Don's reticence was mainly verbal; physically he was quite there, an electricity under his pale brown skin that set my blood tingling, though I couldn't have said quite why. It is an interesting question, this question of "sexiness." Shy Don certainly was, and he had a certain awkwardness, but—a big "but" this—he turned me on, literally set my head spinning, and I set this down finally to a charge in the flesh like static electricity, a superabundance of life force (animal magnetism? orgone?)—a something that crackles, palpably, at the touch.
Making it with him was more tantalizing than satisfying. There was a certain sadness in it, a turning and turning away. His cock was really beautiful, long and slender tool, infinitely expressive; his coloring was indescribable; and he had beautiful hair; curling in tight ringlets like a cap all over his head. He was the size and shape I liked best too: a little too long and too thin-an exaggerated, elongated elegance. But none of this was the essence of it. His essence was shadows, and colorless gleams in the dark. Or the flash of his warm skin, golden sheet-lightning. Elusive. A sideways mover with a glint in his eye, looking back at you over his shoulder.
Mornings, Don's and my scene bordered on the incestuous: a certain amiable brother-and-sister quality, Cocteau-like, as we lounged about in simplistic nudity on the large stuffed chairs, reading and sipping orange juice, or watching the early morning news on television in the large curtained living room.
Sometimes the door would open and it would be Ivan, grinning, returned from some exotic city in the center of the country, and ready to leap into bed in the middle of the afternoon. He had
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married and was back in school, would reek of ivy and crumbling academic walls and the endless dusty breezes off the plains of the Midwest. But not to be believed, his professorial airs, for the old glint was still in his eye, and I no sooner got him out of his tie and gaiters than he was tipping me over on the wine satin quilt and checking out all my reflexes with tongue and tool.
I was always glad to see Ivan because I knew he would fill the bill, big enough to meet all my requirements. A wholly absorbing cock, that left me neither latitude nor thought for anything else. We would romp the daylight away on the totally familiar fields of each other's body, and then go out in the twilight and roam through the city, taking a taxi up the West Side to the north tip of the island, End wood Park, going down on each other in that damp and chilly wood, while all around the faint rustle of wildlife was the rustle of the gay boys cruising. Then we'd ride the subway to a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, and walk back to Sixtieth Street through Central Park, dodging the cruising police cars (for there was by now a curfew on the parks), crouching together behind boulders and bushes, feeling each other up for the hell of it in our breathless criminal excitement.
We would return to the pad hungry and smoke hash and get hungrier, devour everything in the kitchen-down to Bosco sandwiches on whole wheat toast-and fall into bed sticky with milk and honey to fuck till dawn, our flesh glowing silver and magic in the moonlight that bounced off my fire-escape.
Ivan was always excitement, riches, a certain sparkle in the air. Pete was home, and dumpiness, and Swiss cheese sandwiches on rye bread for lunch. Making it with him was like having crumpets and tea—with a certain vague awareness that the crumpets were communion wafers, but no idea at all what to do about that. We had, after all, shared a bed for some six months or so before we started screwing: had agreed at the beginning of that previous fall not to make it until the first snow. And then the first snow had slipped past us somehow, and it was well into the winter, after my job with Ray Clarke, before we got together.
Sleeping with Pete was like sleeping with a life-size teddy bear: furry and affectionate and stolid. I got to like it. Antoine had to hurt one a little before he was excited, a few scratches on the back
Organs And Orgasms
or some bites here and there; Georgie had to hurt himself. Don needed mystery and silence and great orderliness all around him before he could let go, and Ivan throve on a certain sparkle and elan that wasn't always easy to come up with. But with Pete things could be exactly as they were: there could indeed be mouldy sandwiches at the foot of the bed, dusty oatmeal for breakfast, turned-off gas and electric. One could be excited or excitable or neither, let one's hair down—even have a bit of dandruff. No great enchantment—a kind of bread-and-butter sex.
Soon after we started making it, Pete moved back into the pad, having fled Big John and his furnished room after a night on which—so he claimed—he had come home and found that his roommate had taken a wet, seven-foot oil painting to bed with him. It was a good and fine thing.to have Pete as roommate and available lover, and it didn't cramp my style. He was—or seemed to be—totally unjealous, and if he came home and I was busy with someone else, he'd simply go out for an English muffin and coffee. Or I would get up after he was asleep and slip out with Don or Ivan, coming back before dawn to a bedfellow who hadn't stirred.
The only guy at this time who came from downtown, who really came from the downtown scene, was Dirty John. He brought a certain funkiness with him, a certain down-to-earth ambience: rank odor of old clothes and roach killer.
