We were all eager to spend time together but at the same time we were terrified at the idea of opening up, revealing the truth about ourselves. Pranks and crude jokes were the best way we had to conceal our inner life, drowning it in a vulgar laugh that was always slightly awkward and embarrassed and defensive. It was in fact much simpler to show off your penis in the locker room after gym class by swinging it like a lasso than to display any other undefended part of your personality. The crudeness cauterized wounds or prevented them from being inflicted. Sports were the ideal activity for this purpose, they allowed us to spend time together without obliging anyone to open up in any real way. In fact, by playing sports with our classmates and pals, we developed a supermuscle of control. In order to protect ourselves from the risk of potential confessions (the kind of stuff you’d expect from young ladies), we preferred to do things instead of talking about them, and in sports there’s next to no chitchat at all, a game is the kind of thing that after an hour and a half or two hours of insane intensity, thank heavens, comes to an end, so that you’ve given your all without actually giving anything specific or useful, the most burning commitment over the shortest period of time—and in fact it has many things in common with sex. That is, it allows you to emerge still virgin and uncontaminated. Risking your physical safety in sports ensures that you preserve your psychological safety. Male locker-room camaraderie, in other words, has very little in common with intimacy; instead it’s something midway between vaudeville, with its rat-a-tat volley of gags and bullshit, a lineup of suspects, and a conference table surrounded by generals with maps and charts before or after a battle. The things that are said there have the muscular character of an exhibition, and the rhythm of a variety show.

Unfortunately, true intimacy doesn’t exist in a partial or moderate form: it’s always, by its very definition, excessive. Made up of vertical lunges. Contaminating, like saliva in French kisses. That’s why we feared it, because we dimly sensed that you can never quite recover from contact with it, you can no longer veil what has once been unveiled.

Rather than opening up to your pals, then, it was necessary to conquer them, or, at least, stand up to them. Hold your own in public in such a way as to avoid being riddled with indiscreet questions. What it required were such gifts as a powerful or strident voice, the capacity to tell jokes and anecdotes (a good memory was fundamental if you wanted to keep stock of your repertory), quick repartee so that you could offer a clever or filthy riposte to any mockery, the ability to lay your audience low in helpless laughter or else make them shut their mouths with a sharp glare. What’s more, sports, as practiced intensively at SLM, were a reasonably effective bulwark against the threat of girls, or at least the thought of them, seeing that there weren’t any in the surrounding area. The only individual of the female gender in the entire school, as I’ve previously mentioned, was a woman who sold pizza at recess. Still, even a vague thought can be every bit as unsettling as a physical presence and, in some cases, even more intrusive. I, for one, can say that I’ve never felt females to be so incredibly close to me as the times that all I saw on all sides were other males: in my years at SLM, during my mandatory stint in the army, and in prison, I could easily swear that they were physically present, that’s just how close I felt them, intensely close, upon me, inside me. It’s like the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor, claiming that he’s a hermaphrodite; “What are you saying, are you sure of this?” the doctor replies. “Let me take a look…” Then, after an examination, the doctor reassures him: “Trust me, you’re fully male, perfectly normal…” “No, doctor, the thing is,” the guy insists, in desperation, “I have a pussy, more than one in fact, right here!”—and he slaps his hand against his forehead.

Nothing remained to us, in other words, but mental projections that we’d try to exorcise with chaotic basketball games, hikes, push-ups on wooden handles, kicking balls back and forth on dusty red fields, raising long trailing clouds behind us with every galloping charge, like in the cartoons with the racing ostrich. Some went so far as to try heading a seven-pound medicine ball. With actual flesh-and-blood girls, in any case, we wouldn’t have begun to know what to do, what to say, it was an unknown ritual, one that most of us would learn, if anything, by testing out and rehearsing an array of phrases and acts borrowed from our older brothers like good suits, but only after we’d graduated. Once we were expelled into the real world. Only a mechanically applied ceremonial protocol would allow us to get over the shyness we’d accumulated over years of dress rehearsals.

