The Farewell Symphony

by Edmund White

  Nothing could have been more streamlined than that life. I took my meals in coffee shops open twenty-four hours a day. I was free from the need to clean or cook or do anything but run the garbage down or take the laundry to the laundromat once a week and pick it up three hours later or cash a check every ten days. Leonard, I realized, wasn’t just buddies with Billy. No, they were lovers and they’d recently moved a younger redhead in with them, an Irish kid from Brooklyn whom they introduced as “Nick, our lover.” Nick worked at the gym behind the desk, sometimes going down to the shower room to break up orgies. “Okay, fellas, knock it off. One more warning and you’se outta hiyah.”

  I could still draw on Leonard sexually, however, if I wanted. I was dating a handsome little slave from Kentucky who was always looking for new thrills. I’d seen Leonard in black leather chaps, motorcycle boots and a chain-festooned black jacket. I stripped my slave naked and tied him up in one room and then, as prearranged, I buzzed Leonard in. In the living room he took off his shirt and jeans and put his boots, chaps and leather jacket back on. When we went into the bedroom all my slave could see in the half light was a six-foot-four sadist with a hard-on and leathers, his face cast in shadow by the bill of his motorcycle cap. The slave moaned and came before Leonard even touched him.

  What he couldn’t see was that this was Leonard the creep from Gainesville, the faggot who’d still blush if a woman flirted with him, who liked Thom Gunn’s poetry and Robert Wilson’s plays, who’d sat through the entire Ring cycle twice and liked to swing incense at “Smoky Mary’s” Midtown church on Sunday mornings. This was the warm, smiling, genial Leonard who encouraged Billy to learn Schubert and Schumann, who gave dinner parties for all men at which the guests would linger till dawn, discussing life, love, art, money, morality. He wasn’t competitive, he loved nurturing other people’s talents, he’d learned, all on his own, the arts of life, but he didn’t promote them in order to intimidate or impress other people but simply in order to communicate his curiosity and love. Billy was his partner, Nick was their lover, but Leonard was also in love with Walt, a big, soft-spoken fireman who once gave me a NYFD gold and blue T-shirt which I wore for years until it turned to shreds. By that time Leonard and the fireman were both dead. Leonard and Walt would go off on gay motorcycle rallies. Once they even went to Reno to a gay rodeo. To look at them you would have said they had nothing in common with the opera queens I’d known in the fifties; if you ran into them on a dark street you might even be scared. But they weren’t afraid to show their love of the arts and Leonard could weep when Billy played the Kinderszenen or sang in his quavering, pale voice Schubert’s Erlkönig.

  I suppose the most distinctive thing about them was that they lived in an all-male society in which they adopted (and even exaggerated) a virile manner and an interest in sports. They took on hyper-male jobs (work in construction or the fire department). They spoke in loud, deep voices and looked like a lord and his bravos when they went out to the clubs at two in the morning in a phalanx of five or six guys in T-shirts and leather jackets, all of them over six feet tall. But they were not merely male impersonators. They were just as capable of staying in all evening around a table, nursing brandy and cigars, talking about Balanchine or Mallarmé, of Fred Halsted, the tough-guy porn-film director (L.A. Plays Itself), famous for his fist, or Halston, the celebrity dress designer. They were no longer creeps—or if so, then only on a bad, fearful morning. They could walk girders on a building site twenty stories up or enter a blaze in search of a “crispy” (fireman’s slang for a burn victim).

  They didn’t starve themselves into tight jeans—Leonard developed a real gut, which was becoming. When years later he went out to dinner with me in Paris he ordered two of everything (two first courses, two entrées, two desserts), because he knew that otherwise he’d go hungry in France. They didn’t worry about their tans. They didn’t stand around in gay bars and cruise—the ultimate sad-sack act of self-hating narcissism. No, they met plenty of men in their work or even on the street. What Leonard, the dream top, secretly longed for was an even bigger, stronger stud who’d top him, and guys like that might go to the Mineshaft but not to an ordinary bar.

