City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (2 page)

We eventually discovered that we weren’t really compatible sexually. But I truly loved Stan. At first because he was so beautiful and I was an idolator of beauty. I didn’t like the way I looked and I was proud to be seen with him. Nor was my admiration of his looks a subjective thing; his beauty was classic and “famous,” or at least generally acknowledged. Two straight male friends of his fell for him; for both he was their only gay experiment. Once one of the best-known dress designers in America stopped Stan on the street and offered to take him to Egypt on a holiday. The man wanted to hand him a plane ticket on the spot. He and Stan hadn’t exchanged a word; for the designer it was “impulse buying.”

But I loved Stan not just as a trophy but because I really cared for him. He was studious and hardworking. At first when he wanted to be an actor, he took acting classes at the Herbert Berghof studio. Then he went back to school and got a master’s degree in English. He enrolled in a course in Henry James from the great James biographer Leon Edel. I paid the rent and I enjoyed having this slight hold over Stan. He needed me, at least for shelter. Of course
he was also attached to me but was terribly moody and given to deep depressions.

I had found my first job at Time-Life Books on the thirty-second floor of the Time-Life Building on Sixth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. Every day I’d put on a coat and tie and head uptown from our Village apartment, usually in a taxi I could ill afford. Officially we worked from ten to six but I could never get in until eleven and I kept expecting to be reprimanded or even fired, but nothing ever happened. In fact we had little work, and a whole week’s worth could be dashed off during a panicky Friday afternoon. Our weekly assignment might be to write four picture captions of two lines each, a trivial workload that seemed momentous only because we had so much time to think about it. The editors above us always demanded rewrites since they, too, were underemployed.

I spent the whole day wasting time. A two-hour lunch. Endless coffee breaks with other writers and researchers. A weird man who came by to shine our shoes once told me that for two hundred dollars he could have anyone I wanted bumped off. At noon I’d pay a visit to an art gallery on Fifty-seventh Street or to the Museum of Modern Art around the corner. In those years I saw the first Pop Art works at the Sidney Janis Gallery—a ghostly life-size plaster man by George Segal standing on a ladder changing the letters on a movie marquee, or Roy Lichtenstein’s benday-dot comic-strip panels (“Oh, Brad”). Or I’d go to the Gotham Book Mart down on Forty-seventh, where I’d slump to the floor and read the books that were too expensive for me to buy.

The Gotham was the ideal bookstore with dozens of literary magazines stacked on the counter up close to the front door beside the cash register and, halfway back on the right, a big table full of the newest books of poetry. On the walls were pictures of all the greats who’d read at the Gotham, including Marianne Moore and Cocteau and Dylan Thomas, some of them perched high up
on a library ladder, posing above the elegant Frances Steloff (who died at 101 in 1989). Although she sold the “shop,” as she called it, to Andreas Brown in 1967, she was always prowling around, sometimes urging customers to buy. She liked Oriental religions in a slightly creepy “period” way that went along with table-tapping and ectoplasmic photos, and an extensive section on Krishnamurti and the
Bhagavad Gita
was in an alcove just beyond the poetry table. Steloff, from a poor family, was self-educated. On her own, she’d turned the Gotham into a major intellectual center. I’m sure plenty of famous writers were lurking about during the hours and hours I spent there, but I didn’t recognize them. Of course when you’re an uninitiated kid, you’re not likely to recognize literary celebrities on the hoof. You’re like the Yale undergrad who (according to an anecdote of the period) saw Auden aboard the club car of the train to New Haven and passed him a note via the waiter asking, “Are you Robert Frost?” Auden wrote back, “You’ve spoiled Mother’s day.”

The Gotham was one of the great bookstores of my life. At the very rear of the store was a huge fiction department, where I would dip into dozens of books. It was there that I bought Robert Stone’s
Hall of Mirrors
and Joyce Carol Oates’s
them
and Pynchon’s
V.
, though of all my Gotham finds my favorite was Hugh Kenner’s
The Pound Era
. The store was an oasis from the philistine world all around it. To be sure, there were other great bookstores in those days, especially the Eighth Street down in the Village, with its many floors and its sullen, unhelpful clerks. By the end of the 1970s there was the Three Lives bookstore, then on Sheridan Square.

