The Tall Boy: A Memoir
Page 23
It seemed the perfect solution to everything, except that my work stopped. Back some years—about the time we got our cardboard house really fit to live in—I had sold a novel to Hollywood, and put a payment down on a place of our own. However, this added security did not prepare me for the months that followed when I sat down to write every morning, and not a word occurred to me. I had been happier these past years than ever before in my life, yet somehow the words, the images, the meaning, had stopped.
“Did you think that isolating yourself from the world wouldn’t have a cost?” my friend Joe asked.
Joe was the only one of my old New York circle who would brave the rattle and grime of the Long Island Railroad to come out to visit. In fact, he had completed his first book in the shed that we liked to think of as our guestroom. “Downtown Joe,” he was affectionately called, or sometimes, “Saint Joe,” for he was devout. Vigorous, vivacious, unshakable in his convictions, looking like a pocket-edition of Mark Twain, he gathered signatures for worthy causes, served at soup kitchens, nursed the plague-stricken, and, from the first moment of the Stonewall Rebellion, joined a group of writers and thinkers in marching towards freedom.
His accusation infuriated me. “What do you mean, isolating myself from the world?” I demanded.
“What else do you call it?” he asked. His gesture withered the garden we were sitting in: “You’ve hidden yourself a hundred miles outside of this century.”
“Having a few fucking hollyhocks doesn’t mean I’m out of touch with the world,” I protested.
Even after Joe had taken the train back to New York, his accusation remained. I stormed along the beach, kicking up the sand and sometimes hurling chunks of driftwood back into the waves. How could he say I’d hidden myself from the world? It was true I seldom got into the city anymore, but after all, what were telephones for? And if I no longer subscribed to a morning paper, I faithfully watched the news every evening. Yet despite my skill and practice in evading the issue, there was not a minute when I didn’t know exactly what he had been talking about. The battle for gay liberation was going on outside my garden wall, and I was no part of it. I had lost friends to AIDS, but my response to this was limited to regret. A whole new point of view was forming in the world, and I, while out of the closet, was still watching from the bedroom. “You were asking why you’ve stopped writing,” Joe had said just before he boarded the train. “I’m suggesting it’s because you have nothing to say anymore. You’ve settled for contentment.”
When I returned home, Lo asked, “Did Joe have any suggestions?”
I faked innocence. “About what?”
“What to do about your writer’s block.”
“Nothing that would be of any help to me,” I mumbled.
However, Joe’s impassioned words came back every time I sat down and tried to write. I did not even make notes to myself now, but simply stared at that terrible foolscap Sahara. The only image that came to my mind was of an amputee wincing at the pain in a limb that wasn’t there anymore.
And Lo kept coming up with solutions. “Suppose,” he said, that night, “just suppose that, instead of thinking you have to make up stories and invent characters, you were to simply report? Maybe tell about some of the shit you had to put up with, back in the bad old days?”
Those bad old days were something he and I had never talked about, and the coolness of my voice was meant to discourage our starting to now. “Tell about it to what purpose?” I asked.
He spoke as if this were something he had thought about for a long time: a generation of kids was coming out now who had no idea how tough things used to be for gay people, he said. They thought it had always been as easy-going as it was today, “—and that it ’ll automatically go on this way all by itself.”
I escaped into the dark garden, but he followed after me. “And that leaves them unguarded,” he persisted, “because the opposition hasn’t gone away, and all the old injustices could gradually sneak back—”
I had enough problems without going back to those memories, I told him. “And even if I wanted to, the words don’t oblige anymore.”
It was around four that morning when I woke up and was unable to get back to sleep. So as not to waken Lo, I sneaked into our other room and tried to read; tried watching TV too, and even meditating, but nothing helped. Instead, I kept getting feelings I didn’t want, the old uneasiness, the isolation, the anger. It was only June, and the windows were open, yet I was sweating. I saw the glitter of lights, and the reflection of a smile in a plate glass window. I heard the husky decoy speak enticingly, and when I responded, glimpsed the flash of brass in his wallet as he told me I was under arrest.
Make it work for you, Agnes had told me—anger, failure, shame! I hushed her voice, but there were others now, even my own. Suddenly whole phrases were coming out of me like the gush from a wound. I wasn’t prepared for them—had no paper handy, and in this exigency, was forced to scrawl the words down on whatever I could find, the fly leaf of a book, the margins of a page, the backs of old telephone messages. Eventually, there was a wild scatter of makeshift manuscript around my chair. I was exhausted, and at the same time, too keyed up to rest. Hardly knowing what I would find, I gathered the papers up from the floor.
The writing was scarcely legible and not always coherent. At times, it seemed to be the outcry of someone I scarcely knew, and for a moment, I was tempted to hide or destroy it. Instead, I hunted up some foolscap and began to copy my scrawl onto clean sheets of paper, writing each word clearly this time.
By the time I had finished, daylight was coming in the windows, and I could hear Lo calling sleepily from the next room. I didn’t answer yet, but glanced back at the copy. “Hollywood Boulevard was crowded, but nobody seemed to be going anywhere,” it began. “The tourists drifted aimlessly, and so did I, until I noticed that one of them was cruising me—”
I was out at last.
Also by Jess Gregg
Novels
The Other Elizabeth
The Glory Circuit
Baby Boy
Plays
The Seashell
Shout from the Rooftops
Cowboy
The Mens Room
The Undergound Kite
Acknowledgments
My many thanks to Elise D’Haene, my editor, and to Martin and Judy Shepard of the Permanent Press. I’m also grateful for the wonderful support of Julie Fallowfield, Victoria Hartman, John Laudando, Leo Revi, Laura Stein, Neenyah Ostrom, and Richard Philp. Sherry Ogilvie and Jenelle Bailey too. Credit Alan Einhorn for patience and skill when I had to be photographed. And thanks to Blossom Akst Levy for giving me permission to use lyrics from her Dad’s song, Am I Blue?
Some of this material has appeared in a different form in Christopher Street, Dance Magazine, and Readers Digest.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Jess Gregg
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2398-6
The Permanent Press
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Distributed by Open Road Distribution
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Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Part One
1 February, 1943
2 Big Pal
3 Dress-Up
4 Minotaur
5 Little Boy Blew
6 The Parlez-Vous Question
7 Full-Time Hopscotch
8 Am I Brown?
9 Walk Tall
10 Blue Heaven
11 The Security God
Part Two
12 Bill, Collected
13 What Can I Tell You, Hon?
14 The Pearl
15 Eaten Alive
16 A Credit to Society
17 Life Preserver
18 Just the Three of Us
19 The Degas Look
20 Dean B.
21 Lo
Also by Jess Gregg
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page