City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (29 page)

I had become friendly in New York with Manuel Puig, the Argentine author of
Kiss of the Spider Woman
(1976). I’d suggested he be put on the cover of
Christopher Street
, not long after the gay literary magazine had started up. I’d had lunch with Puig, who’d won me over with his strange mixture of seriousness and campiness. “I spent the whole day yesterday at the baths, Edmund, looking for a husband.” Long, sad look. “I didn’t find one.”

I invited him down for the day to Johns Hopkins, where he’d be lunching with John Barth, addressing Barth’s grad students, then giving a reading. As we were walking around campus, Barth said to Puig, “Tell me, Manuel, when you turned to the epistolary novel, were you trying to return to the very roots of fiction, as I am doing in my epistolary novel
Letters
?”

To Barth’s astonishment, Puig said in his Latin-queen cantileña, “Oh, no, you see I was living in America and France so long I forget my Spanish, so I thought I have them write letters and if they make mistakes in Spanish, it’s their fault.”

No matter how bleak I felt on campus, I cheered up the minute I arrived at Stephen’s house. I knew I was in for a long, delicious evening of far-ranging talk and good food, though it began with an English sort of anchovy paste called Gentleman’s Relish. We had wonderful evenings with the poet Cynthia Macdonald and various young beaux Stephen was trying out—one nearly hysterical concert pianist was all big white hands and wasp waist who went on to write a biography of Horowitz edited by Jackie Kennedy. Young Elizabethan scholars were always around—but Stephen’s interests were broad. He was a major and discerning and greedy collector of rare editions, especially anything related to Shakespeare and his spiritual descendants. He was already embarked on reading all of Trollope and Wharton, whose best books he would introduce in new editions. I first read Mavis Gallant in his spare room. She became one of my favorite writers and eventually a friend when I lived in Paris. Stephen kept a journal in which all our lives were recorded moment by moment—he will end up being the Pepys of our generation. He liked to think of himself as the country mouse and David as the city mouse, but of course he recorded all of David’s gossip, too. Like David he had an unparalleled gift for friendship, domesticity, and loyalty. Stephen was always tender and sustaining to his “dear hearts” and coldly arrogant to the hordes of people who didn’t interest him.

Anne Freedgood, my old editor at Random House, had published John Gardner and launched his career by bringing out
The Sunlight Dialogues
in January, when no new books of importance are published. The novel was favorably reviewed on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
, which then had
the power to make or break a book. Other hefty tomes by Gardner were subsequently published (
Nickel Mountain
and the only good one,
Grendel
, Gardner’s retelling of Beowulf, which had come out the year before
The Sunlight Dialogues
but drawn little attention initially). Yet nothing created such a furor as his attack on all his contemporaries,
On Moral Fiction
(1978). His polemic was obviously indebted to Tolstoy’s
What Is Art?
and took other writers to task for anything opaque or experimental. Gardner wanted the style of a book to be totally transparent so that the action could unfold behind it like a constantly moving, panoramic dream.

A strange man in his forties, Gardner had long, straight hair on the sides but was going bald on top, reputedly had had a colostomy, drove a motorcycle. He had a girlfriend, Liz Rosenberg, who was a grad student in poetry at Johns Hopkins. Later she became a professor at Binghamton University. I think Gardner was jealous of John Barth’s influence over her. He’d attacked Barth’s writing in
On Moral Fiction
, which had just recently come out, after Gardner had been invited to speak at Johns Hopkins. Barth announced to his staff that he would not be host of the luncheon for Gardner (I had to do the honors), but that he would attend. Barth lay down only one rule—Gardner could not discuss Barth’s writing before Barth’s own students. During the lunch Gardner told me that my own writing was “immoral.” I assumed he meant because it was homosexual. Not at all, Gardner assured me. What was immoral is that the father in
Nocturnes for the King of Naples
is not angry when he discovers his son’s homosexuality but rather pleased, since that means more women for himself and no competition from a younger man. In the novel the father is represented as a total roué who shoots heroin, drinks to excess, stages orgies in a rented villa in Spain…

Gardner: “You know your own father would never have reacted that way.”

Me: “That’s true. In real life he was very upset. But the father in my book is a character—”

Gardner: “Who never existed, who never would exist. No father would react that way. That’s why your book is immoral.”