I remember one afternoon as I browsed at the back of the Gotham hearing Andy Brown talking on the phone with someone I figured out must be a rather desperate Jack Kerouac, who wanted to sell an old manuscript to finance his move to Florida with his mother (Kerouac died in 1969 in St. Petersburg). I didn’t really hear
what sort of deal they struck, if any, but I suppose what was most exciting was the idea that literature was still alive, that it was going on all around me, and that some of the legendary figures I’d read about (and even read) were still alive and struggling. Kerouac, for instance, was a sad drunk, which a later biography corroborated but which Andy’s patient tone already half suggested, talking to Kerouac as if he were a child incapable of understanding.

This idea that literature was somewhere nearby made it only more tantalizingly distant. I remember thinking how strange it was that all the writers of the past seemed to know each other but that “we” didn’t. I supposed that the writers of the future were already living and working in New York, but where to find them?

I felt professionally isolated—worse, becalmed. Nothing is more tedious than working in a big corporation. We had such a narrow range of activity and our tasks were so silly and infantile that we felt degraded.

Part of my isolation, no doubt, was due to my being attracted only to men my own age or younger. I wasn’t meeting older people who were accomplishing things. At Time-Life Books there was only one exception, an editor, Ezra Bowen, a tough guy with rolled-up sleeves, a wiry frame, and a punched-in nose who kept a photo on the wall of a father lion licking his cubs. Ezra was the son of Catherine Drinker Bowen, the celebrated biographer (Tchaikovsky, John Adams, Ben Franklin), and he had literary—well, not ambitions but rather manners. He’d been married to a novelist, Joan Williams, who before that had been one of Faulkner’s personal favorites, his protégée. When they’d met, Faulkner was in his fifties and already a Nobel Prize winner and Joan Williams was just a redheaded college girl from Memphis. They were briefly lovers and even collaborated on a play, but she’d ended their affair because he wasn’t free to marry her (he already had a wife) and he was thirty-some years older. By the time she married Ezra Bowen
in the early fifties, Faulkner was in love with the even younger (and more receptive) Jean Stein, but he remained friendly with Joan Williams and wrote her hundreds of letters. She and Ezra had two sons and divorced in 1970. She fictionalized her relationship with Faulkner in a novel called
The Wintering
. People around the office said that Ezra had taken a year off from Time-Life to write his own novel, but had wasted the time constructing a study for himself in a shed in the garden—and that Joan, saddled with the children, the housework, and a part-time job, had turned out a successful novel in the same period. She wrote five highly regarded novels in all, and Ezra only did a few Time-Life books on such things as skiing, Native Americans, the wheel.

I was afraid of ending up like Ezra. I forced myself to write plays and novels during the evenings after work—anything creative as a break from the torpor of an imagination-killing office job.

Chapter 3

I was making four hundred dollars a month. Stan’s and my apartment cost just a hundred. It was on MacDougal between Bleecker and Houston, in the heart of the old Greenwich Village, right around the corner from the Little Red School House, a bastion of progressive education, and directly across the street from Bob Dylan’s apartment, though I never once glimpsed him and didn’t quite see the fuss over a man whose singing sounded whiny to me. On the corner was the San Remo, which had until recently been a famous gay bar but was now straight. Here, in the men’s toilet, Terry Southern in his novel
Candy
had set an abortion scene. Frank O’Hara, the New York poet, had hung out there. I pictured thin gay men in Brooks Brothers suits, smoking, drinking martinis, their pale faces covered with light hangover sweat, their teeth brown from cigarettes, their bluish white hands shaking.

There was also a coffee shop across MacDougal called the Hip Bagel.
Hip
was for a while crossed out, then later reinstated, as the word itself was condemned for being square, then rescued through a second degree of irony. It had black walls and individual spotlights trained down on booths. In a back booth on the left I would sometimes drink espresso with an oversize girl who swore she was going to be a famous pop singer someday. I’d never heard of a fat singer off the grand opera stage, so I just nodded politely, though I
was impressed to hear that she’d already appeared in
The Music Man
. A few years later she emerged as Mama Cass in the Mamas and the Papas, which meant little to me since except for the times it would provide the sound track for my romances I didn’t care for pop. By now I’ve loosened up a little more and have over the years learned, through repetition perhaps, to appreciate and even enjoy some of the popular music boyfriends have pressed upon me or played for me.

