by David Leite
I nod, tearing up.
“And who are they?”
“My consultants—” I try to say more, but my throat clenches.
“I’m sorry, who?”
“My consultants from Aesthetic Realism.”
“And how do you think Eli Siegel would feel if he knew you were here?” I break down, sobbing. Barbara has a travel packet of Kleenex at the ready. I blow my nose.
“Why do you always make people cry like this?”
I walked up the aisle toward the door, praying it would open. I pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. Freaked, I rattled the crash bar and threw my weight against it. Startled by the noise, people on the sidewalk turned around just as I hurtled out. A woman screamed and grabbed at her throat. With my face burning, I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked toward the Brooklyn-bound subway.
As I sat on the R train to DeKalb Avenue, a thought gnatted around inside my head. No matter how much I tried to swat it away, it buzzed loudly: I didn’t want to end up like these men—desperate and hollow-eyed, with belts jangling in the dark—but I knew, deep inside, I was of them. There had to be a different way to be gay that had nothing to do with pedophiles in their basements, or men groping in the dark. I also understood that I had to exorcise Bridget, get her out from under that bell jar in my head, a preserved specimen of what my life could have been. The truth was that the primal hip thrust I felt toward men was stronger than any “stirrings” I had for her. And, despite what my consultants said, it was more logical than anything I’d heard in Aesthetic Realism. Yet by the time I turned the corner on to South Oxford Street and climbed the stairs to my apartment, I had tucked common sense and gut instinct in on themselves, to become the crisply folded, neutered version of David others expected—the Origami Me—just like those men from Rahway and Croton-on-Hudson.
From almost the beginning of my consultations, the greatest acrimony had been reserved for my refusal to wear the “Victim of the Press” button. Believing that the teachings of Siegel had been perniciously and purposefully ignored by the press, which, in the foundation’s impenetrable logic, was just another example of snubs pointing to the enormity of the world’s contempt for the greatest man who ever lived, consultants and students took to wearing the pin. Small and white, with black serif letters, it was a brand, marking their intolerance of the intolerance of the media.
The pressure to wear the button was enormous. My consultants, fellow students, anyone involved in the organization, felt it was their duty to challenge me as to why I wasn’t wearing one. And so, eventually, like a cheating husband who slips on his wedding band just as he’s skulking home and pulls it off the minute he leaves, I did the same. Right before turning onto Greene Street, I pinned it to my shirt and hurried along, zippering myself into the line for the gallery, hoping no one saw me.
Home should have been a refuge from all this. Instead, my roommate, Darrin, the beautiful blond Rob Lowe from Carnegie Mellon whom I’d introduced into the organization, was by now a zealous adherent and my greatest critic.
“Why don’t you want to wear the pin in the apartment?”
“Because I have no one to make my point to,” I said wearily. “And I know I’m a victim of the press, so it’s redundant.”
“Wearing it all the time is a reminder. Just think how different our lives would have been if we knew about Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism when we were small.” He had adopted their monotone delivery, as if reading a liturgy.
“But, Darrin, I know it. That’s all that matters.” Where did that happy, carefree kid go? I wondered. The one who’d thrilled to be running around naked on CMU’s stage as the dead man in Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata, or who’d cracked us up at dinner in the cafeteria with the sexual possibilities of a slice of pizza.
During a break in a presentation at the Terrain Gallery one warm spring night, a student approached me. She was exotic, with dark hair, perhaps Brazilian or Argentinean. Definitely one of the very few people of color in a vast sea of prim white folks in khakis, oxford shirts, Ann Taylor dresses, and sensible shoes. We were at the back of the room, near the door, and I could feel the press of her criticism.
Criticizing one another was something students were encouraged to do by consultants. It served two purposes: It kept us on the defensive, as well as allowing the organization to ferret out any threats to itself, as nothing was secret. Because most students lived, studied, and socialized together, ratting out one another was a favorite pastime. Emboldened, they often took this as an opportunity to let their hatred, animosity, jealousy—whatever negative feelings they’d been bottling up in the name of conformity—gush like water from a hydrant, blasting anyone in their path. All in the name of caring deeply for that person’s life.
