City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (6 page)

Marilyn seldom applied her theoretical acumen to her own development as a painter. I can’t recall her ever discussing the art-historical underpinnings of her work—or the changes in her work. She admired Richard Diebenkorn, the California painter, because he’d returned to figurative art when everyone on the East Coast was still resolutely nonrepresentational. She liked the way he painted those California excesses of sunlight and their blue, accumulating shadows. She loved Bonnard, whom the New York critics could never quite place in the first rank. She was an improbable kind of Midwestern German sensualist. Not that she surrendered to the appeal of luxury or decadence, but rather she followed her nose and her eyes and her sense of touch and taste toward what intrigued her in some direct, unmediated way.

Perhaps because I lived in a world made of words, I half envied Marilyn her wide-open senses. She was alert to the beauty of the everyday, even the banal. She’d go into raptures over something anyone else would have considered ugly, but not out of perversity or an inverse snobbery. She would suddenly be struck by some purely visual aspect of something—a wonderful passage of brickwork or a slice of Tiepolo-blue sky above a windowless wedge of black buildings or the weave of metal in a manhole cover, the dissolving steam exhaled by a subway grate, or a kitschy but carefully done memorial wall hanging of John F. Kennedy in a Puerto Rican beauty shop on Columbus Avenue.

The New York School poets (John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler) were hymning the city in the same casual, shrugging, but secretly precise terms. In “An East Window on Elizabeth Street,”
Schuyler writes, “I don’t know how/it can look so miraculous and alive/an organic skin for the stacked cubes of air.” Later he writes:

Mutable, delicate, expendable, ugly, mysterious

(seven stories of just bathroom windows)

packed: a man asleep, a woman slicing garlic thinly into oil

(what a stink, what a wonderful smell)

burgeoning with stacks, pipes, ventilators, tensile antennae—

that gristling gray bit is a part of a bridge,

that mesh hangar on a roof is to play games under.

But why should a metal ladder climb, straight

and sky aspiring, five rungs above a stairway hood

up into nothing?

Marilyn had a two-room apartment on the West Side between Riverside and West End that she was endlessly decorating, then stripping and filling up again. Bits of savage finery, a blue feather on a bone, would hang on the burlap wall above a massive bedouin bracelet with its brass welts and multiple locks, like some horrible chastity device. She had a kneehole round table that her father had made her of good pale oak and, in another corner, a drawing board covered with pastels of “famous” lesbians. She liked lace curtains worthy of a concierge from the Pas-de-Calais and a strength-sapping sofa heavy with bolsters and pillows.

I was surely a strange, edgy, difficult friend—excessively polite and docile, patient and indifferent, but then rebellious, on the lam, a master of the disappearing act. Chain-smoking and filling the air with my noxious clouds. Some of my primitive fears of women, based on my dread of my stifling mother, attached to Marilyn—except she was herself elusive, quick to cancel appointments, horrified by the idea of marriage. She made a cult of friendship but scorned the family, though she was wonderfully kind to her own
mother and siblings. More than two evenings out in a row spent even in our unintimidating, undemanding society would give her a splitting headache. She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light. Marilyn certainly was as full of contradictions as I was—she was a sensualist who loved baths and delicious little meals, but at the same time she was virtually a Stalinist in her politics, as far as I could tell, though at other moments she alternated between a superrational, unforgiving Aristotelianism she’d acquired during years of study at the University of Chicago and a highly Romantic love of lush, swooning verismo operas.

I’ve forgotten to say how funny and affectionate she always was, how much warmth she radiated, what good humor she brought to every occasion, how much interest she lavished on her friends, how forgiving and tolerant she could be. She loved turning her back courtyard into a little vernal paradise in the summer, where she’d serve cold Riesling and warm potato salad.

In the summer we’d fill the tub with ice and thirty bottles of white wine (a bottle per guest) and run about with old friends from the Midwest and a few new ones from the East Coast, men and women, and it seemed those exciting days of youth and independence and exaltation would never end.

