by Gary Indiana
This was, at any rate, the gist. The letter itself ran to twenty single-spaced typewritten pages, gave a long-winded account of my personal history, my circumstances, my mode of existence, and included numerous philosophical digressions, speculative passages, lyrical paragraphs concerning Gregory’s blinding erotic attraction, and so on. In my early youth, I had once managed to get in bed with a rigorously heterosexual, surpassingly beautiful guy by writing him an incessant stream of flattering letters, and I supposed there was as good a chance if I kept this up with Gregory. No man is straight every minute of his life unless he is dead.
But the first version of this letter failed to satisfy me. I read it through, compulsively, nine or ten times throughout the evening, all the while drinking bottles of Japanese beer. After some readings I thought, Well, just stick the thing in an envelope and mail it, you’ve already made an ass of yourself, you might as well be a complete ass. On the last reading, the excessiveness of my own sentiments sobered me. What am I doing? I’m handing this person a deadly weapon, a weapon he’ll use against me, he’ll show it to all his friends and laugh about me with them. I’ll be an object of derision wherever I walk. This was not an unreasonable fear. New York is a woefully tiny village, despite its apparent hugeness. Everyone knows everyone, everyone talks about everyone, everyone knows everything there is to know about everyone, to the extent that a simple stroll through your neighborhood often feels like a protracted crawl through a minefield, and if you are at all known for anything, a character in this city’s tiresome living novel, it’s especially true that you cannot go anywhere without being observed by people who then talk about you, who talk about you even more, in fact, when they do not see you for a while. Anyone who is known who isn’t seen for a while is rumored to be dying of AIDS, addicted to heroin, living in another country, or dead, such is the idle chatter of New York and particularly of downtown Manhattan. And of course among Gregory’s peers, the young set, in this neighborhood, a letter declaring my uncontrollable passion for him could have tremendous gossip cachet. Look here, he would tell various odious strangers, this older writer has fallen in love with me. I painted this scene in the darkest colors, in my own mind, casting myself as an older writer, a sort of Humbert Humbert figure, and by the same token, in light of Gregory’s extravagant comeliness, thinking of myself as comparatively unattractive, ill-dressed, not at all sportif, a natural object of ridicule for the fashion-conscious younger generation. These ruminations advanced sufficiently for me to tear the thick letter into tiny pieces. I brooded for several minutes, then rolled a fresh page into the typewriter. Dear Gregory, I commenced, dropping the “Burgess” as altogether too precious and nineteenth-century, Even though we only just met, and under such peculiar circumstances, I feel I really have to see you again, to get to know you; I rarely meet anyone to whom I feel such instantaneous sympathy and attraction, anyone of such obvious discernment and intelligence. Had he actually displayed any obvious discernment, or more than quotidian intelligence? It seemed to me, just then, that he had. But perhaps this was going too far. I ripped this up and started afresh. Dear Gregory, This is probably the weirdest letter you’ve ever received. I can’t help that, I can only hope that even if I don’t interest you, you’ll find it sufficiently flattering not to despise me for it. There, I considered, I’ve hit the right note. I continued filling the first page, then a second page, arriving at last at a length of twenty-three pages, assuring myself the whole time that virtually any human being given such elaborate and loving homage would almost feel obligated to bestow his favors, simply out of gratitude if not attraction. I flopped onto my bed, wasted from so much writing, and noted that five hours had ticked past in a frenzy. Again I read through the letter, many, many times, and this time got up, found an envelope, typed out Gregory’s name and address, folded the letter into it with difficulty (wondering if it might burst open in the mail), licked the flap, sealed it, and placed it triumphantly on my desk. It would arrive at its destination like a bombshell, I thought. Perhaps he, despite his impossible beauty, feels insignificant, struggling along as an artist while working backbreaking shifts at some loathsome French restaurant. Whereas I, in his eyes, am a published author, an inhabitant of a glamorous world he only dreams of entering. Perhaps, receiving such a letter, from such a celebrated person, will seem like a miracle. Of course he’ll sleep with me. Not only sleep with me but become my lover. Not only become my lover, but the person closest to me throughout my life. We will adhere as one being, becoming so close as to seem indistinguishable. Or perhaps he’ll handle this whole business with astonishing sophistication, give this adoring older guy an affectionate toss, and thereafter remain a friend, taking his particular path through life while I continue alone down mine.
