Major Conflict Read Online Free PDF Page A

was feeling for Greg was nothing at all, really, that I was completely straight after all. There was simply no room in the self-image I was creating for the feelings Greg was stirring up in me.
    But I was learning fast that it wasn’t something I could control entirely. I found myself spending more and more time with Greg, going into work on my days off just to see him, going out with him after work for drinks, spending even more time with him on the phone at night. At work, when we were alone, I’d massage his shoulders and back playfully; one day, as we were sitting on the OTB counter at Grand Central, I lifted up his hand without thinking and looked at it, then took hold of it and tucked our locked hands between us. From that day on, though it made me nearly sick with fear, this was something we always did there, on the closed OTB counter at Grand Central; we secretly held hands while he smoked his cigarettes and I chewed my Starbursts.
    It began to feel almost like an addiction, something I was forever trying to stop. Just when I would get to a place where I’d feel certain that what I was feeling for Greg was simply the bond of male friendship, I’d say something or do something that went past the boundaries of simple friendship. After hanging out upstairs at Grand Central, we’d usually go down to the number 7 train below, where he’d wait for the westbound train to Times Square, and I’d wait for the eastbound train to Queens. One night as my train pulled in I jumped up from the bench Greg and I were sharing on the subway platform, planted a kiss firmly on his left cheek, and then rushed into the train just as the doors were beginning to close. As the train pulled away I looked through the graffiti-scrawled window to see Greg still sitting on the bench, looking somewhat stunned, one hand pressed up against the kissed cheek. A few nights later, standing in Rockefeller Center, the RCA Building lit grandly in front of us, I suddenly found myself grabbing Greg’s shoulder and turning him toward me and saying, “I like you. I want you to be my pal.” Later on that night, as we passed under the marquee of the Guild Theater on Fiftieth Street, Greg turned to me and said with a smile, “I like you, too, Jeff. I want you to be my pal.” And I said, “Ah, c’mon, you like me more than that,” and Greg’s face fell, he seemed embarrassed, then a little angry, and without thinking I pulled my ROTC pin from the front pocket of my jeans and handed it to him. “I want you to have this,” I said, and all the anger and embarrassment rushed from his face and he smiled again and hugged me.
    I didn’t realize it at the time, but this act of giving my ROTC pin to Greg, of connecting the two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of my life in one simple action, was the closest I would come to uncompartmentalizing my life, of bringing together the soldier and the man, for several years.
    But the ROTC pin wasn’t enough, of course, for Greg. Having come out at seventeen, leaving Pittsburgh to come to New York, Greg was light-years ahead of me on the gay curve. He was ready to have a relationship, and he became increasingly less tolerant when I’d suddenly close up and continue to insist that I was straight. I sensed that he’d fallen in love with me and that this love gave him an almost Herculean patience when it came to my being totally honest about my sexuality. But even that had its limit, and one night near the end of April everything snapped and he reached that limit.
    There’d been some talk at work about us, and I’d gotten paranoid. I was working the twelve-to-eight shift, he was working the nine-to-five, and when I came in at noon I ran into him taking a smoke break in the back staircase that led up to the sales floor. I told him we had to cool it, we couldn’t hang around each other so much, and then I told him that should the subject of