City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (11 page)

In New York no one south of Fourteenth Street ever wore a tie or anything but a ripped T-shirt and dirty jeans and sneakers or cowboy boots. Gay men held cologne and jewelry in abhorrence. Some of the bars posted rules forbidding cologne, hair spray, dress slacks, cuff links, and even underpants. For New Yorkers the streets were considered “backstage,” and even beautifully dressed
women wore gym shoes on the street and put their heels on only when they arrived at the office, a dinner party, or the theater. For Romans the street was the stage. In returning to New York, I felt as if I’d boarded a forward-flying time machine.

Now in New York a friend of a friend offered me a job as a stock boy in his shop on Madison Avenue selling clear plastic furniture. But I was hoping to find something better. I tried to get a job in publishing. Tom Congdon, the editor who would nurse
Jaws
toward bestsellerdom in 1974, interviewed me. My seat for this encounter was a low child’s chair and his a high executive throne (in fact, there was a book out at the time about how to intimidate others, and this tactic of relative chair size and positioning was one of the key strategies). I also was interviewed by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the biographer and scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Then there was someone at Atheneum. They all told me that it was unheard of for a writer to be a book editor. In England, perhaps, that might work, but in America it would be a clear conflict of interest.

I found some freelance writing work and a one-room apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village, not far from the Hudson River, for a hundred dollars a month. There were a few scraps of furniture—a kitchen table, a pretty desk, two chairs, a single mattress on the floor. There was a closet and a small, dirty bathroom. The windows were covered with heavy metal gates, but through the bars you could see big green ailanthus trees. As soon as I turned on the light, cockroaches scurried off into hiding.

I never met any of my neighbors but most of them were young. I could hear them running up and down the stairs all the time, all through the night—not a heavy tread, just a light scampering. They, too, were roaches, fleet of foot and light-phobic. On the corner of Horatio and Greenwich Street there was a laundry run by a sweet old couple who had concentration-camp tattoos on their arms and were always smiling and spoke almost no English. Unlike my lady
in Rome, they were indifferent to how their customers looked. On one side of Horatio were elegant brownstones from the middle of the ninteenth century. On my side were tenement buildings, shabby structures from the beginning of the twentieth century meant to be temporary housing for immigrants.

From my aerie I would swoop down on men of all ages and shapes, usually late at night. Not that there was much happiness in a life of pleasure. Once I was in the backs of trucks or in the ruined piers along the Hudson, I simply couldn’t make myself go home. Even after a satisfying encounter with one man or ten I still wanted to hang around to see what the next ten minutes would bring. What it brought was the morning light, the sudden explosion of expensively shod feet on pavement as well-dressed men and women, pale from too much work and too many late nights and too little sleep, rushed out of their apartment buildings and hurried off to their jobs and I, in need of a shave and a bath, slunk home in semen-stiff jeans and a T-shirt that stank, my spirits depressed, my body thoroughly reamed.

I mentioned that I sometimes felt I was too old for all this.

But gay men—like straight women—always feel they’re too old. I remember that my twenty-sixth birthday was the most difficult one, since suddenly I thought I was no longer a student who could get away with being sloppy and unfocused and riddled with bad habits. Having no longer any chance to be a prodigy, I now had to content myself with being a late bloomer, if I was going to bloom at all. I would do isometric exercises for my face (a new fad at the time), trying to avoid age lines and saggy pouches. I was on a lifelong diet (in three months I once lost fifty pounds with the help of amphetamines and a regime of steak, salad, and white wine). I who took no pleasure in sports was launched into a lifelong program of exercise. I who hated shopping and was too poor to buy new clothes would do whatever was possible within my means to
obtain the latest “hot” look. I had my hair “relaxed” to resemble a surfer. I remember in the sixties glancing at the first gay men to sport mustaches and saying to a friend, “I could never kiss that!” Within three months I had my own mustache. Just as ten years later I shaved mine as soon as everyone else did. Long hair, straightened hair, crew cuts, long sideburns—I followed almost every fad.

I felt I’d come down in the world. Before Italy I was living in the nicest apartment I’d ever had, I was wearing suits, and I’d had a retirement plan. Now I was thirty and unemployed and living in a roach trap. But at last I’d become the long-haired hippie in dirty jeans and torn T-shirt, even if the era for hippies was gradually passing. I wasn’t sure if I preferred the living death of respectability linked to a dull job or the peril of living on the economic edge, free to keep my own hours—and to fill them up with tedious, ill-paid freelance work.