I drank another bottle of Japanese beer, which turned sour and disgusting in my mouth, then tore the letter into shreds, envelope and everything. I’m not twenty-one any-more, I informed myself, I’m thirty-five. At twenty-one it seemed noble and romantic to send letter after letter to Teddy Brightman, whose name at least I haven’t forgotten, Teddy who was hardly any older, who succumbed to this adulation in no time at all, showing up one afternoon in my Boston rooming house, where, after an hour’s chitchat, he unzipped his trousers to reveal what he claimed had been lauded as the finest cock in Christendom by his Eurotrash girlfriend. And I remembered having thought “Christendom” a jejune word choice at the time, expressing a worldliness we were much too young to feel. Summertime with Teddy: fellating his proud Christian pecker twice that day, then again a few weeks later when he came in from Amherst for the weekend; then throughout the early summer he turned up at odd moments, developing a taste for butt-fucking, rim jobs, whatever I then had in my repertoire. By autumn his homosexual period had drawn to a close, if memory serves. I ran into him a few years later, but he’d lost the taste for it, having matured into a totally uninteresting, unexceptional-looking adult academic. By then I was twenty-five, Teddy twenty-six. Years later, at thirty-five, I was drinking through the night and writing love letters to a twenty-seven-year-old, imagining these letters could produce the same magical results they produced when I was twenty-one and Teddy twenty-two, back in the provinces. Absurd.
“People are what people are,” M. says, dismissing the idea that some people, at certain times, reinvent themselves as worthier, more responsible, more thoughtful people. I suppose a person gradually becomes aware of deficiencies and virtues in others, sometimes only after decades. I think I’ve known “everybody” in New York at one time or another, and I have spent years weeding out the ones with truly lousy characters. You’re less and less likely to be really deceived, though it’s always possible for you to be mistaken. There are people you can sustain two utterly different opinions about at the same time, people who command equivocation as other people command respect or fear or sexual attention; people who’ve deliberately obscured the text of their own personalities, who can’t be read without incredible difficulty. In the end, the hardest thing is learning how to tell a secret from a mystery.
I haven’t the heart to tell my own story: but a few weeks later I was offered a job, a regular job, writing cultural items for a large-circulation weekly magazine. The offer came out of the blue, and my first impulse was to turn it down. I did turn it down, as a matter of fact. Two days later, the editor again phoned and asked me to reconsider. I reconsidered. Can I write anything I want, I asked. By all means, I was told. That’s what we want you to do.
I had not been an employee for many years, and the prospect of becoming one was only slightly ameliorated by the immense prestige attached to the position. Immense as far as magazine writing goes. It was a power job, writing about the arts for a big audience. A job through which one could focus public attention on virtually anything. And in a city where nearly every person carries about with him a pathological craving for public attention, a person in such a position would, of course, be regarded as powerful, would be courted, lobbied, hounded, importu
ned on every front. However, mutatis mutandis, such a person would not be powerless. Such a person could even accomplish some conceivable good in the world, using such a position in a judicious fashion. A writer’s most fundamental need is to be read by people, as many people as possible. Of course one only writes for oneself but after one has written, one wishes to be read. It was not really the sort of power I wanted or the sort of job I wanted. I had, in fact, always detested most of what appeared in this particular magazine, which had, curiously enough, ignored my existence for years. I had done so many things, and yet the magazine had never taken the slightest notice. And now I would be part of the magazine. Odd.
