The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  He had something with his brother, because once we had flung ourselves onto the floor while I was working him over and his brother called and Siegfried took it. He got really hard while I was sucking on him and he was talking to his brother. Makes you think, doesn’t it? All these little clues that no one ever pieces together.

  We were having an afternoon off and we were at my place. They were setting up the stage for Aida, so we couldn’t rehearse on it. The sets for Aida were so enormous that they couldn’t get them all into the theater. There were giant two-story doors on the back of the theater and the second- and third-act sets were left on the street while the first act was being set up. Which meant that whatever the temperature was out on Seventh Avenue was the temperature on the stage.

  In the winter, it was so cold that the dancers in the triumphal scene were allowed to stay in their dressing rooms until time to go. We had so little on they called us “the Sex Squad.” Both Illy and I were in the Sex Squad. The best bodies were chosen, because all you wore was a tiny bikini, body paint, a headdress, and a lot of bracelets. The girls had a little bra top, too.

  That night we sat in the dressing room, bright orange with body paint and naked, until we heard Stanley, the stage manager, shout “Sex Squad” down the hallway, and out we came. We always liked Stanley the best of the stage managers. A slight little dark-haired guy with contact lenses. He always looked at you with his head tipped back, the light glinting off his contacts, trying to get you in focus. One of the other stage managers was an always confused man of vague foreign origin who wore a wig with the net hairline attachment clearly in view. Alfred angered him one day by cutting a strip of netting and gluing it along his own abundant, natural hairline and walking ostentatiously in front of him.

  Then there was Patrick, the younger, red-haired manager, who always projected that he was too good for this job. He was probably right. He was sort of good-looking and that never hurt at the Met. Patrick was much too dignified to shout “Sex Squad” down a corridor. He would have come to the door of the dressing room and said quietly, “You’re on.”

  There was always something wonderful going on at the Met. Because we did repertory, we were always rehearsing something new; there were always new stars appearing for rehearsals. Lily Pons was one of the most exotic. It was her last season, and she was fitting in her rehearsals with her busy life as a socialite. She was married to André Kostelanetz and was a BIG star and had been a big star for many years. We were fascinated as she always showed up for rehearsals in couture dresses and furs and all her jewels. She was really major-league.

  I wasn’t in Lucia di Lammermoor, but I was passing the stage late one morning when she was rehearsing. Miss Pons was getting irritated, waiting at the head of the staircase for her entrance in the third act–the mad scene, as if you didn’t know. She waited, dressed for lunch in a navy-blue dress, lots of jewelry, and that famous turned-under pageboy bob. She still looked as she had for years in the magazines and newspapers. Belle-Mère would have been thrilled. The rehearsal had been seriously dragging on.

  Maestro Stiedry seemed to be only interested in the chorus that day. They would rage up to Lucia’s entrance and then he would tap his stand, stop the orchestra, and ask the chorus to do it all over again. They had done this about twenty times. Miss Pons was looking at her Cartier watch, tapping the toe of her high-heeled Bally pumps.

  Suddenly the chorus got themselves all worked up, the orchestra didn’t stop and swept into Miss Pons’s entrance. She appeared at the head of the great stairs, paused a moment, and started down. Maestro Stiedry tapped his baton, stopped the orchestra, and said, “Mees Pons, Mees Pons, what are you doing? You are singing the Bell Song from Lakmé!” She glared at him and said, “After all, Maestro, I am mad!” And rushed towards the stage door, grabbing up her mink from a chair as she ran.

  Neighbors

  The only break from rehearsing, performing, and fucking seemed to be parties. When I look back, there were always lots of parties going on. Impromptu parties, beer-drinking or wine-drinking parties. I don’t even really remember a lot of drinking going on. Lots of smoking, though. Dancers always smoked a lot, to keep from feeling like eating. At the old opera house there were always red-painted buckets full of sand sitting about where people could douse their cigarettes.

