“A single bed will give you more space in the room,” my mother insisted.
I told her I didn’t need to move around. I could put a table and chairs out on the deck and eat meals out there when the spirit moved me.
“That’s silly, darling. There’s only one of you, and the single bed is plenty roomy.”
I told her there was more storage in the double bed.
“You’ll be way too cramped in that room,” she insisted. “You’ll have to squeeze around the bed just to get to the kitchen.”
“I like a big bed,” I said feebly.
My father was the one who put an end to this. “For God’s sake, Diana, he’s a grown man. He might wanna have company some night.”
Did he know what sort of company? Certainly not.
Did my mother know?
Maybe. No, probably.
Did she really think that a smaller bed might keep it from happening?
I NAMED THE pentshack Little Cat Feet after that line in the Carl Sandburg poem. “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” It didn’t really need a name, but I’ve always enjoyed naming places, and the fog was so full of mystery when it rolled over my deck at night and blurred the Deco buildings on either side, leaving only the random yellow rectangles of their windows. Sometimes it got so thick that all I could see from my deck was the pink neon fish above a restaurant down at Fisherman’s Wharf. There was something insistently symbolic about that fish, like the billboard with the big eyeglasses in The Great Gatsby. For someone once steeped in Anglican mythology it was tempting to think of the fish as an early Christian ichthus, but I knew in my fledgling pagan heart that San Francisco was a place where myths could flourish just fine without the help of Jesus. Little Cat Feet already felt steeped in its own secret history, which is why I eventually plopped it on the roof of my fictitious 28 Barbary Lane and made it the apartment of my creepiest villain.
In 1993 when Tales of the City was filmed for television, the pentshack was meticulously re-created on the roof of a parking garage in North Beach. The fact that there was a police station downstairs made it all the more titillating to smoke a joint behind the camera as I watched a scene come to life in a replica of my first real San Francisco home. Nothing would have been sweeter than to share that moment with my best friend, Steve Beery, who lived just a few blocks away in his own little studio on the leafy crest of Telegraph Hill. (“In the pubic hair of Coit Tower” was how he always put it.)
Steve had been my biggest booster and confidant for fifteen years. My muse, really. We had been lovers briefly, but friendship was what truly agreed with us. We had been cabinmates on cruises to Alaska and Mexico, fellow travelers to London and the Cotswolds and the Isle of Lesbos—adventures that had all sparked plot turns in “Tales of the City.” We became real-life Hardy Boys as we searched Nob Hill’s Grace Cathedral for an elevator that would lift us to a catwalk hundreds of feet above the floor. What if? had been our constant marching song as I spun a tale that was never allowed to end. What if that shed in the park is where the mysterious hermit named Luke lives? What if he turns out to be someone long presumed dead? What if that society columnist somehow falls in love with the hermit? Of course I wanted Steve with me that day. The story was still going on.
The phone rang at least eight times before he answered. I knew what that meant.
“Sorry, sweetie, were you asleep?”
“More or less,” he said.
“Do you feel like a little trip? I’m down at the pentshack set. It’s fucking amazing and you have to see it.”
“I dunno, bud.”
“I could send a cab to Coit Tower. You wouldn’t have far to walk. I’ve saved a director’s chair for you.”
He was thirty-nine years old and too weak to get out of bed. He never made it to the pentshack set—or, for that matter, more than a fortnight past forty.
Remember his name: Steve Beery.
When the time is right, I’ll tell you how we met.
It’s something I might have made up myself.