Soon after accepting the job, which wasn’t to begin for two months, I realized my life was about to change. A person goes through life, longing for one thing or another, wishing if he’s a writer to be read, to be recognized, to produce a body of work, laboring against the self-destructive inclinations which seem almost inevitably to accompany a Creative gift, despairing frequently if not incessantly because of the impossibility of doing the single thing he wishes to do, ultimately resigning himself to his obscurity and his feeble productivity, and then, as he approaches the nadir of despondency, things change. Even if they do not change very much, even if this change is not a dramatic change, the very premises upon which his existence is based turn themselves inside out.
And now, I considered, I shall truly exist in the world. Not that I don’t exist now. But I will exist in a special way, for others, too: a large and disturbing way. I will no longer be a private person, but a public figure. Not an enormous public figure, like a film star or a politician, but a modestly-scaled public figure, someone whose activities are inquired about by many people he does not know and doesn’t care about, a person who takes up space, who is fated for attacks from embittered individuals, an object of envy, malice, and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance.
In that week, a kind of panic set in. A new year had begun with ominously good fortune, dragging me into a new situation as if my clothes had gotten caught by the fender of a speeding truck. I telephoned Gregory Burgess, inviting him to lunch.
It was a cold day of soiled white sky. A few hours earlier he had called, asking if I would meet him on the street, so we could then decide where to eat. I am never happy about choosing restaurants over the telephone. So at 1:30 I positioned myself in front of a drugstore on Second Avenue. Actually, I got there at 1:15, anxious not to be late. I looked at a display of unspeakable objects in the pharmacy window: bedpans, rupture trusses, ointments for varicose veins, corn plasters, for some reason this pharmacy had decided to cast its most repugnant wares into the limelight, things one finds it disagreeable to ask for, purchases for which one loiters until other customers move out of hearing range were lovingly piled up in the sooty window, shameless advertisements of the human body’s wretched deliquescence. Every few seconds I walked away from the window to the corner to peer up the side street and down Second Avenue.
Gregory’s apartment, which he’d recently moved into, he’d said, with his girlfriend, a woman named Gloria, was in Loisaida, down around Orchard Street. A part of the Lower East Side that had always been mysterious and depressing to me. He would undoubtedly arrive from that direction, but perhaps he’d walk up First Avenue and cut over on the side street, rather than walking across Houston to Second Avenue. He might come from either direction. I hoped to catch sight of him walking toward our meeting from a distance. Every young person of a certain height caught my attention, if he was wearing a hat or had black hair; my eyes seized on any person under six feet tall who happened to look thin in winter clothes, walking up Second Avenue or across on the side street. A man who looked like Gregory made his way up Second Avenue, becoming more familiar-looking as he came nearer, and then, still some distance off, strode off across Second Avenue, in the direction of Bowery.
I ran down Second, thinking suddenly that I’d been standing all this time on the wrong corner. I’d thought he’d said Seventh Street, but perhaps he’d said Fifth Street. When I reached the corner of Fifth Street I could see the man proceeding toward Bowery and saw that it wasn’t Gregory after all, because this person was now swinging his arms while in motion, in large unnatural ellipses, and his head seemed to be jerking compulsively up and down. I raced back to my original spot, trying to recall exactly what corner we’d agreed on. I knew it was Seventh. But it could also have been Eighth. The corner of Eighth and Second is such a typical corner for meetings of this kind, perhaps we had settled on Eighth after all, having at first rejected it in favor of the less frequented corner of Seventh and Second. But should I venture up to Eighth, I wondered, in the certainty that I could see the corner of Seventh and Second from the corner of Second and Eighth, or stay put in front of the drugstore, confident in my ability to view both the corner of Second and Eighth and the corner of Sixth and Second, which suddenly seemed another possibility, from my vantage point at Seventh and Second? I now felt less confident. If we hadn’t agreed on Seventh and Second, it seemed likely that we had agreed on some place even more obscure. Certainly not Eighth and Second, the popular meeting-corner, and perhaps not Sixth and Second, either, since Sixth Street has no pertinent associations in my mind, I would never propose that corner for a meeting, whereas I might very well suggest Fifth, Seventh, or even Fourth.
