The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  Alfred never commented on his relationship with his parents, but stories like this suggested he realized that his family was not without their own personal quirks.

  Alfred also sang. In his quavery voice, he sang, “As I sit alone each lonely night/Counting out my cards from left to right,” and finally reaching something about how he was all alone just playing solitaire. His voice sounded like a recording reaching the modern day from long ago, something like Ruth Etting’s. A fine, slightly whiny voice rising above a band that played like Paul Whiteman’s while men in white pants and women in cloche hats two-stepped around the hotel terrace. Everything in Alfred’s life seemed to have happened a long time ago.

  Alfred didn’t have a lover, but I knew he wasn’t averse to being picked up by adventurous strangers on the bus or in the subway. His pale, languid, poetic air must have appealed to many. I’m sure that although he would never be aggressive seeking romance, he would not place many obstructions in the path of someone seeking it from him.

  Our dancer friend Robby had been in some kind of detention home for boys with Alfred when they were teenagers. It was never made clear what they were doing there, or what they had done, but there was a kind of complicity between the two of them. They spent little time together, but they had the air of survivors of a long crossing of the Great Western Desert by covered wagon. They had seen things and survived events we could never know. Alfred and I were already too old to be able to replicate the experience as friends.

  Alfred’s stories of the reformatory conjured up visions of tall, uncurtained windows looking out over endless snow plains scattered with an occasional pine tree. Within, all was chill and empty. He hinted at abuse and neglect. It was all very Jane Eyre. Robby and he considered escape, but how and where across those snowy endless fields? This was in New York State somewhere. He made New York State seem very romantic, if unpleasant. Again, all of this was in black and white, accented with shades of gray. And dark-blue night skies. Just like many of the Joseph Cornell boxes.

  Later, Alfred was to work with Cornell, and the interiors of those boxes must have seemed like coming home for him. He already had inhabited the vast, empty spaces Cornell confined in those small, handmade wooden boxes. Full of stars and snowflakes and the feeling that something important once happened here but is now gone. All of Alfred’s life was like that. He was the last and sole witness to a once amusing and vibrant world. But it was clear to me, even enchanted as I was, that this world had never been here on the North American continent, and most likely not here in the time and space of this planet. Even when and if it had, Alfred had not been there. Disliking the world of Sally and Ed in the projects, he had imagined a lost world and then gone there to inhabit it.

  I had never met anyone like Alfred in Michigan or Chicago. I don’t think there was anyone like him to meet. I enjoyed coming into his lost world, and there I learned a great deal about the Magic Realist painters and the Paris of the 1920s and ’30s. There I first heard about Djuna Barnes, the details of life with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toldas, of the cosmetics queen Helena Rubenstein’s early attachments to and patronage of Picasso and his circle. All the backstage gossip of the Diaghilev ballet and its tours between the wars were common exchange between Alfred and his pals over tea. I learned that Nijinsky was followed by Massine in Diaghilev’s bed, and Massine in turn by Serge Lifar.

  This was my world. At one end of the spectrum, tangled in the hot bodies and sprawled legs of my lovers in my almost sordid apartment on Sixteenth Street; through the brilliant lights and exhausting days and nights on the opera stage; to the almost ghostly and never quite real atmosphere of Alfred’s Paris-in-Greenwich Village flat. Not dusty but not clean, always stale smelling, that little top-floor apartment.

  Have I caught the atmosphere a little for you? Even in the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the varieties of life in New York at that time, this must have been a unique one. Now gone. Other people live in the apartments where Alfred and I once lived. My building now has a new brick facade and hints at respectability and normal life within. As does my own life. True, Alfred remains, and he is far more unchanged than I. The last time I met him it was on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum with my daughters. He was with Robby, who is now a wizened and drug-raddled gnome. Completely unrecognizable from the sensuous, rosy-skinned, dark-eyed, arrogant boy who used to swing his buttocks about the dressing rooms at the opera.

