It was an eminently civilized gesture—and it began a series of very pleasant evenings, now at their apartment on Hudson Street and, a little later, in their second-floor flat in the picturesque alley of Patchin Place, just next to where E. E. Cummings had lived and right across the cobbles from where the aging Djuna Barnes still resided, during which their downstairs neighbor, a mannish woman named Dotty, would drop in to regale us with fascinating stories of various Village characters, from Smith College encounters with “Vincent” (her name for Edna St. Vincent Millay) and, striding through the night in the black cloak given her by Peggy Guggenheim, Barnes herself.
One evening Dotty invited the four of us into her cramped apartment, with its framed Beardsley on the wall above the fat plush sofa arm, where she passed out brandy snifters. Marilyn, John, and I sat on the floor, Dotty sat on the couch, and Guy in a corner chair. My sense is, in that diminutive Patchin Place livingroom, no knee was more than six inches from any other.
“Five or six years ago, now, I was walking my dog—” Dotty explained, putting the bottle back on the side table and bending to pat the head of the creature, at her feet as were we—“somewhere over in the East Village; though it was the East Side, then. It occurred to me I wanted a beer; and I was passing this bar, on Seventh Street, I think: McSorley’s. So I turned in—”
We all perked up. McSorley’s Old Ale House was a holdover from the mid-eighteen-fifties, famous (especially, during the first half of our century) with Ivy League fraternity men for not allowing women on its premises.
“Understand, I knew nothing about the place. I walked over to the counter and said to the bartender, ‘I’ll have a draught, please.’ Well, between the porch and the alter, I’d already noticed an odd feel. Everyone was staring at me—the way I dress, sometimes people do; though mostly I barely notice: I thought it was because I had the dog. The bartender hesitated a moment, then went and drew me a glass, brought it back, and I picked it up and drank from it. Well, don’t you know, at that moment everybody in the place applauded—and stood up! I looked around. That’s when I saw that they were all men. Well, then, somebody explained what the place was. It wasn’t a gay bar, though it might as well have been. There’s a sign on the window I hadn’t seen: ‘Women will not be served.’ Apparently, they told me, I was the first woman who had been through the door in a hundred years. Even the woman who owned the place had never come inside!” Dotty laughed explosively. “Well, I’ll tell you, after I finished my beer, I was quite happy to go! I certainly wasn’t interested in a place with no women! Really, I felt rather sorry for them. But, I thought, leave them be. Still, to applaud—that was gallant.” Laughing with her and sipping Hennessy, crossed-legged on the rug in that little room, which, in memory, is lit with ivory light from behind me and orange from my right, even then I had a sense Dotty’s mid-fifties infiltration of that all-male space had been a political turning point. Also it carried a lesson about power (as opposed to material strength, with which power may or may not be enforced): It is always located with the people, no matter the claims of an administration, and may be defied as easily as pristine ignorance’s stroll across a bar’s dark floor planks.
29. My first professional publication was an article in Seventeen magazine and was a result of a recommendation from the same editor who had recommended me to Breadloaf. The article was on folksingers working in Greenwich Village. The original commission for the piece had actually come before Marilyn and I had married. The three-thousand-word essay I’d written just before we’d taken off to Detroit had been debated for three or four months. Then it was suggested that I do another on jazz. I did. Six months later, the second was finally rejected as “too intelligent.” Another editor unearthed the original folk music essay—which was cut down to some five hundred words and, in October or November of 1962, appeared.
You might understand why I was not too excited by it.
What is often a major event in a young writer’s life was, for me, like my high school graduation, just another parenthesis.
A month later, however, I received two hundred and fifty dollars for it. That fee, deposited in the bank on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue C, where Marilyn and I both had our small accounts now, doubtless made possible the winter night’s adventure I’ll tell of after I fix one image from the night of The Jewels’ publication.
