City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (10 page)

So at the beginning of the new decade I took Italian lessons in New York for a month and I quit my job—the only real office job I’d ever had and that I’d obtained only after two months of interviews. Maitland Edey, the same New England mandarin who’d asked Sigrid and me about feminism, now said to me that I was foolish to give up my job with Time-Life Books with all its benefits and job security and four- and even five- and six-week vacations thanks to our union, the Writers Guild. But I was determined, if frightened. I withdrew my seven thousand dollars in profit sharing and converted it to traveler’s checks, which the bank officer thought was also rash.

Just before I left, Richard introduced me to a person in New York who would become my best friend: David Kalstone. He was living not far from Howard Moss in a sublet. He was a professor (he’d written a book on Sir Philip Sidney) at Rutgers, but I gathered he was in a state of change—wintering in New York City, summering in Venice, being outfitted with contact lenses and more up-to-date clothes, even writing about contemporary poets such as Bishop and James Merrill.

None of that struck me at the time. What impressed me right away was how subtle and gentle and observant he was, though
he was almost legally blind. He had a sweet, wise smile, eyes that blinked into the indistinct void around him, hands that made wonderful rounded gestures. Richard Howard treated him a bit as if he were a distinguished but dim cousin, but I felt right away that he could be a … playmate. Although Richard liked all of us to sit up straight and present to the world our best face and to say right off our cleverest remarks and to speak of our serious reading or our life-transforming experiences (the ballet, Angkor Wat, the Sistine Chapel), David would never jump through that hoop. He was completely obliging, but a slightly goofy sense of humor played over everything he touched. He didn’t write as much as his friends expected, or so I gathered, but I guessed that was partly because he spent a lot of time at friendship. He was a generous, amused man and he liked me a lot, I could see, maybe because in a sense we were both newcomers. Although he was ten years older than I, he’d devoted less time than I had to being a New Yorker, which in those days was something like a religious vocation, full of obvious penances and rarefied rewards.

My time in Rome is not part of this story. I stayed from January to June and ran through all of my savings inviting Italian and American acquaintances out to dinner. We’d sit at long trestle tables in the Piazza Navona and look out at the spotlit lavishness of Bernini’s fountain of the continents (Is that a camel there? A palm tree? A Negro?). We’d eat plates of spaghetti and clams and drink liter after liter of sour white wine poured from those official transparent receptacles that had the exact liter level legally scratched into the glass—which made no sense since the wine could always be watered to bring it up to the right level. I took an Italian lesson nearly every day in a modern brick apartment block near the Vatican. My original apartment building in Trastevere was gutted by a fire after I’d been there for one unhappy month. The English
girl Lulu, the agent who’d rented me the apartment, had been sacked for other reasons but we’d stayed friends. Now she told me of Phillip, an acquaintance who needed a roommate and who lived on the Largo Argentina.

I moved in with Phillip and soon met all his friends and played his piano and walked his dog and learned his ways. His two-room apartment had a terrace planted with azaleas and a view of the traffic below and a constant free-flowing source of water that the neighbor lady told me must come from an ancient Roman aqueduct. We led a useless Roman life compounded of worries about money, two mild hangovers a day (lunch and dinner), and lots of empty talk and not much sex. The long-aproned ten-year-old boy who worked in the café downstairs would take our order over the phone and climb the six flights to our apartment at ten or eleven in the morning with our caffe lattes and our round, dry buns or
cornetti
. Sometimes he’d come back two or three times a day, always cheerful and uncomplaining, and take away our empties with a professional smile and a snappy gesture. In this city everyone seemed to be stylish; Phillip told me that people would eat nothing but bread for dinner under bare lightbulbs but step out into the square in a bespoke suit swinging Maserati keys that lacked Maseratis. The white-gloved policeman directing the traffic in front of the Victor Emmanuel monument was exactly that—a symphony director. We might cook some sauceless spaghetti for ourselves and the half-wild cats—until I became convinced that they were missing some essential minerals found only in proper cat food and persuaded Phillip to let me serve it to the animals, and they both died in horrible agonies.

