The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  By now the topic was too delicate.

  19. Months before, a painter named Simon had told me about the trucks parked under the highway out by the docks at the river end of Christopher Street as a place to go at night for instant sex. (Simon’s vivid and precise canvases seemed more luminous to me than any art since Cary’s. Once, his downstairs neighbor, another artist named Shirley, was hired by some businessman to copy several Vermeers. Often I, and occasionally Marilyn, would sit in Simon’s tiny fourth-floor flat, with intricate iron-scrolled railings upright for gates in the windows and driftwood and brass bells on the sills, while Simon worked at his easel and, at the table, artbook open beside her, Shirley worked on her copies—and, from time to time, Simon would point out to her the way around some technical problem, such as how Vermeer had used the texture of the canvas to suggest the wattle behind a bit of fallen plaster, or the way a line between two subtly different grays opened up the space between as a storage for light.) That Simon was also gay came as a jarring surprise after I’d known him almost a month.

  I went once to the docks, stood across the street, under the street lamp, watching the trucks almost twenty minutes—and saw nothing of the mass orgies Simon had described. Now and then, a lone man in jeans wandered across to disappear among the parked vehicles—some driver checking his van?

  But that was all.

  “No,” Simon told me the next afternoon, “you have to cross over and walk around between them. And you still probably won’t see very much.”

  “Isn’t that kind of scary?” I asked.

  “You got it,” Simon said.

  A few nights later, I went back. And crossed over. And discovered that, from about nine in the evening on, between thirty-five and a hundred fifty (on weekends) men were slipping through and between and in and out of the trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in, numberless silent sexual acts, till morning began to wipe night from above the Hudson, to dim the stars, to blue the oily water.

  I stayed perhaps six hours, had sex seven or eight times, and left, finally, exhausted.

  19.1. Now, with Marilyn gone, the plan was to finish up Out of the Dead City over the eight weeks. I hoped to work on the book during the day, have dinner with Billy and Terry in the evening, and perhaps stroll over to the West Side docks after a little while—but after only a few days, I found myself drawn to the growing Voyage, Orestes! Every once in a while, I’d try to return to the trilogy. But I seldom wrote more than a page or two on it. Once, I even mapped out an alternate SF novella, The Ballad of Beta-2. I worked on it intensely for four days; but at the three-quarters point I bogged down in the fragmentary tale. The next day I was back on Voyage, Orestes! The trips to the dock, however, became an almost nightly excursion. More and more I skipped dinner with Terry and Bill. For a good deal more was going on that summer, with Marilyn away, than just writing.

  19.2. Among the first nights that I went out in June, on my way back I met a guy about twenty-four or -five. His name was Al and he wore an incongruous watch cap on a warm evening. Talking in some doorway on Greenwich Avenue, he seemed nice, if somewhat preoccupied. I took him back with me to Fifth Street. The sex was very good. He worked, he said, at the vegetable seller’s on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth. Sex with men was fairly new to him—he had a girlfriend and didn’t know quite what to do, as his own predilections were moving him more and more toward homosexuality. I told him a little of my own situation. He said he liked talking to me. We should get together again. I was pleased. That he was, yes, another nail-biter didn’t hurt.

  Perhaps, I thought, we might even start a regular thing that would endure the length of Marilyn’s trip.

  Two days later, though, when I went to the vegetable stand and asked if an Al worked there—the one who wore the cap—I was told, yes, he’d been there. But he’d only been taking someone else’s place for a few days. He lived out in Brooklyn, and none of the Village Italian men working there now was sure where.

  19.21. Just a year later I saw him, again working at the stand; then, once more, he was gone.

  19.3. Within a night or two of meeting Al, when I was coming home from the docks through Tompkins Square Park at one or two in the morning, I saw a guy in an uncharacteristic (for the neighborhood) suit and tie standing near the public john—a pleasant-looking thirty-five with glasses. He was still watching me when I looked back. I turned around, came back to say hello.

  Hello. His name was Harry.

  Mine’s Chip. I was going home to Fifth Street. Did he want to come?