Richard, with a complete lack of resentment and a nearly unique generosity linked to his natural ebullience, fixed me up with not one but two different young men, one after another. There was a bright, skinny writer, impotent from heroin; we spent an uncomfortable New Year’s Eve together. There was a dark young doctor who was always depressed, whom I was half in love with. He lived in another city and spent weekends with me in my pitiful apartment. I didn’t see how bad it was, nor did I ever think of myself as poor. Broke, perhaps, but not “poor.” Maybe because my father had been rich, maybe because I’d had a well-paying job I hated, maybe because I thought of my life as enviable, maybe because it all felt like gleeful slumming, and anyway an average tidy studio apartment in a doorman building would have seemed like even a bigger comedown after my father’s house—better the gutter than the curb.

New York was a broken city, literally on the verge of bankruptcy. A woman I knew bought a brownstone in the Village for thirty
thousand dollars and said to me, “I know I’ll never get my money out, but I’m sentimental about the city.” Uncollected garbage piled up along the curb. The sidewalks were cracked and tilted by tree roots. Streetlights burned out and weren’t replaced. The crime rate was high. My little apartment was broken into, despite the metal gates on the windows, and my radio and typewriter were stolen. I hired a burglar-proofer who, he assured me, was a convicted thief himself and therefore knew “all their tricks.” He lined the front door, which had painted glass panels, with sheet metal. Into the window frames he put long metal pegs that had to be extracted before the windows could be opened. As the man said, “They only have two or three minutes from the time they break the glass and the time they have to hop in and clear the place out. If the window is too complicated, they won’t bother. But of course they could always get into the apartment downstairs and bore their way through.” Heroin addicts, everyone said, were responsible for the thefts. Burglaries were so common that no one paid much attention to them except the victims. I was haunted by memories of New York when I’d first moved there in 1962 and lived in the Y and had to borrow money from friends just to eat. Now, just less than a decade later, I was back down to five hundred dollars again. I’d blown my profit-sharing money inviting everyone out to dinner in Rome, though I didn’t regret it.

I began to see David Kalstone all the time. He’d moved up to Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, the block where I live now. He lived in a floor-through of a brownstone in a lovely disorder of half-filled teacups and freshly opened “little” magazines, of ballet programs and long telephone cords, of cast-aside Missoni sweater vests and extra pairs of reading glasses, of a big silver bowl full of freesias as fresh and unbent as spring onions still in the ground. He loved Maria Callas and I pretended I did, too (worshipping her was an article of faith among gay men in those
days). To my ears, she sounded shrill and flat, though I was prepared to believe she’d been a great actress, never mind the screeching.

David never had much money because he was always saving up from his salary, and the extra income he earned as one of the several editors of the Norton anthology of English literature, for his extravagant summers in Venice, where he would rent a whole floor in a palazzo. Chelsea in those days was mostly Puerto Rican and the rents were low. Men in T-shirts sat on their stoops listening to Latin music and drinking beer. David took the subway everywhere in the city, never a cab except late at night, and commuted to his job at Rutgers University by bus rather than train because it was fractionally cheaper. Despite his budget, we’d go out to dinner, dutch—usually to Duff’s on Christopher Street, where we’d sit in a booth and eat our rare sirloin steaks and green beans and drink white wine and bid the waiter, “Take the bread away—we’re dieting!” After a few weeks we’d see the waiter, smiling a mild acknowledgment at us, turning away the busboy carrying the bread basket.

I adored David but he represented the adult, charming, sexless world for me. Though I was thirty I wasn’t quite ready to be a grown-up. I’d get restless as midnight approached. I longed to escape and to run out to the backroom bars or the trucks. I needed to leave the salon before my hands began to sprout hair and my teeth to sharpen.