29.1. My first SF novel The Jewels of Aptor’s official publication date was December 1, 1962.
But when I was a handful of chapters into The Fall’s Book One, in November the first copies of The Jewels of Aptor arrived at Ace Books (in a double volume with James White’s novella Second Ending, a former Hugo nominee to help sales for the unknown Delany, on the other side), recently moved up to new offices on Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street.
Walking, after dark, with Marilyn along West Fourth Street, somewhere near Gerdes Folk City (then two blocks east of Washington Square), suddenly I hurled the clutch of paperbacks into the air with a whoop of joy, then ran along by the manhole cover in the cobbled street to swipe one from where it had landed, spraddled open, both covers up, while Marilyn stood behind me, laughing.
29.2. The next day at the Fifth Street apartment I was back at work on the final chapters of The Fall’s first volume, but with a strangely distanced feeling. Why didn’t the real pleasure of my first book’s publication (a copy lay on the green metal wing of the typewriter table, as I typed up the current chapter from my notebook) do more to impel me through the writing of this one? But it didn’t. Nor has it since. And it seemed grossly unfair—as I knew by now that worry over what was happening to an earlier book could trouble work on a new one.
29.3. The first check for five hundred dollars I’d received for my first novel had been absorbed immediately by rent, lights, phone, food, and like necessities. Three weeks after the book appeared, when the second (and last) five-hundred-dollar check arrived, Marilyn was now working for the post office. On weekend evenings, I was singing in the Village and although it was the most desultory and unstable of incomes, the three or seven or sometimes even fifteen dollars that might come in on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, from passing the basket around the tourist audience, would give us a meal together with some of the other singers, down in some basement restaurant in Chinatown at three or four in the morning. And while some of the new money was immediately earmarked, we were on a slightly more even keel.
“I’m going to take fifty dollars of this,” I told Marilyn on a chilly evening, “and go out and have a good time. I’ll be back late. Or maybe tomorrow morning.”
“Sure,” Marilyn said. “I think you should. After all, it’s your novel.”
Late that afternoon, I came out of the house onto the chill stoop in my army jacket, my notebook under my arm. Within its black lace of soot, snow clutched the sidewalk’s edge. But it was warmer than it had been, by a little. The light had gone deeply blue—with some gold still streaking behind the school building’s low roofs beyond the fence and across the yard.
I went down between the factory and the handball court (D. T. K. L. A. M. F. …) and out onto Fourth Street. I walked out of my way to pass the tiny storefront of Stephen’s Book Service on Third Avenue, whose half dozen revolving racks carried half a dozen copies each of every new SF paperback to appear: but it was already closed, and white-haired, deep-chested, nervous Mr. Takacs (another nail-biter, he, which made it pleasant to hang around his store; back then, because he ran Stephen’s Book Service, I thought his name was Mr. Stephens) had gone home to Staten Island. Over in the Village I dropped into the Eighth Street Bookshop, back then occupying the ground floor and basement on the corner of Eighth and MacDougal Streets, where tall Martin was the manager and my slightly older friend, Snoozey, worked as one of the clerks when he was not substitute-teaching at the school that blocked off East Fifth, behind which I lived. Ever since I’d been seventeen, summers had seen me clean-shaven, but in winters I always grew a beard. I rubbed my mustache with my thu
mb, looked at the two copies of The Jewels of Aptor still on the Eighth Street’s SF shelf, and wondered what a good time was going to be. I went over to the Paperback Book Gallery on Sheridan Square—a bookstore open twenty-four hours a day. But it wasn’t even that late.
And they’d never gotten the book in anyway.
The stall that had sold fresh clams right behind the Cafe Figaro was shut down now for the winter. Maybe, I thought, I could go up to Forty-second Street. The cruising in the movie theaters was usually pretty depressing; but the whole strip was open all night long, and maybe, in the late hours, when I’d never been there, things might go better. And there was always Grant’s, on the downtown corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street, for clams, burgers, and hot dogs. The winter walk up Central Park West was usually pretty bleak. But it was at least a place to look. … Soon I was walking up Eighth Avenue, hands in my pockets, now and again dropping my face when the wind would roll down the dark avenue.
