One didn’t small talk with Miss Dowling; there were no casual asides about how your weekend went, no questions about issues unrelated to the OR. I was also never allowed to address her by her first name, Dorothy, although a few of the scrub nurses used Dorothy, even Dotty, with abandon. Nurse Shelley, a very feminine Barbie-doll type, was Miss Dowling’s favorite. The two of them could often be seen in private huddles. Nurse Shelley called me Thomas and spoke to me as if I was a child. Her condescending attitude had everything to do with an orderly being at the bottom of the hospital totem pole. Like Miss Dowling, she never exchanged pleasantries with subordinates. In fact, during the two years that I worked in the OR, Nurse Shelley would just issue me an order and walk away. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she probably had a beef about the CO thing.
Nurse Shelley was popular among the surgeons because of her inability to walk without a wiggle. Her walk, in fact, kept the eyes of many surgeons glued to her bottom when they were not throwing forceps or surgical scissors across the room at an unsuspecting scrub nurse who wasn’t keeping up. Nurse Shelley knew how to coddle the egos of surgeons. In many instances she was called into an OR room to replace a scrub nurse who could no longer take a surgeon’s abuse.
“Nurse Shelley in Room 6, Nurse Shelley in Room 6,” Miss Dowling would announce on the OR intercom.
Surgeon temper tantrums were a common occurrence, erupting at the slightest provocation. A tenuous synergy existed between scrubs and surgeons. One moment there’d be jokes, flirtatious asides and laughter, but then came the sudden downturn. A temperamental surgeon could erupt at the slightest scrub mistake.
Spinal anesthesia necessitated that an orderly hold a patient tight so that the anesthesiologist could inject fluid from a syringe into the patient’s back. These procedures were rarely painless and took some time. Often it was the fault of the anesthesiologist if a good hit could not be mastered, although in some cases the problem had no known cause.
I developed a reputation for being able to calm the most nervous patients. My coworker, Will, wasn’t as good, but he could clean and remake an OR table faster than I could. Will was African American, my age, and lived in a room in Roxbury not far from his parents’ place. He shared a slightly different shift, eight to four, and began work after I opened the OR and had set up all the IV stands in the curtained-off anesthesia area. He would usually arrive in time to help me get the 8:00 a.m. cases from the upper floors.
“Anyone ever tell you that you look like Howdy Doody?” he said to me one day, collapsing over a stretcher in fits of laughter. The Howdy Doody comparison would last two and a half years, the entire time I was at Tufts, and it never failed to send Will into peels of laughter. Sometimes he’d point at me and repeat “Howdy Doody” over and over again, his laughter raging like a fever. Will had a talent for making me see the humor in situations. Sometimes just watching him laugh lightened my mood when the going got rough. I didn’t mind the Howdy Doody jokes so much because I was able to see myself through his eyes: a white guy with red hair and freckles. To an African American from Roxbury probably every white guy with red hair and freckles looked like Howdy Doody.
“I’m not taking this anymore, Popeye,” I’d tell him. A little later on, when we really began to feel comfortable with one another, I’d call him Buckwheat, referring to the character from the old Our Gang comedies. Will would just laugh as much as he did when he called me Howdy Doody. We genuinely liked each other and worked well together as a team, even when Will aimed his barbs at homosexuals. The topic of homosexuality came up thanks to the presence of two flamboyant gay men who worked as orderlies on the upper floors, the most notorious being Wray Wray, a tall muscular African American guy with an Afro the size of Angela Davis’s. Wray Wray wore a blue uniform and often assisted me when I had to transport patients to the OR from his floor. I got to know him slowly, although the first time we met the obvious disconnect between his tall muscularity and his petite lady’s voice hit me hard.
Here, obviously, was one of Dr. Stein’s homosexuals. It was also a sure bet that Dr. Stein had given Wray Wray his preemployment physical exam, something that no doubt led her to tell him what she had told me: “There are a lot of homosexuals in Boston.” No doubt she said this to a lot of men she thought might be homosexual. While watching Wray Wray interact with various nurses and physicians, I was always trying to detect hints of disapproval. I found quite the opposite: an acceptance level so relaxed it made me feel embarrassed that I was thinking so negatively. This was Boston, after all.
