“Sorry,” Eli said hotly. And letting go of my hand, he climbed down from the loft, switched on his computer.
“What are you doing?”
“Working.”
“But what about I Love Lucy?”
“I don’t even like Lucy,” clever Eli answered. “You’re the one who’s crazy about Lucy. You watch.”
“But you have to watch! It’s not the same alone.”
“For Christ’s sake, Martin, will you give me a break? I don’t interrupt you when you’re doing your work. Is mine less valid?”
“You’ve spoiled everything.”
“I’ve spoiled everything!”
Such rapprochements, alas, were typical of our intercourse. Eli’s attempts to excite me I rebuffed because they embarrassed me and seemed ill-timed, yet what must have hurt him even more than my mania for ritual was the obliviousness, even the callousness, with which I greeted what were to him gestures of the gravest sincerity. Indeed, so consumed was I by my own perspective that even my worry lest Eli should leave me amounted merely to the projection of selfinvolvement onto a larger canvas, neatly sidestepping as it did the more delicate question of what he himself might be needing (and not getting).
My erotic history, as it happened, had in no way prepared me for someone like him, just as his had in no way prepared him for someone like me. His (compared to mine) was both intricate and thorny, and included among its major players Ethan, Gerald Wexler’s twin brother, a yoga teacher who ate raw onions for a snack, a girl named Zoë whom he had dated in high school, and a British medical student (also a girl) with whom Liza had also had a long affair. Men and women both, in roughly equal numbers, for on a purely physical level Eli claimed actually to prefer sex with women—an avowal that puzzled me less because it seemed incompatible with his calling himself “gay” than because for me the very idea of sex on a “purely physical level” seemed so incomprehensible. It was in this regard, as he later reminded me rather cruelly, that I differed from everyone else with whom he had ever been involved.
Curiously enough, however, the natural hostility that sex tended to stir up in both of us did not stop us, at least at first, from having it all the time: much more, probably, than we would have if we’d been less ill-matched. The reasons for this were twofold. First, we felt it incumbent upon ourselves to endow the “great love” we were always parading in front of other people with the weight, the experiential ballast, of which sexual passion is supposed to be the measure. Second, from ideological motives, we were determined to prove—if not to these others than at least to ourselves—that contrary to popular opinion gay men could enjoy guilt-free sex in the context of a “healthy” relationship, as opposed to only cheap and impersonal sex in a bathhouse or in one of the dreaded “back rooms,” which I envisioned always as entryways to hell. Such practices as these appalled us. With a sort of automatic contempt we mocked (and rigorously defied) that shopworn convention according to which homosexual men must be either “tops” or “bottoms,” just as we looked down our noses at the “clones” in their lumberjack shirts and mustaches whom we sometimes passed on the street in Eli’s neighborhood, and who were to us less human beings than emblems of a degraded era, one that it was the duty of our own generation to surpass.
Young people, in their arrogance, are thus able to diminish the experience of their elders without even attempting to grasp its complexity. Yet what made this snobbery even more pernicious was the fact that despite my many avowals to the contrary, I was secretly attracted to this antiquated social order of tops and bottoms, just as I often found myself secretly drawn to the clones Eli and I would run into when, say, we had gotten up early in the morning and were taking a walk along the river, and they were stumbling home from the piers whereon they had just enjoyed a night of licentious abandon that had left their hair mussed, their skin pallid, their clothes smelling of amyl nitrate and cigarettes. After the clones I stared with an envy that I draped in the vestments of disgust, a sleight of hand that Eli must have seen right through, just as he must have seen through the excuses I made whenever he asked me to fuck him. For he knew as well as I did that despite the tedious lectures I was always giving on “internalized homophobia”—as a consequence of which, I argued, homosexuals felt obliged to take on the roles of “male” and “female,” rather than formulate their own democracy—I myself was (as Roy Beckett would later put it) a natural-born piece of ass. Or perhaps I should say a “natural-born piece of ass” of the mind, attracted more to the idea of being fucked than the reality, which frightened me.
What was this thing about fucking? I often wondered. Was it because of its procreative function that for homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, penetration was so often viewed as the ne plus ultra of intimacy, in comparison with which what might be called the ancillary sex acts—masturbation, frottage, sucking and licking—were merely nostalgic adolescent diversions? Certainly this was Eli’s view. If he took pleasure in those varieties of sex that come under the heading of “foreplay,” it was in the same way that I took pleasure in I Love Lucy reruns. Fucking, on the other hand, was to him an adult taste, like the taste for raw oysters and strong cheeses—it was, as the Italians say, “important”—which was probably why I shied from it, confirming Eli’s suspicion that I lived in a state of arrested development, a chronic adolescent whose weirdly goofy demeanor would seem less and less becoming the older I grew.