  They both, despite the daughters, addressed me as though we had just thrown our dance belts and ballet slippers into our dance bags and were heading for Bickford’s. They had been visiting the period rooms because they thought the English library with its huge desk had a cheerful air, with the permanent electric sunlight pouring a yellow haze into it. They liked the pink French drawing room with its abundance of roses embroidered on the upholstery and the great ruches of the pull-up pink taffeta draperies. “Now we are braced for the subway again,” Alfred said. “And modern-dance concerts at the 92nd Street Y, where I’m sure at this moment, someone is dancing something called My Sacrament and rolling around on the floor hanging onto a large log.”

  Robby’s eyes were empty as he looked out over the students sitting on the museum steps and the yellow taxis loitering along the edge of the pavement. I wasn’t sure he knew who I was. He turned to my daughters and said, “When your father was young, he was very cruel to people.” My daughters said nothing. They seemed neither to hear him or to understand him.

  Alfred said nothing, either. He shook hands and smiled in that dry manner. “As usual, you leave as though you are going somewhere more interesting,” he said to me.

  “I assure you that is not the case,” I said.

  His hooded eyes looked as though they didn’t believe me. Robby’s line was down again and he left wordlessly with Alfred, walking down the stairs. Alfred turned and said, “You know where we’d be today if we had been successful in our dance careers? On a truck-and-bus tour of Bye Bye Birdie in Milwaukee. If we were lucky.”

  My daughters and I went down to where a taxi was waiting. They didn’t ask about Alfred and Robby or how I knew them or about my days as a dancer when I explained I had known them at the opera. But then they never have and never do.

  The Supers’ Party

  A short, dark young man with a bath towel wound about his head like a turban was standing in the middle of the room shrieking in a high falsetto when I came into the room. “It’s Schrieber,” Alfred said. “He thinks he’s Risë Stevens. I suppose that’s the hell scene from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice.”

  “How’d you guess that?” I said.

  “All those people writhing around on the floor. Like all those extras crawling around on the staircase when Orpheus descends into hell, remember?” he said.

  I did remember. And I wasn’t very happy about it, either. When we rehearsed it, Mr. Bing, the director of the Met, stopped the onstage rehearsal and came up onto the stage and came directly over to me. “You have to do something about your hair,” he said. I stared at him. “You’re too blond. I can’t see anything but you on the stage.” And he walked off.

  We took a break then, and Stanley, my favorite stage manager, came up to me. “We’ll spray it brown,” he said. “It’s nothing. I’ll meet you up in Wigs when we’re done rehearsing.”

  Harold up in Wigs found no problem. “I’ll just buy some of that temporary spray-on stuff,” he said. “It’ll wash right out.”

  “This is my natural color.”

  “No one thinks it isn’t, honey,” Harold said, patting me on the behind. “Nice little ass you got there.”

  “It’s natural, too,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m sure it is, I’m sure it is,” he said, glancing after me as I walked out.

  I didn’t stride out, but I gave it as much as I could. Everybody was patting your ass at the opera. The ballet girls did it absent-mindedly when they were talking to you, as though they were petting a dog or something. The dressers did, and some of the
stagehands, too. They were all just being affectionate. They didn’t really think it was going to lead to anything else, and if patting my rear end gave a little lift to their long, hard day, so be it.

  In the elevator going back down to the stage level Stanley said, “I think Mr. Bing was just trying to call himself to your attention.”

  “You’re kidding. What about Mrs. Bing and all the little Bings?” I said.

  “There aren’t any little Bings,” Stanley said as he pushed open the creaking grille that closed the open side of the elevator. And left me to think about it.

  At any rate, I was still thinking about it when I went to a party that night with Alfred. He didn’t want to go alone. “The supers are giving it,” he told me. “They’ve invited some of the boys from the ballet. One of those supers is really good-looking, and I want to go, but I don’t want to go alone.”

  “What’s wrong, can’t you get home by subway?” I asked him, remembering his number-one rule: “Never go anywhere you can’t go home by subway.”