  The Mineshaft was a new sex club in the meat-packing district. The whole area was badly lit except for a sudden flare of fire in an oil drum on the curb where the butchers warmed their hands before heaving a side of beef onto moving overhead hooks that lurched and dangled the carcass out of a truck and into a warehouse. The pavement was gummy with dried blood and the air thick with the rich, gamy smell of fresh blood. The men in their blood-stained white aprons shouted orders or jokes—commands, anger, humor all sounded equally hostile.

  The entrance to the club was at the top of a long flight of stairs. There a guy seated on a stool kept out the undesirables—men wearing cologne or silk shirts or sports jackets—and let in the guys who smelled of nothing but leather, sweat and beer. Once inside, the customer could check all his clothes at the door or all but his boots and jockstrap, or he could stay fully dressed, though the jeans often had the seat ripped out, exposing a bare butt, and the T-shirts were usually strategically torn. The hat-check boy also handed out paper cups full of Crisco.

  In the first room men drank at a long bar and played pool.

  In the second room the customers were plunged instantly into near-total darkness—a pickpocket’s paradise (I kept just a few dollars inside my socks, pressed between the bottom of my boot and the sole of my foot). One wall was perforated with saucer-sized holes at waist height—glory holes. Guys would stick their cocks through these holes and get sucked off by unseen mouths on the other side. Some stood there silently at attention; others writhed and clawed the wood, as though the wall were their tipped-up mattress and they were having a bad dream.

  As in Hell, the punishments became more severe the lower one descended. Upstairs men were being fisted in slings; downstairs they were naked in a tub being pissed on. As though Hell were a sideshow, most of the men were shuffling from the bearded lady to the snake charmer. One whip-wielding man kept driving his lover back into a corner, which represented the kennel; everyone rushed to see this noisy dressage. Elsewhere a man was being wrapped in sheets of transparent plastic—only a slender pipe came out of his mouth to allow him to breathe. This image of mummification frightened me so much I couldn’t look at it. As in Hell, one circulated mechanically, bored. To enter excited and leave bored was infernal, as was the experience of having your body treated as a customs official treats luggage—patted quickly, dismissed as harmless, examined in depth only one time out of a hundred.

  The place I liked more was ten blocks uptown, the Slot, where no drinks were served and the lights weren’t too dim. Men paid an entrance fee and passed through a turnstile. Inside was nothing but a rabbit warren of booths with doors that locked. Each of the three walls in each stall had a glory hole pierced through it. I’d crouch in my room, four feet square, and turn from one cock to another, suck one while stroking another.

  We felt like prisoners seeking to establish contact with one another. Sometimes we’d hold hands or kiss through the holes. Yet if a neighbor invited me into his booth I hesitated. Would his whole body be as romantic as these frustrating glimpses, his presence as magnetic as my fantasies?

  Sometimes we were all bottoms and at every hole was nothing but a gaping mouth. We’d slam a door behind us angrily, in search of a stiff one wanting to be serviced.

  A guy might strip naked and squat and twist to let me run my hands over his body, while in the holes behind him and to one side large disembodied eyes, as in an Odilon Redon painting, were blinking and looking up, down, left, right.

  One night an angry young man with a big cock locked himself into the innermost room, a long, narrow slot the size of a horse stall, and strode angrily back and forth, dipping his penis now into this hole, now into that. Everyone was trying to attract his attention—beckoning with a hand through the hole or flickering a tongue like a snake or making s
ucking and slurping sounds. He paced back and forth, half as though he were the Minotaur looking for a way out of the maze and half as though he were Theseus stabbing at everything in the labyrinth that snorted or pawed.

  The kid on the door took a liking to me and asked me to stick around till six when he got off. To keep me there he gave me a joint that must have been sprayed with acid. I suppose he thought I’d become so confused I wouldn’t be capable of leaving, but in fact I was suddenly so inundated by drugged desire that it turned me bold, much bolder than I’d ever been before. I saw a sexy guy with big, startling eyes, a cocaine-user’s punch-drunk way of constantly sniffing and jerking his head and neck to one side, and a hairline that had receded in order to throw into still higher relief a strong brow, a penetrating gaze and a nose that was obscenely large. He also had a dancer’s legs and ass. Instead of taking the booth next to his I marched right into his before he had time to drop the latch. We fell on each other ravenously while hands and tongues flickered around us through the holes. He said, “I live just a few blocks away.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We went to a second-story loft on Twenty-Third Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, the sort that seemed to be bare not only out of a taste for simplicity but also from extreme poverty. There was a double bed pushed against the wall, two hungry cats with soft fur and rasping voices, one chair and a single overhead light. Fox—that was his name—snapped the light off as soon as we came in; the room was dimly lit now by sodium-vapor street lamps through the uncurtained sash windows. He fed the cats quickly, muttering to them in an annoyed voice, not for my benefit.