Will mimicked Wray Wray with gestures like putting his hands on his hips and pitching up his voice. Sometimes he would walk like Wray Wray around the movable laundry cart that we had to bring in from Central Supply twice a day. It was obvious that Will thought that all homosexuals behaved this way, even though I would tell him that I’d met some masculine homosexuals in Harvard Square (a lie), men who could lift a wheel barrel of bricks or throw people Will’s size across a room. Will, to his credit, never let a conversation about homosexuals become too serious. They stayed safely put on the comedic Wray Wray level or they gravitated to another Tufts homosexual floor orderly, Oswald, a thin white man with almost no personality who was later fired for fellating a patient after giving him a pre-op pubic prep.
“Homosexuals should be killed,” Will would say, exploding with laughter. “They are in my neighborhood and they get popped…they walk the street like Wray Wray and pop pop…you see them go down, pop pop… Oh, it’s so funny. Oh…oh…”
I did my best to instruct him: You shouldn’t think that way. It’s discrimination. What would Martin Luther King, Jr. say? Will would never answer me but just refer to something Wray Wray did, and laugh.
During operations, once the patient was asleep, surgeons and scrubs would slip into banter mode: on a good day there’d be lots of sarcasm and joking, even outright flirting. The telling of jokes was common as were stories about friends and families. In some cases, the jokes would turn to off-color comments or innuendos. Working on hundreds, even thousands of what T.S. Eliot referred to as patients etherized upon a table, had no doubt produced this edgy form of humor.
One time a very elderly woman was brought in for an obstruction in her lower abdominal region. She appeared to me as a quiet church lady type. While the nature of the abdominal obstruction had not been noted on Miss Dowling’s Patient List, when the woman’s X-rays were posted in the OR room the truth of the blockage became apparent: a salt shaker–like object tilting slightly to the side appeared to float in space. The old woman, who had apparently lost the instrument while trying to masturbate, was now the brunt of OR jokes, as long lines of surgeons and scrubs came into the room to take a peek at the X-ray. The poor woman, asleep on the table, had no idea that her case had provided the entertainment for the day.
I was introduced to Padre Basco, an OR technician in his late forties. Basco was of Mexican heritage and had the face of an ascetic. On my first day of work, Miss Dowling assigned Basco to show me how the lockers worked. From that moment on we became great friends. Basco not only had great insight into people, he was great at explaining the bizarre behaviors of the surgeons and scrubs. Later he’d tell me stories about the surgeons, especially how one married Jewish surgeon would haunt the Washington Street porno theaters one night a week looking for gay sex. Basco was popular among the staff, as many scrubs liked to confide in him. Not only had he known great suffering, he’d seen much of the dark side of life but had emerged as a kind of medicine man with a quick wit and an engaging, easygoing style.
“I hate sex,” he told me once. “I hate sex because of what it can do. I hate sex because of what it did to me. I hate sex because for me it became an obsession. I hate sex because it is still an obsession. And it usually has nothing to do with love.”
Prior to his employment at Tufts, he’d been an Anglican priest until he was arrested for soliciting an undercover cop. Forced to leave his parish and the priesthood, he decid
ed to move to Boston. Eventually he took up with a poet. They lived together, first as lovers, then as platonic friends in an apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. A small collection of his partner’s poetry was published by Basco after the poet’s death. In that collection, Johannine Appendage, the poet writes that…
Death is grabbing everyone
The learned and the unlikely ones
Into that pavilion
Sumptuous beyond belief
The busier apes and the silent ones
On that miraculous non-journey to a tepid sea.
