In the Shadow of the Bridge

by Joseph Caldwell

  For fear of homoeroticism in the show, Dan decreed that the vampire could bite a woman on the neck but bite a man only on his wrist. But there was an even more explicit demonstration of his homophobia. During one of our plotting sessions, Dan lowered his tone to emphasize the gravity of what he was about to say: “I heard that Louie Edmonds [who played Roger Collins] is queer. Do I have to fire him?”

  He had chosen his advisers wisely. Had we ruled against Louie, Dan, to be consistent, would have had to divest himself of two-thirds of his writing staff, as well as the actor playing the vampire and another actor, who played a dashing romantic lead. A valued actress could also have been given the axe. Ron and I, however, managed, with straight (unavoidable pun) faces, to assure our producer that Louie was a good actor, that a replacement would confuse the viewers, and that he in no way imperiled the show. Dan submitted to our counsel and we all kept our jobs.

  Sad to say, I had made that promise to myself when I started to write for the soaps that I would do it for no more than six months, then use the accumulated money to support my own work for the half year following, I kept the promise even though the show was headed for cult popularity. The real fun was just beginning. And I could have been involved with a vampire, a witch, a werewolf, and assorted periods of time and place. Not a good career move.

  The show’s enthusiasts persisted in their adulation even after the object of their fanaticism was no longer being produced. Their core connection to each other and the show was a regular mailing of the Shadowgram, edited by the devoted and indefatigable Marcy Robin. The continuing careers of the actors and the writers were recorded. Important incidents, celebrity appearances, even deaths were given their due. But the cult’s most extravagant expression of their continuing allegiance was an annual festival, usually in a hotel convention center that could accommodate several hundred people. The votaries would congregate at these sites across the continent, some of them replicating a favorite character. The main attraction, however, was a presentation by one of the actors or writers, sharing inside information and recalling fond memories.

  When one of the celebrations was in New Jersey, I was the invited speaker. I think I included along with other remarks the epiphanic moment experienced by Ron and me that resulted in Barnabas being a “reluctant vampire,” forgoing, of course, the gay source of this inspired realization.

  The most memorable moment for me, however, came during the question-and-answer period after I’d spoken my piece. A woman in a red dress, seated in the third row, shot up her hand. Her question: “Why is it that your scripts for Dark Shadows were so sensitive and so eloquent, and your novels are so disgusting?”

  In a surprising moment of quick thinking, I respectfully told her that we were there to talk about Dark Shadows, not my other writings. I was rather proud of how I controlled what could have become a difficult situation. Now I realize that I should have been more flustered and less adroit. I should have engaged her objections to the fullest, discussing all the unsavory, shocking, and disgusting aspects of my novels, the sex and the violence. Few things can attract interest to one’s books more than a full-throated condemnation. She would have given my novels an inadvertent endorsement that money can’t buy. If only I hadn’t been so fast on my feet! Too late now.

  At a later time, when I somehow managed to become poor again, I took a job as a messenger in the Wall Street area. It wasn’t all that bad. I liked the irony of rushing around, carrying stocks and bonds worth millions when I was a hapless pauper myself. I wasn’t cooped up in an office. I was out in the fresh air and it was spring. Still, I really preferred to make a bit more money. I asked a friend of mine who was attached to a reasonably successful soap, Ryan’s Hope, if he could arrange for me to write some trial scripts. This did not mean that I was going back on my resolve never to work for the soaps again. Those who wrote trial scripts were providing the show with a small number of writers who might prove their capabilities and at the same time become familiar with the show itself, ready if a replacement was needed. I would write six trial scripts, take the money, and run.

  I wrote four. When I got that far, the head writer, who possibly was not privy to my plan, phoned me and told me I would be writing no more scripts. I quote her: “To write for Ryan’s Hope you have to have a spiritual dimension [dementia?]. Either you have it, or you don’t have it, and you don’t have it.” This was news to me, but I chose to be amused.

