Bettyville

by George Hodgman

  . . .

  I was twenty-four, finished with grad school in Boston, new to New York, with no job. A few weeks before, I had found myself sitting in the lobby of a building on East Thirty-second Street, about to meet this man, this therapist who could supposedly help me. My friends were all employed and my afternoons were hard to fill. It was late fall 1983. I was living in Carroll Gardens, a Brooklyn neighborhood that felt like a small Italian town. Sports bars played Connie Francis and Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady.” Our landlord was named Carrado Carbone. There were dozens of bakeries that sold beautifully decorated cookies that all tasted terrible. In the apartment I shared with three Californians, a previous tenant appeared to have done engine work in the bathtub, which was smeared with black.

  I wanted to be an editorial assistant at Knopf or Random House. Dressed in my suit and scuffed wingtips, between interviews I set up a sort of office in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria, where instead of proofreading my résumé I found myself scoping out the bar to see if any of the women were prostitutes. My first interview was at Random House, where a senior editor named Joe Fox, a gentlemanly sort, asked what subjects I intended to make my specialty. I said, “Fiction and nonfiction.”

  He smiled and said, “No, that is too general. You are supposed to say something like sports.”

  I was crestfallen and beginning to perspire, fearful of leaving sweat prints on the upholstery. I said, “Not sports.”

  He said, “I do sports.”

  I said, “I swim like a fish.”

  He said, “You remind me of Truman Capote.”

  Although I had in the previous weeks spent hours in front of Tiffany with a cinnamon roll or two, I considered this a private matter.

  “Does Truman swim?”

  . . .

  My interviews were all failures. Every time I tried to impress someone, I left myself, abandoned ship— the old problem, and it still happened on dates. At a party, a friend gave me the card of a gay therapist. She said I needed help adjusting.

  “To what?” I asked.

  “Everything,” she said.

  Aside from Pinky, I had never been counseled, though my handwriting had been analyzed by the mother of a friend of mine, an extremely slender woman from Los Angeles who practiced something she referred to as grapho-therapeutics.

  “There is fear here,” Mrs. Asher had determined after examining my signature.

  I just could not get a job. “Come home,” my father said on the phone. Not Betty. She held firm. She knew how much I wanted to make it in New York. “Don’t be a quitter,” she said. “I’m putting my foot down on this. Do not come back here with your tail between your legs. Something will happen. I have told everyone at bridge you are working there. When was the last time you got your hair cut?

  “Don’t give up,” she whispered before hanging up the phone after my father had already gone off to bed.

  My counselor in New York, Paul Giorgianni, asked about my family, my life, my feelings, sex life, vices. When he asked if I used drugs, I said only when they were available. He asked if they were a problem. I said not for me. He said I should not use them as an avoidance. Why else I would use them?

  “You don’t have to entertain me,” he said.

  “Then what are you paying me for?”

  “You are hiding from your feelings.”

  “Can you teach me how to hide a little better?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Lobby art.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “Because I can’t get a job.” I explained that I could not get through an interview and that I kept making a fool of myself on dates. “I lose myself,” I told him. “I go away. I can’t be there when I need to be. I go away.”

  It all came out. “You know that cat in the cartoons that gets scared and winds up clinging with his paws to the ceiling? I feel like I am up there, upside down, barely hanging on and there is just the shell of me in the chair, looking desperate. Can you help me not go away?”

  He was Freud. I was Dora. He was Dr. Wilbur. I was Sybil. He gave me a discount, and, considering my estimated neurosis-per-dollar ratio, it seemed a deal.

  “How long will it take to stop this from happening?” I kept asking him. He didn’t know. “Can’t we please hurry?” I asked.

  Just before Christmas, I actually got a job at a place called Yourdon Press where they published books about systems analysis. When I read the ad, I thought that was health-related. Something to do with kidneys.

  My job was writing advertising and catalog copy. My computer went down about every fourteen seconds. In the corner of my screen: a tiny picture of a tiny man in a tiny boat. When things were purring along, he smiled. When technical disaster struck, he frowned. It seemed that every time my fingers neared the keyboard, his expression changed to that of a Titanic passenger. Constantly I found myself on the phone, pleading, “Please send the fixer man!” The IT specialist and I became so well acquainted we could certainly have adopted a child.

  At night I wrote letters, sent résumés to real publishing houses, got some interviews, and finally secured a new job, not in books, but writing pamphlets for a Wall Street firm. My boss—a young Harvard guy from Cleveland—was good to me. “Why did you hire me?” I asked one day. “I don’t know a bull from a bear.” Looking out of his glass-partitioned office at the collection of middle-aged men on the other side, he said, “Look at them. They are boring. Your job is to talk to me about the movies. You are interesting.”

  “Sometimes I think so,” I said, “and sometimes I don’t.”

  . . .

  At the beginning in New York, while my roommates, who were straight, had dates, I went to Uncle Charlie’s, a gay bar on Greenwich Avenue. Although the guys still laughed and drank; although Madonna kept on pushing her love over the Borderline, it was the beginning of AIDS, wartime. The newspapers were filled with photos of men with lesions from Kaposi’s sarcoma. Reality had turned on us; we were very young but it didn’t matter. At Yourdon Press, a woman joked, “Who will do my hair?”