I was amazed that he’d bothered to read that far in my book (which was virtually unknown), and his objections to it were less impressive to me than the seriousness with which he took it. I did, however, point out that not all fathers were middle-class Americans and that my character was an invention, someone I’d imagined—

But no, Gardner didn’t want to hear that. I was immoral, but I was of course in good company, along with most other American novelists of the day, especially the reprehensible Barth and Updike, though I hadn’t rated a mention in his version of Who’s Who in Hell. What was fascinating to me in later years was how this one book,
On Moral Fiction
, remained something serious people read long after they’d forgotten Gardner’s fiction. Despite its Puritanism and narrow, hectoring tone, it nevertheless took a firm stand and pursued its point. My theory is that readers, especially serious young students of literature, are so at a loss as to how to evaluate fiction that they will respond to any critic (F. R. Leavis, Harold Bloom, John Gardner) who tells them what to think, has a simple principle for determining quality, and uses often and forcefully the word
great
.

Although Gardner had promised not to mention Barth’s fiction, the very first thing he did in front of Barth’s students was to attack John Barth. Barth, who was sitting toward the front of the crowded room, objected, but Gardner plowed on. Angry words were exchanged between the two great men. A reporter from the
Baltimore Sun
was sitting in the back and furiously scribbling notes—and soon the story had gone national.

A confrontation of this sort was especially dramatic in Baltimore. In crowded, pedestrian New York where everyone was a loudmouth
and defended his or her turf with a ferocity unknown to mild auslander, verbal fights occurred daily. The leader of the New York teachers’ union would attack a black educator who’d proposed that Ebonics be taught in the public schools. In the spring of 1970 Earth Day was celebrated, one of the first mass demonstrations in favor of the environment. Gay Day, anti–Vietnam War protests—every month brought another huge march.

But in the rest of the country (this melancholy, lonely country) the streets were empty, people were sealed off in their offices or cars or houses, no one saw anyone outside his or her circle or had any contact with strangers. Suburbia, television, and the automobile had isolated everyone—perhaps a good thing in such a potentially violent country. Even in gated communities, miles and miles away from the nearest ghetto, the frightened golden-agers were all buying weapons or taking karate classes. It was precisely in those places that were the safest that the sheltered populations most often expected imminent violence. Armageddon was both a religious and a looming social reality for nearly a third of Americans. In Utah, houses for sale were advertised as having “fully furnished” basements, meaning set up as bunkers for survivalists when the Final Days began, when the Rapture started separating the sheep from the goats. Which would be tomorrow. Or the next day.

I’d lived through both of the blackouts in New York. The first one, in 1965, went more or less peacefully by since it happened when it was getting cold, but the second one occurred on July 13 and 14, 1977, and led to two days of rioting and looting. Some 1,616 stores were looted, and at certain points the looters were looting the other looters. Altogether 3,776 people were arrested—the largest mass arrest in the city’s history—and 1,037 fires were reported.

New York was a mess by the late 1970s. The city had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. It was from time to time incapable
of paying teachers their salaries. Graffiti covered every square inch of the interiors of subway cars, which were awash with garbage. Passengers were subjected to the intolerably loud music coming out of boom boxes. Crime had risen faster in the sixties (and was continuing to rise in the seventies) than in any other American city since the 1930s. In 1975 Mayor Beame had furloughed thousands of city workers, including cops and garbagemen. When Beame asked President Ford for federal assistance to meet the payroll, Ford told New York to drop dead. New York had been called Fun City. Now it had become Fear City and Stink City. Garbage left on the streets would go weeks without being collected.

I remember I had a boyfriend at the time, Ken, who sold sappy greeting cards and was a determined masochist. He was from Kentucky and talked all the time—in such an irritating, constant motormouth way that it was easy to whip his butt from time to time out of sheer frustration. We were sitting in his apartment—him talking, me smoldering with boredom—when the 1977 blackout started. He thought it was a lark, a sort of “trend,” and he was always alert to trends. He lived in the Village on West Fourth Street around the corner from Pizzeria Uno, where within an hour or two the hundreds of frozen pizzas were quickly thawing and were being handed out to passersby completely free. Ken grabbed several and “we had a ball,” as he put it. “This is fabulous,” he said. He wanted me to get “into” it more, but there was a limit as to how much cheery excitement a sadist could exhibit to his slave. I was self-conscious about my role because it wasn’t my usual one. We sat on his fire escape. The earlier blackout had been reassuring because it had shown how good-natured and ultimately how disciplined New Yorkers were. The new blackout showed how racially divided we were, how much anger seethed just below the surface, how rapacious and every-man-for-himself we’d all become.