  I had neighbors on Sixteenth Street who were frequent party-givers. Bill and Dave. Bill was blond and a painter. Dave was dark and wrote plays. They seemed thrillingly professional to me, so self-assured in their careers. Bill did work practically full-time as a temporary secretary to support himself and Dave. Dave didn’t do much but sit about looking like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and John Huston.

  Bill and Dave were from the University of Texas and all their friends were from the same school. They had all known Jayne Mansfield there and were astounded at where her bosom had carried her. Evidently she had graduated summa cum laude. Something she learned in Texas must have kicked in when she hit Hollywood. Cathy Crosby had been in their class, too. She opted to marry Bing Crosby and get out of the running completely. They seemed to envy her slightly more than Jayne.

  I thought they were all terribly interesting and exciting. I had read My Sister Eileen and expected New York to be full of strange people and strange goings-on. I was never very fond of campiness and the kind of Tallulah Bankhead–style bitchery that was social life in the dancers’ dressing room at the opera, but I loved the kind of wild and rowdy evenings at Bill and Dave’s. I suppose it was what I imagined bohemianism was going to be like, and it was.

  Bill and Dave were what they now call “out,” and nobody they knew cared in the slightest. They evidently had been completely out at the university, had lived together, and nobody cared there, either. They had a beautiful, voluptuous friend named Nora, whom everyone expected to become a big star. There was a couple named Ted and Valerie. Ted did make it later. I saw him on Broadway in that Tommy Steele musical. What the hell was it called? A Pocket Full of Sixpence? Haifa Sixpence? Who knows? It was terrible. Valerie was ahead of her time. She looked something like Demi Moore. A desperate Demi Moore. She was the only one that usually got very drunk and sang, “He May Be Good Fucking but He’s No Fucking Good.” I always thought she was sort of desperate because hubby wasn’t good fucking. How should I know? It can’t be any fun hanging around with a crowd of homosexuals who are getting theirs good and proper and at very regular intervals when you’re not. Probably feels very unfair.

  Bill and Dave had an open relationship. Could they have called it that? Probably not, but they both slept around a lot. Dave more than Bill. I think Bill would have liked Dave to stay home and sleep just with him, but Dave had a kind of drinkin’-and-smokin’ Hemingway-style manliness about him that also, I suppose, required a lot of screwin’. The homosexual Hemingway. Or Norman Mailer. There’s certainly plenty of them around.

  Dave told me once that it was best to have six lovers that you were sleeping with regularly. That way, when one of them dropped you, he really wasn’t missed all that much. You could replace him by going out trawling the streets regularly. Dave liked to trawl the streets. Greenwich Avenue, in the Village, and Third Avenue were the big cruising grounds in those days. Dave told me that Washington Square Park on the west side along the railing had been the big pickup area when Bill and he first came to town a few years before. The men just sat along the iron-pipe fence on that side of the park, their heels hooked over the lower railing. Others would patrol up and down looking for what was good. That was the origin of the expression “the Meat Rack.” There it all was, bulging out of worn denims, and not even for sale. It was being given away.

  I never did that. It always seemed so embarrassing, going to bed with someone you didn’t know. Like, wait a minute … where did you go to school? How old are you? What’s your favorite ice cream? All that stuff. No wonder those guys were always hungry, when they skipped to the dessert right away. Just think, you might meet Mr. Right, hop in the sack with h
im, and he’s gone and you never even knew it. Just another one-night stand. I think they all come to that conclusion after a while.

  Of the men I’ve known who were the most sexually active, it seems to correlate with how successful they were in other areas of their lives. When they haven’t got much else going on, they seem to pride themselves on their fucking. Just fucking one person very often doesn’t count. It has to be a lot of different people. It’s not so much being famous or powerful or rich, it’s more how busy you are in some area of your life and how much you like it that keeps you off the streets. As long as you’re doing something you like regularly, you don’t seem to be compelled to boff every other stranger who comes along.