People can’t begin to imagine what a fragile fabric male shyness is, they never seem to make the effort, except perhaps to make fun of it. And they never consider, even more than the stumbling block of shyness itself, just how mortifying it is to have to make recourse to various stratagems to find one’s way out of it: in pathetic little vignettes, the movies and TV have retailed the tryouts, a boy in front of a mirror rehearsing his lines, as he plans to invite a girl to dance, the declarations of love uttered to one’s own image in the mirror by gawky guys who then shut their eyes and wrap their arms around their own shoulders and kiss themselves, but all this is strictly to get a laugh out of the audience, while male shyness really does have a dark, morbid side, demented and mad, which can lead variously to murder and suicide, forget about sophomoric comedies with Jack Lemmon or Adam Sandler! When you feel as if you’re being strangled … that the air won’t reach your lungs … and a devastating wave of desire rises to the verge of an anxiety attack, and yet it still can’t breach the levee and transform itself into action. You don’t lift a finger. Your voice dies in your throat. And she impatiently turns away, walks across the room, starts talking to other boys …

Even idiotic pranks like taking a classmate’s underwear, left in the locker room during swim lessons, and drenching them thoroughly (this was a trick played frequently on Arbus, and I confess that a couple of times I myself was a member of the gang of pranksters), played a role in this process of negotiation. These were moves on the chessboard of our identities, constantly under construction. In this way, we negotiated the fear of being taken for faggots. We negotiated the desire, however small or large that desire might be, to be faggots without letting it be seen. We negotiated the rank that we were to be given in the hierarchy, where the classmate forced to wring out his sopping underwear was dropped a level or two, and if subjected sufficiently to cruel leg-pulling and ass-kicking, might sink to the very bottom of the barrel, and even remain there, a permanent pariah. To become the target of ridicule, in fact, constituted our greatest fear, a fear that we negotiated with ourselves, each of us splitting into a dual personality, at once victim and agent of the same persecution, to see which of the two personalities would be the first to collapse, the faggot within me or the real man? The serial killer or the naked girl in the shower? When you’re an adolescent, it’s impossible not to be both things at once. We negotiated our way through that rising tide of pointless, vulgar words and a barricade of rude and repetitive gestures pushed well beyond the bounds of the absurd (pinches, knuckle-grinders, nape-smacks, accompanied by shrill whistles and neighing, goat-nips and donkey-chomps, soldier-slaps, unannounced smacks to the testicles), struggling the whole time with our aggressivity. Put like that, I wouldn’t be able to say whether we tamed those aggressive impulses or became enslaved to them like so many robots.

Since all of us were equally revolted by the thought of playing the part of the victim, we had to study, like so many would-be professional executioners, how to lop off a head, hurrying feverishly lest our own head be lopped off first. Honestly, I never really believed in even a tenth of the jerky wisecracks or extravagant boasting I spouted back then, in retaliation to those spouted by my pals and classmates, and I’m not saying that I realize that only now: I already knew it at the time. And yet, like so many others, aspiring as I did to be like everybody else and, when it came right down to it, succeeding—I said those things. I spouted them. Well, what’s so bad about that? You were in trouble if you missed a chance to make a rhyme with words ending in “-ock” or “-ucker” or “-ussy” or “-unt.” They just made your mouth itch at the chance. We also negotiated these succulent opportunities to show off our poetic or creative sides. To show some wit—wit, which delights in whistling through obscenities. Though none of us were born to the working classes, the low humor of our filthy nursery rhymes challenged the finest creations of an age-old tradition, in general, and Roman tradition, in particular, based on long, filthy lists and a ruthless vision of life, a cavalcade of cynicism and ass-fucking.

But foul language made us feel like good kids. Why not, a genuine community of good kids. It’s often said of people with dubious reputations, even of criminals, that deep down they’re good kids. If you scratch the surface, deep down you’ll find a good kid. What is it exactly that makes a young man a “good kid”? What are we talking about? About someone who’s always loyal to his buddies and ready to do what they’re willing to do without hesitation, to follow them anywhere, even when we’re talking about deplorable deeds, because if he tried to pull out at the last minute, then what kind of a buddy would he be, what would be so good, after all, about this good kid? A man is judged by the things he does, not by the things he says, so if someone doesn’t happen to get the chance to show what he’s capable of, he runs the risk of remaining a child, in the sedentary society we live in, stingy as it is with special moments. That’s why sports were invented, that is, a rapid succession of acid tests that can be administered two or three times a week, even at school, without having to wait for a war to break out or an apartment building to catch on fire in order to test those who are involved, to test their courage, their emotional control, and their willingness to endure pain. With the fairly pedestrian excuse of physical exercise, improving their posture, etc.: and at SLM they’d understood all this perfectly, to the point that they outfitted the school with a very modern gymnasium, and a pool where half of the Quartiere Trieste now splashes and swims (we’ll talk about that later on), as well as a sports center with basketball courts and soccer fields on Via Nomentana, where every afternoon buses full of shouting kids would pull up, and then leave several hours later full of the same kids, but now exhausted. We’d return from that sports center so sweaty and weary that often, in the winter, when night fell early and Via Nomentana was jammed with traffic, we’d fall asleep, dusty heads leaning together. Maybe males can establish relationships only in the midst of raging battle, so they re-create that condition on the playing fields. (The Catholic School)