In One Person

the service-to-my-country part come into the story?” the studio exec in the light-colored clothing had asked Alice. I was a little confused by the question; I thought I’d written an anti-Vietnam novel.
    But in the exec’s opinion, the reason the closeted gay protagonist doesn’t check the “homosexual tendencies” box is that he feels an obligation to serve his country—
not
that he’s so afraid to come out, he would rather risk dying in an unjust war!
    In this studio exec’s opinion, “our voice-over character” (he meant my first-person narrator) admits to homosexual tendencies because he’s a coward; the exec even said, “We should get the idea that he’s faking it.” The
faking-it
idea was Mr. Sharpie’s substitute for
my
idea, in the novel—namely, that my first-person narrator is being brave to come out!
    “Who
is
this guy?” I asked Alice. No one had made me an offer for the film rights to my novel; I still owned those rights. “It sounds like someone is writing a script,” I said.
    Alice’s back was to me. “There’s no script,” she mumbled. “This guy just has a lot of questions about what you’re like to
deal
with,” Alice said.
    “I don’t know the guy,” I told her. “What’s
he
like to ‘deal with,’ Alice?”
    “I was trying to spare you meeting this guy, Bill,” was all Alice said. We were living in Santa Monica; she was always the driver, so she was sparing me the driving, too. I just stayed in the apartment and wrote. I could walk to Ocean Avenue and see the homeless people—I could run on the beach.
    What was it Herm Hoyt had said to me about the duck-under? “You hit it and run—you know how to run, don’tcha?” the old coach had said.
    I started to run in Santa Monica, in ’69. I would soon be twenty-seven; I was already writing my second novel. It had been eight years since Miss Frost and Herm Hoyt had showed me how to hit a duck-under; I was probably a little rusty. The running suddenly seemed like a good idea.
    Alice drove me to the meeting. There were four or five studio execs gathered around an egg-shaped table in a glassy building in Beverly Hills, with near-blinding sunlight pouring through the windows, but only Mr. Sharpie spoke.
    “This is William Abbott, the novelist,” Mr. Sharpie said, introducing me; it was probably my extreme self-consciousness, but I thought the
novelist
word made all the execs uneasy. To my surprise, Mr. Sharpie was a slob. The
Sharpie
word wasn’t a compliment to how the guy dressed; it referred to the brand of waterproof pen he twirled in his hand. I hate those permanent markers. You can’t really
write
with them—they bleed through the page; they make a mess. They’re only good for making short remarks in the wide margins of screenplays—you know, manageable words like “This is shit!” or “Fuck this!”
    As for where the “Mr. Pastel” nickname came from—well, I couldn’t see it. The guy was an unshaven slob dressed all in black. He was one of those execs who was trying to look like an artist of some indeterminate kind; he wore a sweat-stained black jogging suit over a black T-shirt, with black running shoes. Mr. Pastel looked very fit; since I’d just started running, I could see at a glance he ran harder than I did. Golf wasn’t his game—it would have been insufficient exercise for him.
    “Perhaps Mr. Abbott will tell us his thoughts,” Mr. Sharpie said, twirling his waterproof pen.
    “I’ll tell you when I might take seriously the idea of service to my country,” I began. “When local, state, and federal legislation, which currently criminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, is repealed; when the country’s archaic anti-sodomy laws are overturned; when psychiatrists stop diagnosing me and my friends as clinically abnormal, medically incompetent freaks in need of ‘rehabilitation’; when the media stops representing us as sissy, pansy, fairy, child-molesting
perverts
! I would actually like to have children one day,” I said, pausing to look at Alice, but she had lowered her head and sat at the table with one hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes. She was wearing jeans and a man’s blue-denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up—her customary uniform. In the sunlight, her hairy arms sparkled.
    “In short,” I continued, “I might take seriously the idea of service to my country when my country begins to demonstrate that it gives a shit about me!” (I had