I might shoot for the same goal of financial independence and feel a special pleasure knowing I could quit work and go off at any time—but I’m not sure I would actually quit. It seems too risky to give up all your routines and most of your grounding and social relationships and strike out on your own, alone. I like to know where I’m going.
Yet isn’t it fantastic? To have the self-made independence to fulfill one’s potential? To be fully, or almost, master of your own fate? The anticipation of such a life may be more stimulating than the life itself. But such a future might be every bit as stimulating, I should think, as a traditional happy family life would be, two hours of commuting to the law firm each day until retirement at sixty-five.
Esquire took me to some of the bars and to the baths that Charlie, the bashful model, was too conservative to frequent. Look at Esquire in his bell-bottom jeans, stoned on some $35 shit only New York attorneys can afford, dancing his head off with that lanky boy in the middle of the floor. This is the Tamburlaine, in the East Forties, a popular mixed dance bar, mostly gay, until it burned down, or was bombed some say, because it clashed with the quiet residential neighborhood. All types in this place. Esquire, who is flinging his NYAC-sun-room-tanned body in all directions in homage to the Rolling Stones tonight, will be earning $75 an hour tomorrow morning counseling IBM on the subtleties of antitrust precedents. His lanky friend came to New York from Dallas to earn $75 an hour modeling, when there is work. Right now there is none: Fresh faces are needed for the pages of the Sunday Times magazine—always fresh faces—so he settles for $1.05 an hour plus tips at Daly’s. When you look like this lad and you work on New York’s East Side, you get outrageous tips (some of the clientele can’t resist), and tips are mostly “tax-free.” Esquire might try to keep up with him and take him home tonight, but it would be a little awkward with me sleeping on the couch in the living room—and there is that meeting with the client at ten tomorrow. They will have dinner tomorrow night, instead.
Gay life in New York is so different from gay life in Boston. The bars are different. There are more of them, and they change faster. If you go to Sporters a couple of nights a week, you are bound to see many of your friends. If there is someone you want to meet, sooner or later a friend will introduce you, or you will find yourself standing next to him, both of you knowing that it is time to say hello because you both have been smiling a little the past few times you’ve seen each other there. There are some neighborhood bars in New York that have their regulars, but the game is played to a faster pace. With so many bars going at any time people hop around. In for a look—nobody here—out to another. And the bars go until four, so the crowded time extends much later—not from eleven to one on weekends as in Boston, but from eleven to two or three, seven days a week. What are the chances that you will ever see that man again who just passed by? What are the chances one of your friends knows him and can introduce you? The two of you may never bump into each other again. So you had better go up and say hello if you have any interest—and for his part, he had better not be too hard to get if he wants to be gotten.
So in New York, it is accepted practice for the guy standing next to you to stick out his hand, cold from the sweat of his beer bottle, and say “Hi. What’s your name?”—sometimes even without telling you his first. You would never do that in Boston unless you had just come up from New York for the weekend and didn’t know any better. Hell, if you didn’t know any better, you might even be wearing your New York faggot Guccis and some kind of expensive shirt unbuttoned down to your solar plexus, exposing your New York faggot Puerto Rico tan. We are simpler folk in Boston, and more reserved.
Relationships tend to last longer in Boston than New York. In either city it takes a while to get on a last-name basis—getting to know you as you, not as a sex object that needs no name. But once you do, you are likely to stay in touch longer in Boston. There are fewer temptations to spin you dizzily on to other people, more barriers to loose living, more inhibitions, more conservatism.