Dirty John really earned his name: he was known for the infrequency of his baths. In the winter he never bathed at all, never even changed his clothes. When November came he put on a certain dark blue hooded sweatshirt that framed his thin, dark, furtive face and made him look like a ghetto vampire, and took it off again the following April. If spring was early, that is. He had a seven-dollar Timex wristwatch with a wide band and when he went to bed he would take off the watch, and the strap would have left a white mark on his grey-colored arm. Color of ashes, bright ferret eyes peering out of the hood. Lithe, limber body-the body of a good second-story man, and the ability to come six or seven times in as many hours.
Dirty John was good fun, was always full of schemes for getting rich quick. My favorite was his plan to buy up a piece of the Arizona desert on one of those two-lane straightaways that cuts
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through it, and there incorporate a town, and singlehandedly vote in a fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit, and enforce it with incredible fines as the folk tore through at night. Not a bad plan, actually; I have since been through several towns in the U.S. which subsist in just that way. Orem City, Utah, for example.
Dirty John seldom came to the house, but when he did it was always a special occasion. I remember several times that year when we went to bed about seven and made love six or seven times before getting up around two in the morning to go out and eat something at Rudley's luncheonette on the park. Then, reinforced with extra sandwiches for later, we would wend our way home and fall to again, falling asleep after it got light.
Dirty John was from the Pittsburgh slums, and he was full of a dark paranoia and hopelessness that I recognized in myself, but had never encountered in anyone else. He was sure it was all going to go wrong, finally. He was probably right. But in bed he was a pleasure, there was a fine understatement in his lovemaking, it came on slow and strong, snuck up on you unawares, so that blue lights as of cocaine were melting in your gut before you were quite aware that anything had started to happen. He didn't hold out and wait for you to court him, like Don did; wasn't dumpily there, a mountain in your kitchen window, like Pete was; didn't come on like a heavy who really KNEW, like Antoine; he was just easy, an easy lover who took you apart when you least expected it. Dirty John was good times, camaraderie and good fucking, a small slim body that fitted mine well, and though he never bathed in the winter he did OK that Spring, 'cause he never smelled bad when we got together, and his cock was always clean-what more can a girl ask?
He left me with a good feeling when he split, because I knew the games I dug were being perpetrated in some other corner of the city, silently and secretly carried on. Like the time he told me about, when after three days of solitude and heavy meditation he had gotten in touch with the flying saucer peo
ple. They were just coming in through the window to take him away with them, like he'd asked them to, when, he said, he suddenly realized that he wasn't ready yet, and told them so, and they obligingly split. People like that were rare in the middle-1950's, and I treasured Dirty John—a good friend who would arrive on his stolen motor-
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cycle and walk absolutely silent through the kitchen whenever I thought hard about him: sent out a call.
And so they would come, each of them the same, but all of them different. They would wake me before they got to the door, the presence and strong telepathic head would do it, like Dirty John, or when they put the key in the lock, subtle and self-assertive, like Ivan, or when they walked possessive and heavy about the kitchen, like Antoine, or when they came to bed and kissed me hello, and I would kiss back, saying "Who?"—or kissing would recognize touch or texture: the smell of Pete's musty clothes, or Don's expensive cologne, or half-sense an aura in the dark.
And they would clamber half-clothed, hastily, into bed, or sit on the blankets and talk me awake, or they would have brought up some grass or some wine, and I would watch, tousled and sleepy, while they made a fire. There would be the B Minor Mass to fuck to, or Bessie Smith, and we would have a moon, and open window breezes off the river, or dank, chilly greyness and rain beating down, bouncing off the windowsill in bright, exploding drops, and it was all good, the core and heart of that time. I thought of it as fucking my comrades, and a year slipped by.
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twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn't hit the scene as yet. The affluent post-Korean-war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
As far as we knew, there was only a small handful of us—perhaps forty or fifty in the city—who knew what we knew: who raced about in Levis and work shirts, made art, smoked dope, dug the new jazz, and spoke a bastardization of the black argot. We surmised that there might be another fifty living in San Francisco, and perhaps a hundred more scattered throughout the country: Chicago, New Orleans, etc., but our isolation was total and impenetrable, and we did not try to communicate with even this small handful of our confreres. Our chief concern was to keep our integrity (much time and energy went into defining the concept of the "sellout") and to keep our cool: a hard, clean edge and definition in the midst of the terrifying indifference and sentimentality around us—"media mush." We looked to each other for comfort, for praise, for love, and shut out the rest of the world.
Then one evening—it was an evening like many others, there were some twelve or fourteen people eating supper, including Pete and Don and some Studio people, Betty McPeters and her entourage, people were milling about, drinking wine, talking emphatically in small groups while Beatrice Harmon and I were getting the meal together-the priestly ex-book-thief arrived and thrust a small black and white book into my hand, saying, "I think this might interest you." I took it and flipped it open idly, still intent on dishing out beef stew, and found myself in the middle of Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Put down the ladle and turned to the beginning and was caught up immediately in that sad, powerful opening: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness. . ."
