Composing a Further Life

on me growing up,” he said. “It’s odd that one year of difference in development between kids can leave you sort of … For a long time I thought of myself as deficient in handling baseballs and hitting and stuff. When I turned out finally to realize I was gay, I wondered if that was part of it. I was always comparing myself to Larry and Jerry, and they were a year older …”
    “And they kept being a year older,” I commented. “It doesn’t stop.”
    “And they were always … I mean, there are comparisons … growing up. There were a number of boys in the neighborhood who were, say, four or five years older, and they were doing incredible things, and I didn’t realize how unusual this was until much later. They would dig holes in the ground to make these incredible hideouts or build tree houses. Then when we would try to do it, of course, our things didn’t work very well. One of them, Jim, finally went off and became an engineer, ended up living in Sacramento. He was very clever and ingenious, and we just thought that’s what older guys did.”
    Dan was his parents’ oldest child and, because of his mother’s continuing ill health, carried a great deal of the responsibility in the family. One of his early duties was bringing in coal for heating and removing buckets of ashes. The family had an old-fashioned icebox, for which they bought blocks of ice that slowly melted. “If you didn’t drain it, it would run over,” Dan explained, “and that was always a mess. You had to be very careful. So those were my jobs. I was doing this as a first and second grader. And I’m looking at kids now, and they don’t seem to have that same responsibility. You couldn’t just dump the ashes all over, and you were supposed not to drip the water. And it must have been fairly heavy. I’m saying ‘must have been’ because I don’t have any sense of having been imposed upon to do this or being forced to labor. It was your job and you did it.”
    Later on, when the family took in two cousins whose mother had run away, Dan took over the laundry, with mountains of ironing, and the cooking, with his mother giving instructions from her bed. “My father was kind of useless on this kind of stuff,” Dan told me. “It was no big deal. He wasn’t really absent, but it was not his thing to do anything with Mother, I mean to talk about family and stuff like that. And later in life, I never really connected with my father. Not like we avoided each other, but we never did advice. But my mother would talk to me about her family and so forth because she had no one else to talk to.” And Dan would take care of her as well as the house. “So this little boy was—I became her confidant a little too early, I think. It didn’t seem to warp me exactly, but it left me with a little too much knowledge at an early age.”
    Dan had become excited about music early on and sang his first solo, “Beneath the cross of Jesus,” in the local Baptist church while he was in first grade. “I had one of those amazing soprano voices. The church had a really good pastor and youth program. Religion was very important to me at that time, and I suppose I got saved and so on.” Dan paused in the conversation from time to time to sing a few bars of a piece of music he had referred to, almost conversationally, now in a grown-up tenor. In fourth grade, he started piano lessons, which he paid for himself by delivering papers for thirty cents a day. In addition to music, he loved reading. At the same time, he was beginning to learn about his own body and its pleasures. “I became aware of my sexuality much earlier than I think most kids did,” he said. “I was masturbating and playing games with the kids in the neighborhood, doctor and stuff, in third grade. I think I was precocious, because when I talk to other people, they say this didn’t happen to them until sixth or seventh grade.”
    By seventh grade, Dan and another boy were vying to be substitute Sunday school organist, and the job went to the other boy, whose parents had made significant donations to the church. “That was my first hit of music and politics,” Dan said ruefully. Later he took up the saxophone, working off the installment payments himself and joining the band. Between the band and the choir, participating in a lot of inter-school events in different towns, he told me, “you got an experience of doing really complicated music with the best singers.”
    When he