by David Leite
“Open your bag!” She was suddenly stern, and her words weren’t skidding into each other.
“What?”
“You heard her. Open the bag,” said her Sasquatch drug fiend.
“There are plenty of worthless things in this apartment a certain someone could be tempted to take,” Laurie said. She was oblivious to her mistake.
“Fine.” I opened the bag, and Sasquatch riffled through it.
“Satisfied? Can I please leave now?”
She swung open the door, and I stormed out. She waited until I was at the elevator to holler, “And you’re fired! I don’t want you around my son! Ever!” A pathetic attempt to steer suspicion away from her and onto me, for the benefit of the neighbors.
On the street, still trembling and with nowhere to go, I dug into my wallet and pulled out the only telephone number I had.
22
OPPOSITES DON’T ATTRACT
Nice to meet you,” said Tom Junger, shaking my hand as he ushered me into the Greenwich Village apartment. Tom was Judith’s brother-in-law, the one who’d turned straight through Aesthetic Realism.
“We were just getting delivery when you called,” his wife, Maggie, said, digging through a drawer in the kitchen. “Hope you don’t mind.”
“I definitely don’t,” Tom said. As he walked behind me, he whispered—not particularly softly: “Maggie’s a much better sculptor than cook.” The grins on their faces told me this was part of their daily jousting.
“Delivery’s fine,” I said to Maggie.
“Indian? Chinese? Italian?” She held up a fan of menus. Over her shoulder, Tom mouthed Chinese.
“Chinese sounds great.” He gave me a thumbs-up and started setting the table.
I’d been in the city for only a few weeks and was blown away by the idea of Any Food, Anytime. Of course, I’d had delivery before, but it had been mostly pizza in college, and those pillowy chow-mein sandwiches Dina used to order for us back on Brownell Street. In New York, though, authentic international cuisine was delivered right to your apartment. Thai, Sichuan, Israeli, Jamaican, Mexican, Spanish. I’d answered the door at all hours of the day for food deliveries for Laurie, and it was always something new.
“So, what exactly happened?” Maggie asked. She saw I was still shaken and poured me a glass of wine.
I explained about Laurie, her drinking, my short-lived career as a drug trafficker, and Sasquatch. “And so, when I saw all that cocaine flying through the air, I called. Thank God you were home.”
“Well, I’m glad you did,” Tom said. He took my bag from me and tossed it on a bed in a small room off the kitchen. “You can stay here as long as you need while you look for a place of your own.”
About an hour later, significantly mellower thanks to several glasses of Chardonnay, I was sitting at the table, an army of take-out containers in the center. I tried to take in this family, a family that wouldn’t have existed, if what Judith had said was true, without Aesthetic Realism. Heather, who couldn’t have been more than four, kept fluttering her feet in the air, determined to show me her ruby slippers, which she pronounced sli-piz, with an accent straight out of the Bronx. Nicholas, who was older and surprisingly adept with chopsticks, was lost in his food. Over their heads, Tom and Maggie exchanged beleaguered, tired smiles. This is what I had envisioned for Bridget and me—kids, mess, happy exhaustion—except we had burned through each other before we had the chance.
Maybe it was the MSG or the wine, or Laurie’s one-hundred-percent, grade-A freak show, but I was wiped. “Does anyone mind if I go to bed?” I finally said. “I got to start looking for a place and a job tomorrow.”
“Of course not,” said Maggie. She gave me a set of sheets and towels and pointed out the bathroom.
“Night,” said Tom.
“Good night. And thank you. Both.”
A week or so later, I found a job waiting tables at Fiorella, on the Upper East Side, and an apartment share in the then-low-rent, high-crime police state of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where gunshots and cries for help were an almost nightly occurrence.