THE PENTSHACK—THE ORIGINAL one—cost me $175 a month. That sum will bring bitter tears to the eyes of modern renters, but even back then, the money had to come from somewhere. Having quit my post at the AP, I was desperate for cash, and I wasn’t too proud to take any job that let me stay longer in San Francisco. Both local newspapers, as predicted, had already turned me down, so I signed up with Kelly Girl, an employment agency so accustomed to its flunkies being female that they mailed me a form letter advising me to wear “a conservative skirt” when I reported for work. That might have been interesting on my first assignment: handing out flyers for a roommate-finder service on a street corner in the Financial District. For another day job they sent me to a warehouse in Daly City, where I loaded department store mannequins into a truck. My coworker was a gentle, feebleminded giant who reminded me of Lenny in Of Mice and Men and insisted on honking the boobs of every mannequin we handled that day. Later, I found work as a clerk in a Thai import shop on Union Street called Fabulous Things. Bored socialites from Pacific Heights, always on the prowl for something Fabulous, would unroll whole bolts of shimmering silk, wrap it around themselves for a quick pose in the mirror, and dump it in a heap before they left for their vodka lunches in little French courtyards down the street. I lasted a week.
Another job seemed to have dropped from heaven. I was making one last effort at religiosity by attending an Episcopal Church not far from Little Cat Feet. I had already abandoned the effort it had always taken to believe in God, but the little Craftsman church was charming, and I thought it might do me some good to volunteer at its suicide hotline. The rector, a stalwart Redfordesque guy with a wife and kids, who was secretly called “God’s gift” by the women of the parish, took note of my jobless state one Sunday morning after the sermon and offered to pay me by the hour as a part-time assistant, drafting occasional letters for him. That had a nice Dickensian ring to it—a vicar’s amanuensis—and it was, after all, a form of writing, the very thing I wanted to do. I enjoyed the time I spent with this liberal-hearted man, though there proved to be very few letters to compose. There were even fewer suicides to prevent in my volunteer job. I would sit there alone at night, waiting for the phone to ring, hoping against hope that someone would at least get depressed. (An ill-attended suicide hotline appears in several scenes of Tales of the City.)
I wasn’t at a loss, however, for how to spend my nights. I could amble down Russian Hill to the hubbub of North Beach, sometimes taking a longer, more scenic route through the leafy canyon of Macondray Lane, just so I could descend the rickety wooden stairway leading down to Taylor Street. There were several such pedestrian byways hidden in the crevices of Russian Hill, but this was the one that inspired the Barbary Lane in my books. I was deliberate in the juxtaposition of those words. Barbary to connote the raw-boned frontier wildness of the city; Lane to suggest the peace of an English village. Seemingly contradictory, yet anyone could sample both sensations in the course of a twenty-minute stroll down to North Beach. Once you hit Columbus and passed the bustling Italian cafés, you had only to take a left at Carol Doda’s blinking nipples on the sign in front of Big Al’s. The last few blocks were the hardest, since aggressive barkers, and sometimes the girls themselves, would try to drag you into clubs for what was known then as a “nude encounter.” I would pick up my pace here with a smile plastered on my face. My own nude encounters awaited me at the foot of Broadway, where a faceless, signless, four-story concrete building stood beneath a freeway off-ramp that has long since been torn down. The building is still there, considerably altered. A quick online search reveals that the bones of its high-ceilinged front room can still be glimpsed in the shared office space it offers millennials with laptops and dreams of a start-up.
This was Dave’s Baths. Even those two words suggest an unlikely duality. The term Baths conjures up a bacchanal in Roman times: add the word Dave’s to the front and, voilà, you have a folksy barbershop in Toledo. B
oth masculine moods were invoked, each in its own nourishing way, once you got inside.
You had to sign in at the desk. I’m assuming that most guys gave a fake name. I certainly did, since they never checked IDs, and I was still worrying about whether or not this was actually legal. I used the name Elloughby Branch, grandly enough, though it may help to know that this was a jokey spin on my Confederate ancestor’s name: Lawrence O’Brian Branch—LO’B Branch. Okay, right, makes it even worse.
The hardest thing about confronting your past is the pinch of the overlapping parts, when you are no longer one thing and not quite the other. It makes you squirm to face yourself in transition, foolish and floundering. But it has to be said that if anything delivered me from the privileged white elitism of my youth it was the red-lit cubicles and darkened hallways and even darker mazes of Dave’s Baths. Everyone went there, pilgrims united on a quest for cock; and even a rejection, if delivered kindly enough, could reveal the difference between a bastard and a nice guy in the dark. My tastes in those days were largely vanilla and oral (it was still such a novelty to have one of those wonders in my mouth), and only afterward, when I lay spent and happy in the arms of a stranger, another tender man-child like me, did I even begin to notice the secondary matters of race, creed, and national origin. It was a deeply democratizing place.