Esquire took me to the Barn, which has since been closed down after someone’s genitals were cut off with a switchblade in the pitch-dark “back room,” or so the story goes. The police are down on back rooms these days. How did Esquire ever find the Barn? It was in a warehouse district near the Village, where the streets have names instead of numbers and run randomly so as to confound all but the veteran cabbies and truck drivers. The building has no sign. There is no advertising, no number in the phone book. The area is completely deserted late at night, except for the people like us walking between the Village bars, so there are few people on the street to ask directions of. You go in a scarred unmarked metal door to a service elevator and wait for the huge car to come down. The elevator boy is unmistakable confirmation that this is the place, and when the door opens upstairs, you are in the midst of hundreds of people, drinking and dancing, on a gigantic, largely unpartitioned warehouse floor. What’s the rest of the building used for? Who knows? Who is the landlord? It’s not hard to guess. How did all these people find it? Word of mouth. It’s “in.” There’s a back room, and the place is always jammed. Half the appeal is that it’s so hard to find.
Christopher’s End is (was?) at the end of Christopher Street and easier to find. They featured nude go-go boys and erotic slide shows on the wall. Uncle Edna’s is a hustlers’ bar up around the theater district. The Eagle’s Nest is one of the leather bars way over by the piers on the lower West Side. Well, near the trucks. Do you want to go to the trucks? “Hi, Mom. I’d like you to meet my new friend, Raunch. I met him in one of the trailers on the waterfront.” Is it possible that I am writing these things?
How about the Y, if you don’t go in for trucks? The YMCA is like an international budget hotel chain for homosexuals. New York’s West Side Y is the medallion in the chain. The Y is also a chain of budget health clubs for young married guys who still enjoy a good ball game to keep in shape, a shower, maybe a rubdown, and a little locker-room banter. Not all these jocks are as near ten on the scale as they would have you think, though they would surely flatten you to prove that they were. Just the way the Pope can excommunicate you to prove that abortion is evil.
If you would rather not stay at the Y when you come to New York, you could stay at the baths. The Continental is world-famous, though by no means the only gay baths in New York. Esquire goes to the Continental once a week, on average, and told me I should really come with him the next time I was in New York. I didn’t like the image I had of older men with wrinkly paunches hanging over their towels, looking to see what was under my towel. I didn’t like that at all. On the other hand, Golden Boy, too, was always selling me on the Continental—he loved to go to New York for a weekend and debauch a bit—and his description was appealing. Somehow I had pieced together a picture of a Holiday Inn kind of place, immaculate, where you could either rent a room (would the TV be color, I wondered?) or a locker and then swim, work out, sit in the sauna, dance, eat—a gay country club where you could smile at a fellow you liked and be in his room a minute later, doing it. I wasn’t sure I could get into such impersonal sex, but it would still be fun to work out and swim and take a look, and you never know what kinds of Golden Boys might be walking around locker-room style at the baths. Wasn’t this my high school locker-room fantasies come true? I could pretend the older men were the coaches, or alumni there for homecoming, and ignore them.
Eventually Esquire and I went. We walked into a small lobby—very small and un-Holiday-Inn-like. On the other side of a large glass window were two attendants—again, one look at the attendants and you know you are in the right place—and an entire wall of safe-deposit boxes. “Occupancy by More Than 900 Persons is Dangerous and Unlawful.” Esquire and I both asked for rooms. He said I would feel more comfortable having a room to go back to in case I wanted to catch my breath by myself for a few minutes or, of course, if I found someone I wanted to make it with. The room was $10, which I was pleased to see you could charge on your
Diners Club card—perhaps this place was like the Holiday Inn, after all. There were student rates, I noticed, too, hoping some students might have checked in that night.