We Set Out
I was too turned on to concern myself with the stew. I handed it over to Beatrice and, without even thanking Bradley, walked out the front door with his new book. Walked the few blocks to the pier on Sixtieth Street and sat down by the Hudson River to read and to come to terms with what was happening. The phrase "breaking ground" kept coming into my head. I knew that this Allen Ginsberg, whoever he was, had broken ground for all of us—all few hundreds of us—simply by getting this published. I had no idea yet what that meant, how far it would take us.
The poem put a certain heaviness in me, too. It followed that if there was one Allen there must be more, other people besides my few buddies writing what they spoke, what they heard, living, however obscurely and shamefully, what they knew, hiding out here and there as we were—and now, suddenly, about to speak out. For I sensed that Allen was only, could only be, the vanguard of a much larger thing. All the people who, like me, had hidden and skulked, writing down what they knew for a small handful of friends—and even those friends claiming it "couldn't be published"—waiting with only a slight bitterness for the thing to end, for man's era to draw to a close in a blaze of radiation—all these would now step forward and say their piece. Not many would hear them, but they would, finally, hear each other. I was about to meet my brothers and sisters.
We had come of age. I was frightened and a little sad. I already clung instinctively to the easy, unselfconscious Bohemianism we had maintained at the pad, our unspoken sense that we were alone in a strange world, a sense that kept us proud and bound to each other. But for the moment regret for what we might be losing was buried under a sweeping sense of exhilaration, of glee; someone was speaking for all of us, and the poem was good. I was high and delighted. I made my way back to the house and to supper, and we read Howl together, I read it aloud to everyone. A new era had begun.
Meanwhile the changes started going down around us thicker and heavier than ever—so that even we couldn't help noticing them. The first thing I noticed, and it gave me quite a jolt, was that the pad was going away, was quite used up. Nothing in particular happened, but it just began to have that air about it, that feeling
when you unlocked the door and walked in, of a place that hadn't been lived in for some time, where the air had not been stirred. Places do that, I've noticed. They turn round without warning, turn in on themselves, and suddenly it's like living in a morgue, or a refrigerator; the vital impulse that made a hearth, a living center of some sort, has changed directions like an ocean current, and that particular island is no longer in its path. You can tell because even in the height of summer there's a chill in the air, a something that gets into your bones.
The rats were part of it. They had moved in, en masse, from the demolished building next door, and they scampered and played about the kitchen at night, making quite a racket. They came in through a hole under the kitchen sink, and we covered it again and again with pieces of tin, till finally there was nothing left to nail the tin to but more tin, and I gave up. But it did often give me a deep shudder as of awe to awaken in the morning and find that a whole loaf of bread in its plastic bag had been carried halfway across the room, or to find, half an inch long, the neat little claw prints of one of my furry roommates in the congealed fat of yesterday's roast.
O'Reilley had already split with our scene more or less completely. Occasionally she did stop down for a night or two, like gingerly putting one toe into some rather scummy water, and then withdrew to the safety and order of her new East Side flat. Don, having completed his movie, decided to take himself seriously and set out for Hollywood. And Pete fell ill, as I have since learned that he does every three or four years: fell seriously, heavily ill with pneumonia and had to be shipped home to Kew Garden Hills in a taxi at his father's expense while his fever raged. The disease itself abated rather quickly, but the weakness remained, and Pete stayed in the comparative luxury of his family's house, eating minute steaks and resting.
It may have been our large rat population that drove Leslie out into the world, but I think it was simply growing pains: he suddenly felt old enough to have a pad of his own, and he set out to get one. He found a loft on Prince Street in a part of the Village that had just opened up. The loft was the top floor of three. They were open to eac
h other at staircase and hall, and they all shared one John. Previous tenants had installed a bathtub and hot water heater on
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the second floor and Leslie's present downstairs neighbor had just added a small washbasin which also served for everyone's dishes. Leslie had a two-burner hotplate on top of a small, rickety office frig, and a table with three wobbly chairs. All the water came from downstairs and was carted up in gallon wine jugs. It was dumped out the window when one didn't feel like making the trip down to the second-floor John. No one worried about sprinkler systems, exits, or other such regulations; living in lofts was illegal, and everyone who could afford it did it.
The light and space in Leslie's place was lovely: huge front room like a big barn, green plants everywhere. White curtains that were probably just sheets let in the play of light. Almost equally large back room faced north on paved courtyard and endless possibilities of rooftops. And kitchen off to one side. It was the most luxurious (and most expensive) apartment that any of us had attempted yet. It cost eighty dollars a month and we all admired Leslie for braving such a rent.
With the pad, Leslie took on a roommate, a long, lanky, funny-looking boy named Benny Hudson. Benny's ears stuck out, and he had a herringbone coat. He smelled of soap and earnestness and other Midwestern virtues, but he had a job and could pay half of the rent-all of it in emergencies-so here he was. He and Leslie were lovers, of sorts. That is, they were making it, and Benny was in love.
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