By now, it was several minutes past the appointed time, according to a digital clock over a bank entrance across the street—though one could never fully rely on this clock because it tended to malfunction in the winter months, sometimes erring by a few minutes, sometimes by several hours. It now read 1:36. I had never known this clock to run fast, except when the hour itself was wrong, for example, if it happened to be 5:00 and the clock reported the hour as 10:00 or 12:00 or whatever, whereas quite frequently, the clock ran slow, in which case it might well be 1:45 or even 1:50. And if it were now 1:45 or 1:50, I most certainly had taken up my vigil on the wrong corner, had been standing at a corner which was not only wrong but so far from the correct corner that Gregory, waiting at the correct corner, whichever it was, couldn’t see the corner where I stood, or couldn’t or hadn’t imagined it possible that I could confuse such a simple, unequivocal matter and in fact be standing at the wrong corner. In fact, if he did not imagine this, he might have been standing as nearby as the corner of Eighth and Second or Sixth and Second without even glancing at the corner of Seventh and Second, and I, so eager for a glimpse of him, may have been following complete strangers with my eyes, overlooking Gregory completely although he’d been in plain view for several minutes.
If this had been the case, and Gregory had been standing, say, at the corner of Eighth and Second and had, like me, arrived a few minutes early, he might even have surmised, as I had, that the corner he thought we had agreed on was not the right corner. He might then have panicked, as I had, and left off waiting at his corner in order to locate me at another corner, at roughly the same moment that I had abandoned my corner to follow the man who had crossed Second Avenue at Fifth Street. I began walking back and forth between the corners of Seventh and Second and Sixth and Second, my gaze searching down the side streets and ahead to more distant corners, all the time rehashing the brief phone conversation of a few hours earlier, becoming steadily more agitated and fearful of having missed Gregory already, or of missing him now by perambulating between corners, for if it was by this time 1:45 or 1:50 or, as the increasingly plausible digits of the bank clock reported, 2:00, and Gregory had been delayed, he might now arrive and assume that I’d grown tired of waiting for him, or that I myself had been grossly delayed, or was in the habit of making people wait for unreasonable amounts of time. If that were the case, Gregory might simply have arrived, and, not seeing me where we’d agreed to meet, concluded that I was completely frivolous and not worth knowing at all, and returned in irritation to Gloria and his apartment.
Of course I had a
rrived early, and my defection from the corner of Seventh and Second had been momentary. Almost certainly we had agreed on that corner, and even if he had shown up, say, as I was walking to the corner of Second and Sixth, he would have seen my back moving away from that corner, would have run and caught up with me. And in any case, I walked back and forth rapidly, if he stood waiting for even a few moments at the corner of Seventh and Second I would have arrived back there myself within plenty of time to encounter him. Then, too, although I had never known the bank clock to run fast except when it told the hour wrong, I did not observe the vagaries of the bank clock throughout the day, or pay much attention to the bank clock throughout the year, for that matter, and for all I knew the clock ran fast all the time, or a great part of the time, and though it seemed I had been waiting for Gregory, in one fashion or another, for well over a half hour, my own acute anticipation of his presence may have made the time feel longer than it was.
My sense of things, at this point, told me that Gregory was merely late, delayed, probably by the hectoring of Gloria, and in all likelihood rushing from his apartment to meet me, unless he had assumed, having been held up for an egregious amount of time and unable to reach me by phone, that I would have given up by now. In that case, he would certainly have phoned my place and left a message on the answering machine. It occurred to me that my down-stairs neighbor, who has keys to my apartment, could, if she were home, let herself into my place and play back my message tape, then tell me whether or not Gregory had called to explain his nonappearance. I would have to phone the neighbor from a pay phone, tell her what I needed, wait a few minutes, then call her back. However, as I had ascertained over the previous half hour by watching people go up to them, the pay phones at the corner of Seventh and Second were out of order. The nearest pay phone, then, would be the one at the corner of Fifth and Second, so even trying to find out if Gregory had or hadn’t been delayed involved abandoning the corner he might that very moment be rushing toward. It was quite possible that I would miss him in the process of trying to learn whether or not he was coming.