But the shame I felt when I was eleven, that embarrassment over my half-formed manhood, soon disappeared. I filled out, I developed physically, I grew tall, and there was no reason after that for me to feel ashamed of my body. And so I remember a lot of swimming expeditions, and I never once came out with that line about bringing bathing suits. Sometimes there even were girls with us, a bunch of us skinnydipphig, four girls and five fellows, maybe, politely getting out of our clothes behind different trees, girls here, guys there, but then everybody running down to the creek together in one mad rush, cocks and tits bouncing and jiggling. And in the water you could see everything pretty well, when they jumped around. And afterward sometimes we coupled off, when we got to be thirteen, fourteen years old, for our first fumbling experiments in screwing. I recall never quite getting over my amazement that the bodies of the girls looked the way they did, so blank at the crotch, so empty there. And their hips wider than ours, and their buttocks bigger and softer, like round pink cushions. All the skinnydipping I did in my middle teens made me look back on that time with Karl and Jim and Sissy Madden and laugh at my own stupid shyness. Especially the time once when Billie Madden came swimming with us; she was our age, but she looked just like her older sister, and somehow, standing there naked at the edge of the creek next to Billie, looking at the freckles running down into the valley between her fat breasts and the deep dimples puckering her big behind, I felt as if all the shame of that time with Sissy had now been canceled out, that the fact of Billie’s nakedness evened the score between me and the Madden girls, that none of it mattered any longer in any important way.

Thinking of these things as I plucked weeds in the fraters’ chili patch, my bare ass warmed by the climbing sun, I was aware also of other things floating in the deep places of my memory, old events, dark and unpleasant and half-forgotten, that I had no wish to remember. A whole curdled mass of memories. Myself naked on other days, with other people. Boyhood games, some of them not so innocent. Unwanted images came roaring like a spring flood out of my past. I stood still, swept by waves of fear. Muscle tensing against muscle, body gleaming with sweat. And something shameful happened to me. I felt a familiar throbbing down below, felt it starting to stiffen and rise, and I looked, and yes, yes, there it was, coming up hard. I could have died. I wanted to fling myself face down to the ground. It was like that time after Sissy Madden had seen us swimming, when I had had to walk naked back to the creek when Karl and Jim already had their clothes on, and I had experienced a real sense of what it was to be naked and ashamed among those who are clothed. Again, now: Ned and Eli and Timothy and the fraters all had their shorts on, and I was bare, and I hadn’t cared a damn about it, until suddenly this had started to happen and now I felt as exposed as though I was on network television. They would all be staring at me, seeing me aroused, wondering what had turned me on, what nasty thoughts had passed through my mind.

Where could I hide? How could I cover myself? Were any of them watching me?

Actually no one seemed to be. Eli and the fraters were far up the row. Timothy, ambling lazily along, was almost out of sight behind me. The only one close to me was Ned, perhaps fifteen feet to my rear. Standing as I was with my back to him, my shame was screened. Already I could feel myself beginning to sag; hi another moment I’d be back to normal and I could saunter down the row to the tree where my shorts were hanging. Yes. It was down, now. All clear. I turned.

Ned gave a guilty start, practically jumped as my eyes met his. His face went crimson. He looked away. And I understood. I didn’t need to inspect the front of his shorts for bulges to know what was going on in his head. For fifteen or twenty minutes now he’d been treating himself to a little fantasy trip, studying my body, contemplating my buttocks, snatching little glimpses of other goodies now and then. Dreaming his tricksy homo dreams about me. Well, there’s nothing surprising in that. Ned is a fag. Ned has always wanted me, even if he’s never dared to make a pass. And I was on display right in front of him, all of me, a temptation, a provocation. Still, I was taken aback by that look of desire, so obvious on his face, so raw; that shook me. To be wanted like that by another man. To be the object of his yearnings. And he seemed so stunned and abashed as I walked past him to get my shorts. As if he’d been caught off guard, with his real intentions showing. And what, pray tell, what sort of intentions had I been showing? My intentions had been sticking out six inches in front of me. We’re into something very deep here, deep and nasty and complicated. It frightens me. Were Ned’s gay vibes getting into my head by some sort of telepathy and stirring old shames? It’s strange, isn’t it, that I would get hard just then. Christ. I thought I understood myself. But I keep finding out that I don’t know a damned thing for certain. Not even who I am. What kind of person I want to be. An existential dilemma, right, Eli, right, right? To choose one’s own destiny. We express our identities through our sexual selves, is that right? I don’t think so. I don’t want to think so. And yet I’m not sure. The sun was hot on my back. I was so stiff down there for a couple of minutes that it hurt. And Ned breathing hard behind me. And the past churning in me. Where’s Sissy Madden now? Where’s Jim? And Karl? Where’s Oliver? Where’s Oliver? Oh, Christ, I think Oliver’s a very very sick boy.

The meditation, I’m convinced, is the core of the process. Being able to turn inward. You absolutely have to do that if you hope to accomplish anything her; The rest — the gymnastics, the diet, the baths, the field-labor — all that is just a series of techniques for achieving self-discipline, for lifting the balky ego toward the degree of control on which real longevity depends. Of course, if you want to live a long time it helps to get plenty of exercise, keep your body in trim, avoid unhealthy foods, etc., etc. But I think it’s a mistake to place much emphasis on those aspects of the Brotherhood’s routine. Hygiene and gymnastics may be useful in extending the average lifespan to eighty or eighty-five, but something more transcendental is required if you want to live to eight hundred or eight hundred and fifty. (Or eighty-five hundred? Eighty-five thousand?) Complete control of bodily function is needed. And meditation’s the key.

At this stage they’re stressing the development of inner awareness. We’re supposed to stare at the setting sun, say, and convey its heat and power to different parts of our bodies — the heart, first, then the testicles, the lungs, the spleen, and so forth. I maintain that it isn’t the solar radiance they’re interested in — that part is just metaphor, just symbol — but rather the idea of putting us in contact with heart, testicles, lungs, spleen, etc., so that in case of problems in those organs we can go to them with our minds and fix whatever has to be fixed. This whole business of skulls, around which so much of the Meditation revolves: more metaphor, which I’m sure is intended solely to give us a convenient focus of attention. So that we can pick up off the image of the skull and use it as a springboard for the inward leap. Any other symbol would have worked just as well, probably — a sunflower, a cluster of acorns, a four-leaf clover. Once invested with the proper psychic clout, the mana, anything could serve. The Brotherhood just happened to fasten on the symbology of skulls. Which was quite good enough, really; there’s mystery in a skull, there’s romance, there’s wonder. So we sit and stare at Frater Antony’s little jade skull-pendant, and we’re told to perform various metaphorical absorptions and engulfments having to do with the relation of death to life, but what they really want us to do is learn how to focus all our mental energy on a single object. Having mastered concentration, we can apply our new skill to the tasks of perpetual self-repair. That’s the whole secret. Longevity drugs, health foods, sunshine cults, prayer, and such things are peripheral; meditation is all. It’s a kind of yoga, I guess — mind over matter — although, if the Brotherhood is as ancient as Frater Miklos implies, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that yoga is an offshoot of the skull-house.