  I simply thanked her, and with good reason. The show had provided me with close to four thousand dollars in fewer than four weeks.

  But that fades into insignificance when, in my last script for the show, I had set down on paper for all time to come the most shameless line I’ve ever written, gallantry at its defiant best. The situation was this: A young cop had married a very young girl. His assignment now was to go on a sting operation against the Mafia and, to protect his wife, he had to get rid of her. (Don’t ask me why. That’s what the outline said: mine not to reason why.) The marriage had to be completely broken up and he was not allowed to even hint at the reason for this devastation so agonizing for them both. At the height of the scene, the cop says, “We should never have married in the first place! You’re just a child! It was all wrong from the beginning! You’re too young! You’re just a child!”

  To which she responds: “Your bride was a child. But your wife is a woman!”

  When I’m asked, “Do you still write soap operas, I answer, “Not intentionally.”

  8.

  It often seems that yearning is single-minded. It’s nothing if not straightforward and unrelenting. But there are times when it invades actions and events to which it would seem to be completely unrelated, revealing itself only later to have been a presence during the first moments of the event’s inception. Such was the case in 1963, when I realized that the Brooklyn Bridge had opened eighty years earlier on May 24, 1883.

  This inspired me to throw a birthday party—on the bridge. On the raised footpath, with those stupendous views to be celebrated as well. I circulated invitations. I filled a gallon-sized thermos with vodka gimlets and got a gallon of Gallo burgundy. Paper party hats, noisemakers, streamers to be thrown and unfurled to welcome the guests—not only those invited but anyone and everyone passing by. (This preceded the bridge as the obligatory tourist attraction it has so deservedly become.)

  Friends brought cheese and crackers, popcorn, and potato chips. The party quickly became overwhelmingly festive. Most welcome were those from distant lands who feared at first sight that they were being confronted by escaped inmates from a uniquely American madhouse. Soon enough we were all close to becoming friends for life. I got to tell tales about the building of the bridge, the genius and humanity of the Roeblings—John and Washington, father and son—and Washington’s wife, Emily Warren Roebling. I even got to quote from Hart Crane’s epic poem “The Bridge”: “O harp and altar, of the fury fused.”

  We drank the Gallo and the gimlets. We ate the cheese and crackers, the chips, and the popcorn. We talked; we laughed; we celebrated. The dark was coming down. Merrily we cleared our mess, leaving not a chip behind. Singing as we went, we made the descent from the Roebling’s immortal gift to us all.

  My party had been a triumph. And then came the realization: I had wanted Bill to come out onto the bridge and find me there. This was a want well beyond hope and, even I, in the idiocy of my longing, did not for a moment allow my want to become an actual hope. I wasn’t quite that crazy. But, I repeat, I had wanted it. And that want had been lurking unacknowledged through all the preparations, all the anxieties about the outcome. Would we be thrown off the bridge? Would we be arrested? All the accumulating thrills I’d made possible, the joy, the affection among the revelers, did not include Bill.

  To be honest, I really did think on some subterranean level that I might, somehow, by some absurdly mystical emanation, have been able to make him appear—to materialize as if summoned
by a beneficent power and become an approving participant of our rejoicings.

  To give some measure to the success of the event, I, with minimal persuasion, agreed to repeat the celebration the next year and the year after that, and the year after that—which I did without being able to expunge completely my absurd longing.

  This newly established tradition never failed to excite, and the invitations were a prized announcement, though all one had to do to be included was to walk out onto the bridge around six thirty on May 24 and be enthusiastically welcomed.

  As the years passed, however, I finally reconciled myself to the simple fact that the prime purpose of my efforts would never come to pass: the sight of Gale coming toward me from the Brooklyn side.