  That’s very nice of you. Sure.

  The sex was satisfactory enough. But later, as we lay awake talking into dawn, I learned that Harry worked in a bank uptown and that he was passionately in love with a twenty-four-year-old part-time hustler named Eddy, who lived in the neighborhood. This largely unrequited affair (I think they’d had sex, he told me, only half a dozen times) had been going on for five years, now. Harry’d been looking for Eddy that night—and had only gone with me when he couldn’t find him.

  Over the next hours, while sometimes I drifted off, I heard encyclopedias of Eddy’s history, his relations with his foster parents, his various adventures at the boys’ correctional home where he’d spent three years, his problems with his girlfriend, tales of his other johns, his drug preferences—all dim today. One image remains from that dawn dossier of lumpen biographia—because, a few years later, I used a version of it in a story.

  Once Eddy had come to see Harry at his apartment uptown and arrived drunk with a case of lemons that had been sitting outside a grocery down the block and which Eddy had decided to filch. Harry had answered the door. Eddy had stepped in, grinning, and declared, “You want some lemons?”—at which point one of the slats had suddenly given way along the case’s bottom and lemons had cascaded all over the floor of Harry’s living room.

  At the beginning of the evening, I’d been kind of impressed by Harry’s generally civilized demeanor. But when, at seven in the morning, I saw him, briefcase in hand, tie in pocket, and shirt collar open, on his way out my door, after three hours of Eddy stories I just said goodbye, smiled, and didn’t bother to invite him back.

  19.4. A little after that I brought home a gaunt guy in his late thirties, who turned out to be an intelligent and incisive actor and acting coach named Claud. As he came into the apartment and saw the clutter I’d allowed to gather over those first hot days, he said: “My god, is this what you think of yourself?” I was surprised at his directness. But though sex did not last in our relationship more than two or three meetings (now over at his Village apartment, now back at mine), we remained friends for years.

  19.5. On the first night of July, coming home one rainy dawn from the docks, I picked up a 240-pound, thirty-year-old Canadian ex-convict (he was not tall) named Sonny, who was lingering across from Whelan’s Drugstore at the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. He ended up staying with me for a couple of weeks, his illegal activities bringing down on me only one invasion of the police. Besides his more or less casual sex with men, Sonny (I learned on the second night he was with me) had a penchant for old women, often derelicts and bag ladies, whom he would bring up to the apartment, douse with the cheapest of perfumes, a bottle of which he kept for the purpose, and screw—gently, solicitously, and with much the same affection, humor, and consideration for their age, infirmities, and pleasure with which, before he found them and after they left, he’d have sex with me—which was considerable. I remember coffee, the morning after, with one of his sixty-seven-year-old girlfriends, during which we sat around a long time, trying to make heads or tails out of some complicated dream she’d had during the night, involving floating babies in long lace dresses. My approach was psychoanalytic, though Sonny was sure it had something to do with that day’s number.

  That Fourth of July I’d been planning to go up to the Newport Folk Festival; the friend driving me up had just lost one of his passengers, so, on a whim, I got a second set of conc
ert tickets for Sonny. All through the drive to Rhode Island in the red convertible, Sonny kept referring to folk music and the Folk Festival as “the old folks’ music” and “the old folks’ festival,” much to my friends’ amusement. At Newport we hung around the beach fires and drank beer and slept on the sand, and attended the evening concerts with Peter, Paul, and Mary, with Pete Seeger, with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, with Jean Ritchie, and Jeanie Redpath, and—in one of the afternoon sessions—my friend, young, blind, pyrotechnic José Feliciano.

  Sonny provided me some of my first evidence for what I’ve since come to believe is a general rule: people who are considerate in bed are—barring extenuating circumstances—considerate in bed with pretty much everyone, women, men, or whatever. Likewise, people who are socially sensitive generally try to use that sensitivity in all social situations. But there all correlation ends. The most genial and affable of folk may turn out to be a lummox between the sheets. And Sonny, who had (frankly) the table manners of a dog, the emotional sensitivity of a rhinoceros, and the belligerence of a goat, was nevertheless a concerned and considerate lover.

