“No, but I mean—if he’s angry or somethin’!”
“He’s never even met you!” I said. “What’s he going to be angry with you about? He’s my boss, not yours. And I told him on the phone I was bringing a friend—”
“Well, suppose he’s angry at you about somethin’. You just spoke to him an hour ago. You don’t know what he’s gonna be like when you get in there. And if I’m there, or he’s changed his mind or something he could do anything!”
This went on, baffingly, another five minutes. Finally I said it was all right if he waited out here in the hall for me—he wouldn’t even come into the reception area—and left nervous Sonny, to enter the citadel of power alone.
The receptionist smiled and told me just to go on into the back. Don greeted me, asked what had happened to my friend (“At the last minute,” I said, “he couldn’t make it”), took me into the art director’s office, and showed me the painting. It was dark blue, with a pair of vampire creatures staring up at some floating globes, in each of which a skull glimmered eerily: the jewels …
Back outside in the hall, Sonny asked: “Was everything okay? He wasn’t angry at you or nothin’, was he?”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t angry. Everything’s fine.”
“That’s good.” Sonny sighed. “But let’s get out of here, okay? Before somethin’ happens …?”
We went back downtown.
But to this murderer, geriatric rapist, occasional mugger, and overweight cat burglar, the concept of the boss—the ultimate authority sitting up in his office—was a notion beyond terror, even if, I supposed, that office had been empty!
A few days later, when I decided it was time for Sonny to go, with great goodwill he moved in with one of his elderly girlfriends who had gotten an apartment about three blocks away; we’d grin and greet each other, when I passed him sitting on the stoop. Sometimes we’d even have a beer or two, on and off through the rest of the year.
19.6. A day or two after Sonny left, I’d planned to knock off writing in the late afternoon, but a sudden downpour that turned into a torrential summer rain kept me transcribing from my notebook on the typewriter far longer than I’d intended, so that when, finally, I lay down for an early evening nap, I felt the satisfaction of having put in a much better day’s work than I’d hoped.
I woke, late, hot, alert, slid out of bed, and turned on the light. What time, I wondered, could it be? I didn’t feel at all like going back to sleep, so I dressed in my jeans, sneakers, rolled up my shirtsleeves, and went outside. The street was cooler than the apartment. Slurred here and there with dark water, already mostly dry, the sidewalk was empty. It was probably after eleven, if not midnight. I crossed to go down the alley and head over through the Village, making for the waterfront.
By Christopher Street, I realized it was even later than I’d thought. Clocks glimpsed through the dark windows of this liquor store and that dry cleaner had confirmed it was after three.
At one, at two, the activity among the trucks tended to fall off—except for the weekends. And even then, there was always some change of tenor.
Sometimes to walk between the vans and cabs was to amble from single sexual encounter—with five, twelve, forty minutes between—to single sexual encounter. At other times to step between the waist-high tires and make your way between the smooth or ribbed walls was to invade a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it—now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality—and failed because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of such a situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred all-but-strangers is hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community. At those times, within those van-walled alleys, now between the trucks, now in the back of the open loaders, cock passed from mouth to mouth to hand to ass to mouth without ever breaking contact with other flesh for more than seconds; mouth, hand, ass passed over whatever you held out to them, sans interstice; when one cock left, finding a replacement—mouth, rectum, another cock—required moving only the head, the hip, the hand no more than an inch, three inches.
That evening, because it was late, because it was not the weekend, as I crossed under the highway, I expected to find the former. But because activity always increased just before dawn, because the rain had kept people in at the night’s start, the latter is what I stepped into.
It was engrossing; it was exhausting; it was reassuring; and it was very human. At one point I heard someone saying to one guy who, I guess, got overexcited, “Okay, okay—calm down now. Relax for a moment. Just take it easy.” And later, when I emerged into a small opening, I saw, sitting on the back of one van, a tall black guy, in jeans and a red T-shirt, about thirty, whom I’d seen there every night I’d ever come, but who never seemed to do anything, fanning himself with a folded newspaper and looking very pleased.
I vaulted up into the van and was caught by two guys (“You okay there?”) steadying me, one of whom, I realized as I moved forward between him and someone else, was naked.
Later, pausing for minutes, I stood at the great beam along the edge of the water. Beyond the covered dock to the south, the sky was getting light. Looking to the west, I saw the black had taken a blue glaze. The water shook and shimmered with the cobalt reflection.
A little way down stood a white guy in his late twenties, early thirties. He wore workman’s greens, short sleeves rolled up over muscular arms. He had one workshoe up on the weathered ten-by-ten that ran the concrete edge. He looked like a driver from one of the trucks. He saw me looking at him and beckoned me over. I walked down the few feet between us, and he squatted, then sat on the blackened wood, put one hand on my hip, and, with very thick fingers, tugged my fly open. He moved forward, and I took his head, his ears against my palms. His brown hair was pulling away from his temples and thinning over a coming bald spot.
He grinned up, then went down.
Looking over his head at the water, I felt very good and very tired. Running across the stretch of dawn river just below us were two nets, one of shadow, one of light, on the wrinkling and raveling tide interlaced, interpenetrated, pulled endlessly one out of the other.