On one of my first nights on South Oxford Street, I pinged awake to the screams of a woman, who was pleading to anyone in earshot to call the police. Someone was trying to rob her. I thought of the story of Kitty Genovese, and how dozens of neighbors had heard her cries for help as she was being murdered in Kew Gardens, yet no one had called the cops. I crawled on my hands and knees to my desk and yanked the phone to the floor. There was no way I was going to let anyone identify me, and I wasn’t about to be bullet fodder at only twenty-four years old. I dialed 911. Someone had beaten me to the punch, which made me feel relieved. At least when it was my turn to get mugged, I could rely upon an unseen neighbor to help me out. I considered making a casserole of thanks, to grease the wheels of community goodwill, but I had no idea who the Good Samaritan was.
Tom and Maggie picked up on my reluctance after work to go home, where I’d lie on my futon in the dark, shutters closed, reading a book by flashlight. “What with all your crime-fighting these days,” Tom said over the phone, “you must’ve built up quite an appetite.” That was all it took for me to sprint the eight blocks to the subway and head to their place for more takeout.
After dinner, Tom and I sat in the living room, his long legs telescoping out in front of him. Maggie was in the kitchen, soft clinking coming from the sink as she washed the dishes. Shrieks and laughter uncurled their way from the other end of the apartment. Tom looked at me, waiting.
I didn’t know how to broach the subject. Had he and Maggie discussed this? Could he speak freely about this with her so near? I wanted to ask: How did you get unbent, become not gay? But what came out was a tepid “How did you get involved in Aesthetic Realism?”
He shifted in his chair, lifting himself a bit straighter—the raconteur claiming his ground. He began by telling me of his time working and living in Bangkok. He filled his story with embellishments, non sequiturs, and sotto voce asides designed to tease Maggie, who could plainly hear from the next room. He explained he had been a tax consultant for a U.S. company, a position that came with local perks. One of them being a houseboy, who, besides his official duties of cleaning, ironing, and running errands, also offered a nonsanctioned assortment of services of which Tom availed himself. “Often,” he added, with a big, unselfconscious laugh. However, it was the punch line—the verbal rim shot to his story—that got me: “David, I wasn’t a practicing homosexual,” he said, a wry grin on his face. “I was professional.”
The room itself held its breath. Should I laugh? Is it right? Would that be contemptuous? Just then Maggie turned from the sink with an Oh, you! smile and shook her head, as if he’d just told me how he’d convinced some tourists that the watchman of the Statue of Liberty lived in an apartment in her breasts—a harmless frat-boy prank.
Taking that as permission, a laugh hiccupped out of me.
Tom went on to recount his experience with Consultation with Three—one of the trios of Aesthetic Realism teachers that dealt with homosexuality—and how being criticized thoughtfully had helped him change. What got me was that the whole time I stayed with them, he never lost his bewildered tone, as if he was the luckiest guy in the world. And his candor floored me. He could have been talking about a suit he’d decided he didn’t like and exchanged for another.
If it weren’t for my Scarface afternoon, I probably wouldn’t have bothered looking up Tom. And I doubt I would have ever taken Aesthetic Realism seriously. Until then, it was all theoretical: tenets on papers, examples in books, voices over the phone. But Tom, with his magnanimity and easy sense of humor, was the closer. He was big and colorful and full of swagger, and clearly beloved by his family. I ached for what he had and would have done anything to get it.
Tom’s bonhomie and wicked wit bore little resemblance to the moony-faced stolidity and emotional lockstep of everyone else I’d later meet at the foundation—especially my consultants. For an hour a month, I s
at on one side of a table while Neal Hartley, Dylan Redmond, and Arturo Wolfe—three men who, like Tom, had changed from homosexuality through Aesthetic Realism—sat on the other side, hurling questions at me. They each had their style. Hartley, on the left, was a beautiful man—he could have been a Paco Rabanne model—who had the slightly haughty air of a European aristocrat. “A piss-elegant queen,” they used to call his type. He spoke the least. Redmond, in the middle, had a face that was all angles and points. He was the kindest, speaking with warmth and wonder in his pronounced New York accent. And then there was Wolfe. He felt like a black, heavy presence to my right. I always half-expected him to slouch over, his bored, slack face cutting me a look that said, “Mr. Leite, you know what? You’re full of shit.” I had to stop myself from turning my body away from him.