Somewhere in the high twenties, I saw a guy standing in a doorway. He had on orange construction boots, all scuffed up. He was wearing a green canvas windbreaker and a green cap. And he was looking at me.
I held his eye as long as I could, walking past. At the corner I turned around and walked back. He was kind of stocky. Which I liked. And when he saw I was coming back, looking at him, he began to grin.
“Hi,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “My name is Al!”
Another Al, I thought. “I’m Chip,” I said. We shook.
“You’re a nice-looking kid,” he said. “I don’t have much money. But we could have a good time, I bet.”
“Sure,” I said. “A good time. That’s what I’m out for.”
“Five,” he said. “Maybe ten. But that’s all I got. Is that okay?”
I laughed. “That’s okay,” I said. I was twenty. He was somewhere over thirty-five. “I’m not hustling.”
“Oh,” he said. He looked a little confused. “You’re a great-lookin’ kid. What do you like to do?”
He seemed pleased by me.
His hand was hard and thick. The nails were work short, if not bitten. And his excitement had a naked energy that was very winning. There was nobody around on the street, so I stepped forward and put my arms around him. He grabbed hold of me, put his tongue as far into my mouth as he could, held me, and shook. He kind of pawed at my pants, and a minute later stepped back and said, “Oh, shit … You’re great! I mean—” He took a breath. Then he just looked happy and confused.
At which point a policeman turned the corner.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure …!”
We started up the street.
At the corner he said, hesitatingly, “Look, maybe at my truck I got some money. I work out of the truck garage, around on Thirty-fifth, behind the post office—”
I laughed again. “I’m not kidding,” I said. “I’m not looking for money. I’ve got my own money. I want to have some fun. It looks like you do, too.”
He grinned, shook his head, and we crossed the street.
When we got to the next corner, he said, “Lemme buy you a beer.” Within sight of the great Greco-Roman revival post office, we turned into a bar. At the counter, Al got me a beer. We talked, and he told me something about his job, something about where he’d come from before getting to New York, something about where he hoped to go.
I didn’t tell him I was a writer celebrating the publication of my first novel.
He got a second round.
“You have to let me buy the next one,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, that’s all right.”
Outside, in another doorway, with smoky breaths billowing between us, we made out some more. He got his hand in my pants, then dropped to a squat in the corner of the doorway in front of me. From time to time he looked up. “How’s that?” he said.
“Fine,” I said. I held his head; his cap came loose. His hair was thinning on top. He reached up to adjust the visor, then took my cock in his mouth again.
“Your turn,” I told him, after a minute.
He looked up again. “Huh?”
I got a hand under his shoulder. “Stand up.”
“You’re gonna do me?”
I squatted down in the doorway, and fumbled open the zipper on his warm corduroys. His hands went first to my shoulders, then to my head. He leaned his head in the doorway corner, taking big breaths. After a while, he said, “Stop, stop—man. I’m gonna come …! I don’t wanna come right away. Please. Please, I wanna stay with you a while. Please …” I stood up. We necked a little more in the winter doorway.
Then we walked a little more. “You’re a great kid,” he said. “Look, I told you. At my truck, I got money. I could make it fifteen. Even twenty. You could stay with me all night. Do you think you could do that? It’s not that much, I know.”
“Look,” I said, “I’m not hustling. Really. I’ve got my own money. I’d really like to spend the night with you—if we could find a place. Hey, you don’t believe me?” I reached in under my jacket into my shirt pocket and pulled out the wad of five folded tens. “Here,” I said. “You hold on to it.” I pushed the money into the breast pocket of his windbreaker. I had the notion that somehow a radical gesture was called for. “Now don’t talk to me about money anymore, you hear me?”