I must also add here (though with no great pride) that throughout this period of frequent, ill-timed, and unsatisfying sex—and despite the mounting evidence that anal intercourse provided the most efficient avenue for HIV infection—Eli and I never once used condoms. I’m not sure why this was. Perhaps we were simply unwilling, in the face of grim statistics, to suspend, as it were, our belief, and accept the disease as an actuality in response to which we would have to disown many of our most basic tenets. Or perhaps, given our youth, we could not yet fathom the possibility (the truth) that an illness so far associated almost exclusively with “them,” the older generation, might also be a threat to us. Or perhaps we had simply not yet grasped the full horror of mortality, of which neither of us had had much experience. Indeed, I remember—and today the memory makes my blood run cold—lying in Eli’s loft bed one rainy afternoon, reading a newspaper article that speculated on “routes of AIDS transmission,” and thinking, well, if we both get it, if he gives it to me, or I give it to him, it won’t be so bad: we can just lie here in the loft together like sick children, watching cartoons. The appalling facts were still so remote from me that I could actually romanticize them that way. Nor did the arguments on which the gay left was then wasting its breath—arguments that in essence attempted to justify sexual consumerism by recasting AIDS in the terminology of a class struggle, in which “they” were using the disease to try to suppress “our” hard-won freedom—do anything to dispel this voluntary blindness, which only an instinctive skepticism could have cured. For instance, I remember once receiving a phone call from Liza, who was in a panic because she had just read an article advising all lesbians to use “dental dams” when engaging in cunnilingus. “But Jessica and I never used dental dams!” she told me. “Do you think I should have? I’m so worried! Because once—I’m embarrassed to say it—she was menstruating, only we didn’t realize it until after I’d started to...”
To allay her anxieties, I reminded her that at the moment there were only five (but previously there had been one) documented cases of female-to-female AIDS transmission—which did not stop her, for months, from feeling her glands ritualistically, neurotically, and at the most unlikely moments: in restaurants, say, or at literary parties, where in the midst of a conversation with Billie Eberhart and Sam Stallings about Penguin’s purchase of Dutton, her fingers, as if of their own volition, would suddenly fly to her neck. Eli was the same. We all were. “Swollen glands” became for us a sort of shorthand for AIDS, about which, in truth, we knew next to nothing, except that swollen glands were supposed to
augur its onset. For about two years we palpated our glands obsessively, worrying over every unusual bulge or distention we might encounter, the subsequent abatement of which would seem to us cause for celebration, because it meant that we were not, after all, dying.
It was around this time as well—though curiously this development did nothing either to dispel or accentuate my AIDS anxieties—that I came down with a case of venereal warts: clusters of them, like tiny heads of that wonderful Roman broccoli, sprouting inside and around the opening of the anus, as well as in that nether region just south of the anus that Kendall Philips (always a wit) referred to as the “taint”—“because it ain’t this and it ain’t that,” he said. At another moment in my life such an event (probably a legacy of my affair with Ricky) would have anguished and humiliated me. Now, however, I was able to view it less as a grim portent for the future than as the residue—mercifully insignificant when compared to other possibilities—of a period in my life that had come to a decisive end.
Accordingly, and with Eli’s forbearance, I made an appointment to see a dermatologist in whom I felt fairly certain I could confide my embarrassing condition, because he advertised in the New York Native, a gay paper. This dermatologist, Dr. Spengler, was not, as it turned out, gay himself. On the contrary, he was married with three children, a handsome Jew from New Jersey a decade older than I, and possessed of that amazingly supple, flat, characterless skin—unblemished by so much as a freckle—that seems to be the hallmark of his profession. I don’t think he had any particular opinion, positive or negative, on the question of homosexuality; what had motivated him, rather, to advertise in the New York Native was simply that mercantile instinct by means of which his grandfather (like Eli’s) had managed to rise from the poverty of Hester Street to the affluence of Saddle River. (By a similar stroke of intuition, numerous West Village Indian and Pakistani newsstand owners were at that time starting not only to sell, but to specialize in the sale of, gay pornographic videos, with which they soon filled their windows, and in the selection of which a complete lack of personal interest did not forestall them from offering unsolicited and cheerful advice: “Oh yes, sir, I’d recommend The Bigger the Better, very popular this week, I’ve sold twenty copies!”)
As I recall, the treatment of the warts required six or seven successive visits to Dr. Spengler, visits during which, while I lay on his examining table in my jacket, sweater, shirt, and T-shirt (elegant clothes seemed necessary as a way of asserting my personal dignity), my lower half denuded, my legs in the air, holding my balls in my right hand so that they might not interfere with his rumble laborings, he would discourse enthusiastically about the bluegrass camp in the Adirondacks at which he sojourned annually, and where he would play the banjo “morning, noon, and night,” while at the same time probing what Eli would have called “the most intimate part of me” with an alarming instrument at which I preferred not to look. The treatment involved liquid nitrogen and when it was over, when at last I was liberated of the tiny heads of broccoli, he sent me off with a smile and a pat on the back, as if I were a pupil who had just passed a final exam and to whom his professor feels obliged to offer words of advice: “Remember, they can recur, but if they do, don’t worry. That’s what a dermatologist is for.”
