Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Jeffrey, however, took visions seriously. He asked for a description complete with details, which he helped pull out of me. I half resented this, and was half relieved that Jeffrey kept me so busy at it that I couldn't meanwhile concentrate on Matt—or he on me.

  Before I was done, Luis interrupted, "Remember at the Flamingo Black Party?" he asked. "You had another vision. Remember, Rog? I found you against the wall shaking, and you told me you'd seen the entire floor drop out and all of us falling? Not just the story-and-a-half into the bank below, but far deeper, into an abyss. Remember?"

  I remembered. In that earlier vision, I and a few others around the edge of the dance floor had been left standing, untouched, while all the others had plunged. But the sense of panic, of fear, had been identical.

  "Time to change your medicine!" Alistair tried levity.

  I was already utterly sobered up. I let the others go on talking, let them forget about me. What was Matt thinking? I couldn't tell. He seemed so far away, so not there.

  Patrick emerged from the john excited. At the urinals, he'd just encountered the first guy to suck his cock. "Way back in Beloit! In college!" He'd been staggered to see the guy.

  "Did he recognize you?" Alistair asked.

  "No, he didn't!" Patrick sounded nonplussed. "And when I told him, he looked at me with this dead eye and said, 'Honey, I sucked more dick in college than you have hairs on your head.' For me it was a first! It was a big deal!"

  That led to a discussion of first-time blow jobs and who'd given them. Everyone seemed to have a story.

  After a while, Matt asked me quietly, "You okay? The last water taxi leaves soon. We're going to catch it."

  Meaning he and Alistair would. Somehow the way he said it automatically and totally excluded me.

  Jeffrey was still hopping around, all wired up; I supposed that I should stay and dance. He'd be annoyed and I'd regret it if I didn't. So I said, "Yeah, I'll be okay."

  "I'd stay," Matt offered. "But it's such a trek home."

  Meaning it would be one with his bad foot.

  "Go!" I insisted. "I'll be fine!"

  But I wasn't fine. I was unhappy when a few minutes later they did leave. Luis and Patrick had stepped into the Ice Palace to dance, and I heard Jeffrey say out of the side of his mouth, "Guess who's cruising you? For the third weekend in a row?"

  "Who?" I asked. But I wasn't able to work myself up into even the pretense of caring.

  "Wake up! Telephone."

  Someone in our darkened bedroom.

  "Alistair?" I asked.

  "Shh! You'll wake Matthew!" he whispered. "Telephone! Your boss at work!"

  "Forget it!" I said, turning over in bed. "I told him I wasn't coming in today."

  "He said it's an emergency," Alistair insisted. "A fire."

  "At the office?" I asked, turning back over. I could picture the next three months' worth of features in my files up in smoke. That's all I needed.

  "No. The baths."

  "What?"

  "The baths!" Alistair said. Then, annoyed: "You talk to him!"

  "What did I do to deserve this?" I moaned rhetorically.

  "Keep it down! You're going to wake Matthew!"

  Matt, naturally, continued sleeping like a two-year-old.

  Out in the living room, it was barely dawn. I picked up the phone. If this was some dumb stunt of Harte's...

  "There you are, finally!" Harte said. He sounded excited. "Get on the next seaplane back to town! I'll have a cab waiting for you at the East Side Heliport!" "What the hell's going on, Forrest?"

  "Really bad news! There was a fire at the tubs earlier this morning."

  That was a shock. "St. Mark's? The Club?"

  "The baths at Twenty-eighth Street. Do you understand what that means?"

  "The absolute worst bathhouse for a fire to happen at. The others are all modernized, with sprinklers and—"

  "I see you understand."

  "What happened?"

  "We don't know yet. We don't really know anything. Neither the fire department nor the police are even admitting it happened. I found out from someone who lives across the street."

  "I don't get it. Why...?"

  "For years rumor said that place is owned by cops," Harte said. "Think of the scandal if people don't get out and that fact becomes known?"

  "But everyone got out, didn't they?" I asked.

  "C'mon on, Rog. That doesn't seem very likely, does it? Think about all the guys who go there on Sunday night and sleep over and go straight to work from there on Monday morning."