It seemed for a moment that both would become one, or would reveal themselves to be two aspects, differently lighted, of a complex singularity. …
The wet heat of his mouth on my engorged penis retreated, came forward, retreated, came forward again. The third time, he just stayed there. He let me go from his mouth to lean his head against my lap. Then he laughed and looked up. “I’m tired,” he said, with a kind of embarrassment.
If he’d had a morning like mine, I wasn’t surprised.
“Okay,” I nodded. “Stand up a minute. I’ll do you.”
He stood. I got down in front of him.
He let me go at his cock for about a minute. Then, with his work-hardened hands, he stilled my head. “I’m too tired,” he repeated and patted my shoulder. “I can’t make it. You work on him for a while,” and fed another cock—from a black guy who’d stepped up to watch us—into my mouth.
He let one hand stay on my head and with the other cupped the teak testicles with their tight hair, loose below my chin. I held on to his heavy, reddened ones, his uncircumcised dick slowly lowering, warm, over the back of my hand, till he patted me again, took a breath, turned—and my hand was empty and cool—to walk, unsteadily, away.
But I was exhausted too; the black guy helped me up and, about three minutes later, I started home.
19.61. The parallel column containing the discourse of repetition, of desire, whether satisfied or unrequited (but always purveying its trope of truth), forever runs beside one of positive, commercial, material analysis. Many of us, raised on literature, have learned to supply the absent column when the material is presented alone. And a few of us have be
gun to ask, at least, for the column of objects, actions, economics, and material forces when presented only with, in whatever figurative form, desire. I would have hoped that the parallel column to the accounts I have written above might have been the chapter of Voyage, Orestes! (or the pages from Out of the Dead City or The Ballad of Beta-2) I’d been working on that day, the day before, or the day after. But there is nothing—certainly not in The Fall—to maintain the split, the gap, the margin between columns. Nothing there sustains the river dividing the two shores that allows all articulate passage, a river that is itself never constituted of anything more meaningful than blue lines (cut by a red marginal indicator) over white paper—or the motion of light in water.
19.7. Three days after the last night on the docks I’d described, as I was going down the stoop steps into the noon heat to get a can of soda from the bodega down the block, I saw Billy coming across the street.
“Hey,” I called to him, “can I talk to you a minute?”
“Sure.” Billy edged between the parked cars and stepped up on the curb.
“Do you know anything about gonorrhea?” I asked, stepping down to the sidewalk.
“The clap?” Billy said. “Sure I do. You think you got it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He grinned. “Well, I just bet you ain’t been the good little boy you were supposed to be while Marilyn was gone, if you’re asking.”
“Shit, Billy—”
“Naw—” He raised his hand—“I’m not saying anything. You stingin’?”
“Yeah,” I said. “When I take a piss.”
“You drippin’?”
I frowned. “A little bit.”
“Are you fuckin’ around?”
“Yes, I’ve been fucking around.”
Billy made a painful face and grabbed his crotch. “Then you got it! Ow! That hurts me almost as much as it hurts you—” Then he laughed. “Not to you, it don’t, huh? You better get your ass to the doctor’s. He’s gonna stick it full of penicillin, too. You’ll be okay.”
I grunted.
There was a doctor’s office directly across the street in a first-floor sunken apartment, whose sign on the wall I’d noticed every time I came through the alleyway. I checked to see how much money I had in my wallet, then crossed over.
When the nurse called me to go into the office, I was surprised to see it was the same doctor who, back at the clinic on Delancey Street, had lanced my jaw. “What’s wrong with you, young man …?”
That evening, at dinner, just before dessert, Terry said, “Billy says you’ve been a bad boy—” and broke out laughing.
“Now why you gonna go tell him I told you about that for?” Billy demanded.
“That’s all right,” Terry said. “I just couldn’t help it. I know, these things happen. Did you get it taken care of?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I did.”
“That’s why he’s sitting so gingerly on his right cheek, I bet,” Billy said—though the soreness from the shot had already gone.
The next day, however, I’d developed a summer cough. I kept on with the oral penicillin that had been prescribed for me—and worked into the evening. Once Terry knocked on my door, and I told her I probably wouldn’t be up for the next few dinners, as I wanted to work through the nights.
“Suit yourself,” she said. “But we always like to have you.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “But I want to clean the place up a little, too. Marilyn’ll be back at the end of the week.”
Over the next two days the cold got a lot worse.
I disappeared into my apartment for four days.
19.8. Marilyn got home, with her suitcase, and found me in bed. The trip had had its rough spots, but basically she’d enjoyed it. She’d gone traveling about the country with two Mexican friends. And she’d written three poems. One was a lovely and sinuous sestina she’d composed on the occasion of purchasing, somewhere in Mexico City, a beautiful alexandrite pendant, the yellow stone looped in gold at the end of its chain, to give to her mother as a birthday present. And there were two other six-line-long character portraits (“The tow-and-aster Texans drawl, scuff, slur / the condescension of conquistadors …”17 and, “Senora P[edrosal]”18) that might, she thought back then, become part of something longer.