  He knew it too.

  And he was proud of it.

  Whenever he suspected that, on social grounds, he’d fucked up, his amends was always to offer himself for sex. The offer per se was seldom more romantic than a wistful, “You wanna suck on my dick?” But “Sure” got you an hour or three of mutual, complex lovemaking, interlarded with laughter and bits of conversation far more interesting than most he came up with at other times, followed by an affectionate, cuddling snooze. Nor was he above making amends three or four times a day.

  Sonny’s criminal exploits ranged from the colorful to the terrifying. He’d been the youngest and only boy in a family of twelve. His sisters, most of whom I met over the next months, were as loud, boisterous, and good-natured as their youngest, petted brother. A number of them were prostitutes—and several had also been in jail. Sonny’s father was a hogshead of a man who’d spent ten of his twenty years as a US citizen in the penitentiary.

  As an exchange for the trip to Newport, Sonny invited me to his father’s birthday picnic out on Randalls Island the next week, with some eight of his hefty sisters and generally slim brothers-in-law—a loud, beer-soaked bash of fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs, in which the old man, over three hundred pounds of him, sat like a surreal bloated spider in the center of the picnic blanket, sweeping food and drink in from all around him, devouring immense quantities provided by his seemingly endless daughters. “My old man’s a fuckin’ pig,” Sonny said, nudging me to take a look—and wolfing a chicken leg of his own. “Once I got an ax and tried to bust it over his fuckin’ head when he was going after Rita, there.” With a thumb, he pointed out one of his sisters, who was lugging another picnic hamper across the grass. “I was really gonna kill him, that time!”

  “I remember that …!” his father bellowed, with a torrential blubbering laugh. “You were a fuckin’ asshole! You’d be dead too, if I’d a’ moved a little faster!” Then, with another laugh to me: “You havin’ a good time?”

  “Sure,” I said and drank more beer.

  At the picnic site, they seemed to get on pretty well. But later, Sonny told me, “I’d kill the motherfucker today if I thought I could get away with it. He’s just about halfway between a pig and a piece of shit!”

  I don’t think Sonny was exaggerating. His self-presentation was just not that of a braggart, though he claimed that as a teenager, he’d been involved in a number of teenage gang fights, in which, by his own estimate, he killed some five people. His last murder had occurred before he was twenty-one and had taken place in a battle on the walkway of one of the city’s bridges, during which he’d thrown a bottle of gasoline with a flaming twist of rag stuck in it at another boy. The bottle smashed; the boy, splattered, had burned furiously—and eventually, died.

  “I had bad dreams about that one myself, for two whole years,” Sonny explained. “So I just figured, I wasn’t gonna kill nobody no more. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. And I ain’t done it again, neither.”

  His own three years in the penitentiary had been on account of a complete botch, he explained. He’d been asked to drive a car in an armed robbery that had fallen spectacularly to pieces. “I knew it when I said yes, I should’ve stayed with my own people.” Sonny’s “own people” apparently meant an ex-brother-in-law with whom, so went the tale, every Tuesday night, he would commit a burglary, rotating between some dozen neighborhoods scattered throughout Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island. “You break in—midnight, one, two in the morning—and if it’s some old folks’ home, they’re so frightened they just lie there and pretend to be asleep and let you take anything you want. Most of the time,” he told me, “I’d fuck the women, too. If they was old and had some perfume or toilet water on the dresser, I mean—and didn’t seem too scared. You don’t wanna fuck one who’s gonna come unglued and shit all over the goddamn bed or something—that happened to me, once or twice, too! We didn’t even use loaded guns. But that’s ’cause we was regular professionals. We’d keep a couple of bullets with us, of course. But we’d never have the guns loaded. Regular professionals don’t ever use loaded guns. Just really crazy kids do that. You get caught pullin’ a job with a loaded gun, and it’s a lot more serious—yeah, most of the time they’d lie there and pretend to be asleep. Some of it was pretty good stuff. Bobby—my brother-in-law—he didn’t get involved in any of the fuckin’. That’s ’cause he was married. But he sure liked to watch me—standin’ around, playin’ with himself, and holding a gun on the old man. Sometimes I think maybe he was a faggot—like you!” This struck him as very funny. But finally he fell to musing. “Every Tuesday, man, for two fuckin’ years. Made a good livin’ at it, too.”