I more or less abandoned Dave’s when I discovered the other baths across town, the Ritch Street Baths and the Club Baths, which we called Eighth and Howard in the interest of discretion. It was a much longer walk, and I did have to walk, having totaled my Opel GT in a head-on collision on Russian Hill, but it was always worth the effort. Even the walk itself past the denim-dense alleyways south of Market could offer its own alfresco entertainments. Once you got to Ritch Street you could sink into a huge Jacuzzi with a dozen of your brothers. It’s like a Minoan temple, I had gushed to my new friend, Jan, though I didn’t know exactly what that meant, since I had merely read the phrase “Minoan Lounge” on a poster. Afterward, on the other side of that room, you could order a nine-grain turkey sandwich with sprouts and enjoy it while lolling on a velvet beanbag with others taking a break from their revels. How strange to remember that there was once a culinary aspect to the baths. Even stranger to remember that I did not find it repellent in the least. The lights in those places were kept low for more than one reason.
Jan, by the way, was the sister of a friend from my Chapel Hill and Navy days. She was the person I took to see The Boys in the Band and Cabaret to show her what gay life was (sort of ) like. A vivacious redhead with a husband and two small kids, she loved hearing every juicy detail of my nocturnal rambles. I had decided, early on, that San Francisco would mean a brand-new life for me; there would be no lying about myself to her or to anyone else. So, one evening after a long day at the AP, I had thrown back a couple of stiff mai tais at a Polynesian restaurant in Fox Plaza and made my way to Jan’s upper-floor Victorian flat in Cow Hollow. She was washing her children in the tub at the time. Seeing the stricken look on my face, she dried the kids and put them to bed, finally joining me in the living room, where I sat with lowered head on the edge of an armchair. She sat on the sofa across from me, frowning with concern. “What is it, babycakes?”
She used that term of endearment with almost everyone, I would discover, but I had never heard it before that night. It would end up as the title of one of my novels.
Fumbling with an awkward preamble (including the shameful and already inaccurate assurance that I would change it if I could), I finally said: “I’m homosexual.”
She absorbed that for a moment then left the sofa and knelt in front of me, taking my hands in hers. “Big fucking deal,” she said with the loveliest little smile.
That’s all it took. I started coming out to everyone. Friends. Coworkers. Cabdrivers. Anyone who would listen. It was so exhilarating. Once, as a reason for quitting a boring office job, I confessed to the employer that I was gay. “So what?” he said with a shrug. “I’m married and I’m fucking my secretary. That’s no excuse.”
I was more than ready for the next level when a reporter for San Francisco magazine approached me about a photo feature she was writing called “The Ten Sexiest Men in Town.” She wanted to include an out gay man and wondered if I would be willing to, um, be him. I jumped at it, recognizing an easy way to clear the Etch A Sketch tablet of my make-believe life and start afresh in the city, free of secrets. (The “sexiest” part was embarrassing—and hyperbole, to say the least—but this was 1973, and the notion of an “eligible bachelor” list in a mainstream lifestyle magazine was already sounding passé.) Here was my chance to utter my own “big fucking deal” in a way that was public but not so public as to make it all the way back to Raleigh. I would be in good company, too. Among the other men on the list were respected local cultural figures like the actor Peter Donat and the Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church. I was photographed striding across the crest of Russian Hill in Levi’s 501s and a plaid flannel shirt, a breeze ruffling my hair. They described me as a Vietnam veteran and an aspiring writer who “ekes out a living doing odd jobs and writing letters for an Episcopal minister.” The fact that I was “homosexual” was mentioned, very matter-of-factly, in the last sentence. All in all, quite gracefully done, I thought.
