City Boy

by Edmund White

  I moved in with Phillip and soon met all his friends and played his piano and walked his dog and learned his ways. His two-room apartment had a terrace planted with azaleas and a view of the traffic below and a constant free-flowing source of water that the neighbor lady told me must come from an ancient Roman aqueduct. We led a useless Roman life compounded of worries about money, two mild hangovers a day (lunch and dinner), and lots of empty talk and not much sex. The long-aproned ten-year-old boy who worked in the café downstairs would take our order over the phone and climb the six flights to our apartment at ten or eleven in the morning with our caffe lattes and our round, dry buns or cornetti. Sometimes he’d come back two or three times a day, always cheerful and uncomplaining, and take away our empties with a professional smile and a snappy gesture. In this city everyone seemed to be stylish; Phillip told me that people would eat nothing but bread for dinner under bare lightbulbs but step out into the square in a bespoke suit swinging Maserati keys that lacked Maseratis. The white-gloved policeman directing the traffic in front of the Victor Emmanuel monument was exactly that—a symphony director. We might cook some sauceless spaghetti for ourselves and the half-wild cats—until I became convinced that they were missing some essential minerals found only in proper cat food and persuaded Phillip to let me serve it to the animals, and they both died in horrible agonies.

  Phillip had no money. Once in a great while he’d be an extra in a movie. His mother was a rich American and his father an Austrian nobleman. Phillip had been raised in Mexico, where he’d been valedictorian of his high school class, though now, just ten years later, his excellent, idiomatic Italian had entirely supplanted his once-fluent Spanish. He spoke American with an accent similar to mine but would grope after even some of the most common English words.

  I paid his back bills and bought him meals and paid all the rent. I suppose I was a little bit in love with him, though he didn’t fancy me. His queeny ex-lover, a small, skinny Sardinian, pitied me for being “double-bodied.” I asked my Italian teacher what “double-bodied” in Italian meant. She said that Italians were still so close to their peasant backgrounds that they prized an aristocratic leanness that showed they’d never done any physical labor. American-style muscles, in their eyes, were a shameful reminder of rural origins. I stopped lifting weights but I did go to an exercise class at the Roma Sporting Center near the Piazza Barberini where everyone followed the professore’s instructions, and where jumping jacks were called farfalle, or “butterflies.” Every ten minutes the professore sprayed the air with cologne to disguise the shocking smell of sweat.

  The gay scene in Rome at that time was pathetic. A few married men sat in a particular movie theater just off the Corso at a certain hour with their raincoats in their laps and might let you jerk them off. A few foreigners, mostly Romanian refugees, would meet at midnight in the Colosseum. I’d get drunk during those endless dinners in the Piazza Navona and go out cruising; usually I’d end up with another American, a big, handsome black man named Ron. Our racial differences would have kept us apart back home (it was the era of the Black Panthers), but in Rome our shared horniness and nationality united us.

  I wrote Richard Howard about all of my shoddy adventures. He admonished me, “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some sort of kicky version of Scranton.”

  I thought that the most that could be said was that in Rome I’d re-created my life in New York but in an inferior version. Like a marble statue copied in lard. I’d written a screenplay that no one wanted. I’d seen historic monuments only when other Americans visited me. I’d met Farley Granger through my Italian teacher and written my screenplay for him. I’d invested endless hours in courting Phillip but had slept with him only during one drunken weekend when we had emptied several bottles of vodka and rolled around like animals. I’d killed his two cats. I’d learned to speak a halting, broken Italian. I’d drunk hundreds of liters of white wine, many of them with Diana Artom, a painter and poet who was in love with me even though I kept telling her I was gay. I’d say, “Sono frocio,” which I guess was the rough equivalent of saying “I’m a fag” in English. She was horrified and said it wasn’t a good word, only my faulty Italian would allow me to say such a thing. I tried to tell her about our habit back home of embracing the insult but she just shook her head vigorously. She also told me that because of my unfamiliarity with Italian society I’d fallen in with some dreadful types, Phillip and his friends. They were nothing but ladri, “thieves.”

