“I see,” she said into the phone, stirring the pot of stew. “I see.”
When she hung up the phone she could no longer look at me. But she did put the meat on my plate. And that was my second lesson about being a homosexual. Not everyone would refuse me, but there would never be a full embrace.
I ate as fast as I could as Mrs. Haas walked off into the other room and sat quietly, alone in the old armchair. I looked at Claudia. She was not my savior.
“I want to go to college,” she said.
Claudia’s mother made her own peace with the facts and they never came up again. I knew better than to ask to stay over, but she did send Claudia to school with extra lunch in her bag for me. Extra tuna fish and hard-boiled eggs chopped up together in a washed-out margarine tub. Extra apple. Claudia and I made love passionately everywhere—in bathrooms, classrooms, elevators. She was in love with me, of that I am still sure. We made love in stairwells, during her lunch hour. She did go off to college, a good one in another town. And I got a second job as a cashier, stealing twenty-dollar bills from the cash drawer to take the train to see her. Terrified, we hid in barricaded dorm rooms and made love with silent terror, not romance. We could give up everything pure and joyous for the one most important desire—to never be caught again.
As Claudia took pre-law and studied in the library keeping up her grades to keep her scholarship and her parents proud, I got a room in the basement of a theater, worked ten to six at Chuckles and seven to one at Baskin-Robbins. I ate ice cream for three meals a day and systematically pilfered bananas. I convinced Italian vegetable vendors to let me have their rotten ones. Those were days of no competition for garbage. That night I would cut out the bad sections of each squash or tomato systemically, and chop the remainders into undifferentiated shreds.
Claudia got an acceptable boyfriend who knew nothing about me. I was expected to go along with all of this and did, unquestioningly. Finally she confessed to him and he pointed to the passage in the Bible where God says it is wrong. I was utterly alone. She got a new boyfriend after that, became a sophomore. I sold pot to kids from suburbia in Washington Square Park. They weren’t afraid of me because I was white. There was no explanation for me. There was no explaining my predicament.
My lying improved enormously. It became quite natural, quite quickly. I got a phony credit card number from an old guy named Adam Purple who handed them out on purple paper from his purple bicycle. I called Claudia from phone booths on cold Greenwich Village street corners. She went to college basketball games. And from that point of divergence, our lives continued apart.
I found out where I belonged and after being turned away from a gay bar for being underage, I managed to get into two or three. La Femme with a fat old man at the door and a suited con walking back and forth across the dance floor. The Dutchess, overseen by Danny of the Israeli mafia, a male bouncer at the door and windows painted black. Black dykes hung out on the west side of Washington Square Park or wandered to Bonnie and Clyde’s with the black women downstairs by the pool table and bar and the whites eating pasta in a “women’s” restaurant on the second floor. Chaps and Rusty’s by Chrystie Street with girls in suits and others in party dresses, the first time I ever socialized with Puerto Ricans. But it was all a game about how long you could avoid the attention of the bartender, while staying constantly on the lookout for some other lost kid who might end up to be that friend I desperately needed.
Afterwards, I could walk over to the pier on West Street and watch the leather queens getting blow jobs or fucking in the open at all hours. You’d walk up and down the aisle and there would be fifty of them. Now, they’re ghosts. That’s where the gay children were—kids like me with nowhere to go. We sat around listening to someone’s radio, and I could lie down at the end of the pier, staring out at old illuminated New Jersey and actually go to sleep knowing I wouldn’t wake up raped because gay men don’t do that to us.
One night I was so alone. It was my seminal aloneness—every solitary moment since then reminds me of that one spot. Alone with nothing and no one on my side. There was no one out there who was for me. And I looked up at a passing boat and saw a rat climbing out of a hole on the dock about three feet from my face. Then I saw that there was a whole swarm of them, that they owned this place and could do as they wished. And instead of running, I just sat there with the rats because there was no other place for me to go.
My first rats. They were the symbol of my condition. And I have to say, that although it is a blasphemy, I thought of my mother and compared myself to her. We had both been punished and neither of us had done anything wrong. Is it really bad of me to compare myself to a Jew?
Evil is so logical. It is so inventive. The problem is how to keep us out, and the answer is a logical system of solutions. My mother could not go to the same movie theater as her friends. She could not sit on the same bench. She never told me this, but I know it from reading history books. Claudia and I could go, but not as what we were, which is lovers. If we wanted to kiss we had to hide in the ladies’ bathroom.
Chapter Fifty-three
I don’t go back to Jackson Heights. I haven’t been there in years, not since the Indians took over. I have nothing against anyone, but I need to keep my own little nostalgia intact. Yet, sometimes when the isolation is too great, I go up to Eighty-sixth Street and First Avenue and walk around the ruined remnants of Yorkville—Manhattan’s version of Kraut-town. My dad told me that my mother used to get dressed up and go over the bridge for some pastry at Café Gieger or a copy of the Aufbau. Walk past the old Bund building that had been converted into a more benign “gymnasium.” Sat on the sidelines watching demure “ex” Nazis marching in the Von Steuben Day Parade. Blonds in lederhosen, with accordions and floats.