The rector thought otherwise. When I showed him the magazine in his office, feeling—yes—rather proud of myself, he read the pertinent caption slowly then looked at me with an unreadable expression. What was he feeling? Shock? Pity? Disbelief? I was flummoxed. He had given every impression of being an open-minded man. I had honestly expected him to congratulate me on my courage.
He got up from the desk and closed the door. “I’m so sorry about this, Armistead. I’m going to have to let you go.”
I just stood there gaping at him.
“It’s not what you think. I’m not prejudiced. I’m not one of those people. It just wouldn’t look right for you to be working here.”
I asked him without a trace of anger: “Then what sort of person are you?”
The answer came, but not from the rector, from me, because it was suddenly oh-so-blazingly obvious. “Oh . . . a gay person.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said again. “I know you understand.”
I did understand. Coming out makes you dangerous to those around you who believe they have to stay in the closet at any cost. Especially if they work with you. Especially if being with you might not look right. Especially if, from the beginning, they had secretly hoped for a little more than someone to write their letters.
I left his office without a word, in no mood for absolutions.
AS IT HAPPENED, I would not be the last person to be dismissed from that church for being openly queer. Five years later, the assistant rector, Father William Barcus, came out of the closet—in the pulpit, no less, in the presence of that very rector, with TV cameras rolling—when he preached against the Briggs Initiative, the ballot measure that would have outlawed gay and lesbian teachers in California. Supervisor Harvey Milk, who led the battle against Briggs, was also in the church that day, and we were swapping Cheshire Cat grins over what we knew was about to happen. Bill Barcus had already used that pulpit to decry the homophobic murder of a local gardener, Robert Hillsborough, who had been stabbed to death by four men yelling, “Faggot! Faggot!” Hillsborough’s death had awakened everyone to the escalating violence against gay people in the city. But Bill, following the established rules of the ecclesiastical closet, had voiced his indignation as a compassionate outsider. Now he was ready to make it personal and “join his people in the fight.”
To hear him tell it—which I did, on a video released after his death from AIDS in 1992—all hell broke loose after his announcement. His coming-out had been a landmark moment that stirred the excitement of the national press and sent many closeted priests running for cover, as he put it, “skirts a-twirling.” And that tape reminded me how Harvey and I came to be in church that day.
One
day Armistead Maupin came to me at [the church] and said, “When are you going to stop preaching about them and start preaching as us?” And I said, “Armistead, it would just ruin my career. You don’t understand.” [He] looked at me and said, “You were not ordained for a career, you were ordained for a vocation. Can we not find one honest man in the church? Just one?” So I went to my friend Harvey Milk, and he said, “Can we not find one honest man?” And I said, “You got him.”
Bill Barcus did find his vocation. He was eventually released from his parish (the sardonic italics are clear on the videotape) by the rector he had embarrassed. When he was transferred across town to Grace Cathedral, he served as canon to the bishop and established the church’s first program for the homeless. At one point there were as many as three hundred people sleeping in the cathedral at night, so Canon Barcus looked for more permanent housing and secured the Club Baths when it was ordered shut by the city as a response to AIDS. Those little rooms at Eighth and Howard—so familiar to me in the sex-fueled days of my youth—became the city’s first dedicated housing for the homeless. Bill was especially proud that there were armed guards to keep residents safe, and that pets were permitted on the premises. This new Episcopal Sanctuary spawned several others over the years, the most recent of which, a newly built five-story, forty-eight-unit building, opened in 2002.
It’s called Canon Barcus Community House.
EVERY ASPIRING WRITER knows the drill: you take a lackluster office job because you need to eat and pay the rent, but the writing you do at work (if you’re lucky enough even to be doing that) drains you so much that you don’t feel like writing at night. So you quit after a few months and fully commit to freelancing. There is freedom in that, at least, and the chance to stretch as an artist, and it’s better to struggle financially than to live under the heel of a boring master. Only it isn’t, really. Struggling means living in a state of perpetual panic, and you can’t be creative when you’re feeling like that. So you nail down another steady paycheck, deeply relieved but hating yourself a little bit more, and so the cycle repeats itself.
Logical Family: A Memoir Page 14