We deposited our valuables in the safe-deposit boxes and were given keys to our rooms and towels. The keys are on wrist bands, so you can’t lose them. The Continental baths are divided into three floors, and our “rooms” were on the third. Each room is barely large enough for a single bed and supplied with two clean sheets. There is a stool, a small mirror, a coat hook, and a yellow bulb with a string chain to switch it on and off. The ceiling is perhaps six and a half feet high, made of chicken wire. The real ceiling of the building is considerably higher. I presume the chicken wire is to keep things like underwear from being thrown around and to discourage people from climbing from one room to the next. The walls are thin plywood. There are speakers on this floor for the PA system—mainly calls to attendants to clean vacated rooms, or pages (“Will the BLBITW please come to the front desk?”)—and no music. It’s eerie. Dark except for some yellow and purple lights. Quiet except for the moans and slurps and sighs of sex. (GB tells me that is supposed to be erotic.) People talk quietly when they talk at all. Mainly, they stalk around the halls, which extend in all directions, mazelike, for what must be miles if you walked them all. Well, half a mile anyway, or close to it. Some of the room doors are open. If the yellow bulb is on, the occupant thinks your seeing him will encourage you to visit. If off, he thinks you will be more interested if it is left a little vague what you’re getting into. If he is lying on his back, that means he wants one thing; on his stomach, another. It is proper etiquette for you, if you think you may have some commonality of interests, to walk in, take a closer look, and either stay or leave. All, perhaps, without saying a word. (Silence sometimes flatters these gentlemen, anyway.) I was too nearsighted to make any definite evaluations from outside the rooms in that fuzzy light and too embarrassed to venture inside for a reliable inspection. I knew most of these people had to be ugly when I saw them up close—what kind of guy was going to lie there in the first place? Certainly not me, for crying out loud—and I couldn’t see having sex that way. I’m not good at sex, remember. I need someone who understands that, preferably someone who has an inhibition or two himself. How could I tell one of these pros the things I was not wild about doing, within earshot of, perhaps, 200 people. I could whisper, of course, or even just use hand signals—but how could I trust one of these strangers not to shout out, WHAT? You mean you don’t like to suck cock! My dear, are you gay or aren’t you? When I ran out of the room in embarrassment, I would have to wedge my way through the 200 curious queens who had gathered by the door.
None of this would happen, of course. It was just that, obviously, I was still not fully at ease with myself, to say the least. I still felt an unhealthy measure of superiority over these other people.
At any rate, most people walk around the baths in their towels, rather than lie in waiting. Those who only rent mini-lockers, gym lockers, or walk-in lockers (something for everybody), have no choice. They walk around the second or third floors, looking in open doors, or looking at others looking in open doors, or visiting The Dormitory, which sports a number of mattresses and a ten-watt light bulb, and is open to all. Thank you anyway.
I spent most of my time on the first floor, swimming in a small overheated pool with enough chlorine in it to kill any disease you can think of, or else watching Little Joe Cart-wright on Bonanza in the color TV room, or else doing sit-ups and bench presses. I used the sun room, passed up a couple of invitations to dance, passed up the massage room, and couldn’t buy anything at the snack bar because I had forgotten to take a dollar out of my wallet before putting it in the valuables box at the front desk.
Esquire led me around at first, explaining the “rules,” but then disappeared with someone, and then with someone else, and then told me he was going home, he had an early client meeting in the morning. How many numbers had I had? Well, none. I was feeling sorry for myself. I couldn’t get into it. Why was I so squeamish? What had there been about my toilet training that made that bad odor around the steam room so revolting?
As we were leaving, they announced a free buffet that would start shortly by the pool; and next Saturday they would be featuring Bette Midler; and the free VD clinic would start in five minutes in Room 100. I might have stayed for a free athletes’ foot clinic, but could have contracted nothing worse that evening. We left.
I went down to Norfolk to visit Freddie, my original crush, for a weekend. He lives at home in the summer and decided to have a talk with his parents when he saw that they had special-ordered The Lord Won’t Mind from the local bookstore. In his case, the talk went well. Though his mother is convinced he is just going through a stage, she is happy so long as he is happy—and he is happy.
(Freddie’s older brother is not so happy. He had married a girl, divorced her, married her again, had a child, and divorced her again. He was now unhappily married to a second girl. Did he honestly love these women until he had them, had to live with them, and then, almost despite himself, turn off? Was there some connection between whatever there had been about that family’s life that had made Freddie gay and whatever had made his older brother unhappily married? If so, should society feel the same repulsion toward unhappily married straights as they do toward homosexuals?)