Chapter 5

In 1964 Stan and I moved to West Seventy-first Street, to a spacious apartment that cost $175 a month. We each had a bedroom and we shared a living room and a dining room. We furnished it at Goodwill with big, heavy oak pieces that were ugly but that looked solid and respectable to us. The neighborhood itself was run-down. Puerto Ricans would throw beer bottles from the window. On the corner was a big Cuban restaurant that reeked of black beans and slabs of roast pork. Next door to us was a bodega where black-magic candles were sold, poured into glass jars and smelling of bubble gum; they were for everything from placing a curse on an enemy to winning back an errant husband. Our neighborhood was so dangerous at the time that it was called Needle Park. A
Life
reporter wrote a nonfiction book,
The Panic in Needle Park
, that was adapted into a violent movie about the heroin trade, from a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. One winter night, walking home from Marilyn’s at two in the morning, swaying a bit drunkenly, I saw a man in an overcoat and a fedora brandish a gun and shoot another man under the marquee of a shabby hotel. A woman in high heels threw herself on the body and shouted, “
¡Ay, Dios!
” It seemed like a bad sequence in a film noir, something that would need to be reshot. I hurried home, undressed, went to bed, and only the next morning over breakfast did it occur to me to tell
Stan what I’d witnessed. I decided not to report it—no one had much of a sense of civic responsibility in that wild city back then, least of all me.

We knew which blocks were safe and which were dangerous—it really went according to a block-by-block pattern. We’d say to out-of-town relatives and friends, “Oh, don’t go down Eighty-fifth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, though Eighty-sixth is perfectly safe.” Our apartment was robbed once, despite all the gates on the windows and the police lock (a stout metal standard that fitted into a socket on the floor and braced the door against intruders). Everyone we knew had had his or her apartment burgled. We would just shrug and say gallantly, “Oh, well, private property is a crime anyway.” One evening at six o’clock my friend Stephen Orgel and I were robbed at gunpoint on Christopher Street while other people streamed around us. The thief had torn the inner pocket out of his overcoat and was able to point the pistol inconspicuously at us, the gun shielded from view by the bulk of his coat. Not that anyone would have helped us in any event, even if he or she had seen the weapon. The man told us to give him our wallets and to walk to the end of Weehawken Street without looking back; if we called out or looked back, he’d kill us. Once we were out of sight and around the corner, we saw a cop car and told the policeman what had happened; the cop just laughed and shrugged and asked with a weary chuckle, “Wanna file a complaint?” We didn’t.

When I moved to Rome in 1970, I suggested to an Italian friend that we switch sides of the street to avoid confronting three teenagers coming toward us. “Why?” she asked, astonished. In New York we paid the cabdriver to wait at the curb till we were safely inside past the locked front door. We were always aware of everyone within our immediate vicinity. You never lost yourself in conversation on the street, but had to be alert at all times. We made sure we had at least twenty dollars with us every time we left home
so that a robber wouldn’t shoot us in frustration, but were also careful not to carry more—nor to be too well-dressed. Whenever we went out in the evening, we always left the radio and a light on to discourage thieves. As we approached our apartment building we prepared our key in our pocketed hand so that we wouldn’t fumble at the door a second longer than necessary. We walked in straight lines down the sidewalk and only at the last moment did we veer off toward our door, not wanting to signal our intentions or our vulnerability to a watching mischief-maker. On the subway we didn’t look at other passengers.

Stan and I discovered Puerto Rico for holidays. So many Puerto Ricans traveled back and forth to San Juan that the plane was virtually a commuter flight. The round-trip cost $140. In San Juan we’d stay at the YMCA in the Old Town and take the Number 10 bus out to luxurious Condado Beach, where we met a beautiful local teenager so proud to be pale he belonged to the Castilian Club, restricted to the descendants of Spanish settlers. The girl who sold ice cream on the beach was so dark that the other local teens called her King Kong. They laughed; she didn’t. The boys we pursued all lived at home but would slow-dance with us in clubs late into the night and smelled of achiote powder. They were romantic and would make love to us in public parks, since we couldn’t sneak them past the vigilant desk clerk into the Y. When we’d get on a bus, an old man would sneeze theatrically. I asked my Puerto Rican friend why he sneezed. “The word for
gay
is
pato
, ‘duck,’ and he’s sneezing because one of our feathers got in his nose.”