  After several years I stopped arranging and attending the event, but such was its hold on some of the regulars that they determined to continue without me. One impetus for the continuation was that my old friend Diffy had the same birthday as the bridge, and he had always been honored as an integral part of the celebration. I would continue to observe his birthday by simply joining him and several of the old friends for dinner afterwards. My friends indulged me and semi-accepted my intransigence about not attending.

  Even after Diffy died, the determined celebrants persisted and I recently agreed to join them. Diffy’s longtime companion, Yusube, had complained to me that two of the expected and cherished stalwarts, Cory and his wife Margie, would not be there. I knew he was experiencing an intensification of his loss of Diffy. How could I not have gone with him?

  The party was well underway when Yusube and I made our way out to the middle of the footpath. There were possibly a dozen persisting partygoers, sharing the few bottles of wine they’d brought along. No hats, no noisemakers, no unfurled streamers to welcome us. Brownies, chips, cheese and a box of crackers were, however, available.

  Some few remembered me and there were hugs. I was introduced to children from about three years old to some in their teens, all of them born since my defection. I drank some wine. I ate some cheese.

  But what about Gale/Bill?

  It is a central irony of yearning that, in its own way, absence can become a powerful presence. During all that I have written here about being on the bridge for a shabby replica of those other celebrations when I so ardently hoped he would appear, arriving from the Brooklyn side, his absence invaded every act of mine, every gesture, every word. For all my easy chatter, I was close to being overwhelmed by my unfulfilled longing. Gale’s absence had, indeed, become that powerful presence.

  I mentioned none of this to Yusube. Perhaps he in his grieving had experienced something similar.

  He and I left before the sun had touched the horizon. We’d been there long enough. It was time to go.

  9.

  In those years during which I entertained on the bridge, I also began to write novels, starting with In Such Dark Places. I could never have even begun to write it had I not been given a residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. The book would be a coming-out novel, the main character a homosexual Catholic. Sound familiar? Though it would not be autobiographical, it would be readily apparent that I didn’t find the material under a cabbage. I wasn’t sure I would have the courage to take it on. This was 1973. But my MacDowell acceptance meant to me that I was included in the continuum of writers who had been judged capable of doing worthy work. With this, I was given the confidence to write what I really wanted to write.

  I completed the novel three years later at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, another retreat where a residency is, by definition, a vote of confidence, leading me to the realization that the ultimate contribution of places like Yaddo and MacDowell to the arts cannot be quantified. The volume of work is not the real measure of their importance. Nor is the number of prestigious awards won. It’s the confidence they give to the artists that encourages them to take risks they would not have been able to take without this implicit validation. This may not be apparent to everyone, but it’s true.

  A Yaddo anecdote. Yaddo is a former country estate of hundreds of acres and four small lakes dominated by a fifty-five-room mansion with a grand staircase, Tiffany stained-glass windows, an intimidating great hall, an elaborate music room and a dining room.

  My first dinner proved to be more than excruciating. I sat down at a table near the doorway to the great hall. The seat next to me was soon taken by a woman formidable to say the least: more hair than needed, large eyes, alert but welcoming. She held out her hand. “I’m Hortense Calisher.” Famous, the wife of the director.

  I said my name and we shook hands. “Good to meet you,” I said. “But of course, I’ve been aware of your work going back to The Catherine Wheel.” She smiled and said quietly, “The Catherine Wheel was written by Jean Stafford.” So much for sucking up to the director’’s famous wife.

  As for my novel, the main character would be a photographer. He would be a son of a bitch. About three sentences into the writing, it was revealed to me that he was not a son of a bitch. On the contrary, he was an honorable and confused young homosexual Catholic who ultimately realizes that the claims of charity take precedence over any misguided sense of unworthiness, a truth I had noted earlier, during my brief stint at The Catholic Worker.

  The other main character is David, a fourteen-year-old urchin who lives by his wits, by occasional thievery, and is sexually agreeable to accommodating the teenage boys in the neighborhood who are either insatiable or insufficiently persuasive in their approach to teenage girls. The neighborhood in which it all takes place was to be around Tompkins Square. It would involve the parish of St. Brigid’s.