  Now it began to sink in. I could picture dozens of stoned gays in those tiny, fire-loving, wooden-walled cubicles, those narrow corridors. People making out or talking after sex or sleeping. Then the lights suddenly go out. The narrow corridors fill with smoke. People begin to yell. To try to get out. In seconds, it's a complete horror show. Who did I know who'd be there on a Sunday night? Armando? Billy Bressow? Jeremy? Any of them was possible.

  "How many didn't get out, Forrest?"

  "I don't know yet how many, if any! But I do know we've got to get someone officially gay inside there, Rog. You understand that, don't you? So collusion doesn't take place between the owners and the cops who are on the scene and the fire department. And so if there are any dead, we find out about it. And who they are. And how many. Otherwise skeletons are literally going to be swept under the carpet. That's why you've got to come back here."

  "You want me to go in there and do it?" I didn't believe it.

  "The fire isn't out yet, Rog. They won't start looking for another hour. I want you on the site when they go in."

  "Why me? Why not some bona fide reporter? Get, I don't know, Joe Nicholson from the Part!"

  "You, Roger, because someone high up in the fire department owes me a favor. I'll supply you with the press pass."

  "Even so, Forrest. Won't the cops stop me before I—"

  "They won't stop you, because, Rog, your cousin told me he knew someone high up in the administration. His name and my connections should walk you right into the smoking ruins of that place."

  I stared at Alistair, who was drinking grapefruit juice straight out of the carton. "Who do you know in the administration?" I asked him, dubious.

  "He stayed at the chateau last year. I'll get him on the phone as soon as you've rang off."

  "Will he come through for you?"

  "He's in the closet. But he'll help."

  Now I was impressed.

  Harte hung up and I went to change. Matt slept through it all. Amazing how much I wanted to awaken him and hear him say something, I don't know what, maybe give me his blessing, or tell me I was doing good, or... I didn't, however. In the twenty-eight hours since he'd left me at the Ice Palace to take the water taxi, we'd barely spoken a word—certainly not one unnecessary word—as though something important, something crucial, had occurred between us, when in fact nothing had. Or had it?

  When I emerged from the bedroom dressed and with some semblance of my weekend bag packed, Alistair pulled on a shirt and loafers.

  "I talked to my friend. This is his name." He handed me a piece of paper. "Everything's jake, Nobody'll dare stop you from going in. C'mon," he urged, "I'll walk you to the plane."

  "You don't have to come with—"

  "I can't go back to sleep anyway."

  The seaplane was just turning around in the bay to take on passengers when I got there. I squeezed into the third seat and watched Alistair waving. Then we were out in the mainstream, speeding along on pontoons, rising, the sun hot on the back of my neck and hair through the rear window.

  Naturally, I couldn't help but think about what I was about to face. One thing was certain: I probably knew the layout in the bathhouse better than any fireman going inside.

  Not that I'd been there much recently—in fact, only once in recent years. Not long after it was refurbished, someone Matt worked for— modeling semi-nude for calendars and greeting cards—had begun a new line
and had thrown a large and actually quite lavish party at the remodeled bathhouse, complete with catered food. A true toga party! Everybody in the gay media had been there. People had talked about it for weeks, comparing it to other great "in-town" parties—Jean-Paul Rossel's 1978 New Year's "Rainbow Room Bash"; the '76 Flamingo Black Party, complete with a carny sideshow including over-the-hill female strippers, male fire-fuckers, S/M acts, and a six-thousand-pound hog; and the 1977 Valentine's Day "Broken Hearts Aquacade" party thrown atop an East Side co-op, with its fifty-story-high glass-enclosed Olympic-sized pool and three hundred nude guests.

  As a rule, however, this particular bathhouse, allegedly the second oldest extant in the city—the St. Nicholas Tubs up in Harlem were first—was definitely not known for being stylish.