  “Maybe,” I replied, “it’s your chance for a makeover.”

  By the time I heard the fourth or fifth person my age say they did not expect to be alive in a year, I stopped going to Uncle Charlie’s. For a while, I avoided all gay men. As the disease got closer and closer, I began once more to pray before I went to sleep every night. I said the prayer that Betty and I had said, way back. It was just a child’s prayer, but that was how I felt, like a kid far from home.

  It was a fast shot to this new place; it was such a fast shot from being young and hopeful to young and thinking about dying. I was twenty-three years old.

  The disease was all we talked about and all we didn’t talk about. I didn’t know if I was sick, but all I could think of was George and Betty finding out not only that I was gay, but also that I was dying. It would kill them and they would be disgraced: I was not even certain that the people in Paris would hold my funeral in the church. Someone told me that back in Missouri, in Columbia, where I had gone to the university, a woman had circulated a petition to drive some gay men from her neighborhood. In the newspapers, there were stories of parents who sent their sick sons away and religious groups who screamed of God’s wrath. I knew my parents would care for me until I died, but every day, every minute, looking at their faces would be worse than dying alone. I decided not to tell them if I got sick. I would write them a letter for them to find later, a message saying I did not mean to hurt them, that I loved them.

  Again and again, I tried to start this letter, just in case. It would be easier to write beforehand than from a hospital bed. When it was finally finished, I left the envelope on my bureau, glanced at it some mornings as I thought of my mother at home, sitting at the breakfast table reading the bridge hands in the Globe-Democrat, adjourning to the bathroom for a secret cigaret
te. Reopening the letter many times, I subtracted, edited, threw in some jokes so they would think I was able to laugh in my last days. I wanted to leave them something to keep. I wanted to remind them that I was more than someone who died of sex.

  I thought of my father; he would have no friends to talk to if I died. There were the men he played golf with, the women who sang with him in the choir at church. Maybe they would be kind to him. More likely, they would not know what to say. There would be no one to help him understand. When I thought about my parents, I felt ashamed. They suddenly seemed so vulnerable to me. I did not want to cause them pain, but all over the city of New York, mothers and fathers were crying.

  . . .

  My friend Ned, who was older than I, seemed to know only dying men. Visiting a friend of his, Kevin Hayne, in the hospital, I held Kevin’s hand while the nurse tried and tried to find a usable vein for his IV. The needle hurt every time she jabbed him and he cried out. His thin white arm was a long history of sharp, hasty stabbings. When she finally succeeded and hit a vein, he screamed out loud and it seemed to me that his pain flowed through his fingers into me, like a shock wave. I yelled too, and ran to the bathroom, trembling. I wanted to get out of there. But he could not. So I could not. I hoped he would not die that night with just the two of us there. I had no idea who to call.

  It was a Sunday night. On the subway, the 2 or 3 train, I remember black women in their church hats coming back to Brooklyn from uptown, Harlem. In the Clark Street station in Brooklyn Heights, a row of grimy homeless men. At home I threw up and did not close my eyes until I fell asleep in my cubicle at work the next day. My boss just let me be, and when I woke up, everyone was gone except him. He was there, at his desk behind the glass, waiting to ride back to Brooklyn with me on the F train. I never outed myself at work, never ever talked about my personal life; I did not think that this was considered appropriate. All around were married men with shiny shoes who talked about women and money, rich young guys from Long Island who did coke and got quiet when I appeared in the doorway. But my supervisors understood who I was and what was going on out there. They were kind, but that confused me. I have always felt immediate reciprocation necessary with every form of giving. Never have I been willing to owe anything to anyone. People being nice made me uncomfortable.

  Rapidly, Kevin was transformed into an elderly man with a curved back who always seemed on the verge of tears. He referred to his mode of transportation to and from the hospital as “My Beautiful Ambulette.” When he died, I didn’t have much time to take it in. Steven, who had also moved to the city, had found out he was positive for HIV. If he had it, I thought it inevitable that I did too, but I felt nothing for a while. I was numb. As I had on the football field in high school, I disconnected somehow, put the feelings somewhere they couldn’t get me, ran from the pictures that came into my mind, shoved it all in a box in my head that I tried to keep sealed. But every time I did anything, I asked myself, “Is this the last time I’ll see a movie?” or “Is this the last time I’ll eat roast beef?” I told no one because I could not imagine anyone who wanted to know.

  I didn’t want to know. I tried to avoid going home unless it was Christmas. Parents and family were not people I wanted to gaze upon.

  Steven’s new boyfriend got him into one of the best doctors in the city, but I still called him every morning, to make sure he knew I was on his side and to make certain that he was still there at his desk, where he should be. He had to stay in place. I could not watch him fall. Things were going so fast, there was no way to take in what was going to happen to Steven or what was going to happen at all. Kevin was down. Tim went down. Bill went down. Jim went down. Richard went down. He was the nicest man I ever knew.

