?”

My channeled mother looked lost sitting patiently in Fish’s bohemian apartment but slightly less so when a long-boned, bra-less woman with a mousy pixie cut entered saying, “I’m Lee,” while extending her hand. As serene as her husband Peter wasn’t, she added, “his wife,” as if neither knew what to make of each other.

“Ruby,” my mother said almost curtsying.

Peter rose introducing us with a flourish, “Dick Katzman and their brilliant son Jed, and this,” he said, bowing to the large red dog that followed Lee in, “is Molly.”

“We’ve been for a run,” Lee said, drying the lovely dog’s fox-red fur as the goddess-looking creature lapped from a water dish.

Despite knowing dog breeds from years pretending I was one, I’d never seen a red Shepherd before. Her dark eyes, intelligent expression and ears were pure shepherd but unlike a guard dog, when Molly came to me with her laid-back ears, sat at my feet and presented me her paw like Lassie, I knew the Fishes were actually good people as dogs never lie, and was ready for my parents to leave.

“Well, you guys,” I said, with Molly leaning on me. “I better start this adventure,” which caused my parents to glance at each other and rise like proud robots.

Rather than waving vigorously or like an orphan as they drove away, I didn’t clench my jaw or pretend my arm was broken wishing they’d wave back when they didn’t burst into flames or shed a tear. But what felt like seconds after the popcorn gravel popped under their tires they vanished like they couldn’t wait to get away.

My father might’ve slammed his BMW into reverse and yelled, if I gave them the finger when my mother didn’t fling open her door and rush back to hug me. It would’ve felt better if I’d known then they were heading directly for a bar, but I’d wait forty years to find that out too.

Watching them drive away was nothing new. By age fourteen, I was used to being dropped off for extended periods with strangers, so I turned to evaluate my new surroundings where I hoped to waste no more time in agony or be astoundingly depressed, with my parents long gone, I removed my shoes.