  I'd first gone in 1969, some weeks after the debacle at the Selective Service Office and following my own, somewhat quieter, decision to look more deeply into being gay. I'd heard the place mentioned by someone at one of Alistair's penthouse parties and thought it might be just enough off the beaten path so I'd be able to investigate my homosexuality in some depth, and experiment with various aspects of it, in a more or less free space, somewhere I could be fairly anonymous. We're talking about a few years before bathhouses became popular and contained nightclubs and cabaret acts and such froufrou.

  This one was without froufrou, definitely no-frills. Seedy. Sleazy, even. Someone once calculated that every disease germ known to man had collected in its undusted, unwashed corners over the years. Not to mention its un-Ajaxed tile floors. (I'd thought the cloth slippers they handed one at the door were silly until I looked closely at that floor.) When I'd first gotten a look at the "bathing" pool in the basement, I was reminded of a slime- and fungus-encrusted sacrificial cistern attached to a Mayan temple in some Grade B horror flick, out of which every night emerged creatures dripping with gore, gurgling eldritch monstrosities.

  Despite these unsanitary conditions, the place did have a reputation for housing the hottest sex on the East Coast. Which was why I was there, aged twenty-four, barely touching the scuzzy mattress of the cot I was perched upon in my nasty little cubicle, its pressboard walls so thin I could hear every whisper and grunt in the dozen booths on either side and across the corridor.

  Nervous? I was petrified! Surely only the most hard-boiled of homosexuals with nothing left to lose came here: those who'd do anything with anyone. Several of them had already scowled at me as I'd entered and found my way to this room. One was heavily muscled with a buffalo mat of hair on his chest and arms and a milky eye in a crushed socket. Another was bald and much tattooed, but wiry like an over-the-hill prizefighter. The third was simply fat, grossly fat, rolling with...

  Well, they couldn't get at me if I stayed locked in my cubicle, smoking a joint of grass followed by one cigarette then another, could they? Neither, of course, could anyone else, assuming anyone presentable was out there. Perhaps I'd been too hasty coming here? Perhaps I wasn't ready yet?

  Just then I began to hear grunting and groaning from the cubicle adjoining mine on the right. Grunting and groaning, then the sounds of a mattress, a cot, rising and falling, rising and falling: the unmistakable aural proof of sodomy only inches away! On and on the cot creaked rhythmically, until soon even those noises were covered over by voices, men's voices dragged up from deep within their larynxes: grunts and groans, sounds unthinking, primitive, primeval as the first enzyme sludge in Precambrian seas.

  I leapt up from my perch. Should I leave? I couldn't possibly stay. Not with them... reaching such an audible climax, going "Oh, oh, oh" and "Uh, uh, uh" until I thought I'd burst with embarrassment at their now triply shared passion.

  When it was clear they would not stop, one of them uttered something in a deep baritone voice. Uttered it twice, which was a good thing, since I had not been precisely certain the first time he'd said it. This time I distinctly heard him say the words "Uh! uh! uh! Pinch my tits and call me Alice!"

  I never stuck around to hear if his bedmate had in fact called him Alice. I was out of my cubicle, down the stairs, outside a shower one floor below, collapsing with laughter.

  The ice broken, that first visit to the baths had ended with me meeting someone young and cute and the two of us having a terrific time. I'd returned time and again, until I moved to San Francisco. But no matter whom I met or what we did, or what attitudes were posed, I could never take that place seriously again, without hearing that deep voice moaning, "Pinch my tits and call me Alice."

  Now, in a single phone call, that was changed forever.

  The seaplane alighted on its pontoons in the East River. I searched through the window for the familiar dumpy figure of the Grunt, who was supposed to be meeting me there. No Grunt. But I did see a gypsy cab from the usual company our cheapskate editor always hired whenever a car was needed. And there, walking toward the dock to meet me, was, of all people, Sydelle Auslander.

  "Where's Bernard?" I asked, letting her take my bag. She shrugged and handed me an envelope. I opened it and took out an official-looking press pass. We'd barely gotten into the cab when it took off.

  With all the fire engines, Twenty-eighth Street would be impossible. But not Sixth Avenue, and I stopped our driver there, leapt out, and began threading my way through the dozen or so fire trucks. There were three companies represented, including those from the West Village, always the cutest firemen in Manhattan—a few of centerfold quality.

