City Boy

by Edmund White

  I’ve forgotten to say how funny and affectionate she always was, how much warmth she radiated, what good humor she brought to every occasion, how much interest she lavished on her friends, how forgiving and tolerant she could be. She loved turning her back courtyard into a little vernal paradise in the summer, where she’d serve cold Riesling and warm potato salad.

  In the summer we’d fill the tub with ice and thirty bottles of white wine (a bottle per guest) and run about with old friends from the Midwest and a few new ones from the East Coast, men and women, and it seemed those exciting days of youth and independence and exaltation would never end.

  Chapter 5

  In 1964 Stan and I moved to West Seventy-first Street, to a spacious apartment that cost $175 a month. We each had a bedroom and we shared a living room and a dining room. We furnished it at Goodwill with big, heavy oak pieces that were ugly but that looked solid and respectable to us. The neighborhood itself was run-down. Puerto Ricans would throw beer bottles from the window. On the corner was a big Cuban restaurant that reeked of black beans and slabs of roast pork. Next door to us was a bodega where black-magic candles were sold, poured into glass jars and smelling of bubble gum; they were for everything from placing a curse on an enemy to winning back an errant husband. Our neighborhood was so dangerous at the time that it was called Needle Park. A Life reporter wrote a nonfiction book, The Panic in Needle Park, that was adapted into a violent movie about the heroin trade, from a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. One winter night, walking home from Marilyn’s at two in the morning, swaying a bit drunkenly, I saw a man in an overcoat and a fedora brandish a gun and shoot another man under the marquee of a shabby hotel. A woman in high heels threw herself on the body and shouted, “¡Ay, Dios!” It seemed like a bad sequence in a film noir, something that would need to be reshot. I hurried home, undressed, went to bed, and only the next morning over breakfast did it occur to me to tell Stan what I’d witnessed. I decided not to report it—no one had much of a sense of civic responsibility in that wild city back then, least of all me.

  We knew which blocks were safe and which were dangerous—it really went according to a block-by-block pattern. We’d say to out-of-town relatives and friends, “Oh, don’t go down Eighty-fifth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, though Eighty-sixth is perfectly safe.” Our apartment was robbed once, despite all the gates on the windows and the police lock (a stout metal standard that fitted into a socket on the floor and braced the door against intruders). Everyone we knew had had his or her apartment burgled. We would just shrug and say gallantly, “Oh, well, private property is a crime anyway.” One evening at six o’clock my friend Stephen Orgel and I were robbed at gunpoint on Christopher Street while other people streamed around us. The thief had torn the inner pocket out of his overcoat and was able to point the pistol inconspicuously at us, the gun shielded from view by the bulk of his coat. Not that anyone would have helped us in any event, even if he or she had seen the weapon. The man told us to give him our wallets and to walk to the end of Weehawken Street without looking back; if we called out or looked back, he’d kill us. Once we were out of sight and around the corner, we saw a cop car and told the policeman what had happened; the cop just laughed and shrugged and asked with a weary chuckle, “Wanna file a complaint?” We didn’t.

  When I moved to Rome in 1970, I suggested to an Italian friend that we switch sides of the street to avoid confronting three teenagers coming toward us. “Why?” she asked, astonished. In New York we paid the cabdriver to wait at the curb till we were safely inside past the locked front door. We were always aware of everyone within our immediate vicinity. You never lost yourself in conversation on the street, but had to be alert at all times. We made sure we had at least twenty dollars with us every time we left home so that a robber wouldn’t shoot us in frustration, but were also careful not to carry more—nor to be too well-dressed. Whenever we went out in the evening, we always left the radio and a light on to discourage thieves. As we approached our apartment building we prepared our key in our pocketed hand so that we wouldn’t fumble at the door a second longer than necessary. We walked in straight lines down the sidewalk and only at the last moment did we veer off toward our door, not wanting to signal our intentions or our vulnerability to a watching mischief-maker. On the subway we didn’t look at other passengers.

