The Sex Squad

by David Leddick

  Perhaps that was why he was so automated and stunned and lost in petty sensuality. It wasn’t that he had lost Hugh Laing. He had lost “the thing.” He couldn’t make beautiful ballets like Lilac Garden anymore.

  A Trip to Far Rockaway

  Illy and I were leaving a party late. Probably over in Chelsea at Dick Baer’s. Nobody was there trying to get laid, just the usual crowd. Illy and me, Alfred, Tommy, and some guys we didn’t usually hang around with, like Fabian and Vincent Warren. It was late, getting towards five o’clock. We were heading towards my apartment on Sixteenth Street. Illy said, “I’m not sleepy.” He never was. He generally had to fuck himself to sleep. “Let’s go to Far Rockaway.” He dragged me down into the subway entrance at Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth, an express stop.

  The next train through went out to Queens, where we changed for the Far Rockaway train. It was March. New York is cold in March. Gray.

  It seems to me now, when I look back, that everything was gray outside the theater. The gray streets of New York under the gray sky. Our gray, colorless clothes we wore when we weren’t rehearsing or performing. Our colorless apartments, worn with all the lives that had passed through them. The color of our lives was under the lights at the theater; the reds of Aida, the orange and black of Vanessa, the blues of La Forza del Destino and The Magic Flute, and the brilliant yellow of Eugene Berman’s sets for Don Giovanni. There was the energy and excitement. Away from the theater, the only color was in our sex lives. The ivory and umber and rose and white of other people’s bodies, forcing their way onto us, into us, exciting us past all containment. That was colorful, too. But a color that was more felt than seen.

  The color of having Illy near me warmed the leaden skies that were slowly becoming visible as our subway pulled across the marshes of the bay behind Far Rockaway. As it curved on its tracks, I could look back and see the train behind us. So out of place in the gray dawn, its bright lights, its empty cars rattling over the brown-and-green marsh grass turning its back against the sea wind. The last stop before the Rockaways was a small fishing village. Inlets full of tiny, tired boats, low tide. The houses not much more than shacks, looking much like the boats, only overturned. A surreal station stop for a train I only knew crawling through the black tunnels of midtown Manhattan. Here the train was almost like some kind of centipede that had been stripped of its shell. A long, crawling kind of crayfish, vulnerable and out of place in a world where there could be wind and rain and sunshine. A kind of environment it never had known.

  Often, in Manhattan, I sat on the train and thought how bizarre and wonderful it would be if it just chugged and whizzed underground to places like Des Moines and Spokane. Making all the local stops. Just on and on and on. Much slower than the above-ground trains because of all the little close-together stops. But you could sit there, your ankles crossed, and ride on without end. The shorter, darker, more smartly dressed people of New Jersey giving way to the thicker, fairer people of Pennsylvania, making just short runs between places like Morristown and Bucks County. The Pennsylvanians giving way to the really big, bluff farmers of Ohio, who in turn would be exchanged for the thick blonds of Iowa. You would see thousands and thousands of different people, all making their little runs from one part of their own homeland to another, while you forged on, day after day. In the bowels of America, seeing all of America pass through your underground train.

  But Far Rockaway had nothing to do with that world. This was where it all began. Where subway trains were born and lived in the real world before they dipped below the surface of the earth.

  The sun was truly coming up as our train made the local stops along the length of Far Rockaway. This was the narrow strip of sand that reached back towards the city and formed Coney Island. It stretched to the east to become the long emptiness of Jones Beach, and after that the many miles of Fire Island. The bay getting ever broader and deeper as this offshore sand barrier reached further into the ocean. Here, in Far Rockaway, were the cottages of the turn of the century. Built shoulder to shoulder in little ranks at right angles to the subway. On the other side of the tracks, towards the mainland, were larger, four-story apartment houses, mostly in brick. At the far end of Far Rockaway were housing complexes of much taller buildings. We got off at a favored stop for Illy. He came here frequently in the summer. He loved to swim and sunbathe, and Far Rockaway required no complicated logistics or weekend invitations. Your bathing suit and a subway token did it.

  A long walk on the boardwalk at dawn in March on Far Rockaway: this was as romantic as Illy got. For someone as open as Illy was sexually, he was very gun-shy about sharing his emotions. The fact that he liked to walk on the beach at dawn was a big admission for him. Something that half the retired people in Florida were doing daily was very personal for him. I realized this and tried to keep quiet. We had once made an outing to the countryside for a long walk and I had sung a lot while we were walking: “Blue Moon,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “How Deep Is the Ocean,” “Over the Rainbow.” Songs my mother had liked and used to sing around the house in Michigan. Later Illy, in one of his rare accusatory moods, had said that I had missed the pleasure of the walk entirely and had ignored it by singing. Why explain that when I was happy I sang? Evidently Scandinavians don’t. So, as we walked along the drenched boards through the air, gray with damp, I kept quiet. I was enjoying the fact that Illy was enjoying himself. I appreciated that he had wanted me to come with him. He didn’t love me, but I was being integrated into his life as a trusted companion. Perhaps that was as far as Illy was willing to go.