  There was nothing to be done. We just watched them disappear. I had heard of the Catholic tradition of lighting candles for the sick and to bless the dying. After work every few weeks or so I went to Saint Patrick’s, paid a dollar for each of the flat round pieces of wax, and lit the candles in the dim light of the huge church. As Betty and I had walked through Madison naming names, so now I walked through Carroll Gardens, and Park Slope, and the Village, and the Upper West Side, asking for help for my friends.

  In Missouri, almost every gay man I knew went down: John, who sold me button-fly Levi 501s; John, the hairdresser with an A-frame overlooking the river; Jim, the one everyone wanted. Maybe the biggest shock to some of my friends was the fact that even beauty was no protection.

  Before I came to New York, I had taken a summer course in how to get a job in book publishing. The man who ran it was shy, extremely closeted, and eccentric, despite his great desire to be interesting, a quest that took him to many of the world’s less traveled places. Maybe he could be himself only when he was far from home.

  Two years or so after we had moved to New York, he came to a party in Carroll Gardens. It went on late and I went to bed before some people left. In the morning, I woke to find him sitting on my bed next to me, his warm hand on my bare back. Not long after that, he disappeared. We asked around, but no one could ever discover what became of him.

  . . .

  In the spring of my first year in the city, my parents arrived for a visit. I wanted it to be as memorable as I could make it because I didn’t know what the future was going to bring or if I would ever make it home again. For weeks, my mother called to find out our plans so that she could pack the right things. She worried over her outfits, planned to bring her best suits and jewelry. There was discussion of blouses, bracelets. Although my father didn’t seem especially excited, Betty asked me over and over where we would go, whether we could see the Plaza or the place where they did The Today Show, if we would make it to Barneys, which someone was always talking about on television. After I told her that the women in New York tended to wear black, she purchased a chic raincoat in that shade.

  At the airport, standing by the baggage claim in that coat, she looked like a New York lady who could hold her own with anyone, a Wall Street woman or someone successful, just back from a business trip. But when we stepped out into the taxi line, the clouds opened and it poured. Betty was frantic. “But you have a raincoat on,” I reminded her.

  “I know,” she answered, “but I don’t want it to actually get rained on. You didn’t tell me it was going to rain.”

  “I predict the weather now?”

  “You knew.”

  That night we went to see, appropriately, Sunday in the Park with George, and before the theater met Steven, who wanted to see them. He had taken up with an anesthesiologist and was living on the Upper West Side with him and a remarkably large Tamara de Lempicka. He couldn’t wait to tell my parents that he lived with a doctor. After he had shared the news, my mother looked down at her hands and said, “Well, that will be handy if you get sick.” Steven stared across the table, looking frightened for a second. “She means like with a cold is all,” I said.

  My parents weren’t crazy about the show, but at the end there was an extraordinary song called “Sunday,” sung by the entire cast. It was the real thing, the goose bump experience, hitting somewhere between jubilation and sorrow, instilling a little of both. One voice—a woman who it seemed was trained for the opera—soared over all the rest, and the first time I heard her, bringing the humor and its emotion further, I took my father’s hand and squeezed it. Leaning over, I whispered to him, “This would not be the time to sing along.”

  During the two previous hours, through all the songs and the changing of the sets, and the intermission when my mother watched the many glamorous people, I wondered if we would ever sit in another theater together or if there would be another trip, or if they would ever recover if I died. I wondered if my father would ever sing again.

  The next day they visited our apartment in Brooklyn. On the subway, I told Betty there were hookers at the Waldorf. “What did they look like?” she wanted to know. “I’ll bet there are some on this train
right now. We’d never know.” We met my roommates, had coffee and sweet rolls. The blackened tub was a concern. I said it had been painted after a gangster was shot there.

  Basically, they thought the entire apartment seemed like a potential crime scene. My father, always concerned about my living in New York—a place where he felt certain I would get hurt in some way—looked around and asked, “So this is how you want to live?”

  Betty was less concerned. “Things are different here. Let him go,” she said. “Let him go.”

  She glanced at me as if he just couldn’t understand city people like ourselves. She was in an excited, festive mood and wanted to get out of Brooklyn as soon as possible. She was determined to shop. That afternoon at Saks, because I wanted her to have something to remember the trip and maybe me, I bought her a blue St. John knit sweater with black-and-white stripes on the collar, paying with money she had sent the week before. She bought me some Giorgio Armani pants. “The way they’re cut,” she said, “you won’t want to gain a pound.”

  At Saks, Betty stopped at every floor, looked over what seemed like every piece of women’s apparel, eyed every New York woman as if she wanted to know everything about her life. My mother always loses track of time in department stores, but this time it was worse. “I just want to see everyone. It’s Saturday afternoon. That girl looks like the one on L.A. Law.”

  “I love a tall woman,” a clerk told Betty as she lingered over some dresses. Betty was ecstatic. I didn’t say that my mother had spent her whole life trying to look shorter, hated being taller than all the women and many of the men. “The models are all tall,” the clerk said.

  “I’ve heard a lot of them are foreign,” Betty replied.