  I think Dave secretly suspected that his writing plays was going nowhere, was not going to go anywhere, and that sitting around in a cold-water flat on Sixteenth Street letting Bill support him wasn’t exactly making it. So he felt like fucking a lot. Have I stumbled on some kind of new sex motivation that has nothing to do with testosterone?

  At the parties Bill and Dave gave they frequently lit their little string of rooms with candles. The shadows seemed brown and gold, rather than black. In the bedroom that you passed through to get to the living room, the wall you walked by was covered with many small wooden frames filled with photos of their idols and icons, people like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann and Eugene O’Neill and John Barrymore and the Lunts and Noël Coward and George Gershwin. Sarah Bernhardt wasn’t there, but Eleonora Duse was. Of course, I knew hardly any of these people. I had to have them identified and explained to me. Ethel Merman wasn’t there–they weren’t fans of commercial Broadway theater–but Lupe Velez was. The Mexican Spitfire. The actress that picked up Gary Cooper after Clara Bow dropped him and, after committing suicide, was buried wearing a wedding dress. She was supposedly pregnant at the time. Is all this possible? Probably not, but Bill and Dave admired her “work,” as they called it. I wonder if she called it that.

  Then, after this cave of flickering shadows over the dim faces of the glamorous great of the theater and movies, there was a warm, noisy room full of good-looking people who all liked you, who were glad you were there, who laughed a lot, cussed a lot, and said wild things people never said in Michigan.

  One of the neighbors was a fat boy from Texas who’d known Bill and Dave at school. He had taken an upstairs apartment on the top floor–the same one Belle-Mère and Levoy had for a while. I used to go see him by going up to the roof and crossing over and going down the stairs. The front doors and roof doors were always open and people roamed freely about. The fat boy’s name was Nick. He worked as an assistant to Helen Menken. I think he worked for her free. She had once been married to Humphrey Bogart, which counted a lot for him and for us. What he did for Helen I have no idea, but his Texas family was rich and could afford to keep him going while he found a place for himself in New York.

  Nick gave parties, too, with much the same crowd of Texans that Bill and Dave invited. I used to go there sometimes after a performance. In those days, the kind of mascara we used was hard to get off. Some always stuck at the base of your lashes. Nick always accused me of not trying to get it all off, so I could arrive at his parties looking all wan and smudgy-eyed. I wasn’t there trying to pick somebody up, so I don’t know what he was worried about. I certainly felt wan, and I was there largely to see if there was something to eat.

  Nick was a great cook, and when he awoke in the night and felt anxious, he would get up and cook an elaborate meal. Even if it was ready to go on the table at five in the morning, he would sit down and eat it. Often he would call in the night and ask me over. I was always game to eat, even in the dead of night. I did ask him to please not call me until it was ready to serve. Then I would put a raincoat on over my pajamas and climb the stairs to the roof, beaming my flashlight ahead of me, and descend to big, fat Nick, already at the table. He was like something out of Dickens: napkin tied around his neck, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, ready to tear into whatever cordon bleu delight he’d concocted. We never made small talk–not at five in the morning. We just downed it; then I returned up over the roof to get a few hours’ more sleep before going to the opera.

  Often I took my friend April with me to parties at Bill and Dave’s. April was a dancer who had been in stock at the New Jersey theater with me. She was something like a spirited squirrel. Her name was April Orjune. She had a sister, May. She told me that her parents had absolutely no sense of humor at all but had chosen both their names without realizing that they were covering a quarter of the months in the calendar: April, May, or June. Introducing those girls at parties was always a problem. People always said things like “What’s your brother’s name? August?” But April and May didn’t rile easily. They said things like “No, Dick,” putting a lot of emphasis on the word. That was usually May, who was older and bigger and heavier and more lethal all around. She would say, “No, Dick … head” to the inquirer if it was a man, the “head” slightly under her breath.

  I learned so much from the Orjune sisters. They were real Greenwich Village girls. The kind that must have sprung up in the early days when Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there. They took no shit. You didn’t see that a lot in Michigan, either.

