Hold Tight Gently by Martin Duberman Read Free Book Online Page A

baby
                             and pay the rent
                             for an apartment
                             which creaks too/to
                             syncopated/sad rhythms
                             and a baby breathes
                             to the rhythms
                             and cries syncope tears
                             of want/inquiet
                             during a very Black night . . .
    If Essex began writing seriously at seventeen, his sexual explorations had begun some years earlier. By age fourteen, he’d had his first sexual encounter that went beyond the usual “messing around” among neighborhood youngsters. At a convenience store near his home, a white male clerk in his midforties named George had been whispering in his ear for weeks about how much he wanted to suck his dick, how good he was at it, how many others in the neighborhood had let him, and so on. Essex later recalled that he knew from the start that his answer would be yes, and finally he said it. Then the sucking led to fucking and soon Essex would regularly mount George early in the morning before the store opened or at George’s house after it closed—George’s mongrel dog watching the action nonchalantly. The sex between them went on for nearly two years, with Essex finally ending it out of fear that it was only a matter of time before they’d be caught. 9
    In D.C., Essex attended Ballou Senior High School, just a few blocks from his home, and had a part-time job downtown as a file clerk. He was by then well aware of his sexual attraction to men but realized, “as a way of protecting myself from being identified as a faggot around the school,” that he needed always to have a girlfriend. “It would be my luck,” he’d later write, “to date girls who were ‘good,’ girls who were not going to experiment with sex beyond kissing and fondling, and even that was often only tolerated at a minimum if tolerated at all.”
    During his senior year in Ballou High School in 1975, a more resonant encounter took place when his journalism instructor assigned him to interview the local Episcopal minister of a church known for providing daily meals for the down-and-out. Essex called the church for an appointment, but the man who answered the phone told him that the minister was out. He then chatted pleasantly with Essex, asking him why he wanted to see the minister. Essex found the man’s voice, a cadenced, leathery baritone, enticing, and when he boldly suggested that Essex “come on up here and meet me ,” a startled—and turned-on—Essex required little coaxing. 10
    The voice on the phone turned out to be attached to a tall, broad-shouldered man in his late forties with salt-and-pepper hair. He’d oncebeen a promising professional boxer, but an automobile accident had cut short his career. His jacket, Essex later wrote, “constrained obvious arm muscles and an expansive chest,” and “his hands were thick and strong.” The man, as it turned out, was a volunteer at the church in one of its community programs, and he gave Essex a courtly, unhurried tour.
    Perhaps too unhurried; like most seventeen-year-old boys, Essex had (in his words), “raging hormones and an embarrassing erection.” When the older man finally closed and locked a heavy wooden door in one of the unoccupied rooms and suddenly said, “Take down your pants . . . I want to suck your dick,” Essex eagerly complied. “Orgasm and high-spirited ecstasy” followed, and the two continued to see each other for nearly two years. Essex would borrow his mother’s royal blue Dodge sedan “to study at the library” and the two would rendezvous. And more than sex was involved, though that continued to be passionate.
    The older man turned