David was extremely close to the poet James Merrill, and slightly in awe of him. Merrill’s father, Charles Merrill, had been one of the founders of the brokerage firm Merrill Lynch. James Merrill had written a vaguely autobiographical novel,
The Seraglio
, in which the young hero feels burdened by his wealth and wants to give it away, but it turns out that a legal divestiture of that magnitude is virtually impossible. In real life, Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation (Ingram was the maiden name of
Jimmy’s mother), which gave small grants of five or six thousand dollars to many needy writers. Cleverly, Merrill had figured out that if he wanted to spend time with other poets rather than bankers, he needed to share the wealth without making it look like handouts. If a friend put the touch on him, Jimmy could always say, “Apply to the foundation, but remember I’m just one of the board members.” Of course in reality Jimmy had the last say, but no one was supposed to know that (ostensibly he conferred with John Hollander and Irma Brandeis). If someone got money from the foundation, he or she didn’t have to feel beholden to Merrill himself. Nor was it a loan that had to be paid back—or that could potentially create bad blood if, as might have been more likely, it wasn’t paid back.

David arranged for me to meet Merrill over after-dinner drinks. Merrill was a bit lined from excessive dieting but from a distance he had a boyish look and manner. He was partial to purples and heathers and earth tones, to the colors that fall leaves assume on the ground after the first rain. He wore serapes and embroidered jackets and creased linen trousers and sandals, the antidote to the three-piece suits and bluchers his father must have donned. He was clearly a bohemian. Later when I visited his apartment in the fishing village of Stonington, Connecticut (“Jimmy lives in the only ugly building in Stonington,” as catty friends said), I realized that the top two floors he occupied in the old Victorian house above a store and the floor between were crammed with objects he’d described in his poems: the mirror and bat-motif wallpaper and the red bohemian crystal chandelier above a round table for Ouija messages in the bay window and the widow’s walk above, graced with a Roman bust. They were all magical in the eyes of the aficionado, but they didn’t necessarily go together. His friends, of course, nodded sagely when they read:

Backdrop. The dining room at Stonington.

Walls of ready-mixed matte “flame” (a witty

Shade, now watermelon, now sunburn).

Overhead, a turn of the century dome

Expressing white tin wreathes and fleurs-de-lys

In palpable relief to candlelight…

The room breathed sheer white curtains out. In blew

Elm- and chimney-blotted shimmerings, so

Slight the tongue of land, so high the point of view.

Something about Merrill made you want to please him and fear you couldn’t. He alternated between a silken, silly giggle, but one that was boyish and never girlish, and an earnest unsmiling way of nodding agreement or encouragement. He could listen to an overly long explanation of one’s own (nervous, pompous) and raise his eyebrows and say, “Ah-h-h…” Was that an
ah
of recognition and agreement? Or was it merely a slightly weary way of marking the transition into the next, more amusing topic? He loved to make puns, usually good ones (like the “slight of tongue” in the last line above), then lower his eyes and sit forward or wrap his arms around his knees and lower his lids and purr. He never tried to sell his wit but would sit back and contemplate it with no more proprietorial sense than the newest comer. He was so afraid of protracting a point that he just sketched it in and then licked his dry lips with the sudden, darting flicker of the amphetamine dieter. He could look deeply sympathetic for a short minute, but that solemnity was built on mercury, not bedrock. A moment later his eyes were flashing humor and he was quoting something one wasn’t quite sure one had recognized. When he’d been a young man, as he revealed in his memoir about the 1950s,
A Different Person
, he’d feared he was superficial and he’d felt easier with people of his own class who knew to do no more than smile and shrug in most situations. The
one area in which Jimmy had never been superficial or dismissive was writing. As he’d said, “I wrote, therefore I was.”

I suppose it’s always strange to know in the flesh someone who is destined to be “immortal,” or at least studied and analyzed long after his death. He was the American poet who possessed a grand Proustian sense of time and a Nabokovian love of language and sensuality. Comparing him to two of the best novelists of the twentieth century makes sense given that his poems always possessed a narrative sweep—and that he wrote that most readable and enduring epic poem,
The Changing Light at Sandover
. Having actually known such a person doesn’t give one a special purchase on the reality. In fact familiarity can lead to slightly idiotic complacencies. The French critic Sainte-Beuve wrote that he couldn’t see why everyone made such a fuss over “Beyle” (Stendhal), since good ol’ Beyle would surely have been the first to laugh at his exaggerated posthumous reputation. Even so, everyone wants to hear the story just because it “really” happened, and yet in truth its reality—fragile at best and now largely mythologized into a new shape—is scarcely telling.