  Chapter 8

  And then I was back in New York and the 1970s had finally begun. Stan met me at the airport, popped something fun in my mouth, and took me on a tour of all the discos and backroom bars that had opened since Stonewall and my departure. After six or seven months in Italy, starved for sex, I couldn’t believe how unleashed New York had become.

  For the first time I realized how much New York gay life had gradually been changing all along. Now it seemed as if ten times more gays than ever before were on the streets. With ten times as many gay bars. After the furtiveness of feeling up married men in the Roman cinemas, here were go-go boys dancing under spotlights and hordes of attractive young men crowding into small backrooms and abandoning themselves to each other’s mouths and arms and penises. Although people still talked about quick sex as “disgusting” and “filthy,” I thought of it as romantic. The idea that I could spot a pair of broad shoulders above narrow hips and mounted below a perfect column of a strong neck crowned by black hair and follow this prodigy into a dark room and within seconds be feeling his muscular, hot arms around me and his tongue in my mouth—that I could taste him and instantaneously know him—struck me as a miraculous but strangely easy transition. The intimacy that one would before have had to work for during months of courtship was now available for a whistle and a wink and a ten-step walk into the shadows.

  I kept buzzing around a couple who were obviously looking for a third man to go home with them. They weren’t interested in me till I happened to see a Roman friend and started to talk to him in Italian. The two men came up to me and asked me, respectfully and somewhat timidly, if I spoke English.

  “A lee-tle beet,” I said.

  They asked me to go home with them, and for the entire evening I impersonated what I thought was their idea of an Italian.

  The Gay Activists Alliance held a dance every Saturday in an old firehouse they’d taken over. Here the clothes and bodies were more varied, perhaps less ideal, than in the discos, but the sense of camaraderie was stronger. Men and women danced together. The middle-aged and the pudgy dared to show their faces. People who purported to be gay farmers or gay nurses put in appearances. Blacks, who had trouble gaining entry in the usual gay venues, came to the Firehouse with their black or white lovers and friends.

  Not only had the number of visible lesbians and gays increased exponentially, they were also more fearless and affectionate on the street than ever before. They were loud and flirty or grim and sex-crazed, giddy or pompous—the whole gamut. I knew that it was only on the island of Manhattan that this visibility and variety existed. When I went to my mother’s summer place in Michigan, I walked aimlessly along Lake Michigan through whole vast armies of sunbathers and not once did I see anything that resembled a gay man. Not one eye strayed toward me or gave me that shutter-click of recognition I was so eager to detect in them.

  In New York I attended a meeting of the Gay Academic Union; perhaps no more than fifty women and men were in the audience, young professors for the most part, though some were independent scholars, and they were talking about gay history and gay culture and the intersection of feminism and the lesbian struggle—or they were asking, was Thoreau gay? Whitman? Melville? Just to see all those earnest faces tilted up toward the speaker, not cracking jokes, not looking around for ironic grins of confirmation, made me realize how quickly everything was evolving.

  But the sexual abundance and opportunity struck me the most
. Even though I was only thirty, I felt too old, too late to enjoy the new dispensations. Yet when I entered a backroom or the back of a truck parked under the piers beside the Hudson, or went into the abandoned piers themselves, I didn’t worry about my age or psychic readiness. At first we didn’t get into the holds of trucks but rather the gay boys crouched under one truck and the “straight” teens from Jersey stood in the narrow space between two trucks and got sucked off. The brackish smell of the cold water flowing nearby and the dance of New Jersey lights on the small, faceted waves in the wake of a passing barge filled me with a cool romantic ardor. This was the chase, the adventure. We heard of bodies discovered floating down the river, of horrible mutilations, of drive-by murders, but nothing could make us abandon the prowl.