  Sonny took me to visit my first fence—in a crowded, cluttered Chinatown candy store, where, like something out of a wholly unbelievable film, the aged Oriental owner pulled aside a tatty blanket—no more—hanging in a doorway at the back, ushering us into a vast, skylighted warehouse space filled with televisions, typewriters, stereos, furniture—all, presumably, hot.

  Sonny enjoyed cops-and-robbers pictures, and we saw a number of them up on Forty-second Street in those two weeks. When he talked about them with his friends, I always got the impression he was discussing them not as entertainments, but as serious plans for possible crimes—that aspect of it, among others, was creepy.

  Once we ended up drinking beer and yakking with two or three of his cronies on some stoop on Tenth Street, across from the old market building (smaller cousin of those long since closed down over on Washington Street), at five in the morning. One, sitting with his knees wide on the step above me, was a tall, swarthy guy with curly brown hair, about twenty-four, named Eddy, who I first thought was Hispanic, but who said there wasn’t no Spanish blood in him. He was Irish and Greek and something else. From something he’d mentioned (as Sonny went to the curb to take a leak, a taxi pulled up across the street; the driver, getting out, glanced across as us, and Sonny bellowed, “What the fuck you starin’ at! You wanna suck my dick?” as his urine arched into the gutter), I realized that this was Harry’s Eddy!

  From what dawn devilment I don’t know, I mentioned the name of the correctional home Harry’d said he’d been in, from that other morning’s recitation.

  Eddy frowned down at me, picked up his beer, then moved to the step below. “I didn’t tell you about that, did I?”

  “Sure, you did,” I said. “The last time we were drinking together. Or maybe two times before.”

  “What do you mean?” Eddy said. “I never met you before!”

  “Aw, come on,” I said. “I’ve known you for four, five years, now. Most of the time we were drinking. But you mean to tell me you don’t remember telling me all about how you got drunk and stole this thing of lemons from in front of a grocery store and brought it up to some guy’s house—?”

  “Yeah! That was Harry! I to
ld you about that …?”

  Over the next half hour, talking of this and that incident, I managed to convince Eddy we were old friends. By the end of it, he was explaining to Sonny, “Naw, man. Chip and me go back a long ways! We’ve been gettin’ drunk with each other for years.” By this point he’d even put together a vague memory of where he must have met me.

  “What you know him for?” Sonny said when we were walking back to East Fifth. “Eddy’s a fuckin’ asshole!”

  But it had gotten too complicated to explain.

  For the next ten years, though, every time I ran into Eddy—making his way across Eighth Street, waiting for a bus on Fourteenth—from Eddy himself, now, I’d get the next installment of the narrative Harry had begun, as Eddy moved on to a legitimate job, a marriage, and even—for a couple of years—flying lessons, about which he was hugely enthusiastic; then divorce, and drink, and drugs once more, till our infrequent meetings ceased.

  Once I took Sonny with me up to the Ace Offices—to see the Jack Gaughan cover for The Jewels of Aptor. When we reached the door, I noticed Sonny, who would back-talk at policemen and yell at truckers in the street, had grown subdued and nervous. Finally, he said, “Your boss is in there, huh?”

  “My editor,” I said.

  “But that’s the same thing as the boss, for a writer, ain’t it? That’s what you told me.”

  Picturing Don somewhere beyond the receptionist, behind a manuscript-covered desk, I said, “That’s right.”

  Hulking Sonny took a breath, then shook his head. “I can’t go in there!”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause it’s your boss! Suppose he does somethin’ to me?”

  “What in the world is he going to do to you?” I asked, surprised. “He’s just going to show us a painting.”