He looked at me, looked down, laughed, shook his head. “You’re a really funny kid,” he said. “Okay, I won’t.”
“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” We were passing Penn Station.
“Take a piss over there,” he said, pointed to the corner.
“No,” I said, “I’ve got to shit. Let’s go inside.”
“Okay,” he said.
So we went inside the new building under the Madison Square Garden rotunda. “We could get a motel room,” Al was saying. “Get something to eat maybe. You wanna do that? With me?”
“Sure,” I said. “That’d be great.”
Inside we found the men’s room, with the rows of beige enameled doors. “I’m gonna take a piss too,” he said, pushing into one. I went into another. The general excitement, plus the steady discomfort of the day that had led up to my decision to spend the night out, had loosened my bowels.
While I was sitting there, I heard Al outside. “You still in there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“Take your time,” he said. “You just take your time.”
At this point memory imposes a light edge in his voice that hadn’t been there before.
When I came out of the stall john, there was no Al in the bathroom. I went outside the door, then went back—and only then remembered the fifty dollars I had shoved into his jacket pocket.
I went over to Thirty-fifth Street. There was, indeed, a truck garage there—with about seventy-five trucks in it. I climbed up to look into maybe three. But why would he have come there? Then I went back out to Eighth Avenue.
Later on, I had sex with perhaps three more guys. I have only a vague memory of one of them, a tall blond guy, about twenty-five in a dark coat, who carried an incongruous rolled umbrella against a threat of snow that never materialized that night, with whom I played rather listless S& M games in the back landing of a Greenwich Avenue hallway. I got home about six o’clock that morning, and climbed into bed with Marilyn. As nights out went, it hadn’t been a particularly good one.
29.4. The result was, the next day, that when I picked up another sheet of typing paper to slide it into Rosemary’s odd-looking little typewriter and recommence work on Out of the Dead City, I brought to it now a commitment and an energy that probably carried me to its end. The pleasure that came from the writing itself? That was the only reward I could reasonably look for. But any pleasures I thought I might find through the money that came from it? That was all nonsense, caught up and obliterated by a great psychological and historical machine which, no matter how much one desired them, rendered all other prizes
as a foggy breath dissipated in winter.
When Out of the Dead City was finished (and most of the first scene of The Towers of Toron was written; I had an almost superstitious commitment not to let myself stop between volumes), I felt it was rich and accomplished and infinitely superior to Jewels. I was particularly proud of the climax, a chase through the universe in Chapter 11 (which I planned to repeat in miniature in Chapter 5 of Book Two), whose episodes had been generated according to a complex pattern of the four classical elements (fire, water, earth, air) overlaid on the modern states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma) deployed between the epic spheres (underworld, real world, heavens).
“Yes, we’re going to publish it,” Don said, when, after what seemed years of waiting for him to read it, he called me into the Ace office a week after Thanksgiving to talk about it at last. “It’s not as strong as your first book, Chip. But that often happens with second novels. We’ll probably change the title. Still, it’s got some interesting stuff.”
On the subway back down to the Lower East Side, I found myself thinking that, though they might add a feeling of range to the episodes, probably no reader would experience the elements behind the chase as a pattern, even though they made one.
It took me a week or so to get back to the second volume.
But finally I took out my old notebooks and looked over my notes on spring’s dreams, then launched into the assassination that begins the action of The Towers of Toron.
30. In memory, that second volume remains the most difficult book I’ve ever written. Though certain sections gave me much satisfaction (the long-planned-for friendship between Alter and Clea, some sections among the military chapters), in general everything around them seemed thick to write, thin to read, and sunk in personal dullness.
That winter I was going weekly to Queens to tutor poet Marie Ponsot’s ten-year-old son, Antoine, in arithmetic.
Three chapters into the second volume, I had to give up the weekly tutoring sessions. “Well,” Antoine told his mother, “I guess Chip is writing another novel.” I was; but it was going very slowly.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 28