For me, I only have one destination—Schaller Und Weber, the smoked-meat deli that still sits there on the corner. I can go in once every couple of years and look over all the different kinds of wursts and sausages. The packaging is still the same from when I was a kid and that smell—that swine smell—brings me back to our tiny kitchen, the old refrigerator, hot summer afternoon windows wide open and neighbors sitting out on the sidewalk in folding chairs. Card tables. Black-and-white TVs. Good books. Thick black bread. Strong mustard. A glass of beer. Old records, Bach on the scratchy radio competing with someone else listening to the game. The ball game. A rehashed old argument about something that happened back home in a Germany that could never exist again—a paradise. The last place any of these people was Somebody. The last place any of them had a family. The last place they’d ever belonged. Their last good night’s sleep. I guess Jackson Heights was my version of Bremen. Now, I too am in exile, staring through a store window in a foreign part of town. I would never buy anything at Schaller Und Weber, though. The taste would be more than I could bear.
“You’re David’s father, aren’t you? ” I asked, before I had time to think it over. “I recognized you from the funeral.”
I had wandered over to Carl Schurz Park, past that strange strip of Eighty-sixth Street containing the wealthiest of the wealthy, next to pockets of real poverty, a Latin dance hall, a decrepit movie theater, fast food, yuppie bars, leftover working-class white people really looking for trouble. I ended up looking out past the mayor’s mansion over the East River from the cool shady park.
“I was just thinking about that,” he said. “That park is so far from our house.”
What would it have been like to have a father like this one? He seemed so calm and well dressed. Not some stupid slob like my dad. David’s father was educated, somewhat genteel. He wore a suit. I hardly ever saw my own father in a suit. Never for the delight of it.
Right away the mechanism of betrayal started up in my brain. Immediately I was burying David, finishing him off, dismissing him, discrediting him. I was blaming him for his family’s abandonment. They were upper-class and therefore superior. Why couldn’t David have done better with them? I could complete what
he had never realized. I had outlived him after all. This was my reward.
And suddenly, it all became clear to me—like one of those moments after years and years of struggle when the thing you’ve wanted more than anything is sitting safely in your pocket. Suddenly it all seems so easy and right—the order of things.
Now, I lived in a new world, in a new era. The Post-David Era. And, in this world, those of us who remain can move mountains that the dead could never move. I, Rita Mae Weems, could convince his father and therefore own his father. Once I transformed his father, his father would belong to me, and then I would have a father. I could be a daughter. I would finally, because of David’s death, get a family. His disappearance had made room for me.
Was this the hidden purpose of AIDS—to give the rest of us a chance to have parents? That was the first explanation I’d come across that could make sense. Maybe these hateful parents would regret the way they abandoned their gay children and would come to other abandoned gay children and love us instead. That way, at least one of us would have love.
Chapter Fifty-four
“I grew up over my parents’ vegetable store,” the old man said. “First they had a vegetable cart and a horse in the backyard. Then they had a vegetable store. This is in Brownsville, East New York. My mother came to America. She didn’t know how to read and write. In Russia, she didn’t even have her own shoes. I’ve been sitting here asking myself how I ever got an education when my parents did not know how to read and write. I mean, they could read Yiddish, but not English.”
“How did you do it?” I asked, panting.
“My sister. I had an older sister. She was a woman with a will of steel. She was able to wrestle herself from her destiny, despite complete opposition from my parents. They wanted her to go into the family business, but she wanted to be a lawyer. In the 1930s! And, in the end, she was the first Jewish woman admitted to New York Law School. But she ended up not going. I don’t remember why. I think she didn’t have the memory for it or something like that. She became a public school teacher instead. Anyway, that’s how I became a lawyer.”
Yes, Dad.
“Finished high school, went into the navy and went to City College on the GI Bill. Then I went to New York University Law School and married David’s mother during my first year. Believe me, you needed to have a wife to make it through that place. Especially as a Jew. The navy was the first time I really had to live closely with Christians. But law school was an entirely different breed. They had everything going for them. They knew the ropes before they even got there. My wife was working as a public school teacher, just like my sister, and every Sunday we would go out to the old neighborhood and have dinner with my parents. Fricassee, cabbage soup. My whole family came to my graduation. My mother, father, sister, brother, my brother-in-law, my in-laws. The whole day was for me.”
Tell me, Daddy. Tell me your dreams. And then when you’re done, please ask me about mine.
“That night, my wife and I went for a long walk across the Brooklyn Bridge into the city and all around the town. We talked about what kind of life we were going to have, what kind of children. The son that we would have—David, after my grandfather. And how when he went to law school, he was going to know all the ropes before he got there. At one point, we got to the Hudson River. It was about midnight, and that part of town was very rough then. Old sailors’ bars. Don’t forget, New York was still an active port. Cobblestone streets. We stood looking out over the river and a picture came into my mind.”
And your daughter?