The streets were lined with blue cobblestones that had been brought over centuries before in Spanish galleons as ballast. Because it was a hot tropical country, the cooler nights stretched almost to dawn. Even at three a.m. you could always find someone sipping a tall rum drink in a dimly lit courtyard bar behind a locked
grill while a guitar rambled on to itself. The only Spanish word I knew was
corazón
, but luckily it featured in nearly every song being wailed out of the jukeboxes.

We met boys who soon joined us in New York for a vacation of a week or two. Stan’s was called Pepito, and although he’d been manly and “Castilian” back in San Juan, in New York he evidenced a disturbing propensity for drag. He wanted us to call him Pepita and encouraged us to think of him as a great lady, as a great Hollywood star. Suddenly Stan was completely turned off. Mine was less imaginative, a stolid
macho
named Angel who didn’t have the wit to want to be a woman. Though less handsome than Pepito, he turned out to be better value.

New York in the summer was itself tropical with people sitting on their stoops and drinking beer from the bottle and listening to the salsa station on the boom box. Men strode around in sleeveless, collarless T-shirts, the kind called wifebeaters. They sat side by side on stoops and talked without looking at each other. They sometimes listened to deafening Spanish-language broadcasts of the baseball games.

After Pepito returned to San Juan, Stan took up with a sexy New York Puerto Rican named Jimmy, who was a student at New York University and read everything and knew everything about the history of cinema but worked hard to maintain his Latin identity. He was sweet but macho. He and a friend practiced Latin dances every afternoon. I’d always envied those twirls and syncopated steps on the dance floor, the sudden dips and unfurlings and unexpected recouplings—and stupidly assumed they came “naturally,” as if a genetic code inscribed in Puerto Rican infants facilitated salsa. Now I saw that they worked it out, segment by segment, over long hours of careful rehearsal, punctuated by a sudden cry of insight or a groan of confusion as they got tangled up and bumped into each other. Stan and I were besotted with these
tan-skinned, uncircumcised young dancers with their “Aztec” faces and slim, rotating hips inside pegged trousers and thin black lizard-skin belts, their rapid talk that derailed quickly from English into Spanish, these boys who lived on “Christians and Moors” (rice and black beans) and wore crucifixes or white enamel medals dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen dangling from a thin gold chain. Their combination of sweetness in bed (Angel would kiss my closed eyelids while fucking me) with their street-smart switchblade reflexes excited the Midwestern nerds in us. Stan and I had both grown up watching westerns in which the only men we ever saw in loincloths were Indians (in reality, Italian-Americans). Now we had our own Cheyennes between our legs, their cold religious medals grazing our mouths; or we could overhear them in the next room endlessly rehearsing tonight’s salsa as they lost count, made a false step, got caught up in an elaborate body pretzel, and broke down in a sudden gust of laughter.

Chapter 6

My shrink, Frances Alexander, convinced me that I’d never get “better”—go straight—unless I moved away from Stan. I took the plunge and got an apartment of my own on West Thirteenth Street just off Eighth Avenue. As I left, Stan looked stunned and sat around listening to a 45 called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” I loved him so much but back then no one could defend a homosexual relationship; it was by definition “sick,” spiritually impoverishing, infantile, doomed to repeat itself in a horrid circle of compulsiveness. To the degree that someone was “intellectual” like me, one was au courant with Freudian theories and knew how to torment oneself with extra zeal. At that time I read a book about the Salem witch trials in which the author pointed out that it was precisely the Puritan “intellectuals” who believed in witchcraft. They had the subtlety and instruction needed to detect the presence of the devil in the loony actions of eccentric old ladies and the hysteria of teenage girls. I resented my shrink for pushing me in this direction. Yes, I agreed that homosexuality was second best. But what if I never found a woman as kind and funny and loving as Stan?