In 1978 I moved back downtown. Keith McDermott was living
mostly on the West Coast, my nephew had decided to return to the Midwest and was enrolled in the University of Chicago—and I found the West Side depressing. I had a part-time beau, Norm Rathweg, who found me a studio apartment in the Colonnades on Lafayette Street, a series of scruffy Greek Revival buildings from the 1830s—the most elegant address of the period, filled with Astors, but by the late 1970s in a picturesque state of decay worthy of the French Quarter of New Orleans. My big studio apartment had twenty-foot ceilings, parquet floors, a small white-marble fireplace, and tall windows outfitted with wood shutters that folded back into the deep window frames. My windows looked down on a garden restaurant, and in the evening in summertime I could hear the friendly murmur of voices and the rattle of silverware on dishes. In the winter I usually had a fire on the grate, or a hibachi on which I grilled swordfish or lamb for guests. Norm put in a new kitchen and bathroom and loft bed and painted the whole thing gray-blue with white woodwork. When my nephew visited with a school friend, Richard Kaye, they were shocked by how humbly a writer could live. They were invited to dinner and were impressed and confused that I, an out homosexual, was trying to fix up the literary critic Richard Gilman with a single woman I knew. What business did I have, they wondered, meddling with the lives of straights?

I had met Norm Rathweg at the Sheridan Square Gym, where I’d been working out since the mid-1960s. When I started lifting weights, it was still an unusual activity for a gay man. In the fifties and sixties gays wanted to be as thin as possible but it never occurred to them to be—well, not boys but
men
. In the seventies, however, we stayed thin but began to add muscles—a well-defined chest, a firm, prominent butt, massive legs, baby biceps, more muscled shoulders. I was one of the first in this metamorphosis from boy to man.

A more dramatic example of the transformation was Norm. When he arrived at the gym, he was a tall, skinny boy, pale with nearly invisible blond eyelashes and a blancmange complexion. He was timid and never spoke to anyone except his lover, Louis Keith Nelson. They were at the gym every day but kept to themselves. Norm wouldn’t even meet my eyes or anyone else’s. The only assertive thing he did was to burp loudly, which seemed to be unconscious.

But slowly he changed. He began to fill out and muscle up. He became more confident. I started to go out with him though it was understood that he and Louis Keith Nelson were a couple and would stay together. Back then, in the 1970s, these questions of fidelity and couplehood didn’t come up and we wouldn’t exactly have known how to respond to them. Introducing the issue now slightly falsifies the quiet, natural way in which we assumed everyone would have multiple sex partners, that jealousy was definitely not cool, and that new people could be regular fuck buddies or part-time lovers, that the molecule could always annex a new atom. Of course everyone tacitly feared that a new dalliance might take a lover away forever, but this seldom happened. It was as if the three elements (love, sex, friendship) that straight people centered on one other person we gays distributed over several people and this distribution was a more solid form than companionate marriage.

While I lived in that apartment in the Colonnades, I had lots of group sex—there was a beefy, slightly crazy American Indian from Colorado who’d been “discovered” at sixteen by Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder. He had a smooth body like pillows stuffed tightly inside a silk parachute. There was a handsome Norwegian flight attendant from St. Paul with a cool, bemused manner, though he was open to almost any suggestion. There were lots of other guys and we lay around in my loft bed talking and kissing and listening to music and getting high. I was in my late
thirties and gay men of my generation had earlier always assumed that sex would come to a screeching halt at age thirty, but now that we’d long before reached that landmark age, it seemed just to go on and on, as did one’s youth. People of my parents’ generation had been married at twenty-two, had had children two years later, and were worn-out and paunchy by forty, but we kept working out and staying up late and falling in and out of love, “immature” but weirdly youthful.