Three poems in six weeks? In the previous six months she had fully completed only two.
She sat on the bed’s edge and read the new ones to me, showed me the pendant in its white box—and I was as pleased as she was. “But what’s wrong with you?” she finally got around to asking.
“Just a summer cold,” I told her. “I feel terrible, but I love the poems! I’ll be all right.”
“Well,” she said, peering at me, “you don’t look very good.”
We had a thermometer in the bathroom, and Marilyn decided to take my temperature: it was a hundred three.
A couple of hours later, she loaded me into a cab and took me up to Bellevue, where I was X-rayed, diagnosed as having pneumonia, admitted, and hooked up to an IV.
The fever hit a hundred four that night before it broke.
I stayed at Bellevue a few days, then was transferred to Sydenham for two weeks—where I could look out my window down at the ANGELLETTER wall. My mother and aunts and sister came to see me. I think even Hilda came by. Two weeks later I was out and back at East Fifth Street.
19.81. Claud had called to invite Marilyn and me over for brunch. But that morning Marilyn was feeling tired and on the verge of a cold, and so excused herself.
When I came into Claud’s small, top floor Village apartment, he had a large kettle for hardboiled eggs on the stove. “If you put a little vinegar in,” he explained, “then, when you peel them, they come out smooth and the whites don’t stick to the shells.”
“What—” I was curious—“are we having for brunch that requires three dozen hardboiled eggs?”
“Oh, no—those aren’t for us.” It seemed that Claud had gotten a part-time job with a catering company. He had to boil and peel the eggs for them.
So I washed my hands. Claud cooled the eggs under cold water at the sink; and for the beginning of the morning, we sat at the kitchen table together, while he showed me the proper way to peel one—by making a small crack, rolling the egg on a hard surface so that the shell shattered over the whole of it, then slipping it off with a motion or two, the white fragments clinging to the inner membrane.
“We’re having scrambled eggs,” Claud said, when we were finished. He put away the glass bowl of glistening white ovoids with here and there the faintest green showing. “I always think scrambled eggs come out better if you cook them in a double boiler—do you mind if I put in a dash of Worcestershire Sauce? It adds something I’ve always enjoyed—but it may not be you.”
“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Claud got out his white enameled double boiler and returned to the stove. “I’m just so sorry Marilyn didn’t come with you. …”
I’ve often pondered on the terms “gay culture,” “gay society,” “gay sensibility.” The hard-headed Marxist in me knows that we must be talking about behavior, mediated through psychology, that responds to a whole set of social and economic forces that it would have been as easy to locate under Claud’s life as under mine. But at the intuitive level (i.e., that level wholly culture bound), where we feel as if, somehow, there is such a thing as a culture apart from infrastructural realities, gay society has always seemed to me an accretion of dozens on dozens of such minutiae, a whole rhetoric of behavior—how to twist the skin off a clove of garlic, how to open the doors to the unsold box seats at Carnegie Hall with a dime, the shifting, protean, and liquid knowledge of where sex is to be found in the city, this season, or Worcestershire Sauce in your eggs—that together make up a life texture I was at once almost wholly appreciative of, and at the same time felt almost wholly estranged from: as if it were a myth that I could never quite reach.
But perhaps (though today
I still like Worcestershire Sauce in my eggs) any “identity”—semantic, generic, personal, or cultural—is always such an accretive, associative, but finally disjunctive illusion.
19.82. I was curious how Marilyn would take to Sonny. I’d told him about her; her about him. I wasn’t interested in continuing the sexual side of our relationship. (Did Sonny bite his nails? No. Often he let them grow to none too clean and almost womanly length.) Marilyn was not the most outgoing and trusting of nineteen-year-olds, and I did not see her having much tolerance for a thirty-year-old overweight grifter and thug. Several times I had seen Sonny’s good-natured gruffness become outright cruelty, and I was ready, with Marilyn’s return, to end the friendship altogether, which had been winding down anyway. But perhaps because of his twelve sisters, or perhaps because Marilyn was simply too young to be of sexual interest to him (“I like good-lookin’ young guys and sweet-smellin’ old ladies. Anything else I gotta fuck is work!”), just after I got out of the hospital Sonny came knocking at the door of our dead-end Fifth Street apartment; and Marilyn seemed to draw out of him all sorts of attempts at acting civilized, which, however they misfired, absolutely tickled her. He showered her with attention in a perfectly nonthreatening way.
I suspect she saw him as a cross between a teddy bear and an underclass Prince Charming. (Once he even came to bring her some rather dilapidated flowers.) Sonny soon became one of her favorites among my friends. The only strain on the relationship was once, when we ran into him in the street, he introduced Marilyn to one of his crazed, aged women friends, half bent over with arthritis—who, I suspect, was slightly schizophrenic and who began to finger Marilyn’s clothing and talk a stream of incomprehensible babble. All the uneasiness and barely masked distaste that I’d thought would have greeted Sonny came out now—though the woman’s response seemed only that she now decided, in her incoherent way, Marilyn must need infinite care, concern, and protection, which, I’m afraid, made Marilyn more confused and uncomfortable. Sonny took it all in stride, though.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 24