She questioned why I wasn’t wearing my “Victim of the Press” button (I had stupidly forgotten it at home), and she challenged what she considered my obvious contempt for Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism. “Otherwise you’d be straight by now.”
Oh, no you didn’t.
My vision began telescoping—a sure sign that an anxiety attack was galloping my way. Fight-or-flight flooded my body, and this time I chose to fight. I decided to ride this one out, to root myself to that spot and take whatever shit she had to sling.
Come on, bitch, I thought. Give me all you got.
I was practically vibrating off the floor with a veneta so virulent, it felt like my skull was shrinking, crushing my brain. As she lit into me, I shocked myself by imagining vomiting all over her. The image came uninvited, and I allowed the fantasy to carry me. I pictured her disgust as orange Kool Aid–colored puke dripped down the front of her tailored champagne dress, with its shoulder pads and bulky gold buttons. Don’t fuck with me, lady! I’m Regan in The Exorcist. I envisioned her arms out from her sides, like the broken wings of a bird trying to take flight, and the slow, hateful gaze as she lifted her head to look at me, as if to say, See? See how deep your contempt is?!
She hammered on, even corralling another woman into the conversation, so I was getting criticized in stereo. I nodded at the accusations, agreeing with a false solemnity that startled me. When they were satisfied that they had done Siegel’s work, they threaded themselves back into the crowd. I stood there, my body rocking slightly in time to the pumping of my heart.
It wasn’t as if a fever had broken and the pain and writhing and sweating were gone. But something was extinguished that night. I left the building and walked up Greene Street, taking a right onto Houston Street, into the real world—one I loved, hated, admired, resented, embraced, feared, and, yes, at times had delicious contempt for—and went home.
On a Saturday afternoon around my twenty-fifth birthday, I rummaged through my apartment, gathering Siegel’s books, all the musty newsletters I could find, and the box of my old cassette tapes from consultations that I had stashed away out of shame. This was to be a solemn and ritualized ceremony; I wanted it to have the whiff of those endless Sunday masses, where Father Fraga would mumble in his heavily accented English about the body and blood of Christ. And just as the bread and wine used in the Eucharist are supposedly turned into the body and blood of Christ via transubstantiation, there was to be a transformation here. I was going to transform all the rhetoric, double talk, and what I’d experienced as disgust thinly veiled as helpful criticism during the past two years into something truly glorious: freedom.
I crumpled up pages of the New York Times and made a crinkly bed under the grate in the fireplace in my bedroom. Next came a Duraflame log, the only kind I was allowed to burn in the apartment. I knelt down in a prayerful way in front of the hearth, my pile of Aesthetic Realism propaganda to my left, and lit a match. As the flames ate through the paper crumples and started licking at the log, I thought back to all the people who had asked me, “But you’re so smart. How could you get involved with a cult like that?”
I’d never had a sufficient answer. I tried, “It just makes sense.” Then: “There are so many successfu
l people who are students—the actor William Atherton, who was in The Day of the Locust and Ghostbusters, for crissake! How could it be a cult?” Tired of defending myself, I defaulted to, “They can help me change.”
But after all these years, the answer was obvious, like a crossword clue that eludes you for days. I’d gotten involved at a time when I’d been bereft. I had believed my life was a cheap polyester knockoff of the real thing, and Aesthetic Realism came along promising me a real life, with real, true feelings for a woman, in a real relationship: what I’d coveted in Tom Junger. But in time, I came to see that what I’d admired so much had nothing to do with his sexuality. I’d been taken by who he was—that larger-than-life, confident, irreverent man. It was his personality that I’d fallen for, not where he put his junk.
When the fire plumed with heat and size, I took hold of Self and World. I flipped through it, reading my margin notes, which were just regurgitated AR-speak. Then I ripped off the cover and tossed it in the fire. I felt such guilt, as if I were defacing the Bible, or a first-edition Nancy Drew mystery. That didn’t last long; on its heels came fury. Fury at having bought wholesale this business of turning straight. Fury at the accusations that I wasn’t trying hard enough. Fury at their insistence that I had contempt for Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism. (And if any of them is reading this, I’m sure they’ll use it in a lecture, as proof of my contempt. That’s their way.) I tore at the pages, feeding them into the fire faster and faster, until a tower of pages balanced on the log.