“I imagined a scene, from my own future. I imagined that my wife and I were older, about the age we were ten years ago. My wife and I are attending the theater accompanied by our son. Broadway. My son and I approach a waiting taxicab from either side of the car. Dapper and fit in crisp tuxedos and tails, you know, like Fred Astaire. I am older than he is, grayer, more elegant and in excellent physical condition. He is impetuous, laughing, handsome. We open the doors simultaneously as our ladies step in before us. His mother, contented, elegant. His wife flirtatious and witty. We glance at each other over the top of the cab before stepping in—two halves of one person. Our unity and similarity are indescribable, unspoken and thoroughly understood. But you see, my dream will never be realized because my son took it away from me the day he decided to be a homosexual.”
Chapter Fifty-five
I was having an experience I was never meant to have, and it transported me through all kinds of memories and associations, like an Eric Dolphy record—a little bit of this sound and that.
If Dad had asked me what I was feeling I would have told him that these moments leave their mark like a shadow covered in soot. A kind of vain hopefulness rooted in nothing. Like a line of black women in their Sunday best at six a.m. at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Children’s new clothes, beaded hair, waiting for visits with incarcerated men. Thighs squealing against tight, tight seams and chitchat about caseworkers.
“They come to your house,” one says, sipping Coke through a straw, butt encased in a white stretch fabric. “Chantelle, you stop that.”
Kids, hopeful. White shoes.
The screaming you hear at home might be from someone else’s TV. A live news program feeding your neighbor the original scream, even if the camera’s trained on you.
“What did you lose? ” I asked. “What did David take away from you? ”
“Normalcy,” he said. Old, stupid man. “I had strange parents, don’t forget that. They had accents. They could not read or write. They weren’t educated. They didn’t understand anything. My sister wanted to be a lawyer, but for her generation, that was not normal. It was not normal for women to stand out that way. I was the son. I was the first one in my entire family to be appropriate. What is so awful about being appropriate? About making something of yourself? David had to be a big shot. He had to be oppositional. And look where it got him.”
He looked at the ground. I didn’t know if he meant hell or six feet under.
“It is bad enough that he had to be homosexual, that he had to do that to me. But then he had to write about it so everyone in the world would know that our family was not normal. My son went to Columbia University and he spent his life writing pornography. Do you know what he used to call me? David Greenglass! Can you imagine. Calling your own father David Greenglass? ”
“Who is David Greenglass? ”
“Oh, you must not be Jewish. You’ve heard of the Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius? ”
And for the first time, he asked me a question and waited for the answer, really wanting to know.
“Of course.”
“Ethel was sent to the gas chamber by the testimony of her own brother. Ethel Greenglass. After his sister was executed, he was disappeared into a witness protection program. You know, the FBI changed his name and set him up in a little house somewhere. Actually, you have to pity the man. How he must have paid. This is what my own son calls me—like I am sending him to his death. One day my daughter and son-in-law and I decide to go out to the movies. We go to see Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors. We’re standing on line and who else is there waiting to get in? David. My son. He was alone, so of course we invite him to sit with us, and he was sitting next to me just like he used to when he was a little boy. Sitting next to me in the dark. We’re watching the film and then Woody Allen makes a joke. He says, ‘I love you like a brother, like David Greenglass.’ And David, my son, starts to laugh and laugh. He’s laughing too loud and everyone is looking at us. It was one of those audiences where no one else got the joke. And I knew he was laughing at me. Good for him. He laughed and now he’s dead. And I’m not laughing.”
“No.”
“Near my first law office was an old cafeteria called Cohn’s Cafeteria. Not Roy Cohn, but another Cohn. And we would sit there in Cohn’s watching Roy Cohn drive by in his chauffeur-driven limousine. I knew this attorney, Ernie Kaufman, not like Judge Kaufman, the Rosenbergs’ judge, but a differen
t Kaufman. Ernie. We sat with Cohn—the cafeteria Cohn, not Roy Cohn, and Ernie told us that he had to sue Roy Cohn for some client and the guy didn’t have a cent. Even with those chauffeurs. Cohn. Kaufman. Greenglass. They were all after something. Something big. But so were Ethel and Julius. Two factions of the same tribe. They wanted influence. All of them. I, personally, never needed to make an impact. I just wanted the best for my children.”
Breeze.
“One time he came to my office.”
“Cohn?”
“No.”
“Kaufman? Rosenberg? Greenglass?”
“No, no. My son. He was demanding to know why I wasn’t ecstatic that he was a homosexual. ‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘Some parents don’t even let their children into the house. I always let you into the house.’ I wasn’t the worst.”
“But Dad,” I said. “What about love?”
“Listen,” he said. “I love my son. I have always loved my son. I have always been there for him. Any time he ever needed anything he always knew that he could count on me.”
Chapter Fifty-six
I spent the next three days going to Killer’s house straight from work. Troy and Killer and I would sit around eating spaghetti in front of the television set or having soy milk in our coffee and other healthy stuff. No dairy.
“What’s new at work?” I asked Troy.
“It is mob-action on the streets, as usual. Outside, everyone is rollerblading. The whole city. Every time I buzz someone into the bakery, they arrive up the three flights of stairs panting like crazy because they’re wearing rollerblades. And those helmets and knee caps. All in shiny black, if you have good taste. Everyone under twenty-five looks like an ad for the Gap or Guess Jeans. And, you know what else?”
“What? ”
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