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10 NATURE SELDOM IGNORES THE BROKEN PIECES OF A CHILD'S LIFE, AND during my first year of college she began fooling around with mine. I had decided to become a doctor, and I entered Oxford College of Emory University, where I could begin my path to the Emory School of Medicine. The college had only four hundred students and a freestyle academic intensity that appealed to me. I felt comfortable with the school. My father had studied there. The sense I had was that they knew my dad at the school, so they'd look out for me. But no one could have predicted what would happen. Practically the minute I stepped on campus the fall of 1971, yet another Walt awoke inside me. There was no way, when I was seventeen, that I could know about him or the other living, separated fragments of my personality. All I knew or felt in those first months of college was the presence of a velvety pain, soft and old and obscure. It touched me too much and it made me crazy. I took to slinking to class only on certain days and at certain hours, when I didn't hurt as much or when I thought the lectures would entertain me. As my professors began to hand me back my dismal test scores, the dean called me to his office and suggested that I drop out. When I returned to Tallahassee, Blount suggested that I get a construction job. The recommendation irked me, not least because I'd worked in the hospital emergency room over the previous summer. As an orderly I'd helped the nurses and doctors treat every trauma, from gunshot wounds to attempted suicide-by-roach-tablets. It had been a natural job for a boy on the path to doctorhood. Now, however, by languishing in a cosmos of melancholy and missing so many classes in my first months of college, I'd virtually assured my exclusion from medical school. My psychologist thought that the construction work would serve not only to shock me out of my despondency but to make a man of me. Soon after I took the job, his first expectation was fulfilled. My boss gave me Copyrighted Material 67 a flatbed truck to drive, but when I climbed a hill toward the busiest intersection in Tallahassee, I got confused about the gears, pulled the wrong lever, and dropped a load of cement blocks in the street. I don't know whether the woman driving the car behind me was able to conceive of an explanation for my little project, but she did manage to leave the scene unharmed. I quit that day and told Mother I was ready to go back to school. Chief among my early discoveries this second time around was a new friend, Wallace. He'd first appeared at school in his ancient rusting Buick, which he fondly called Anastasia. "We come from the hinterlands of Georgia," he'd announced, "sixteen years old and the dear girl is falling apart already. My Buick, that is, not myself." Ideduced that Wallace was a homosexual. Although he wasn't the kind of guy you'd imagine holding a chain saw, neither did he fit the swishy stereotype. He had a round face, like an almost-plump rose gardener, a little content and a little aunty-ish. He had a way of drawing his posture back at the top, in a delighted wobble. His blond mane dropped to his shoulders, though when he talked it flew around the air. We engaged each other in a campaign of friendship. From the very start we took to conversations that often lasted till sunrise. Wallace discussed his interests-opera, his hair, and his crushes-while I listenedeither rapt or laughing- and occasionally offered some molecule of response. Never had I met such a brilliant and flamboyant wit. Nor such a loud, giggly Southern voice. He'd play the records of his favorite divas and teach me to recognize the vocal distinctions of, as he fondly called them, Guillotine Price, Beer-Gut Nihlsson, and Monsterfat Cowbelly. Around Wallace, my state of embarrassment gave way to silliness. When he laughed, his long hair flying, I laughed too. I forgot my genteel Southern deportment and discovered that, just like Wallace, I possessed an irreverence, a heightened awareness that the inequities in my life came mostly from the sins of my culture. He made it easy for me to tell...
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