I’d had to maintain a professional detachment while I interviewed Peg Donohue, concealing, as best I could, how deeply affected I was by her talk of Bill Ryan’s life and death. The fact was that his life and mine were not so dissimilar. We had both been forced to choose between our families and their cultures—his Irish Catholic, mine Mexican Catholic—and the freedom we needed to express our deepest sense of ourselves. Well, not chosen, exactly. Apparently, his family had made the choice for him. I had not been so explicitly rejected by my family, but only because my parents died before I had a chance to come out to them. Had they not, I’m sure I would have been violently disowned by my father with my passive mother going along.

Both of us—Bill Ryan and I—seem to have responded in the same way to having been cast out of our tribes, by becoming over-conscientious overachievers, as if our successes and accomplishments could compensate for our deficiencies as sons. We weren’t unique. There was even a name for this reaction—the best little boy in the world syndrome. I had spent hours talking about this with Larry, who himself suffered from this syndrome.

It’s like, I said, I have to justify the air I breathe by being better than everyone else at my job. That’s a tough way to live, he replied. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yeah, that’s exactly how it feels. That dread of being exposed as—As what? he asked. A faggot? A queer? That ship has already sailed for both of us, Henry. I know, I know. I started coming out of the closet when I was seventeen, so why do I still feel like I have to prove myself? Because, Larry said, it’s hard to be hated and to never know when that hatred’s going to slap you in the face.

After my morning, it was a relief to step into the Gold Mountain, where Adam greeted me with a dazzling smile, and to turn my head off. Today he was cooking but, after I got my food, he came out of the kitchen to take his break with me.

“How’s your day going?” he asked.

For a moment, I thought about telling him Bill Ryan’s story, if only to relieve myself of the sadness it had caused me, but Adam was untouched by a world where parents rejected their children and men died ghastly deaths. I wanted to keep it that way.

“Just putting one foot in front of the other.” I replied. I looked at the plate in front of me, piled high with broccoli and beef and rice. “This is a lot of food. Did you make up my plate?”

He grinned. “You need to eat, Henry. You’re all skin and bones.”

“We can’t all be gym rats.”

“Do you get any exercise?”