  Stan and I discovered Puerto Rico for holidays. So many Puerto Ricans traveled back and forth to San Juan that the plane was virtually a commuter flight. The round-trip cost $140. In San Juan we’d stay at the YMCA in the Old Town and take the Number 10 bus out to luxurious Condado Beach, where we met a beautiful local teenager so proud to be pale he belonged to the Castilian Club, restricted to the descendants of Spanish settlers. The girl who sold ice cream on the beach was so dark that the other local teens called her King Kong. They laughed; she didn’t. The boys we pursued all lived at home but would slow-dance with us in clubs late into the night and smelled of achiote powder. They were romantic and would make love to us in public parks, since we couldn’t sneak them past the vigilant desk clerk into the Y. When we’d get on a bus, an old man would sneeze theatrically. I asked my Puerto Rican friend why he sneezed. “The word for gay is pato, ‘duck,’ and he’s sneezing because one of our feathers got in his nose.”

  The streets were lined with blue cobblestones that had been brought over centuries before in Spanish galleons as ballast. Because it was a hot tropical country, the cooler nights stretched almost to dawn. Even at three a.m. you could always find someone sipping a tall rum drink in a dimly lit courtyard bar behind a locked grill while a guitar rambled on to itself. The only Spanish word I knew was corazón, but luckily it featured in nearly every song being wailed out of the jukeboxes.

  We met boys who soon joined us in New York for a vacation of a week or two. Stan’s was called Pepito, and although he’d been manly and “Castilian” back in San Juan, in New York he evidenced a disturbing propensity for drag. He wanted us to call him Pepita and encouraged us to think of him as a great lady, as a great Hollywood star. Suddenly Stan was completely turned off. Mine was less imaginative, a stolid macho named Angel who didn’t have the wit to want to be a woman. Though less handsome than Pepito, he turned out to be better value.

  New York in the summer was itself tropical with people sitting on their stoops and drinking beer from the bottle and listening to the salsa station on the boom box. Men strode around in sleeveless, collarless T-shirts, the kind called wifebeaters. They sat side by side on stoops and talked without looking at each other. They sometimes listened to deafening Spanish-language broadcasts of the baseball games.

  After Pepito returned to San Juan, Stan took up with a sexy New York Puerto Rican named Jimmy, who was a student at New York University and read everything and knew everything about the history of cinema but worked hard to maintain his Latin identity. He was sweet but macho. He and a friend practiced Latin dances every afternoon. I’d always envied those twirls and syncopated steps on the dance floor, the sudden dips and unfurlings and unexpected recouplings—and stupidly assumed they came “naturally,” as if a genetic code inscribed in Puerto Rican infants facilitated salsa. Now I saw that they worked it out, segment by segment, over long hours of careful rehearsal, punctuated by a sudden cry of insight or a groan of confusion as they got tangled up and bumped into each other. Stan and I were besotted with these tan-skinned, uncircumcised young dancers with their “Aztec” faces and slim, rotating hips inside pegged trousers and thin black lizard-skin belts, their rapid talk that derailed quickly from English into Spanish, these boys who lived on “Christians and Moors” (rice and black beans) and wore crucifixes or white enamel medals dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen dangling from a thin gold chain. Their combination of sweetness in bed (Angel would kiss my closed eyelids while fucking me) with their street-smart switchblade reflexes excited the Midwestern nerds in us. Stan and I had both grown up watching westerns in which the only men we ever saw in loincloth
s were Indians (in reality, Italian-Americans). Now we had our own Cheyennes between our legs, their cold religious medals grazing our mouths; or we could overhear them in the next room endlessly rehearsing tonight’s salsa as they lost count, made a false step, got caught up in an elaborate body pretzel, and broke down in a sudden gust of laughter.

  Chapter 6

  My shrink, Frances Alexander, convinced me that I’d never get “better”—go straight—unless I moved away from Stan. I took the plunge and got an apartment of my own on West Thirteenth Street just off Eighth Avenue. As I left, Stan looked stunned and sat around listening to a 45 called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” I loved him so much but back then no one could defend a homosexual relationship; it was by definition “sick,” spiritually impoverishing, infantile, doomed to repeat itself in a horrid circle of compulsiveness. To the degree that someone was “intellectual” like me, one was au courant with Freudian theories and knew how to torment oneself with extra zeal. At that time I read a book about the Salem witch trials in which the author pointed out that it was precisely the Puritan “intellectuals” who believed in witchcraft. They had the subtlety and instruction needed to detect the presence of the devil in the loony actions of eccentric old ladies and the hysteria of teenage girls. I resented my shrink for pushing me in this direction. Yes, I agreed that homosexuality was second best. But what if I never found a woman as kind and funny and loving as Stan?

