The Two Kinds of Decay

The Admiral’s Nephew

Except for the very richest and a few others, Harvard upperclassmen live in one of twelve residential houses.

When a large group of homosexuals from my class were assigned to live in a historically preppy house, it was decided that the group would attend the notoriously conservative Eliot House Spring Fête in drag. A friend to the downtrodden, I had to find a tuxedo to wear.

Through a network of teenaged idealists, a tuxedo appeared. It belonged to a classmate whose family’s roots predated the American Revolution and who had attended an excellent private school in New York.

The jacket was navy blue and double-breasted and had gold buttons, and it had belonged to my classmate’s uncle, an admiral.

Though a few times that year I smoked marijuana with a clique of elite private school alums, in their dorm rooms that were nothing like mine — I remember a freestanding antique silver ashtray, and I remember some of the richest students had had their suite condemned for its filth — I knew our lives were already irreconcilable and that I would only ever be a tourist in theirs. And because I knew I was a tourist, I quietly gathered my small knowledge of the natives’ ways and left scant trace of myself.

The lending of the tuxedo was a gesture of superb faith that we — the awake and living of the class of 1996, whether we had come from privilege or not — were, at least for a moment, of one voice. The lending of the tuxedo was a favor by a stranger, an intimate gesture made to benefit the general welfare of homosexuals.

Three years later, my suitemate, who had both kinds of friends, from both private and public schools, asked me whether I would be willing to help the admiral’s nephew.

The nephew had enrolled in a video-making course, and his assignment was to make an edited movie of a process that involved the body. My suitemate had already watched me flush and dress my line by then, and she knew a picture of that would make a better movie than a picture of someone shaving his head, or putting on or removing clothing.

I don’t like it when we refer to anything other than a corpse as the body.

But when my suitemate asked me if I would permit the admiral’s nephew to videotape me flushing and dressing my line, I said yes.

While I had my central line I wore athletic bras because they were the only ones that didn’t squeeze the wound site, and it was easy just to shrug out of one side of the bra before making the sterile field and changing the dressing.

I was less concerned that a handsome rich boy was going to see part of my right breast than I was ashamed he would see the hump of fat on my pimply shoulders and think I was a girl who not only had gone to public school but who had acne and was fat.

I wanted to tell him that the steroids had given me the acne. The steroids had made me fat. And the steroids had made me go to public school.

But in the end I just told him I had a rash on my shoulders and that it was from the medicine I had to take. He asked me if I’d like my face omitted from the final edit, and I said yes.

He gave me a copy of the tape but I’ve never watched it.