  In one of the old piers there’d be no lights at all beyond the occasional flare of a match seeking a cigarette, a sudden phosphorus flash revealing that what you thought was an embracing couple was actually a thick stump of wood with a rusting chain wrapped around it, or what you saw as a gull’s wing was really someone’s shirttail. Ramps led up to rooms with missing doors and floorboards, to a seething Laocoön entwined by snakes or by arms as he held fast to his sons or lovers…

  I had a joyful, drunken reunion with Richard Howard and in my sentimental excitement about seeing him sent him a wrong signal. He said, “Oh, darling, I was hoping you’d feel that way someday,” and I was too polite to clarify the point. Richard spirited me away for a bucolic weekend at the country house of Coburn Britton, a rich poet from Cleveland who was publishing a little magazine called Prose. Coby had an old apple farm in northern New Jersey. We all went over to visit Glenway Wescott, the novelist in his seventies who had been a beauty back in Paris in the 1920s and who’d written one classic, The Pilgrim Hawk. Now he no longer wrote anything beyond his journals but devoted most of his time to being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I thought that was a terrible fate—and now that I’m in my late sixties I, too, am serving on the awards committee of the academy.

  After my all-too-apparent physiological lack of interest in him, Richard politely withdrew and never said a word about it. He was tactful and worldly in the best sense.

  For a few weeks I lived with Marilyn. I’d grown my hair long and I’d come back from Rome with a blue velvet jacket and a white suit. I was skinny and not healthy looking. I’d drunk so much white wine and eaten so many olives and so much bad bread that I looked jaundiced. Italian words kept flitting through my head; I was translating everything I thought into Italian, but badly. In Italy a man could not be seen carrying laundry or groceries; he had to put everything in a suitcase as though headed for the train station. I went along with that. He dared not step outside even to go to the corner without wearing a coat and tie; I went along with that. The last day I was in Rome was a steaming day in July. I went in shorts to pick up my laundry and the laundress complained, “I work day and night to make you look well dressed and here you are disgracing me.”

  In New York no one south of Fourteenth Street ever wore a tie or anything but a ripped T-shirt and dirty jeans and sneakers or cowboy boots. Gay men held cologne and jewelry in abhorrence. Some of the bars posted rules forbidding cologne, hair spray, dress slacks, cuff links, and even underpants. For New Yorkers the streets were considered “backstage,” and even beautifully dressed women wore gym shoes on the street and put their heels on only when they arrived at the office, a dinner party, or the theater. For Romans the street was the stage. In returning to New York, I felt as if I’d boarded a forward-flying time machine.

  Now in New York a friend of a friend offered me a job as a stock boy in his shop on Madison Avenue selling clear plastic furniture. But I was hoping to find something better. I tried to get a job in publishing. Tom Congdon, the editor who would nurse Jaws toward bestsellerdom in 1974, interviewed me. My seat for this encounter was a low child’s chair and his a high executive throne (in fact, there was a book out at the time about how to intimidate others, and this tactic of relative chair size and positioning was one of the key strategies). I also was interviewed by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the biographer and scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Then there was someone at Atheneum. They all told me that it was unheard of for a writer to be a book editor. In England, perhaps, that might work, but in America it would be a clear conflict of interest.

  I found some freelance writing work and a one-room apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village, not far from the Hudson River, for a hundred dollars a month. There were a few scraps of furniture—a kitchen table, a pretty desk, two chairs, a single mattress on the floor. There was a closet and a small, dirty bathroom. The windows were covered with heavy metal gates, but through the bars you could see big green ailanthus trees. As soon as I turned on the light, cockroaches scurried off into hiding.

  I never met any of my neighbors but most of them were young. I could hear them running up and down the stairs all the time, all through the night—not a heavy tread, just a light scampering. They, too, were roaches, fleet of foot and light-phobic. On the corner of Horatio and Greenwich Street there was a laundry run by a sweet old couple who had concentration-camp tattoos on their arms and were always smiling and spoke almost no English. Unlike my lady in Rome, they were indifferent to how their customers looked. On one side of Horatio were elegant brownstones from the middle of the ninteenth century. On my side were tenement buildings, shabby structures from the beginning of the twentieth century meant to be temporary housing for immigrants.