Phillip had no money. Once in a great while he’d be an extra in a movie. His mother was a rich American and his father an Austrian nobleman. Phillip had been raised in Mexico, where he’d been valedictorian of his high school class, though now, just ten years later, his excellent, idiomatic Italian had entirely supplanted
his once-fluent Spanish. He spoke American with an accent similar to mine but would grope after even some of the most common English words.

I paid his back bills and bought him meals and paid all the rent. I suppose I was a little bit in love with him, though he didn’t fancy me. His queeny ex-lover, a small, skinny Sardinian, pitied me for being “double-bodied.” I asked my Italian teacher what “double-bodied” in Italian meant. She said that Italians were still so close to their peasant backgrounds that they prized an aristocratic leanness that showed they’d never done any physical labor. American-style muscles, in their eyes, were a shameful reminder of rural origins. I stopped lifting weights but I did go to an exercise class at the Roma Sporting Center near the Piazza Barberini where everyone followed the
professore
’s instructions, and where jumping jacks were called
farfalle
, or “butterflies.” Every ten minutes the
professore
sprayed the air with cologne to disguise the shocking smell of sweat.

The gay scene in Rome at that time was pathetic. A few married men sat in a particular movie theater just off the Corso at a certain hour with their raincoats in their laps and might let you jerk them off. A few foreigners, mostly Romanian refugees, would meet at midnight in the Colosseum. I’d get drunk during those endless dinners in the Piazza Navona and go out cruising; usually I’d end up with another American, a big, handsome black man named Ron. Our racial differences would have kept us apart back home (it was the era of the Black Panthers), but in Rome our shared horniness and nationality united us.

I wrote Richard Howard about all of my shoddy adventures. He admonished me, “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some sort of kicky version of Scranton.”

I thought that the most that could be said was that in Rome I’d re-created my life in New York but in an inferior version. Like a
marble statue copied in lard. I’d written a screenplay that no one wanted. I’d seen historic monuments only when other Americans visited me. I’d met Farley Granger through my Italian teacher and written my screenplay for him. I’d invested endless hours in courting Phillip but had slept with him only during one drunken weekend when we had emptied several bottles of vodka and rolled around like animals. I’d killed his two cats. I’d learned to speak a halting, broken Italian. I’d drunk hundreds of liters of white wine, many of them with Diana Artom, a painter and poet who was in love with me even though I kept telling her I was gay. I’d say,
“Sono frocio,”
which I guess was the rough equivalent of saying “I’m a fag” in English. She was horrified and said it wasn’t a good word, only my faulty Italian would allow me to say such a thing. I tried to tell her about our habit back home of embracing the insult but she just shook her head vigorously. She also told me that because of my unfamiliarity with Italian society I’d fallen in with some dreadful types, Phillip and his friends. They were nothing but
ladri
, “thieves.”

Chapter 8

And then I was back in New York and the 1970s had finally begun. Stan met me at the airport, popped something fun in my mouth, and took me on a tour of all the discos and backroom bars that had opened since Stonewall and my departure. After six or seven months in Italy, starved for sex, I couldn’t believe how unleashed New York had become.

For the first time I realized how much New York gay life had gradually been changing all along. Now it seemed as if ten times more gays than ever before were on the streets. With ten times as many gay bars. After the furtiveness of feeling up married men in the Roman cinemas, here were go-go boys dancing under spotlights and hordes of attractive young men crowding into small backrooms and abandoning themselves to each other’s mouths and arms and penises. Although people still talked about quick sex as “disgusting” and “filthy,” I thought of it as romantic. The idea that I could spot a pair of broad shoulders above narrow hips and mounted below a perfect column of a strong neck crowned by black hair and follow this prodigy into a dark room and within seconds be feeling his muscular, hot arms around me and his tongue in my mouth—that I could taste him and instantaneously know him—struck me as a miraculous but strangely easy transition. The intimacy that one would before have had to work for during months of courtship was
now available for a whistle and a wink and a ten-step walk into the shadows.

I kept buzzing around a couple who were obviously looking for a third man to go home with them. They weren’t interested in me till I happened to see a Roman friend and started to talk to him in Italian. The two men came up to me and asked me, respectfully and somewhat timidly, if I spoke English.

“A lee-tle beet,” I said.

They asked me to go home with them, and for the entire evening I impersonated what I thought was their idea of an Italian.

