hot springs

It's 1968 and i'm eligible for a draft deferment if i teach shcool or join the Peace Corps. terrified of Viet Nam, of killing or being killed or of being a shitty teacher, i opt for the Peace Corps (Korea) but get the boot half way through training. the shrink diagnoses me as a confrontational personality that won't cut it in a non-confrontational society like Korea. i would be the classic ugly American. my next try was for a teaching deferment. through Yale i land a job as a special class/art teacher in a one-street town called Moosup (as in 'there's a moose up the river'), Connecticut. i last 8 months. i fall in love with one of my students, E. he lives across the street from my boarding house in a nearly-falling-into-the-river, two story shack with his mom, her boyfriend(s) and 6 brothers and sisters. by winter, i am sleeping in his bed every single night. no one minds. we are tentative physically. i get no sleep and tip-toe out in the morning, shoes dangling from two fingers, rush across Main Street, dress for school and get picked up by the football coach, my heart in vertigo. Moosup Junior High is not eton or Exeter (where i imagine boys slept with boys and/or teachers for centuries as a right of passage and part of the curriculum). of course this is bullshit. i'm working a public school in a tiny town with tiny minds. E will be found out, shamed or worse. god knows what might happen to me. i decide the best thing for everyone is to skip town. i ride to Philly on my Kawasaki 650, depressed and weakly suicidal. when i call E up, twenty years later, his son answers: 'dad's out,' he says. i tell him who i am, how i knew his dad and before i can finish explaining the kid shouts, 'Rick!? from Moosup?!' like i'm some long lost hero, back from traversing the globe, the person his father told him about. when E takes the phone, he tells me that i wouldn't like him now. that he has a pot belly and isn't 'that way' anymore. he says we'd been good with each other then and are still so today. maybe we'll get a beer if he comes up north. but this conversation occurs long after i try, only one short year after Moosup, to take a second crack at teaching, this time in a co-ed boarding school in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. what was i thinking? sure enough, three months down the road i have 'those feelings' again, this time for K, my english student. we spend hours together, get messed up on Robitussin, weed and take long walks in the snow, the electricity of high emotion and laughter bouncing off the hills. sometimes i lie in his lower bunk, he in the upper we hold hands top to bottom. not saying a word, smiling. we drive to the top of a hill, take off our clothes and slip into the hot springs, floating there, at peace and forgetting school, job, drama, age difference (i am 21, he's 16) and thrive in the moment of our friendship, close, a bit in love. it is a rare, psychedelic oasis on top of a Colorado peak and though we never 'do anything', i'm 'caught', accused of sleeping with boys AND girls and fired. they shunt me off to a motel where i drop acid and wait until one of my teacher friends sneaks K down to see me one last time. we hold each other, cry some and then, next day, he goes back to school and i take the bus to Denver for my draft physical, acid high and scared to death. i flunk. i have letters from two shrinks that are conclusive. i am both 'suicidal AND homicidal', a 4F. this was the ignominious end to both my last stand as a teacher and dodging bullets in Nam. i write K long letters about everything, missing him. i guess they were love letters. the headmaster reads them aloud to the student body at lunch in the cafeteria embarrassing my friend and dooming our relationship. i try to repair the damage by driving to Santa Barbara and waiting for him when he flies home for Christmas. but when he arrives he doesn't want to see me. it had been too much to bear, the public humiliation. it is a long, amphetamine drive home. i suppose, even as i was terrified and partly ashamed of everything that went down, it was time to take seriously the idea that i might become that most wonderful, infamous identity: artist/musician/homo.