Another place where I’d sit and nurse a beer was the Bleecker Street Tavern, a barny old bar with many tables and few customers and a kindly waitress with a man’s face and dyed hair. Little did I know that this had been the first gay bar in New York, the Slide; in the nineteenth century all these tables had been crowded with transvestite prostitutes in crinolines and their top-hatted customers. In the basement were little rooms where the whores had taken their johns, and though the rooms are still there the place is now a heavy-metal hangout called Kenny’s Castaways.

The beatnik/hippie revolution was swirling all around me. After work I’d take the subway down and get off at the West Fourth Street stop and walk to our tiny, dirty, roach-trap apartment on MacDougal. On a warm evening my street was so crowded with kids with long hair and burgundy velvet jeans and mirrored vests and filmy shirts with puffy pirate sleeves that few cars would venture down it. It was still an old Italian neighborhood with little cheap pasta joints down two or three steps from street level (Monte’s was our favorite), cafés serving espresso such as the Caffè Reggio, and funeral homes with alabaster urns lit from within by electric bulbs, the stained-glass windows shrouded by closed beige curtains that were never opened. Our neighbors were Italian and spoke to each other every morning in, I guess, a Neapolitan dialect. Out our scrap of back window we could see old Italian wives cranking laundry across the air shaft on pulley-operated lines. We
were far from our Midwestern suburban roots. Over that bedrock of the Italian Village was scattered the more recent topsoil of stores offering hookahs and shabby finery and light boxes and paintings that one could make oneself by splashing acrylics on a revolving potter’s wheel—the centrifugal force threw the shiny colors out in crazed patterns. The smell of incense and patchouli filled the air.

As I came home in my suit and tie, weaving my way through the motley throngs, skinny kids in fringed leather coats would growl at me, “Go back to the suburbs.” Which made me indignant, since I knew they were probably living with their parents in the suburbs and had to sneak out of the house with a paper bag full of their trendy new clothes. They’d change in the back of an unlit bus, leave behind their bourgeois togs in a bus station locker, and traipse down to the Village in their beads and bangles. They were the “plastic hippies,” not I!

Through Raymond Sokolov, one of my high school friends, I did some freelance reviewing for
Newsweek
, which would have landed me in trouble at Time-Life if anyone had noticed. I reviewed Malraux’s
Anti-Memoirs
(published in 1967 in America) and Solzhenitsyn’s
The First Circle
(1968) and disliked them both. Malraux was obviously a fake, a bore, and a liar, though Americans were still impressed with his name and
Man’s Fate
was still considered a “classic,” much like that other Communist classic, Mikhail Sholokhov’s
And Quiet Flows the Don
—which won its author the Nobel Prize in 1965 though most critics now believe it was largely plagiarized and written by a committee.

The First Circle
, though a novel that protested Stalin’s regime, seemed to me proof of the sad consequences of Soviet censorship, since it could easily have been written in the nineteenth century. I told my editor at
Newsweek
that the publication of the book should serve as the pretext for a cover story on the samizdat press (clandestine self-published manuscripts that had been censored by the Soviet state), but my advice was ignored and every other
publication in the States declared the book a masterpiece. One wonders how many people read either book today. I wasn’t given any more books since my reviews put me out of step with everyone else in the country.

I went on to review a few books for the
New Republic
, but those pieces, too, were mostly nasty—and in 1978 I wrote a negative if respectful review of Edward Said’s
Orientalism
, one of the most influential books of our day. I suppose I was so underpublished and resentful in those days that it was hard for me to write a positive review of anything by anyone. Said, unfortunately, remembered my bad review, and it took years for me to repair the damage, which I very much wanted to do because upon reflection I came to admire him so much. In the end, in the early 1990s we became friends and continued to be so until he died.