The Gay Activists Alliance held a dance every Saturday in an old firehouse they’d taken over. Here the clothes and bodies were more varied, perhaps less ideal, than in the discos, but the sense of camaraderie was stronger. Men and women danced together. The middle-aged and the pudgy dared to show their faces. People who purported to be gay farmers or gay nurses put in appearances. Blacks, who had trouble gaining entry in the usual gay venues, came to the Firehouse with their black or white lovers and friends.

Not only had the number of visible lesbians and gays increased exponentially, they were also more fearless and affectionate on the street than ever before. They were loud and flirty or grim and sex-crazed, giddy or pompous—the whole gamut. I knew that it was only on the island of Manhattan that this visibility and variety existed. When I went to my mother’s summer place in Michigan, I walked aimlessly along Lake Michigan through whole vast armies of sunbathers and not once did I see anything that resembled a gay man. Not one eye strayed toward me or gave me that shutter-click of recognition I was so eager to detect in them.

In New York I attended a meeting of the Gay Academic Union; perhaps no more than fifty women and men were in the audience, young professors for the most part, though some were independent scholars, and they were talking about gay history and gay culture
and the intersection of feminism and the lesbian struggle—or they were asking, was Thoreau gay? Whitman? Melville? Just to see all those earnest faces tilted up toward the speaker, not cracking jokes, not looking around for ironic grins of confirmation, made me realize how quickly everything was evolving.

But the sexual abundance and opportunity struck me the most. Even though I was only thirty, I felt too old, too late to enjoy the new dispensations. Yet when I entered a backroom or the back of a truck parked under the piers beside the Hudson, or went into the abandoned piers themselves, I didn’t worry about my age or psychic readiness. At first we didn’t get into the holds of trucks but rather the gay boys crouched under one truck and the “straight” teens from Jersey stood in the narrow space between two trucks and got sucked off. The brackish smell of the cold water flowing nearby and the dance of New Jersey lights on the small, faceted waves in the wake of a passing barge filled me with a cool romantic ardor. This was the chase, the adventure. We heard of bodies discovered floating down the river, of horrible mutilations, of drive-by murders, but nothing could make us abandon the prowl.

In one of the old piers there’d be no lights at all beyond the occasional flare of a match seeking a cigarette, a sudden phosphorus flash revealing that what you thought was an embracing couple was actually a thick stump of wood with a rusting chain wrapped around it, or what you saw as a gull’s wing was really someone’s shirttail. Ramps led up to rooms with missing doors and floorboards, to a seething Laocoön entwined by snakes or by arms as he held fast to his sons or lovers…

I had a joyful, drunken reunion with Richard Howard and in my sentimental excitement about seeing him sent him a wrong signal. He said, “Oh, darling, I was hoping you’d feel that way someday,” and I was too polite to clarify the point. Richard spirited me away for a bucolic weekend at the country house of Coburn Britton, a rich
poet from Cleveland who was publishing a little magazine called
Prose
. Coby had an old apple farm in northern New Jersey. We all went over to visit Glenway Wescott, the novelist in his seventies who had been a beauty back in Paris in the 1920s and who’d written one classic,
The Pilgrim Hawk
. Now he no longer wrote anything beyond his journals but devoted most of his time to being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I thought that was a terrible fate—and now that I’m in my late sixties I, too, am serving on the awards committee of the academy.

After my all-too-apparent physiological lack of interest in him, Richard politely withdrew and never said a word about it. He was tactful and worldly in the best sense.

For a few weeks I lived with Marilyn. I’d grown my hair long and I’d come back from Rome with a blue velvet jacket and a white suit. I was skinny and not healthy looking. I’d drunk so much white wine and eaten so many olives and so much bad bread that I looked jaundiced. Italian words kept flitting through my head; I was translating everything I thought into Italian, but badly. In Italy a man could not be seen carrying laundry or groceries; he had to put everything in a suitcase as though headed for the train station. I went along with that. He dared not step outside even to go to the corner without wearing a coat and tie; I went along with that. The last day I was in Rome was a steaming day in July. I went in shorts to pick up my laundry and the laundress complained, “I work day and night to make you look well dressed and here you are disgracing me.”