Stones, knocked down before the setting sun
Death is grabbing everyone
Hagios Ho Theos…everyone
It confused me when Basco told me that his relationship with his poet friend was platonic despite their twenty years together. I was not yet aware that sexual passion didn’t last forever although I had read a great deal about how homosexual relationships don’t last in pre-1969 LIFE magazine and Newsweek articles. When I’d question Basco about his relationship with the poet, he’d tell me that when it came to sex he found it “elsewhere.” A few years later I’d come to know what that “outside” meant when he took me on a guided tour of Boston’s sexual underworld, the massive labyrinthine old movie houses on Washington Street in the city’s Combat Zone, where the married Jewish doctor went.
Hearing Basco talk about how he and his poet friend were only united in “spirit” made me wonder if I’d ever find a lasting love. It frightened me to think that passionate attachments over time devolve into primarily emotional connections where sex is left behind or becomes sterile and perfunctory. Basco had even told me that a long-term monogamous relationship between two men was impossible because at some point the men have to make peace with “the occasional other.” In a way I was facing the unpleasant fact that maybe Basco was proof that older homosexuals have a hard time acquiring long-term lovers and that by necessity they are either forced to live lives of celibacy or they must seek out places like Washington Street.
I told Basco about Pierre, the bogus Frenchman.
“He lied to me… He was wearing a cape the night I met him in the Punch Bowl. This was the same night I saw another gay man in a cape circling the Public Gardens. He had me convinced. The accent was perfect. I thought he was from Paris.”
“Oh no,” Basco said, laughing that laugh of his that suggested that I’d met a recognizable type he knew all too well. “Don’t go giving your heart away to bogus art,” he added, accenting the word bogus as if it was a dart thrown across the room.
I told Basco that Pierre would write me letters and make plans to come visit, while insisting that he could not be seen entering or leaving my place and that I should never, under any circumstances, take it upon myself to walk to his dorm for an impromptu visit.
“As if I would actually do that; he’s so paranoid, thinking I would walk over to his place out of the blue,” I said, one eye out for Miss Dowling, who respected my friendship with Basco but who didn’t like to see me talking to him for too long. “Once he wrote me a note on fine stationery commenting on my typewriter and ‘the writer’s desk,’ but we don’t really talk. He won’t go out to dinner or have a drink with me because he thinks that risks exposing him to classmates. When he comes to my place, he leaves right after we make love. I’m surprised he doesn’t wear the cape.”
During one of Pierre’s visits to the Manor I discovered that he had an artificial right ear. I hadn’t noticed it before, but one evening while we were making love I went to kiss it and felt a hard substance much like plastic. Pierre had hoped to interrupt my ear kiss with a quick, “Don’t do that,” but it was too late. My tongue had already unlocked the secret.
“I should have told you,” he said, turning his head to the side. “When I was a teenager I lost it in an automobile accident.”
I was not disgusted because my hospital work had made me immune and blind to many physical glitches. I even surmised that he was probably a nicer person as a result of his artificial ear.
“It looks very real,” I said. “You would only know the truth if you touched it.” I did not want to interrupt our lovemaking so I delayed asking questions, although a kind of newspaper banner headline crossed my mind: What else about this guy is false? I couldn’t help but imagine the rush of pain he must have experienced the moment his ear was hacked off. Images of his ear flying across the street and making a U-turn to him before landing in his shirt pocket, or even landing by a fire hydrant, flashed through my mind. Pierre, in true opera cape style, was much too discreet to give me details although he did indicate that there had been great pain.
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” as Emily Dickinson wrote.
Basco said that the story reminded him of Luke chapter 22 where Peter steals a sword from a Roman guard in the Garden of Gethsemane the morning Jesus was taken away, and slices off the ear of Malchus, servant of the high priest, after which Jesus tells Peter to stop and goes up to the servant and holds his head tight until the ear is mysteriously reattached.
Like the surrogate father he would become, Basco told me not to put too much energy into Pierre. I had already accepted the fact that Pierre was beginning to withdraw from me because he felt a long-term involvement would compromise his future. Pierre would later tell me that he did not want to be homosexual at all because homosexual love was impossible, and that it was his plan to marry and have children so that he could pursue a career in law, which I imagine included a judgeship of some sort. My days with Pierre were numbered, so I knew I’d soon be back at square one, which meant that I had to return to the Punch Bowl and meet somebody else. I was still piqued that Edwin from Manor II wouldn’t talk to me. “There’s no reason for you to give up. You just started,” Basco said. “Boston is full of men.”