  “I can walk home,” he said. I visited Alfred once when he still lived with his parents on the Lower East Side. I tried to be nice and homey with them. Alfred said later, “You’re the only person most gay boys in this town know that they can introduce their mothers to.”

  The supers, or supernumeraries, at the Met were a kind of raffish crowd that never varied. The same boys and men reported in every evening for their pittance and a chance to carry a spear or a sedan chair or be in a crowd of citizenry. We got to know them pretty well, because our scenes often involved a crowded stage and they were on hand. Many of them were out-of-work actors, and some were the younger boys from the ballet school of the Met, in training to join the company. Most of them, however, were great opera buffs and knew every detail of every star’s history, performance schedule, and eating habits. The stars knew them, too, and were very friendly. Only Maria Callas was haughty. Her great rival, Renata Tebaldi, made a big show of being warm and gracious with her backstage admirers, to point out the contrast. But Lisa Della Casa was everybody’s favorite. She kissed and hugged her fans back in the wings. One night, in The Marriage of Figaro, we were going on at the same time she was. She turned and looked back at us in her eighteenth-century white wig and panniers and said, “Let’s go, kids.” Really adorable.

  Eleanor Steber was more one of the boys. She hung around with the stagehands a lot, backstage. Sort of a larger-scale Mae West. Once I went out into the audience to watch her rehearsal in the new Eugene Berman-designed production of Don Giovanni. She was Donna Anna, the wronged woman. No one was in costume yet, but she threw herself down upon the body of her slain father anyway, the minute little Cesare Valletti. Her bosom came tumbling out of her low-cut black dress, covering Mr. Valletti’s fine little features. She seemed unaware of it. The conductor’s hand trembled a little, but he struggled on. We could see Mr. Valletti’s eyes opening and staring hard at the flow of flesh over his nose and chin. The maestro stopped the orchestra; Miss Steber sat up and calmly tucked her bosom back in. Signor Valletti sat up too, smiling. She pushed him back down with one hand and the rehearsal went on. Backstage I heard her say to some laughing stagehands, “Aw, he loved it. That’s why I didn’t move for a while.”

  Because of this one-big-family atmosphere onstage, it wasn’t out of the question for Alfred and me to go to a supers party. We didn’t know all their names, but we felt friendly towards them. And as far as finding new friends, lovers, or one-night stands, probably everyone onstage thought anyone else onstage was fair game.

  It must have been a Sunday night–the only night the Met was dark and nobody had to work. I stepped through the crowd rolling around on the floor and went out to the kitchen to get something to drink. I had no idea who the host was or whose apartment it was. Nobody seemed to know. I didn’t really drink, so I took a paper cup of punch from someone, ladling it out of a big metal cooking pot on the stove. I was just noticing that there was something in it when two older men met in the doorway, expressed pleasure at seeing each other, and kissed on the lips. That was new to me. Kissing in bed was one thing. Men kissing in public I hadn’t seen before. Alfred appeared on the other side of them in the door and saw me looking. Goggling probably. As they broke apart, he came towards me, followed by Ronald, the super he had come to see. Ronald was tall and dark and good-looking. Older.

  “It’s European,” Alfred said. He’d noticed my surprise at the men kissing in public.

  “I don’t think Frenchmen kiss on the lips,” I said.

  “Oh, sometimes, surely,” Alfred said in his best Jean Cocteau manner.

  I don’t think he’d seen a lot of it, either.

  Back in the living room, there seemed to be a lineup of older men around the walls while the younger ones mingled and paraded in the middle.

  “I don’t remember seeing these guys at the opera,” I said to Alfred.

  “They’re just here to see what’s new and good,” Ronald said.

  “What are you here for?” I asked him.

  “I’m here to see what’s old and bad, actually,” he said. “No, I’m just kidding. I’m here to meet the love of a lifetime. Aren’t we all?”

