PART ONE
Peter Norbach tells how he met Louis Coyote and the extraordinary pact they made
Among the various meanings of the word "switch" offered in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, I find that all of them are strongly suggestive of the relationship between Louis Coyote and myself:
"Switch:(l) to strike or beat with, or, as if with a switch. WHISK. LASH. (2) a: to turn from one railroad track to another: SHUNT, b: to move (cars) to different positions on the same track within terminal areas. (3) to make a shift in or exchange of (~the talk to another subject). (4) to lash from side to side–switchable. switcher."
The last of the above was prophetic. As it turned out, Louis and I were, literally, "switchable switchers."
I laughed uneasily after I said to Louie, "You know what we're doing, don't you? We're about to pull a Prince and the Pauper."
Louie didn't know what I was talking about. It was hard for me, at first, to remember that an intelligent man is not necessarily an educated man. I made a silent, firm resolve never to talk over his head again. The handsome, charming man I admired and envied had a painful inferiority complex about his lack of formal education. I wanted to make him understand that everything he was–and everything he was not–added up to my passionate desire to switch places with him. It was no use telling him that the pampered darlings I went to the fancy schools with were, compared to him, the dullest, most predictable, most limited, and least sexy bores on earth.
It was no use telling him how I envied every rotten break, every deprivation, every emotional and physical agony he had endured in his twenty-two years of living–because it made him what he was!
What he was, in my crazyromantic view, was so beautiful, glamorous, and sexy that I hated my super-rich, sterile, terminally boring existence all the more. I didn't want to be like him. I wanted to become him–Louis Coyote–half Cherokee Indian, half German–son of an El Paso couple who had died as they had lived–dirt-poor losers in a society that worshiped the values and lifestyle epitomized by my vaunted foster family–the Norbachs of Long Island–the same nouveaux riche barbarians I was running away from when I, literally, collided with Coyote in a fog so dense that we couldn't see each other's faces clearly until we had checked into that hotel room in the little town just ahead. All across the country there are hotels called "Terminal" simply because they are in the vicinity of a train or bus station–as if nobody ever considered another meaning of the word. I always asked, "What man in his right mind would want to check into The Terminal Hotel?"
I thought of all those Tennessee Williams cafes and bars and hotels and streetcars: Desire, Tarantula Arms, Last Chance, and, of course Terminal.
But in the Hotel Terminal, in that obscure little room, the dark innuendo of the word did a full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. For there, something long-despised died, and something long-wanted was born.
The cars we had abandoned were left joined at the heads like Siamese twins. We had been driving very slowly because of zero visibility; so, we escaped injury. But all our pushing, pulling, huffing, and puffing efforts to separate our two vehicles were in vain. We finally broke up, laughing, and started walking.
Nobody in Tiny Town was going to do anything except stay comfortably indoors until that pea soup lifted. So, we decided to do the same. We checked into a room that was not altogether uncomfortable, despite the exceptionally quaint custom of a "double room" turning out to be a rather large room with one double bed.
"I don't mind if you don't," said Mr. Coyote. I assured him that sleeping with another guy was nothing strange to me, having been raised in a house with four older foster "brothers."
This, in fact, was not altogether true. I didn't mention that the house I was raised in was a seventy-five-room mansion with twenty guest rooms and that all my life I had slept all by myself in the smallest of the family bedrooms, which was five times larger than the hotel room Louie and I were in.
Not that having my own room granted me any rights of privacy. My four "house-peers" considered it their privilege as well as their pleasure to burst in on me in the middle of the night and subject me to the kind of abuse usually associated with college fraternity hazings. One would suppose this sort of thing would go away as we all got older. Instead, it only got kinkier.
Louis and I called for room service, which they had never heard of. They did, however, send up a young boy–he couldn't have been older than nineteen. He didn't resemble a bellhop at all, but he filled his Levi's very well and condescended to get us some clean glasses and a bottle of Scotch in exchange for a lot of admiration and an enormous tip.
Only after we had started sipping our first drinks did Louis Coyote and I actually introduce ourselves. We had already been acting as if we had known each other all our lives. We were an extreme example of the phenomenon called "strangers on a train" or "two ships that pass in the night." We told each other the stories of our lives. We exchanged the most personal details, revealed every intimate secret, every ambition. Finally, with considerable alcoholic assistance, every broken dream.
When we got around to the subject of sex, we eased into a mood of sadness–gravity, even.
We tried to restore some levity by recalling how we had progressed from playing it very straight–the feigned macho routine about having to sleep together in the same bed–to openly flirting with the kid we sent out for booze–in less than three minutes!
Our sadness came from deprivation. "Depraved and Deprived" became the title of the song we crooned in a drunken duet.
To put it plainly, we were practically virgins. I was twenty. He was twenty-two. We were virgins not because we were afraid of our desires for men but because we were uncertain–even mystified–regarding the exact nature of those desires.
Added to our sexual frustration was an almost pathological low self-esteem. It was easy for me to understand the cause of his feelings of inferiority. It was much more difficult for him to comprehend the source of mine.
I am Peter Norbach, the youngest, flimsiest, and most tentative of Victor Norbach's five sons. At the age of twenty, I was escaping from my life as a hostage. The seventy-five-room mansion was my prison. My adopted father was the warden. My four older "step-brothers" were the sadistic guards.
Victor Norbach was the millionaire son of a poor Norwegian fisherman. His first four sons were chips off the old block. The fifth son was not. The fifth son would probably have taken after his mother, had she lived to bear him. This is why the family patriarch chose me as a small child–for the "fine-boned, elegant beauty" I seemed to possess, that reminded him of his recently passed wife. Of course, this was the very reason I was despised from Day One by my "step-brothers." They wound up instilling within me the conviction that I, veritably, murdered this mother I never knew.
Of course, I had a sense of humor. It was the major tool in my survival kit. But I also read Scott Fitzgerald and learned how to play the "poor little rich girl" and enjoy high-class self-pity.
I learned the exquisite arts of the professional victim. I had superb instructors. Four of them! I called them The Viking Goon Squad.
All of my homemade masculine role models were huge, muscle-bound giants. So, I got the idea that I was an ugly, puny runt.
In school, I took up swimming, tennis, and some weight-lifting, too. Despite the presence all around me of other slim, smooth-chested, elegantly proportioned boys on the swimming team, my thoroughly conditioned self-loathing, admirably concealed beneath a facade of fun-loving charm, prevented me from really connecting with my reputation as the best-looking jock in school. When my jock buddies, in the course of our grab-ass rituals in the locker room, kidded me about my big cock, I actually took it as criticism. My enormous dangle was out of proportion with the rest of my regulation-size thirty-eight physique–more proof of my physical inferiority.
My house-peers, you may well guess, were not nearly so well hung, and their overdeveloped thunder-thighs made their penises look even smaller.
So, they never stopped taunting me about my cock–that ugly, enlarged thing I should be ashamed of. Every time they hazed me, they tore my shorts off and made me get a hard-on. Then, they would invent new ways to taunt and tantalize my offending penis–keeping it hard while they tormented it, of course.
When a man's self-esteem is so low that it amounts to a mental illness, it cannot occur to him, however intelligent and informed he may otherwise be, that all of the putdowns he hears from his family stem from jealousy. The noise of low self-esteem shouts its lies to the inner ear, "As I must be the miserable cockroach they tell me I am, then surely nobody could be jealous–except perhaps another cockroach."
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