  I’d never lived alone before. When I’d come home from work to my new solitary apartment, my heart would start to beat harder as I approached the door. I bought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began to prepare elaborate meals, recipes that would sometimes take two days to execute—veau Prince Orloff or boeuf à la cuillère (in which a big square of beef was boiled, cooled, hollowed out, the minced meat then mixed with sautéed mushrooms and shallots and combined with a sauce, then reinserted into the beef shell and covered with Gruyère and heated up under the grill—or something like that; I can’t remember, I only did it once, and it was pretty dry). I realized that despite my therapist I probably wasn’t going to get married, and that I should start giving dinner parties to fill up my lonely evenings.

  Much of my spare time was devoted to sex—finding it and then doing it. In those days before online hookups and backroom bars and outdoor sex, when there weren’t even very many gay bars, we had to seek out most of our men on the hoof. Back then people glanced back over their shoulders, though few do it now (or do I say that only because now I’m old and uncruisable?). Then we had to look back or we’d spend the night alone. The whole city was awash with desire and opportunities to satisfy it. Now people can afford to be arrogant and to scurry past one another haughtily, knowing they can always go online later, but then they were driven to tarry and gawk. Typically we’d walk up and down Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street—not with friends, which might be amusing but was entirely counterproductive. No, only the lone hawk got the tasty rabbit.

  If you looked back and he looked back as well, you’d pretend to scan the contents of a shop window. He’d do the same thing twenty yards down. You’d keep exchanging reciprocated glances at an ever-increasing rate. Then you might just smile simply and stroll toward him and he’d pull away from his window and the two of you would form your little conversational duo. If you were still afraid of being rejected or arrested or beat up, you might ask him the time or for a light. It was considered especially cheeky to ask for a light while you were already smoking. Usually you’d just say, “Do you live around here?”

  If he was willing, you’d invite him back to your apartment, which in your mind you’d refer to as your trick pad, since he was the trick you’d just scored. Sometimes you’d trick more than once in an evening (“Oh, God, last night I was a real nympho, I tricked three times in a row, my cooze was oozing, must have been the full moon”). The way you could tell the difference between your friends and your lovers is that you never camped with a trick. When discussing him the next day, you might refer to him as “she,” but never to his face (“I thought she was so butch, but within seconds she had her legs in the air!”). As one of my friends said, “If God had wanted men to be fucked, he would’ve put a hole in their ass.”

  We tried to trick every night, if we could do it efficiently, but we reserved the weekends for our serious hunting sorties. I’d clean my apartment carefully, change the sheets and towels, put a hand towel under the pillow (the “trick towel” for mopping up the come) along with the tube of lubricant (usually water-soluble K-Y). You might even “douche out”—sometimes, if you were a real “senior girl,” with a stainless-steel insertable nozzle attached to the shower. You’d buy eggs and bacon and jam and bread for toast, if you wanted to prove the next morning that you were “marriage material.” You’d place an ashtray, cigarettes, and a lighter on the bedside table. You’d lower the lights and stack the record player with suitable mood music (Peggy Lee, not the Stones) before you headed out on the prowl. All this to prove you were “civilized,” not just one more voracious two-bit whore. Once you’d landed a man, there was no way to know what he liked to do in bed. No frank discussions about who was a top and who was a bottom. Not yet any color-coded hankies in back jeans pockets or keys on the left or right. You usually walked home with the minimum of small talk, sometimes in total silence. Everyone knew that you could lose a trick if you were too mouthy; a sibilant s could make an erection wilt in a second. Only once you had him back home behind closed doors and curtains did you serve him a drink and then begin to kiss. If you had to say something, you’d keep your monosyllables in the baritone register. You could tell his intentions pretty quickly by whether he felt for your ass or your cock—but even that wasn’t done instantly. A slight pretense of romance was still required, some closed-eyed necking and French-kissing before his hand would drift down into the exciting zone. With any luck he’d claw your clothes off and shed his own in one quick shrug (“My dear, you could hear the Velcro ripping!”). If he folded his trousers neatly and looked around for a hanger, you knew he’d be a bore (“She turned out to be an accountant, of course. I could see that by the way she fussed over that pleated skirt of hers. Betty Bookkeeper…”).

