We spent the night together at my place and had sex several times. While we were lying on the mattress in the back room, he treated me to a disquisition on the unreality of Max’s life—Max had never been married, the way Joe had been; he never had to scrabble for his living the way Joe had; he didn’t do drugs, and he owned the building where Joe was staying, but lived somewhere else in the city, as well as had his own place in Florida. (I had been married, yes, but I wasn’t particularly into drugs at all myself.) Later, it occurred to me, if only because he existed, Max was just as real as I was—though who was the creator in terms of the relationship was possibly a big unknown. In Florida they had known each other for several years before something had happened that had caused Max to invite Joe to come up to the city. Joe had had a job doing grounds work at some sort of racetrack, I think it was, down in Florida, which is how the two of them had first known each other, casually for a couple of years. …
While we talked, Joe told me about Florida friends who were then in jail, of his two years working at a Florida stock-car track, not as a mechanic—though that was the job he’d have liked, and despite the business arrangement for the summer, I know he didn’t consider himself a hustler. “Naw, this is a guy I’ve been friends with for years—since I was a kid, almost. I guess he always wanted to do something with me, but before this summer, we just never did. Then the chance to go with him to New York came up, and watch his house for him; so he asked me if I minded doing a little work for it. Yeah, it’s an S&M thing. But I’ve done that before, just for fun. Basically I just take him on walks around the place. I throw a stick and make him play fetch with me. When he does something wrong, I tell him he’s a bad, bad doggy … stuff like that. We fool around a little … well, not that much. The first night I was up here, he took me out to dinner. It was real nice. But he’s very busy. It’s funny—I used to see more of him down in Florida than I do up here, when we weren’t doin’ nothin’ at all.” At this distance, of course, I could be off in any—and, indeed, every—detail. But that’s the effect they produced as, now and again, he’d mention one or another aspect of the relationship.
In the morning, when I was walking Joe back west, I ran into Susan Schweers on the street, a member of the recently disbanded commune and band that I’d been part of, Heavenly Breakfast; in the book about it (also titled Heavenly Breakfast), she is called Lee. After I introduced her to a friendly Joe, the next time she saw me, she said, “Hey, Chip, I want one of those. Where did you find him?”
So probably I told her, or I might have said, “Just somebody I met.”
Meet a new person and you enter a new city because you go to new places by new routes at new times.
A day or so later, I remember, Joe came and knocked on my door. He had a bicycle that belonged to a girlfriend of his, who lived in Brooklyn Heights. Her name was something like Jen. We took some time to screw around as before, and the next I knew, it was three or four in the afternoon, and Joe and I were walking his bicycle up the steps to the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge.
It was one of those gray and copper evenings where fragments of a brilliant sunset try to break briefly through the city’s overhang of industrial haze, before night wells up from the steely water and engulfs all but the window and park lights along both shores.
It was four or five o’clock in the afternoon before we approached the Brooklyn end, when a bunch of black kids, none older than fourteen, stopped us—there were perhaps eight of them. To my astonishment, one pulled a (very ordinary pocket) knife out of his jeans and, rather matter-of-factly (you would have thought they were asking us for a stick of gum), told us to give them all our money.
I didn’t have any money in my pocket. “Sorry,” I said. “Better luck next time.” But as I recall, Joe had two dollars. He took them out, held them up, then wholly surprised me by starting off, “I don’t think you really want to do this. Lemme tell you why …” and, equally discursively, he began to recount—with far more self-confidence than I could have mustered—the downside of a life of crime and petty pilferings.
The boys listened attentively, like schoolchildren hearing out a social studies teacher. There were benches for pedestrians on both ends of the bridge walkway back then, and after ten minutes, we all ended up sitting on them—two of the kids cross-legged on the concrete at our feet—while Joe went on dissuading our young muggers from robbing us. Eventually, I kid you not, one of them said it was late and he had to get home. The leader argued half-heartedly that he should be allowed to take Joe’s two dollars with him since, after all, he had a knife—and we were supposed to be scared he was going to use it.
“Oh, come on,” Joe said. “You can’t do any damage with that thing. Look how much bigger we are than you. We’d fight back, and, yeah, maybe you or even we might get cut—but all you’d do would be to make a mess. You’d get all this blood all over you, on your jacket there, your shirt. Yuccht! That’s not what you really want to do. You wanna forget all this, go home, and be glad the police aren’t running around banging on your mom’s door lookin’ for you! ’Cause that’s what they do—and they bang hard! With billy clubs! You’re eatin’ dinner, they come banging, and scare you out of your seat!” One of the other kids, who I think was pretty nervous about the whole thing, started to argue with the leader—on Joe’s side now. Finally, with Joe’s two bucks back in his own jeans pocket, they allowed us to leave—and they went on into Williamsburg.
Today my sense is that Joe had done a fair amount of this himself—stealing cars for joyrides, shoplifting, and the sorts of petty crimes adolescents can so easily fall into in that overgrown Florida landscape … about which, of course, at the time I knew little. But I suspect the police had come banging on his mother’s door (why do I think they lived in a trailer park …?) more than once, before he was twenty. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about.
