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Stonewall: Stories of Gay Liberation 85

For months she had lain wasting away with cancer in the depths
of white sheets. He looked down at her remembering how all through
his youth she had sized him up and encouraged him saying, “At least
you’re tall.” She warned him that no girl likes a short man. “Short
men,” she had said, “are impossible to deal with.” She should have
known. Robert’s father was short. But Robert had felt tall, standing
next to her shrinking form. For an hour at the beginning of her last
week, he had stood by her bed with the plastic tube of the intrave-
nous fluid pinched tight between his thumb and forefinger. Mercy
or no mercy, he had hoped to kill her, but his hand had cramped
even before the nurse almost caught him.
In Floyd’s piano room a large cardboard box grated heavily across
the gritty floor. Robert heard Floyd say, “Ah, there it is.”
“I suppose they do,” Robert called to Floyd who was dragging
the huge box into the shop itself.
“You suppose who does what?” Floyd panted with the exertion,
but his face was triumphant.
“I suppose they do put out their own kids’ eyes.” Robert had
read more than he even wanted hanging out in libraries, slicing pages
out of magazines. “There’s all those operas about Greek plays where
the kids get turned into mincemeat. Some parents kill their young.
Maybe they’re no more cruel than nature is cruel. People wouldn’t
pay good money to go see that sort of thing if they weren’t natural ly
interested.”
Floyd began to dig into his box. “Now, don’t you laugh at me,”
Floyd said. He was matter-of-fact. “I have these treasures I don’t
share with everyone.”
“I understand,” Robert said. But he did not under stand as much
as he thought he did, and he was about to understand a whole lot
more.
The box was neatly packed with magazines, picture albums, and
loose photos of the kind most adult men keep to themselves. At first
glance, Robert Place knew, almost faster in his groin than his head,
what kind of illustrations these were. They were the kind Robert had
tried all his life to avoid, but could not. They were the kind who
©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved
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