I told him that Dr. Stein had said practically the same thing during my employee physical, after which Basco gave me a knowing smile because he, too, had been examined by Dr. Stein years ago, although he did not say that she had told him that Boston was full of homosexuals.
When Pierre stopped coming around, I returned to the Punch Bowl in search of another love. In those years, I had no idea that the Punch Bowl was an iconic place, and that celebrities like Robert Mitchum and Rudolf Nureyev were occasional visitors. I went back, hoping to repeat the magical night in which I met the “Frenchman,” but nothing happened, so I was reduced to hitchhiking into Cambridge because I had missed the last MBTA across the Charles. I had gotten a lot of practice hitchhiking in Pennsylvania prior to my taking the Greyhound to Boston. Hitchhiking was the norm in 1969, although thumbing it on a highway at two in the morning was a first for me. I figured I might get lucky and meet someone coming home from the bars.
I stood near the Charles River Bridge parallel to the closed MBTA and watched as a car pulled up beside me. I could see that the driver was a single male in a checkered hunter’s jacket. He was a short, stocky guy with a round slightly pockmarked face that was not entirely unattractive. Immediately after I told him where I was going he asked me if I wanted sex. His bluntness caught me off guard, but I was so lonely I said we could head to my place. Charlie lived with his parents in Dorchester and worked as a milk deliveryman. When we got the sex over with, he asked me if we could do something the following weekend, promising to take me to the Other Side, a bar with live bands and dancing. I felt sad that it wasn’t Pierre asking me out, but I said yes.
When I told Basco about Charlie I said that he looked like Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and that he didn’t have much personality. About this time, I heard from an ex– college professor in Baltimore—where I went to school before dropping out to become a CO—that Judy Garland was hanging out in Boston’s Napoleon Club, a posh bar for older gay men in the vicinity of the Punch Bowl. I had heard Punch Bowl men refer to the Napoleon Club as a “piss-elegant wrinkle room.” The place had a piano, and a chandelier of sorts, and it was said to be structured like a townhouse. Since I was
n’t seeing Charlie until Saturday, I decided to find Napoleon’s and look for Judy Garland on Friday.
This was a year before Stonewall, a time when Judy Garland was at the height of an end-stage drinking problem. For years I’d heard my mother talk about Judy Garland’s drinking problem, and now here was my ex–English professor telling me I needed to find her before she drank herself to death.
When Friday came, I dressed up because I had heard that men were required to wear jackets at Napoleon’s. I didn’t wear a tie because I knew that more likely than not, I’d be stopping in at the Punch Bowl before heading home, and maybe even hitching a ride home again. The club was hard to find but when I finally walked through the doors I had the feeling that it was not a bar at all but an elegant supper club. It had the look of a Victorian French restaurant: there were elaborately framed oil paintings, Oriental rugs, that chandelier and random high-backed chairs placed beside display tables. Several men were seated at the first-floor bar, all of them in suits. I did a fast walk-through to see if the place merited a longer stay, looking for a slumped-over singer either at the piano or on a bar stool surrounded by men. When I didn’t see Judy on the first floor, I headed up the club’s narrow staircase, which was much like the staircase in a private home, and surveyed the second bar, just as elegant as the first. My heart skipped a beat when I saw a woman in the corner of the room surrounded by fawning men but a second glance revealed that she was no Judy. The legend was nowhere in sight.
Maybe she’s already drank herself to death, I thought.
I left the bar. I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t want to go to the Punch Bowl again, so I explored the streets after stopping by the Greyhound bus station as if to recall the morning of my arrival. By accident I came upon the Other Side. Not only was the club bigger than the Punch Bowl, but it had a bluish façade that promised a different kind of experience. Inside, I could see that it was arranged like a nightclub with small café tables positioned in front of a large dance floor or stage. The dance floor was crowded with men fast-dancing to the songs of the day. Once again, Dr. Stein’s prediction hit pay dirt.
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