  The novel was published in 1978. About a year later, a very strange thing happened. I received a phone call: “May I speak to Joseph Caldwell?”

  “This is he.”

  “This is John Cheever.”

  “Oh?”

  “Are you interested in the Rome Prize?” This was the Rome Prize for literature awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters: a year in Rome to write.

  Stunned, “Why yes, very much.” To say the least.

  “Well, you’ve got it.”

  Mr. Cheever then went on to tell me who had been on the jury of the American Academy that had made the award. (An imposing list I assure you. Cheever, Elizabeth Hardwick, and John Hollander, among others.) He told me I would come to the spring convocation of the Academy of Arts and Letters to receive the award, when I would go to Rome, and how much my stipend would be. It would give me a year at the American Academy in Rome. There was a pause.

  I had to say something. Anything. I blurted out, “If my memory serves me, you yourself got this same award.”

  “No. I never got it.”

  “Well, keep plugging!”

  He did not laugh. The conversation soon ended. I found out years later why Cheever had chosen not to be amused. When his inimitable biographer, Blake Bailey, called me about an unrelated matter, I told him about my remark. He explained the silence that had greeted my presumed witticism. Years before the phone call, Cheever, married, his first son born, was desperate for money to support his family. He had been led to believe that he was to be given the Rome Prize, which at that time, would have meant two years of financial security. He didn’t get it. It was given to poet John Ciardi. No wonder he hadn’t laughed. (This tale is included in the Bailey biography, a footnote on page 223. I am a literary footnote. One takes one’s distinctions where one gets them.)

  When I returned from Rome to New York, just before New Year’s Eve, 1980–81, I was told by Diffy that a gay cancer was going around and that it was expected that five percent of those who had it would die. No one knew what caused it or how to treat it. I should be careful, whatever that meant.

  Also, Eddy Parone told me that a friend of his, the writer Larry Kramer, was sending out notices warning gays about what was happening. I asked Eddy to let Larry Kramer,
whom I had never met, know that I’d be more than willing to help, even if it meant doing nothing more than licking envelopes. Word came back. “Tell Joe Caldwell that I hated his novel [In Such Dark Places] so much that I don’t want to have anything to do with him.” And I could have become a founding member of Gay Men’s Health Crisis!

  I was, however, offered another opportunity to be of some use.

  The predicted five percent was, before too long, revised to one hundred percent. Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia became the number one killer. Dementia, blindness, as well as the cancer Kaposi’s sarcoma were also numbered among the possible afflictions that signaled a person’s immune system had been fatally compromised, meaning put out of commission totally and irreversibly.

  The number of people diagnosed increased by multiples. Twenty-five hundred one year would increase to five thousand the next year and double again the following year. A plague was upon us. At one point, 1982–83, the illness was named: Human Autoimmune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The means of infection became known: not communicable by air or touch but by bodily fluids, primarily blood and semen. Those first infected were drug abusers who shared blood-tainted syringe needles and sexually active homosexuals—semen.

  St. Vincent’s Hospital, with which I would soon become involved, was in Greenwich Village, at the epicenter of what remained for some time the ground zero of the epidemic It initiated a 110-bed unit reserved for people with AIDS that was quickly occupied. The staff agreed to be assigned, a near-heroic act considering that, despite increased knowledge, uncertainties shadowed one’s every move. A needle prick could be a death sentence.

  Several things must be mentioned here. St. Vincent’s Hospital, whose primary mission was service to the poor—founded, staffed and administered for 162 years by nuns—is no more. It went bankrupt. Its buildings have been demolished. Its often frantic emergency room is gone—even though it had been so vital on September 11, 2001. No public or private rescue of the hospital was effectively attempted. Rumors of consolidation never advanced to reality and whatever efforts might have been made were dead on arrival.