  The Aida Christmas

  On Christmas Day, we did Aida in full body paint. Two men with buckets of orange glop marched into the bathroom and each of the Sex Squad took turns standing between them to be painted. We had already made up our faces, and wearing only a dance belt, we stood with legs apart while, with wide brushes, they slapped orange paint all over our bodies as though they were applying wallpaper paste. I never thought to ask who the professional body painters were. Two Italian men who were related to someone in the dressers’ union, I’m sure.

  Then we dashed back down the hall to the dressing room to put on the little wraparound skirt and the armbands that made up our costumes. We also had little helmets to cover our hair. We originally had rather tall headdresses, but the moment the choreography required that we bend forward, the headdresses went rolling. So helmets had been substituted. I guess somewhere in all those Egyptian frescoes there must be something that suggested our attire-lowly slaves most likely. In ancient Egypt, if you had any kind of social standing at all, I’m sure, you had a head-dress. It was so hot, you didn’t want any extra robes.

  The girls had Cleopatra wigs, little black curls dripping down on each side of their faces.

  The dress rehearsal had been quite an event.

  We didn’t have to wear body makeup for the rehearsal, which was a godsend. Everyone was afraid of getting smeared by us. One touch and you were orange from one end to the other. Fedora Barbieri was singing Amneris in this production, and she was particularly afraid of us, because her new costume cost a fortune. When she appeared on cue at the rehearsal, the orchestra had stopped playing, they were so amazed. Her wig was Cleopatra style, but all in rhinestones. Dripping chains of rhinestones all over her head. Her robe was scarlet, and over it she wore a long cloak of gold lamé. Long. Dragging yards behind her. On her chest, two giant wings sprouted forth, gold, well above the level of her head. She was wearing gold platform sandals. Nor had she stinted in the makeup department, either. We were used to Fedora because she had sung with Callas in her debut in Norma. Fedora was a real trouper, and when Callas got into vocal trouble in their duets, she always supported her and tried to make her sound good instead of blaring forth to make sure the audience understood there was nothing wrong with her voice. I think she felt that she had been overshadowed by Callas in Norma, and here she was going to shine. Zinka Milanov had the title role, and Zinka never overdid it. Secure in her position as Queen of the Met, she wore the same kind of vaguely Grecian robes that she wore in almost any period opera.

  The stage manager let Fedora rehearse the second act in her finery, but I noticed him talking to her quietly in a corner of the stage after the curtain came down. She had gotten rid of the wings when she appeared on stage in the performance, but the rhinestone wig was still in place
.

  Christmas Day evening it was well below zero. It was cold on that stage, and everyone stayed in their dressing rooms until the last moment. If you walked behind the looming sets you could look out the gigantic Gothic-arched doors standing open on the back of the theater as the traffic zoomed by on Seventh Avenue. Aida is so loud that it drowned the noise of the passing cars.

  Not only was Aida done on Christmas Day but on New Year’s Day also. New Yorkers like to go to the theater on the holidays. Taking the whole family to the opera on Christmas Day probably dates back to the time of Queen Victoria. We really didn’t mind that we had to work–what were we going to do instead? Almost no one had a family that lived nearby, no one knew how to cook, and no one wanted to eat that much anyway. We were just as happy being there all together in the theater, covered in orange paint. There was something almost gala for us, too, on the Aida days. The orange paints sloshing around the showers, the running up and down the halls almost naked, then the sprint down to the stage where the onstage temperature would make your skin bubble up into goose bumps under your orange covering, the blatant blaring of the triumphal march, and you were on. The Sex Squad was displaying their near-naked bodies for all to see. Briefly, but thoroughly.

  We fled the stage as quickly as we descended upon it, and dashed back into the showers to get rid of the orange. We were all in the communal showers together, and you really never got it all off, even though the tile walls were covered with the splashing paint as it washed off our bodies. It was fun, these naked young bodies, jostling and splashing and laughing.

  Homosexuals as jocks. It happens.

  After the performance that Christmas Day evening, I was with Illy and some of the other boys having supper at Bickford’s. Alfred was with us. And Fabian, a boy who wasn’t usually in our crowd. He was small, with very dark hair and sapphire eyes–sort of that Paulette Goddard look.