  We went down between the big piers of heaped-up boulders that separated sections of the beach and sat on the sand, after sweeping the damp upper layer away to reveal the dry underneath. It was good and made me think of Michigan, of living someplace where the outdoors was in your life as a daily occurrence. I didn’t particularly miss it, but this was the first time I realized that nature was completely absent from our lives. Aside from the shifting levels of outside layers of clothing, jackets to sweaters to T-shirts and back up again towards winter jackets, there was no real indication of seasons in New York. We were just going from one indoor place to another. The life we led indoors was always the same.

  As it became true daylight, we became tired and headed back through the little rows of dilapidated cottages towards the elevated subway tracks. Once we were aboard with all the local cleaning people and early risers, it took an hour until we were back at the Seventh Avenue station where we had embarked. It was nine o’clock on Saturday morning.

  “It’s Die Meistersinger today,” Illy said. “We’re not on until the last act. We don’t have to be in the theater until four. Let’s go get some shut-eye.”

  We didn’t make love. Neither of us was in the mood.

  After the theater, Illy went home to Queens to his department-store boyfriend and I went home to sleep. I love to sleep. I always have. I didn’t feel lonely. Illy and I weren’t interwoven emotionally. Being away from him didn’t tear away a piece of my heart.

  Illy Remembers George Platt Lynes

  Illy’s lover/roommate/ex, whatever you wanted to call him, worked at Bloomingdale’s in the necktie department all day, so Illy felt comfortable making bamboola in his own bed on Saturdays. Don’t ask. I was eighteen by now, but I still went along with what older people decided in those days.

  After he clambered off me, I stayed in bed while he took a shower. He liked to take a shower before ransacking my body and again afterwards. He probably wanted to take showers at my place, but I only had that tub with the double enamel lid in the kitchen. It was a full bath or nothing chez moi.

  I love sleeping in someone else’s bed. At least I did then. The different smell, the different texture of the sheets and blankets. It was comforting somehow, to be in the warmth of someone else’s cocoon, instead of always in the home I made for myself. You have to remember I was eighteen.

  After I snuggled and snoozed for a while, I pulled open the
drawers to Illy’s bedside table to see if there was anything to eat in there. A chocolate bar, some hard candies, gum? (Dancers are always hungry. You hear people talk about dancers being anorexic. They should be so lucky. I ate nonstop in those days and weighed 173 pounds. I’m tall, and was never skinnier. But attractive, I guess.) No candy, but I found a large envelope. Dirty pictures? I wondered. Illy and the roommate/lover had separate bedrooms and probably dragged many an irregular through those bedrooms when they went out trawling. Illy said they never slept together anymore. “Never” usually means “not very often.” I avoided thinking about the other people Illy might be sleeping with. Of course, AIDS didn’t exist then. The clap, yes. Syphilis, too. But people went to Dr. Brown in the East Nineties and got rid of it. I knew that much, although I never had to go.

  The envelope had proofs of Illy in it. Small photographs, about twenty-four to a page. No negatives. I could hear Illy still in the shower, washing, washing, washing that fuck away.

  In some of the pictures, he was wearing a black ballet costume. A tight jacket with a standup collar enclosing a little white ruffle. The prince’s costume in the Black Swan pas de deux. Like that. Some others were naked with a towel tucked around his waist. They were taken with the light from behind to set off his strong thighs. He had his arms crossed over his chest to make them look stronger. Illy didn’t have a powerful upper body; it was slender. It made it easier to jump. Nobody went to the gym in those days. Well, a few did, but it wasn’t a common thing. Still, a couple of the boys in the company bulged. Don Martin. His friend Steve. But we thought that dancers shouldn’t look like bodybuilders. Erik Bruhn was our ideal–all streamlined and whippetlike. Royes Fernandez, too. Slim, trim, and fleet of foot, that was our ideal.

  Illy had that look with strong thighs and buttocks. The perfect classic profile. Some of the photographs were of his head and shoulders. The face in profile. He was younger in those pictures, softer-looking. A little less handsome, but angelic in his blondness.

  “What are you looking at?” Illy dropped on the bed still damp, hair wet.

  “You’ll get the quilt wet,” I said.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “My mother sent it to me. Let’s wear it out. Oh, that’s my George Platt Lynes shooting I did. He died last year. Young. I never got any prints. What do you think?” He took the proofs out of my hands and fell back on a pillow, holding them over his head to look at them. “I was studying at the School of American Ballet then. I had just got here from Minnesota. I studied with the Esterhazys in Minneapolis. They sent me there.”

  “You were quite a cutie in those days,” I said.

  “It’s only two years ago,” Illy said. “Do I look a lot different?”

  “Handsomer,” I said. I snuggled up against him and reached up for the pictures. “I like the towel pictures best,” I said.

  “I didn’t want to do those. I don’t know if he was trying to get into my pants or not. He didn’t. Maybe I was too innocent for him. Lincoln Kirstein sent me to him.”

  I knew who Lincoln Kirstein was. Vaguely. George Balanchine and he headed up the New York City Ballet. I didn’t like the New York City Ballet. All that “go here, go there” stuff, and the girls got all the best things to do. The boys were just there filling up space.