Ariadne, my cat, was lying on the hearth. She scooted as the pages tumbled. I had to beat at them with a kitchen spatula; not much need for a poker set with a Duraflame-only fireplace. With the fire now burning more steadily, I ripped the tapes out of their cassette cartridges, yanking and yanking until each had puked up its insides. I was sitting among skeins of shiny brown threads. They went up in an instant, curling and hissing, the cassettes melting like thick slices of cheese.
The “Victim of the Press” button was last. I contemplated keeping it, and writing “NOT” in Magic Marker above, but I wanted a clean purge, so I tossed it in. I watched as the white button turned the color of caramel, then tea, and finally black.
After the fire had died out, all that was left was irony. It was ironic that Aesthetic Realism, whose greatest goal was to help people to like the world, made me justly leery of it, especially of any organized thought. It made me distrust myself, my gut, my thoughts. Also ironic: The world they claim to have such love and respect for is the very same world they came to fear and grow paranoid about, because it had failed to see the greatness of what they, the keepers of the One True Knowledge, were trying to share. But perhaps most ironic: Within five years, Aesthetic Realism would no longer offer Consultation with Three for men and women who wanted to become heterosexual, saying they preferred not to engage in the anger surrounding the issue. Which is hypocritical, because they triggered that rage by creating, promoting, and defending the absurd and completely erroneous idea of the possibility of change.
The next morning, I knelt on all fours at the fireplace, Ariadne making figure eights between my legs. I swept up cinders, chipped off gnarled hunks of plastic from the andirons and floor, and scooped it all into a bag. Outside, I tossed the bag on top of the mound of garbage waiting curbside and headed toward the subway, smiling.
23
QUARTER-MILE-HIGH CLUB
Looking up at the Twin Towers made me dizzy. It was an enormous study in perspective, like the kind we would practice in art class at RIT. The steel columns reminded me of train tracks that, above the lobby level, split into three tracks each, all of them soaring to a vanishing point beyond sight.
I took the elevator to the 107th floor, where Windows on the World was located. When it pinged open, I was dazzled; it was like standing inside a giant kaleidoscope. The long, imposing hallway to the front desk was lined with huge geodes and crystals from around the world. Behind them, the walls were all chrome and mirrors. I was instantly ashamed of myself. Reflected back were a million me’s—a million lopsided and scuffed black sneakers, a million black polyester pants that I could now see were sagging in the ass. I couldn’t wear a suit because right after my interview I was headed to work at Fiorella, and I didn’t need that smug French waiter, Joël, who’d had it in for me from the day I started, pointing out my clothes to our manager.
After I introduced myself at the front desk, I was escorted to the right, to a corner booth in the Hors D’Oeuvrerie, the bar and smaller restaurant of Windows on the World, where a woman in a tan naval uniform was perched in front of a splay of papers. The booth was on the highest tier of tables. All around, nearly unobstructed views east, south, and west.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” she said. I was gawking out the windows at the Statue of Liberty, Governor’s Island, Staten Island, and New York Harbor beyond. The restaurant, she told me, was so high that guests looked down on helicopters, and sometimes sat above rain clouds while the sky above remained infinite and blue. Suddenly, I wanted this job more than anything, if only for those views I knew I would never grow tired of seeing.
Around us, waiters in white naval jackets and waitresses in officious tan dresses were setting up their stations, polishing flatware, hip-checking chairs into place, folding napkins. Moira—that was the manager—looked at my application. I had little New York experience, so I talked up my almost yearlong stay at the Grand Concourse in Pittsburgh, where I’d moved after Gullifty’s. I think it was my prattling on about table-side service—the flourish of deboning Dover sole, shelling lobsters, assembling and igniting desserts—that got me the job. She told me I’d start with lunches, plus one breakfast and Sunday brunch. Lunch, she explained, was a private club for members only, or for the occasional civilian willing to pony up a hefty surcharge.
“When can you start?”
I looked out at the light stippling the water of the harbor. “I’ll give my notice today,” I said.