  "No press past dis here spot!" a detective in a streaked trench coat said and held me back. The fire had evidently been put out. I had to hurry.

  "I have to get in. I know someone who was in there."

  He looked me straight in the eye and said, "No one was in there. That's an abandoned building."

  "Like hell it is!" I said. I spotted a guy wearing a heavy poncho over what looked like a fire department uniform.

  "Captain," I called out, getting his attention, "I've got a press pass and this flatfoot isn't letting me through."

  A good-looking heavyset guy in his fifties, clearly in his element and not happy with the police, the captain came over to us and took a look at my pass. He reminded me of someone, a young Cap'n Kangaroo or... I don't know.

  "Pass looks good to me," he told the cop.

  "No press on the premises. I've got orders."

  I mentioned the magic name Alistair had given me. "He thinks the press should be on the premises. At least he did when I spoke to him about this, a half hour ago," I told the cop. "You want to call his office and explain to him why you're not letting me through? Or should I call myself from the pay phone and give him your badge number while I'm at it?"

  He glared at me. "You stay here," the cop said, suddenly very nervous.

  I saw him talk to someone in civilian clothes, evidently his superior. As I waited, the fire department captain looked me over.

  "You've got some fancy friends, Mr...."

  "Sansarc. Roger."

  "Fahey. John Anthony," he offered his name but no hand to be shaken. "I take it there's a reason your fancy friend wants you inside?"

  "He wants me to see if there are any bodies. To I.D. them. To count them. He's afraid the count might be incorrect at Arson Division."

  Captain Fahey bit his lower lip. "What bodies? That's an abandoned building."

  "That's the official lie. The unofficial truth is that it's a well-known and heavily attended homosexual bathhouse," I said, "and it was operating when the fire broke out. I take it that the employees split at the first whiff of smoke, and I assume the management is at this moment booking long vacations in the Bahamas. But I'm going inside!"

  Trench coat returned. "We don't know nothing," he said. I noticed that he'd covered over his badge with a wrapped hanky and that the guy he'd been speaking to had vanished. "But we don't want any trouble."

  So I pushed my way through the wooden horses, ignoring his faint attempt at a protest, and addressed myself to Captain Fahey.

  "You going to help
me?"

  "It's going to be... No one knows where to look."

  I looked directly at one merry pale-blue eye and said, "I know the layout of the place pretty well."

  Without flinching, he asked back, "Upstairs and down?"

  "The whole place. I've been inside several times."

  "You're full of surprises, aren't you? How easily do you throw up?"

  "Doesn't matter. I've still got to go in."

  "Okay, tough guy, let's see how big your chops really are," he said, handing me a hard fire hat and an axe, and taking one up himself, along with a long, deadly-looking flashlight.

  The space directly behind the entrance booth had been knocked completely in. The ground floor of the bathhouse looked strangely open and gutted. It smelled really awful. It was still pretty dark and smoky and almost comfortingly warm.

  "Downstairs!" I pointed. "The showers and the pool."

  "Whoever was down there got out." He pointed up the half-burned-away stairs. "Same here. All the staff. So did the people on the next floor. If there's a problem, it's up top."

  There were plenty of firemen chopping away at the remnants of the thin walls as we ascended. The captain borrowed an oxygen unit from one, and he and I both took sips from it.

  The stairs to the top floor were gone. We had to be hoisted up there by rope. The air was better: no wonder—the roof had come down in sections and the place was open to the gray morning.

  Fahey held a building plan in his hands. I glanced at it.

  "Forget it! The place was remodeled a few years ago!"

  I remembered that dozens of new, low-ceilinged booths had been installed up here in the remodeling. Some had been around a corner. It took me a while to locate them: they were through another doorway. Here, the walls were still warm, the cubicle walls still standing. It was darker too: the ceiling had held here, although it could be heard dropping in places behind us. Surely this was the least affected area of the place. It must be vacant.

  As we advanced, I held up the axe protectively as Fahey instructed. Our flashlights provided only dull gleams of light. Even so, as we kicked our way into booth after booth, I ended up seeing far more than I wanted to.