On the table, between us, was a cassette tape recorder—witness to it all. My homework each month was to study my tape, listening to it as many times as needed to glean an understanding. And that was the problem: I never could. Not the listening; I did that ad nauseam. I could never wring meaningful truth from their words. Part of the problem was the pace of their criticism; it was assault-weapon fast. Before I could come up with a thoughtful answer to one question, someone fired off another. And then another. They piled up, few ever getting answered by me. Almost all were leading questions that left no doubt as to how I should answer. Just a few:
“Mr. Leite, do you think you’re being tricky, getting one over on the world?”
“Mr. Leite, are you truly grateful?”
“Mr. Leite, did you cozy up to your mother as a child and find a way for both of you to be superior to your father?”
“Mr. Leite, do you think it was intelligent or stupid of your mother to be so devoted to you?” I thought of my mother, and imagined what her reaction would have been had she been in that room at that moment: She would have coldcocked these assholes into the middle of next week with the butt of that knife of hers. I bit back a smile.
“Mr. Leite, are you having a problem with the idea that you have more gratitude and more respect for Eli Siegel than you ever thought possible?”
“Mr. Leite, do you want to have conquest over a man?”
“Mr. Leite, do you use your accomplishments and interests to make yourself important and offset your great respect for Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism?”
“Mr. Leite . . .”
“Mr. Leite . . .”
“MR. LEITE . . . !”
I sat there, hands fidgeting, feeling verbally gang-raped. It’s hard to comprehend, but I never considered standing up for myself, because I’d been programmed to think that it was me and not the philosophy that was problematic; that I was flawed, like a piece of handblown glass that they could see right through. And that flaw, no matter what we were discussing, was always my “terror of respect for Eli Siegel,” the greatest man who ever lived. Yet the only thing I was truly terrified of was my consultants. Every time I tried in earnest to comprehend, and take what I was learning and shape it to fit my life, I was jumped on, like in a bloody three-on-one fight in a schoolyard, and told that I was reprehensibly disrespectful. Aesthetic Realism wasn’t there to serve me, they said, fingers jabbed into the table for emphasis. My job wasn’t to pick and choose what I wanted, “like on a Chinese menu,” but instead I was to study it deeply, respect it, heed it, because it was “the most beautiful explanation of the world that history has ever seen.” They said it could put an end to war, racism, poverty, and crime. I wanted so much to see that.
During one consultation, I questioned Wolfe, whom I’d seen smoking in front of the building.
“Mr. Wolfe, don’t you think smoking is contemptuous of yourself and others?” He reminded me of a king cobra, expanding his chest and shoulders like a hood, rearing up in what the foundation called “beautiful anger,” staring right into my eyes. The other two flew into paroxysms of self-righteousness, denouncing my disrespect for the three people, they said, who cared most about me in the world.
“But I’m simply asking, because I’m trying to understand—”
“You’re not trying to understand, Mr. Leite,” Wolfe finally roared. “You’re trying to manage us, to get one over on us. You, Mr. Leite, want to be superior to us and Aesthetic Realism, so that you don’t have to be affected by it.”
“I feel sorry for you, Mr. Leite,” Hartley said.
“Why?”
“Because you’re in the business of making everything around you dull and not coming to much, aren’t you?”
All I could muster at that point was what I felt they wanted: a guilty and ashamed “Yes.”
I slumped out of my sessions, wondering why they weren’t working for me, why I wasn’t being affected the way my consultants told me I should be. So many of the other students, especially the men who were changing, seemed to bound down the stairs from the second floor of the Terrain Gallery after a consultation. Across their faces was a gleeful, almost euphoric expression that reminded me of the rapturous look my mother had when she came home from her prayer meetings, where people were slain in the spirit and talked in tongues, and devils were cast out.
Consultations had the opposite effect on me. Instead of having “stirrings” for a woman, as Aesthetic Realism called them, I felt driven toward men more than ever. At my kitchen table, with my books spread around me, I fracked my heart, trying to flush out any feelings of superiority or conquest I had when a man looked my way on the street, or flirted with me at Fiorella. But all I could come up with was that I felt seen, acknowledged, grateful even.
