That meant getting lost; my father would pull a ten or a twenty from his pocket and say, “Lay low for a while,” and off I’d go: no plan in mind, necessarily, just a street kid’s faith: what might the day shape itself to be? And where would the night find you, that creosote-scented Tucson darkness, warm and, if you got away from the spreading lights of town, gorgeous with stars? Anyplace at all and no place; everybody knows a kid like that, in no hurry to get home, always with one eye turned to the next: next meal, next friend, next place to sleep, next place to score.

I was getting good at “laying low,” was becoming, in fact, resourceful. I carried my notebook everywhere, in a shoulder bag adorned with glass beads and old Chinese coins, a thick black sketchbook full of drawings and daydreams and fragments of poems—homages to Lorca, surrealist mutterings, wild rants. Nothing directly about my life—who wanted to write that? Or even could?—but dreamy and disjoint evocations of anxiety and beauty: smoldering guitars, swooning gardenias, constellations of my own devising.

My junior year of high school just beginning, I decided I not only couldn’t face gym class ever again, but maybe I didn’t have to. Between home and school was a new cinder-block doctor’s office surrounded by ocotillos and prickly pear. I didn’t think much about what I was doing; I just acted, as if I’d been planning this on some level less than conscious. I walked into the receptionist’s office and asked to see the doctor. “Do you have an appointment? No?” She looked at me, taking stock. “Just a minute,” she said, and left the room.

When she came back, she said, “Have a seat, the doctor will see you in a moment. Do you have any insurance? No? All right then.”

The doctor’s urbane, professional as he shakes my hand. He says, “Do your parents know you’re here?”

“No.”

Pause, thoughtful. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m a homosexual,” I say, “and I need to get out of PE. I can’t handle being in PE. I need a doctor’s note that says I don’t have to go.”

He thinks a minute more, then he writes me a note. I am filling up with such gratitude I could cry, except that I am too numb to do so. I didn’t know what would happen if I said it, and it’s all right. It’s all right. He says, “Have you considered telling your parents?”

I don’t know if I even answer him, but my face must tell him something, and he hands me the note and tells me there will be no charge.

The note says: “Mark Doty is to be excused from physical education classes permanently.” Period.