After a week, I wondered if I’d made a mistake, if perhaps I was more suited to a job with the common folk a quarter of a mile beneath me. I felt choked by my starched military uniform, and the atmosphere. I’d been instructed to stand erect, never to interact with a table unless invited, and never to laugh or speak loudly. I was invisible unless serving. “You never know,” Moira told me, “when some multimillion-dollar deal is being made under your nose.” Day after day, we all stood prim and silent. So I was shocked when I worked my first night shift a few months later. Gone was all the military precision. Instead, the lights were dimmed to an opalescent gold, the better to see the winking lights so far below. A trio played while couples swept around one another on the dance floor. The rigidity of the staff during the day melted into a dreamy sultriness. Our outfits had a lot to do with it. The women dressed in jewel-toned satin cheongsams with sinuous slits up the sides, while the men wore pants and short kimono robes, a dragon snaking up the one side. The robes flopped open whenever we bent over. Some of the better-built waiters would strategically reach in front of a group of young women or enthralled drunken matrons, giving them the briefest view of their chiseled, manicured chests. Me, I safety-pinned my robe closed in several places. I needed my tips.
Every night, even when we hovered anchorless in a haze of clouds lit pink and orange from the lights below, the place was packed: moony newlyweds; gawking tourists, who never listened when we explained that taking a flash photo out a dark window would only result in a nuclear blast of white; and, new to me, courting Orthodox couples on Saturdays. They’d quietly occupy tables by the windows all night, the highest-priced real estate in the joint, nursing two Cokes and leaving a five-dollar tip. Other times, those same stations could easily pull down 135 bucks—a small fortune in 1986.
And then there was the menu—a paean to Asian hedonism.
Wildly exotic to me, it featured nearly three dozen dishes. Thai spring rolls, crispy coconut fried shrimp, chicken yakitori, sushi and sashimi, Kyoto beef rolls, Indonesian
lamb saté. One of the most popular dishes, Bangkok avocado dip, was a mix of mashed avocados, cubes of ruby-red tomatoes, thinly sliced Thai chiles, and lime juice. “Think of it as an Oriental guacamole” was how I described it to guests. Whenever anyone unfamiliar with the dish leaned in and stared, I added, “Don’t worry, those Styrofoam-looking things on the side are shrimp chips. They’re weird, but they’re wicked good. Trust me.” That usually unfurrowed a couple of foreheads and added a buck or two to my tip. My favorite? Szechuan hacked chicken served on rice noodles with a spicy sesame sauce. It was made by a volatile Ecuadorian prep cook, who every day before service whipped out a menacing cleaver and made short work of a heap of cold chicken breasts. Watching him, I thought of my mother’s only knife, the one so worn from my father’s grinder, and considered buying her a cleaver. But then again: no.
I schooled myself in these dishes, adding to that inventory of flavors, aromas, and textures I’d begun creating in my dark bedroom on Brownell Street. It wasn’t the restaurant, but my guests that taught me. Let me explain: All us waiters had hiding places in the kitchen where we’d stash plates of half-eaten food from the dining room. A guest wouldn’t have descended fifty stories by the time I’d grabbed her plate, hidden in my spot down by the dishwasher, and torn into the leftovers. With shoulders turned to the kitchen, I cataloged the nasal burn of wasabi, the tingle of ginger, the oceanic purity of Cotuit oysters in their crenellated shells. This overlooked food gave me my first understanding of fine cuisine and ingredients.
Breakfast was no less of an object lesson. Working dinner the night before a morning shift usually meant my head would barely hit the pillow before I had to be up and at the restaurant by five-thirty in the morning. Never a caffeine addict, I nonetheless needed a way to wake up, so I’d stumble to the dessert case and cut a generous slice of dacquoise, a delicate cake of hazelnut meringue layers with coffee buttercream filling. The dacquoise, made the day before, was best then; the crunchy meringue had turned slightly chewy because of the filling. I’d install myself at one of the east-facing tables and, with my feet up and my starched uniform falling open, I’d watch and wait. My reflection would fade while the sky turned from black to battleship gray to a luminous mauve, as if the world had just discovered Technicolor. On the clearest of mornings, as the sun rose, I could see almost ninety miles, or so the bartender would always tell me.