With Freddie I met Michael and Michael, who had not made the vain attempt to obtain a legal marriage certificate and a common last name (perhaps to avoid confusion), but who had been “married” for twenty-two years. No kids. Michael and Michael lived together in a beautiful Colonial home and were partners in a real estate firm. They were well liked in the community, whatever jokes may have been made behind their backs, and led pleasant, peaceful lives. They attended concerts together, church together, parties together. They never went to the bar in Norfolk, but they entertained and visited their many gay friends. They were as faithful to each other as my parents are, even though it may have required more willpower at first.
In my limited experience, this kind of happy relationship is even rarer among gay people than among straight people. However, my sample is probably biased, because I make little effort to meet older gay people and I tend to go to bars and parties older gay lovers wouldn’t be likely to go to. Perhaps more gay people “marry” and settle down for happy lives than I imagine. Certainly, Michael and Michael are not the only example I can think of. And as society becomes more tolerant, such relationships may become more commonplace.
I wonder whether Esquire could ever settle down this way, or whether I will. I am too aggressive and egotistical to live with someone who won’t defer to my wishes and acknowledge, tacitly, my wicker-weave throne. I am competitive. But at the same time, I am too impatient to enjoy the company of someone who is not as aggressive as I am—and I am not stimulated by submissiveness. What is required is a fine balance, an equality, the kind of thing I think the feminists are after. Perhaps I will learn to share and live with another person, the experience with Chris notwithstanding. After all, I was emotionally about fifteen years old when I was going with Chris. Perhaps I simply am not ready to settle down, no different from many of my unmarried straight friends. After all, there is less social pressure for me to settle down with a gay guy than there is for my straight friends to marry (the understatement of the age?). And there is not the incentive to have kids at a reasonably early age so you don’t die on them when they need you. Perhaps it is natural for gays to settle down later in life than straights.
Naturally, I am curious to know what I will be like in twenty or thirty years. And what of forty or fifty or even sixty years from now, should I live so long? When the real crunch comes. Offhand I can’t think of any really old gay people I have met, at least not in an explicitly gay situation where I could hear about that side of their life.
Surely forty years from now the world will be unlike anything we know now, if it is here at all. Is there any sense in speculating
that far into the future? For the moment it is sufficient for me that I intend to provide for a comfortable old age. And that god-damned Chris had just better stay around to clear his god-damned throat in that annoying way from the next wheelchair over in Sunny Faggots’ Rest Home.
CHAPTER 15
Tomorrow the movers come to take my stuff to Washington. I wouldn’t have minded moving myself in a U-Haul, but with IBM selling at $400 a share, we don’t do things that way. Monday I start work again. Frankly, I’ve missed the discipline. For the past six weeks I’ve been sleeping late, working at the kitchen table in my not-too-clean cutoffs, crumbs on the floor, dishes piled in the sink—no one around to make me feel important or needed, no one for me to need or take to lunch, no one to argue with. I think I’ll just leave the sink the way it is and buy a new set of kitchenware in Washington. The bottom layer of dishes has probably been there for close to two months now, and I might not be able to get them clean even if I could bring myself to try. The only thing I hate more than setting the table is doing the dishes.
There is not time to play out the Peyton Place romances I could tell you about. How I fell for an impossibly unattainable model named Randy who turned out to be both attainable and an impossible bore; how when Randy was unattainable, it was because he was busy falling for Golden Boy, who was still too hung up on Dennis Moyer to take any notice—while Dennis himself had chanced to run into Hunter, Chris’s new lover, while Chris was away; how Dennis fell for Hunter (and subsequently for Chris, and subsequently for your humble narrator); how Hunter was beginning to feel that leaving Craig, his lover of the past four years, for Chris may not have been such a good idea after all and in the meantime was quoted as saying to Golden Boy: “I wonder what would have happened if I had met you before I met Chris?”; how a GB-Hunter fling was not forthcoming both because GB remembered the consequences of his last fling with one of Chris’s lovers (your humble narrator, again) and also because it was about that time that word filtered back to GB of Hunter’s thing with Dennis, which naturally drove GB up his own patented Wailing Wall; or how they all lived happily eve’r after.
The Best Little Boy in the World Page 20