The first thing I asked Joe was: “You weren’t scared?”
“Naw,” Joe said. “Maybe a little bit, at the beginning. But when they went and sat down with us, I knew I had ’em.”1
I confess, once it had begun to swing in our favor, I had gotten into it with the kids too and probably added as much to the tales of inconvenience, difficulty, and unhappiness that awaited them all as Joe did. But I certainly hadn’t begun with his confidence—two gay young men, one white, one black, set upon by a band of young muggers. Nor would it ever have occurred to me to try and argue my way out of it if he hadn’t begun it.2 Also, at a level that had not been the case before, I was curious about Joe and who he was and who he had been before I had encountered him in the trucks.
I recalled the Cheshire Cat from Alice, and Miss Liddell’s own comment, “Curiouser and curiouser,” as she’d made her way through the wonderland of her own imaginings (was it sitting up among the girders of the bridge, looking down, the way it had sat among the branches?), not all that different from the ones that I was constructing around Joe.
The next day, walking together through the streets of the Lower East Side, we ran into Sue Schweers, and when she asked him, “And what do you do?,” Joe smiled winningly and said, “I’m house-sitting for a friend of mine, over in the west twenties.”
This simple social reduction and all it conveniently elided probably marked the point where my own imagination began to take in the possibilities that, indeed, Joe was the dark phallic prince of the revels, whose secret task was nightly to drag gangs of men back from the trucks, to bring the most debauched leathermen from the West Side gay bars, for games and glories involving slings, ropes, racks, chains, whips, and manacles, while candles guttered redly in the windows till dawn and in which—yes—his elderly patron was chained and slung at the center; parties that, in only hours or days, after I had proved myself, sexually and drugwise, I would finally be asked to join.
Yes, it was only, now and again, a momentary fantasy. For the facts were, when, from time to time, we went back there, among those bare beige and white walls, no such
equipment was ever in evidence. (Though, of course, neither was the dog leash.) But, by now, I’d also picked up on the fact that Joe was not particularly anxious to take anyone back to his house. At least part of his summer job was to look out for it—and that’s what he was doing.
We talked with Sue a few more minutes. I think Joe asked Sue some tentative questions about the acquisition of various drugs, for which she gave helpful—though far more evasive than she could have (I knew)—answers. Then we walked on.
On Avenue B or C, perhaps a week later, again I ran into Sue, this time by myself.
“My God, Chip—he’s gorgeous!” she volunteered. “Of course he’s as thick as a brick. But who cares! … Where in the world did you find him? Really—do you think you could get me two or three? Just for the weekend, I mean. I could rub them together like Boy Scouts … and start a fire!”
I was pleased, but it was also the death of any lingering fantasies of satanic revelry over in that empty West Side space. For those who had not plucked Joe out of the night and held him to them while he labored on into the dawn for their pleasure, Joe was pretty obviously exactly what he was: an extremely good-looking Italian druggie, up from the South.
Joe had a little girlfriend, Jennifer (another black-haired Italian American, incidentally, about twenty-two or twenty-three years old), whom he’d made on his own while here; maybe it had started as a conversation between them in Sheridan Square, or perhaps she lived with another friend who, in a spate of boredom, Joe’d once decided to look up, and (having had much the same response to him as Sue) she had, in return, come searching him out in his empty town house. Currently Jen was a source of endless drugs for them both and for, I guess, anyone else who happened to be around. With Joe I first tried both cocaine and LSD proper—though, along with me, Jennifer too was allowed to visit at Twentieth Street. I think I saw her a couple of times in the bare rooms of Joe’s three stories and a couple of times when Joe and I visited her at the grungy apartment where she was staying, somewhere nearer mine on the East Side. When I first met her, her hair was blonde with an inch of black root; when I saw her again she had dyed it back to its “natural” black. She spent a lot of time asking Joe what he thought of it. And he assured her it really looked “great, just great.” Certainly, her fingers heavy with silver rings, Jen was the first person I ever saw dump a wax-paper envelope of cocaine onto a mirror and make lines in it with a razor blade. If you met Joey and Jennifer together twice (she always called him “Joey”), it was clear she was passionately in love with him—whereas he found her fun and amusing (and he liked her drugs), but by no means was she the center of his life. I recall when I was with them I felt not a jot of jealousy, because Joe was obviously so much more into me than he was into her—if anything, I felt a bit uncomfortable on her behalf, since it was so clear she had a hopeless crush on a man, who, despite his previous marriage, was gay. He told me she reminded him of his wife, only Jen was a “little crazier.”
My first acid trip was with Joe, on Jennifer’s acid, Jennifer herself having been dismissed for the night: “Come on, Jen. Go on home now. This is Chip’s first time, and I wanna be with him for it”—and so, sulkily, Jennifer took another hit of coke, then left—when, after having watched the sunset together from the roof of Joe’s building, much later that night the two of us were walking along the West Side waterfront when we passed a big stone building with glass doors. Without speaking, we turned quietly into them and stepped into a dim lobby, where some guards sat at a desk alone in that vast space of polished gray-green stone. We walked across the echoing tile. Then one or the other of us asked, “What is this place … ?” to be told, in sepulchral tones by the uniformed man at the desk, “This is the New York Drug Administrations Building.”