  We were at the White Horse Tavern one night and May was seated by some man who proceeded to get drunker and drunker as he spilled out the story of his life. She sat there patiently until he said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, you don’t even know my name.” May said, “No, but it ought to be Schmuck.” We left.

  The Orjune sisters lived over Slongo’s Garage on Hudson Street and had a large apartment for which they paid seventy dollars a month. It was filled with tables covered with letters they were planning to answer, circulars they were planning to read, and bills they were planning to pay. And they had closets, hampers, and boxes full of clothes they were planning to iron. When I had nothing better to do, I would drop in and iron. I once ironed for eight straight hours. The closets were jammed with blouses, shirts, trousers, pajamas, and skirts. I’m sure that was the only time in their occupancy over Slongo’s that the ironing was ever fully done. I love to iron. All part of that female side of me, I suppose.

  I don’t remember Illy ever going to any of these parties with me. He would have thought they were boring and the people weren’t sexy enough. Like many homosexuals, he preferred all-male parties, which I never liked all that much. Also, I don’t think he wanted to parade me around in public. It would have cramped his style.

  I did go to some all-male parties. I remember one party in what they call a “garden apartment” in New York–actually, a basement with a little light filtering in from the windows in the front at sidewalk level. It was after the theater and it was mostly boys from the opera. Vincent Warren was there. We were about the same age; maybe Vincent was a little bit older–a beautiful guy from Florida. I always envied him because he could do the splits very easily. I heard he was Frank O’Hara’s lover later. The great thing about being a poet’s lover is that you get eulogized a lot, but I don’t think Vincent cared that much about being eulogized.

  I supposed Vincent thought I was very inexperienced and uptight, a typical midwestern twit. He said, “What you need is to be really fucked hard by somebody like Steve.” That was one of our tough-guy bodybuilders in the company. Illy was talking to somebody right beside me. I turned to him and said, “Do you think that’s what I need, Illy? Do you think I need to be fucked hard by Steve?” Illy in his most Scandinavian manner stared at me as though I had gone completely out of my mind. To his credit he didn’t say, “Why are you asking me?” He just turned away. But we left together and he did fuck me hard that night. Marking his territory, even if he wasn’t going to say anything about it.

  I don’t know quite what I thought about things in those days. I guess I wanted someone to say they wanted to stay with me the rest of their life and make plans to buy a house in the suburbs and all the rest
of that stuff. Nobody did then, but many guys do nowadays. But deeper down I think I knew that I didn’t want that. What I wanted was to love somebody so much that where we lived and what we did really didn’t matter. I was too young to wonder about what the next steps were.

  How I Loved to Dance

  Dance is the only thing I ever loved that wasn’t another person. I did love it, really loved it. Now it’s amazing to me that I was able to dance and be in love with another human being at the same time.

  In comparison, being a doctor is a job, my job. It’s not really a career. That ended when I stopped being a dancer.

  My theory is that you are only capable of really feeling, really fully enjoying yourself for about an hour and a half per day. That’s all we really have the emotional stamina for. So the rest of the time we might just as well keep busy. Sleep eight hours, eat a couple of times, take a shower, and get a haircut. Chances are that there are another eight hours left over where you might as well work. It doesn’t have to be particularly meaningful as long as it pays the bills. Just as long as you’re getting in that hour and a half of living fully and deeply every day.

  When I danced I always had my hour and a half of class to really feel that thing. Something like Zen meditation. Just you and your body and the music: concentrating, concentrating, concentrating.

  Miss Craske used to say in that high, fluting English voice of hers in the ancient high-ceilinged rehearsal studio on top of the old opera house, “Leave your problems outside the classroom, my dears. Leave your problems outside the classroom.”

  It was like that. You put aside whatever was bugging you and did your class. When you went back to your life, you could somehow handle things better. Perhaps they weren’t solved, but you were stronger. Eventually they solve themselves, don’t they? You don’t solve them. Your problems just wear themselves out if you hang on long enough. You only have to make sure that by the time they do work themselves out, you are still in command of your senses and still look good.