After work, I’d sometimes walk around Times Square, which in the eighties was still seedy enough to terrify tourists and comfort locals. I tried to sniff out the reek of contempt my consultants assured me was there. I tried to make myself disgusted by the squalor of it all—the male hustlers, the lurid posters in front of gay movie theaters, and what I called Stop-and-Pops: booths in porn shops where businessmen in suits on their way home would duck in for a quick hand job and still make the 6:15 train to Rahway or Croton-on-Hudson. No matter how I smutted it up, the ache for men never lessened.
On Eighth Avenue, I’d pass a gay movie theater—each time determined to go in, and each time I’d walk right by. One afternoon, I approached the door and at the last second veered away, acting as if I’d forgotten something. I walked down the block, turned around, walked straight to the door, and peeled off again to lean against a pole. What would your consultants think? I asked, as a way of trying to shame myself into not going in, but the pull was too strong.
“Yes,” I said to the guy behind the window, “I’d like—”
“Six bucks.” I slid the money into the booth, and he jerked his head toward the door.
To say the theater was charmless would be a compliment. Enough light from the screen spilled onto the audience to allow me to see just about every head swivel my way. I dropped the average age of the room considerably. Embarrassed, I ducked into a seat. A few men stood and walked slowly up the aisle, trying to lock eyes with me. When I looked at the first one, and saw him nudge his chin toward a door where men were walking in and out, fussing with their belts, I froze. It reminded me of Mr. Goode, whom I had forgotten about for years. I shook my head and looked down. I had made a mistake. Revulsion started to swill in my gut. There was nothing remotely erotic about the droning moans from men with shag haircuts and mustaches that looked like sleeping otters on their upper lips, doing things I’d had no idea were physically possible. But despite what my consultants kept hammering into me, I didn’t feel superior to these men; I didn’t feel contempt. What I did feel—which surprised me—was the opposite: compassion.
A man slipped in behind me and wedged his knees into the back of my seat, bouncing it to get my attention. I got up and moved one seat to the right, which was construed as an invitation to another man to take my empty seat and loosen his pants. His buckle jingled like Christmas bells. What if they don’t let me out of here unless I have sex? Is
this whole place a Stop-and-Pop? Shaken, I had to step over Mr. Ho Ho Ho to get out, and he took the opportunity to brush my ass with his hand.
I step out into the furnace blast of the afternoon heat, stumbling headlong into a crowd gathered around the entrance. I try to duck into foot traffic and be carried away unnoticed down Eighth Avenue, but someone catches my arm. It’s Barbara Walters, with a huge microphone in her face.
“Excuse me, excuse me, sir,” she says, pulling me to her. A TV camera closes in on my face. “What’s your name?”
“Um . . .” I look at the camera, then back at her. “David.”
“David what?”
“David Leite.”
“Mr. Leite, were you just inside of this homosexual movie house?”
“Me? Inside? No. Well, I was inside, but not inside of the movie,” I stumble. “I went into the bathroom.” She throws a skeptical look toward the camera.
“Oh, God—oh, no—not for that.”
“Mr. Leite, we’re here because there are allegations that men, such as yourself, have been locked in this homosexual establishment and are forced to have sex with strangers before they can be released. Can you comment?”
“Haven’t other men left?”
“You’re the first in more than a week.”
“Really?”
“We’ve counted. Three hundred and forty-seven men have gone in . . . you’re the only one to come out.”
I lean in close to whisper. “Barbara, is this live?”
She whispers back, “Yes, it is. But you’re doing great.”
“These people”—she waits for the camera to pan the crowd—“are the relatives of the men believed to be locked in there. Do you have anything to say to them?”
“Um.” I lean closer to the microphone she shoves in my face. “No.”
“Do you know these men?” She motions to my consultants. Hartley is dripping with haughty superiority, an I knew this would happen look on his face; Redmond just shakes his head, disappointed; and Wolfe takes the cigarette he’d been sucking on and flicks it into the gutter with his middle finger. A long, disgusted stream of smoke snakes from his mouth.