  Then we were naked and on his big bed. He had an old-fashioned dancer’s body—inconsequential torso, biceps-less arms, the only important muscle being the one that rose out of his shoulders to support his neck and head and to pulley his arms up. No, it was his ass that was his glory. A trail of fur descended his spine toward his crack and then hair began again under his big, firm buns, but those twin globes were as hairless and pale as the moon by day.

  I suppose his cock might have been big, too, but the speed he was on had shrunk it into insignificance. I remember, however, that when I fucked Fox he kept whispering commands into my ear; he was the father and I the son who was fucking another human being for the very first time, so naturally my old man had to give his timid little boy very precise instructions—or something like that. We were all obsessed with fantasies back then, which we kept exploring until they became absurd. One boy even said to me: “I do father-son, sailor-slut, older brother-younger brother, black rapist-white secretary, trucker-hitchhiker and a virgin couple on their wedding night.”

  But with Fox I didn’t feel he was just another bored guy looking for a perverse kick. He loved me, even that first night, with the same loony love he would show me for three years—menacing, possessive, admiring, condescending.

  After we’d come he kept sipping at me with lips swollen from too many kisses and he didn’t want to release me from his bony chest. His mouth tasted slightly sour, like a mildewed washcloth. He talked to me in his Southern accent, sleepily, but his nose flexed and moved with his lips; it wasn’t a frozen prow but something supple and expressive, like a hand under a sheet, a penis stirring in cotton shorts.

  When we woke up at noon the next day the street outside was noisy with traffic, calling voices, horns and the ubiquitous New York sirens. Fox grabbed his camera and took photos of me with his white cat in my hands, held high; the picture was cropped just at chest height but you can see I’m naked and still sleepy. An hour later, as the next picture shows, I’m dressed, hair brushed, the cat held against my grey sweater, smoke from my out-of-sight cigarette rising in front of my face.

  But before I got dressed he fucked me in that sunlight-flooded, curtainless room. He’d been frustrated the night before not being able to get an erection; now he wanted to enter me, to plant his flag on my moon. He had a dirty, Southern way of muttering things. If I groaned he’d say, “Feel good, sugar? That’s a greedy little pussy you’ve got.” He came and when he pulled it out he said, “Make a wish,” and seeing that he and I had all the same books, I said, “Why don’t you become my husband?”

  Now that my sex book had come out and my picture had been on the cover of a gay magazine, I was “bankable” again. As a result, my Baroque novel, which could have been subtitled “The Tragedy of Gay Sex,” had been accepted by one of the first openly gay editors. This was the “little” novel I’d written while living with Gabe.

  Not only was I making some money from my books, but thanks to a friend I’d started to teach a house seminar in creative writing one day a week at Yale.

  My students were all rich kids, most of them physically perfect; when I asked them to write something that they’d lived through the preceding year, they’d start the story, “I could hear the jingle of a harness under my bedroom window—the hunt was on!” I’d felt for years that if I’d only gone to an Ivy League school I would have risen quicker and been published sooner. Now I was living in the situation, familiar to me from Victorian novels, of teaching rich children; I was the poor governess preparing them for prospects that would never be mine.

  When I was on campus no one looked at me. I didn’t exist as a sexual being or even as an object of simple curiosity. But the minute I came back to New York and the train doors parted, I was strafed by glancing eyes, like those disembodied eyes at the Slot. Instead of being a benign professorial presence, neutered by age and position, in New York I was an on-going project solicitous of nervous attention—as a body, a past, a future ambition, a clothes horse (or nag, in my case). No matter how inferior a specimen I might be, I still invited evaluation or at least speculation.