  From the time of the World’s Fair in 1964 to the beginning of gay liberation, the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the city was repeatedly being cleaned up. Subway toilets were always being locked shut. Bars were constantly raided. I remember one, the Blue Bunny, up in the Times Square area near the bar where they first danced the twist. There was a tiny dance floor at the back. If a suspicious-looking plainclothesman came in (supposedly you could tell them by their big, clunky shoes), the doorman would turn on little white Christmas lights strung along the ceiling in back, and we’d break apart and stop dancing while the music roared on. I can remember a two-story bar over near the Hudson on a side street south of Christopher that was only open a week or two. When the cops rushed in, we all jumped out the second-story window onto a low, adjoining graveled roof and then down a flight of stairs and onto the street. I used to go to the Everard Baths at 28 West Twenty-eighth Street near Broadway. It was filthy and everyone said it was owned by the police. It didn’t have the proper exits or fire extinguishers, just a deep, foul-smelling pool in the basement that looked infected. When the building caught fire in 1977, several customers died. There was no sprinkler system. It was a summer weekend.

  On Fire Island it was scarcely better in those days. Of course the Suffolk County police couldn’t control what went on in the dunes or along the shore at night, but in discos in both Cherry Grove and the Pines, every group of dancing men had to include at least one woman. A disco employee sat on top of a ladder and beamed a flashlight at a group of guys who weren’t observing the rule. At a dance club over in the Hamptons, I recall, the men line-danced and did the hully-gully, but always with at least one woman in the line.

  Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewneck
ed white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the “A-trainers”), and who were jumpy because of the extreme heat and who’d imagined the police persecutions of the preceding years had finally wound down. The new attacks made them feel angry and betrayed. They were also worked up because Judy Garland had just died of an overdose and was lying in state at the Frank E. Campbell funeral home. At the end of Christopher Street, just two blocks away, rose the imposing bulk of the Jefferson Market women’s prison (now demolished to make way for a park). At that time, tough women would stand on the sidewalk down below and call up to their girlfriends, “I love you, baby. If you give it up to that big black bitch Shareefa, I cut you up, I’m telling you, baby, I cut you good.” Inside the Stonewall the dance floor had been taken over by the long-legged, fierce-eyed antics of the S.T.A.R. members (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). Angry lesbians, angrier drag queens, excessive mourning, staggering heat, racial tensions, the examples of civil disobedience set by the women’s movement, the antiwar protesters, the Black Panthers—all the elements were present and only a single flame was needed to ignite the bonfire.

  * * *

  The Stonewall wasn’t really a disco. It had a jukebox, a good one, and two big, long rooms where you could dance. Bars were open till four in the morning in New York; gay guys would come home from work, eat, go to bed having set the alarm for midnight, and stay out till four. Of course there were no Internet sites, but also no telephone dating lines, no backrooms, and up till then no trucks or wharves open to sex.

  There was a lot of street cruising and a lot of bar cruising. We had to have cool pickup lines. We were all thin from amphetamines; my diet doctor was always prescribing “speed” for me, and I’d still be up at six in the morning reading the yellow pages with great and compulsive fascination. We had long, dirty hair and untrimmed sideburns and hip-huggers and funny black boots that zipped up the side and denim cowboy shirts with pearlescent pressure-pop buttons. We had bell-bottoms. We all smoked all the time (I was up to three packs a day). We didn’t have big showboat muscles or lots of attitude. Our shoulders were as narrow as our hips. We didn’t look hale, but we were healthy—this was twelve years before AIDS was first heard of and all we got was the clap. We had that a lot, maybe once a month, since no one but paranoid married men used condoms. I dated my clap doctor, who spent most of his free time copying van Gogh sunflowers.