As for Liza, her fear of AIDS was taking a different form, becoming entangled with that old uncertainty about her lesbianism to which, in the wake of Jessica’s flight, she had instantly rebounded, just as she had rebounded to her old dependency on Eli. Such a reversal disheartened him, for he had supposed himself, through Jessica, to have won a decisive victory in the battle he was forever waging against her mother. Now, however, she was reverting to old habits. Once more, she wore two earrings. She even spoke about rewriting her novel yet again, reinstating the third person.
Worse, to her many arguments against lesbianism she now added the risk of AIDS—perversely, we thought, given that (as I constantly reminded her) the risk was extremely low for lesbians. At this point she would always revert to dental dams. Dental dams—and her failure to employ them—became her bailiwick. At a drugstore she bought some, and the three of us tried to figure out how they worked—a comical effort, for she could not get one over her tongue without gagging. Yet when I reminded her that by having unprotected sex with men she was taking a far greater risk than she ever could have with Jessica, she brushed me off, now that she was looking for reasons to be straight rather than vice versa.
From Janet Klass, meanwhile, we learned that Philip Crenshaw—dark-eyed, spidery Philip Crenshaw, whose tales of the Mineshaft had been the peephole (or should I say the glory hole?) through which I had caught my first horrified glimpse of gay New York—had AIDS, and was dying, the first person I actually knew to be taken ill. This news sent a shudder of terror not only through me, but through Liza and Eli. Suddenly our hysterical worry over swollen glands revealed itself for the gratuitous pantomime that it was. Then dread, which is stultifying, stopped us cold. Liza even forgot about dental dams—but only briefly. For just as the trespass of an alien presence into the bloodstream is enough to trigger the immune system (at least when one does not have AIDS), so after the initial period of numbness that comes in the wake of terrible news, the mechanism by which we are able to rationalize, to distort, to edit painful truths and make them bearable, switches on. We reminded ourselves that Philip had been—how else to put it?—a whore. He had not lived, as Eli and I did, in monogamous “bliss.” Instead he was—and for using this word, several years later, I would be chided by my fellows in ACT UP, who considered it overly judgmental—promiscuous; from the clones, only a distance in years, not attitudes, separated him. Yet even as we tried, by such justifications, to sequester not only Philip’s illness, but his death (which came a few months later), the news had shaken us to the marrow. We wanted to make sense of it. We tried to make sense of it. The trouble was, it made no sense at all.
The clones—those men whose postures and costumes I disdained without ever bothering to interrogate them—became our scapegoat, the convenient target at which we could volley all the unintelligible terror that AIDS started up in us. It shames me, today, to recall how casually I badmouthed them. Even my tendency to refer to them as “clones” (as if they were less than human) was, I see now, part of a failed effort to smother the desire they sparked in me. For in those days the Village was still full of them, AIDS having only just begun its bloody pogrom. If I’d ever bothered to get to know any of the clones, then perhaps my manufactured disillusion would have given way to a more real (and thus humane) disillusion; I would have discovered that in sharp contrast to the image I sustained of them (and that they themselves promulgated) as sexual rebels, radicals, outlaws, they were by and large rather middle-class white individuals, accountants and shopkeepers, who would have had more in common with Eli’s parents than with Eli. What they constituted was a gay bourgeoisie, the members of which, in addition to being aficionados of ball stretchers, handkerchief codes, and the like, were also expert cooks, serious collectors of antiques, authorities on home decoration, as well as—though this was less known—baseball fans, devotees of fly-fishing, and observers of the stock market. In short, they differed from their suburban cousins only in the outer emblems that marked their trust in conventions: instead of station wagons, motorcycles; instead of tea parties, tearooms; instead of the synagogue, the country club, and the “no-tel motel,” the cowboy bar, the back room, and the bathhouse.
It was around this time as well that Stanley Flint came gamboling back into my life. Previously, when I’d lived across the street from him, I’d hardly ever seen him except in the Hudson-Terrier offices. Now, however, we seemed to run into each other all the time: at parties, on the subway, once, even, in Dr. Spengler’s waiting room. (Flint, it turned out, was seeing him for the treatment of a skin cancer.) “Young man, you never applied to my class!” he scolded when I walked in. “I’m offended!” Then he broke into a smile I found far more off-putting than any expressio
n of offense. “Sit down, sit down.” He patted the vinyl sofa. “How much more pleasant to have a chat with you than gaze wearily at a year-old issue of People!”
As at his office so many months ago, I sat. “You’re right, I didn’t apply,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I suppose I was just so tired of being a writing student.”
“But you’ll always be a writing student! Indeed, the minute you stop thinking of yourself as a writing student, you might as well stop thinking of yourself as a writer. And accolades provide no immunization against failure.” He placed a fatherly hand on my knee. “Take my word for it, Bauman, every time you pick up a pen, you court disaster. Even the great Leonard Trask can fuck up. The pages he sent me last week—vile! I told him so. Let’s hope he listens to reason and doesn’t let his reputation go to his head.”
Martin Bauman Page 32