  Fox would never have turned a silly gay head since he didn’t flatter any reigning aesthetic, and yet with his receding, sandy-blond hair, badly capped teeth, his way of shaking all over with laughter, his way of hectoring people and jabbing at the air to insist on a point until he caught himself being excessive and he dissolved into laughter, but especially with his lean, topographically crowded face with the big, active nose, heavy-lidded eyes and narrow, very high brow, indented at the temples as though he’d been pulled by forceps out of his mother, he was an original: at once the Middle European violinist suffering over a twelve-tone adagio and a rat-like New Yorker sniffing the air for a bit of cheese, a rump to mount or a giant foot to squirm out from under.

  He was very sophisticated. He’d once made love, he told me, to an eighty-year-old man who’d been a dancer for the Ballets Russes. They had had sex surrounded by photos of the dancer when he’d been twenty performing L’Après-Midi d’un Faune—and they both had looked at the old photos the whole time.

  He was a survivor, just, but he wasn’t at all interested in money, though he longed for fame. I found out that he came from Mobile, where his father had been a banker, his mother a socialite. When he was a boy his family had been the embodiment of respectability. He’d spend every other Saturday with his maternal grandfather (the Episcopalian minister) and his ailing, distinguished wife; over the copious, buttery dinner they tried to interrogate him about his future. On the alternating Saturdays he spent the night with his white-trash paternal grandparents, who’d set up metal TV trays before the small, black and white screen. They’d drink iced tea out of sweating, shiny blue or red aluminum canasta glasses, eat TV dinners of turkey, peas and mashed potatoes, and watch a variety show. When the June Taylor Dancers performed, little Fox, nervously eager and already outfitted in T-shirt and basketball shorts, would join in, hysterically copying their movements with frantic agility. He’d end by doing the splits, his infatuated grandparents would applaud and his grandmother would say, “Isn’t that the cutest thing?”

  By the time he was twelve he was a drum major. With a testing trepidation, Fox showed me the hand-tinted black and white photos, three feet by two, that had been shot in a Mobile portrait studio of himself. “Just look what a little sissy I w
as, a real Southern sissy.” He mimed horror and raised his hands slowly to his open mouth. “Look at the outfit—that was green silk with beige silk lapels. And the hat! Tipped on an angle! Saucy slut!” I wanted to have sex with Fox while we both looked at these photos, but he wasn’t turned on by them.

  His mother had died of cancer, his father had taken up with a twenty-year-old hippy from Gadsden and moved her in. Soon afterwards he had been arrested for giving payola to the county government in exchange for an investment of public funds. He was sent up the river to a golf-club prison, where he fraternized with other white-collar criminals. Fox’s father, until then a good ol’ boy, became a long-haired hippy who espoused civil rights and listened to Joni Mitchell records. Within two years after the death of Fox’s mother his brother was living with his father’s ex-girlfriend in the family home. Fox himself had gone first to Washington, where one of his father’s cronies had obtained for him a job as a Congressional page, then to New York where he’d lived with a theatrical commune from Texas and danced in a group-written musical about the Little Prince.

  When I met Fox he’d just given up his theatrical career at age thirty-two. For ten years he’d made avant-garde videos of nude women sucking their thumbs in small felt boxes or he’d been one of the people on four-hour shifts to inhabit a “living sculpture” in the window of an art gallery. He’d appeared in the chorus of an all-male musical about true love and marriage or, mainly, gone to thousands of auditions. He’d been an extra at the dinner party in Charles Ludlam’s Camille, he’d sung in Al Carmines’ In Circles, an opera using a Gertrude Stein text; he’d helped a German artist fill the Judson Church with lard, felt and dead meat. He’d been one of the stoned kids lounging around Bridget Berlin’s room in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, but after Andy was shot by Valerie Solanas in 1969, and after Paul Morrissey began to direct the films coming out of the Factory, Fox was never used again. And Carmines “betrayed” him, too, by not using him in his stylish, uptown opera, the one that opened the Promenade Theater on Upper Broadway and that paid the performers Equity scale.