Speechless (and for brief minutes hopelessly paranoid), we turned away, back across that endless floor, and walked out the glass doors again—once more into the night, where, after walking away quietly for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, we broke up, laughing hysterically. I have always wondered how in the world we chose that building out of all possible places to enter at 11:30 p.m.!
Toward the end of our weeks together, I took off for seven days, which included the weekend after the Labor Day weekend, to go to the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference in Milford, Pennsylvania. At the end of the conference, filmmaker Ed Emshwiller (who showed a film called Relativity and was working on one called Image, Flesh, and Voice) and his wife, writer Carol Emshwiller, drove me back up from the little Pennsylvania town to New York City on a very hot September afternoon, to let me off at Twentieth Street and Eighth Avenue. I told them I was going to see my agent, Henry—but once I got out and they drove on, I walked past his little inset door and continued the two blocks west with my duffel bag to Joe’s. I rang the bell. Someone buzzed me in. I went upstairs. In one of the bare rooms, Joe was on a ladder, with a toothbrush, scrubbing the molding around the ceiling. (The house was all but unfurnished. Somehow I had assumed that it had been filled with expensive artwork just from a few things Joe had said in passing about Max, but now I began to wonder if, besides not living in the place, Max wasn’t somehow much younger than I had thought, even if he was months or even a year or two older than Joe.) Innocently, I asked, “What are you doing?”
And Joe burst out weeping, practically fell down the ladder, and collapsed into my arms, sobbing—to explain that he’d been getting ready to kill himself. Only he’d decided he’d better clean the house up first before he did it so that he didn’t create a mess for his friend….
I thought about asking where Max was, then realized I knew so little about him and the nature of their relation that it became awkward….
The suicide incident made me realize Joe was more troubled than I was ready to deal with. I came to see him twice over the next two days: he’d decided to return home to his mother’s. Besides, Max had finally rented out the house to somebody else, who wanted to move in some furniture. I don’t know how much the bizarre services Joe had to perform in place of rent were behind the “suicide” attempt. Back then I would have thought they had a great deal to do with it. Today, I suspect that the regularity of his duties and their general lack of demands on him were, if anything, stabilizing forces in his otherwise wholly unstructured life, over what must have been a far odder summer for him than it was for me. But it could also have been too many nights at the trucks, coupled with much too much of Jennifer’s acid, speed, and coke. So I took his mom’s address and phone number, and relatively comfortably we parted—I spoke to him on the phone the day he left.
Really, Joe wanted someone who was more into drugs, finally, than into sex—and that wasn’t me. (If there was something I’m really curious about today, it’s where Joe ended up on the Kinsey scale: I didn’t separate from my wife until 1980, and we divorced in ’82. From ’91 on, I’ve lived pretty happily with a male partner and spent forty years as a tenured college professor, critic, and novelist.) Joe went back to Florida in mid or late September. Fairly soon, I started a story in which someone named Joe Dicostanzo was split into two characters. I called the other one Max—and even while I was writing it, I realized that I had no real notion of who the real Max was. ( Had his name been Max after all, or was that something I had added on my own in the course of the writing?) So I began to turn him into some kind of projection of myself, as the building, in which they both lived in the story, became stranger and stranger.
Not too long afterward, Anne McCaffrey (who lived out in Glen Cove, Long Island, not far from where Sue Schweers’s mother lived, and had a beautifully operatically trained voice) asked me for a story for a book she was doing called Alchemy and Academe. I spent at least one evening, sitting on her porch, talking about the story and listening to her sing. Annie’s birthday was the same day—April first—as mine. Either when the story was finished or when it was sold, I sent a manuscript copy to Joe’s Fort Lauderdale address.
I still had it written in my notebook.
I never got an answer.
Eventually I phoned—and spoke to him. Yes, he’d read the story. It hadn’t made a lot of sense, though, he explained. “Who was Max supposed to be?” he wanted to know.
“Just a … name,” I said. “Maybe your friend, maybe me—or part of you.”
“His name wasn’t Max,” Joe told me, with a slightly curious tone. By this time, I’d really believed that it was, which is why I’ve written it this way, but maybe it was something like “Matt” or one he hadn’t even told me.
His mother had thought it was nice that he had a story with his name in it, though she hadn’t read it. My own mother claimed to be wholly unable to read my work or understand it, though she always bought one or two copies from a bookstore.
Joe also told me he was teaching school in some alternative teaching program, to seven-, eight-, and nine-year-olds. Given his response to those kids on the bridge, probably he was good at it.
—February 2002/August 2018
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
______________
1 The invading child in the October 1968 version of the tale, “Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo,” is “the little bit” that Joe was scared of. Or maybe it was the much greater bit of my own fear/fascination at the entire incident.
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