  From my aerie I would swoop down on men of all ages and shapes, usually late at night. Not that there was much happiness in a life of pleasure. Once I was in the backs of trucks or in the ruined piers along the Hudson, I simply couldn’t make myself go home. Even after a satisfying encounter with one man or ten I still wanted to hang around to see what the next ten minutes would bring. What it brought was the morning light, the sudden explosion of expensively shod feet on pavement as well-dressed men and women, pale from too much work and too many late nights and too little sleep, rushed out of their apartment buildings and hurried off to their jobs and I, in need of a shave and a bath, slunk home in semen-stiff jeans and a T-shirt that stank, my spirits depressed, my body thoroughly reamed.

  I mentioned that I sometimes felt I was too old for all this.

  But gay men—like straight women—always feel they’re too old. I remember that my twenty-sixth birthday was the most difficult one, since suddenly I thought I was no longer a student who could get away with being sloppy and unfocused and riddled with bad habits. Having no longer any chance to be a prodigy, I now had to content myself with being a late bloomer, if I was going to bloom at all. I would do isometric exercises for my face (a new fad at the time), trying to avoid age lines and saggy pouches. I was on a lifelong diet (in three months I once lost fifty pounds with the help of amphetamines and a regime of steak, salad, and white wine). I who took no pleasure in sports was launched into a lifelong program of exercise. I who hated shopping and was too poor to buy new clothes would do whatever was possible within my means to obtain the latest “hot” look. I had my hair “relaxed” to resemble a surfer. I remember in the sixties glancing at the first gay men to sport mustaches and saying to a friend, “I could never kiss that!” Within three months I had my own mustache. Just as ten years later I shaved mine as soon as everyone else did. Long hair, straightened hair, crew cuts, long sideburns—I followed almost every fad.

  I felt I’d come down in the world. Before Italy I was living in the nicest apartment I’d ever had, I was wearing suits, and I’d had a retirement plan. Now I was thirty and unemployed and living in a roach trap. But at last I’d become the long-haired hippie in dirty jeans and torn T-shirt, even if the era for hippies was gradually passing. I wasn’t sure if I preferred the living death of respectability linked to a dull job or the peril of living on the economic edge, free to keep my own hours—and to fill them up with tedious, ill-paid freelance work.

  Ric
hard, with a complete lack of resentment and a nearly unique generosity linked to his natural ebullience, fixed me up with not one but two different young men, one after another. There was a bright, skinny writer, impotent from heroin; we spent an uncomfortable New Year’s Eve together. There was a dark young doctor who was always depressed, whom I was half in love with. He lived in another city and spent weekends with me in my pitiful apartment. I didn’t see how bad it was, nor did I ever think of myself as poor. Broke, perhaps, but not “poor.” Maybe because my father had been rich, maybe because I’d had a well-paying job I hated, maybe because I thought of my life as enviable, maybe because it all felt like gleeful slumming, and anyway an average tidy studio apartment in a doorman building would have seemed like even a bigger comedown after my father’s house—better the gutter than the curb.

  New York was a broken city, literally on the verge of bankruptcy. A woman I knew bought a brownstone in the Village for thirty thousand dollars and said to me, “I know I’ll never get my money out, but I’m sentimental about the city.” Uncollected garbage piled up along the curb. The sidewalks were cracked and tilted by tree roots. Streetlights burned out and weren’t replaced. The crime rate was high. My little apartment was broken into, despite the metal gates on the windows, and my radio and typewriter were stolen. I hired a burglar-proofer who, he assured me, was a convicted thief himself and therefore knew “all their tricks.” He lined the front door, which had painted glass panels, with sheet metal. Into the window frames he put long metal pegs that had to be extracted before the windows could be opened. As the man said, “They only have two or three minutes from the time they break the glass and the time they have to hop in and clear the place out. If the window is too complicated, they won’t bother. But of course they could always get into the apartment downstairs and bore their way through.” Heroin addicts, everyone said, were responsible for the thefts. Burglaries were so common that no one paid much attention to them except the victims. I was haunted by memories of New York when I’d first moved there in 1962 and lived in the Y and had to borrow money from friends just to eat. Now, just less than a decade later, I was back down to five hundred dollars again. I’d blown my profit-sharing money inviting everyone out to dinner in Rome, though I didn’t regret it.