  “Balanchine didn’t care about me. He never even looked at me. Allegra Kent, Allegra Kent, Allegra Kent, that’s all you ever heard over there. But Kirstein noticed me and told me I should go see Platt Lynes and get some pictures done. He was nice and good-looking but kind of scary.”

  “Was he English?” I at least knew that English people often had a couple of last names.

  “I don’t think so. No. Definitely no. New York. He was one of those real New York people. Almost a piss-elegant queen, but not quite. But good.” He looked at the pictures, leaning over me. “He did all the famous people. Famous dancers. Maria Tallchief. All the New York City Ballet. And movie stars. His studio had pictures of Burt Lancaster, Rory Calhoun, and Gloria Swanson.”

  “Gloria Swanson?” I said.

  “Yeah, I had to ask, too. He said she really wasn’t all that old.”

  “Neither is Mount Rushmore,” I said.

  “Anyway, after that I ran around with him a little. He was a really nice guy, white-haired and handsome. He was really famous once and knew all these famous people. He had lived in France and knew Gertrude Stein. His best friends were these kind of weird guys, Glenway and Monroe. Do you know Christopher Isherwood?”

  I said I had read him.

  “Yeah, he’s a famous writer. I met him at a party at George’s with his little boyfriend. His boyfriend was only sixteen, and looked younger. Fourteen. Do you like that?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I don’t get it. Why would anyone want to fool around with kids?” I was one myself. I certainly didn’t want to sleep with one.

  “Christopher Isherwood told me a really funny thing about George’s friend Glenway, Glenway Wescott. He had been a famous writer. He was a piss-elegant queen. Christopher Isherwood said to me at this party, ‘Glenway Wescott isn’t just an old bag, he’s an old beaded bag.’”

  Illy cracked up and laughed at the ceiling. He didn’t crack up often. He must have liked Christopher Isherwood.

  “Parties. Lots of parties. They had parties all the time. Lots of old guys trying to pick up young guys. It wasn’t my thing. I heard George say something at a party I didn’t like. Someone said, ‘Why all these dancers, George? Aren’t you getting too old for all these dancers?’ George–I suppose he was drunk–said, ‘I like dancers because they fuck like minks.’ I thought, he never came to see me dance. He wasn’t really interested in dancing and he wasn’t really interested in fucking. He wanted to be surrounded by people who were fuckable, that’s all, so all his old friends could see him. I figured that out and I got out of there. Then he died. He never seemed sick when I knew him. But I called one day. It was snowing. His brother answered and said he had died the day before. He was the first person I knew well who died. It shocked me.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, throwing back the covers.

  “Aren’t you going to shower?” Illy said.

  “I don’t like showers. I like to run around smelling of you. Smelling of come, smelling of sweat. Can I borrow your blue sweater?” I was running around his bedroom buck-naked. Kind of crazy. I never knew George Platt Lynes, but it made me sad.

  I said, “I want to go to St. John the Divine and then I want to go to Greenwich Village and eat at the Blue Mill. Then to Chumley’s and laugh a lot. After all that, I want you to come home with me and stay overnight. Can we do that, Illy? I have to rehearse a modern-dance concert tomorrow with Ronald Chase, but until then let’s go have fun.” Illy’s modern-dance concert had never happened, but there was always some choreographer who wanted dancers from the opera to work.

  I was pulling on my underpants and my jeans and my sneakers. I pulled Illy’s blue sweater over my head and put my gray one into my dance bag. I’d give him back his sweater tomorrow.

  Illy said, “Okay, but you have to take a bath before you get into bed tonight.” I promised.

  Illy didn’t like to loan his clothes, so I knew his letting me wear his sweater was a big deal. It meant he really liked me. Today. And tonight.

  I loved St. John the Divine. I had never been to France. I’d never seen Notre-Dame or Chartres, those vast, dark spaces. I loved the light filtering through the stained-glass windows. And the fact that no one was there.

  Illy had been there before and liked the gloom and that smell, the cathedral smell. Old wet stone, is that it? We used to go to church in Michigan and everybody talked as though they were in a bus station. Soon God would be pulling in from Grand Rapids. Then, everybody all aboard.

  St. John the Divine was really churchy. If there is a God, he’s more likely hanging around somewhere mysterious.

  As we were leaving St. John’s I said to Illy, “Jesus never seemed to have much of
a sense of humor, did he?”

  Illy said, “Maybe he was German.”

  We went on the subway. The E from Queens, transferring to the D at Fifty-third and Seventh, then on to the A at Columbus Circle.

  Then back down to Columbus Circle from the cathedral all the way down to the West Fourth Street station in the Village.

  The Blue Mill was right next to the Cherry Lane, a gay bar with a big sign out front that said OFF LIMITS TO MILITARY PERSONNEL. We loved that. You could dance in the back room at the Cherry Lane. I liked the idea of being locked in the arms of a short, husky sailor, doing something illegal.

  The Blue Mill was full of Village people. Not the Village People but Village people–these people never change. The painters, the writers, the Village girls who always have short hair and long skirts and no makeup. So cozy. Nobody judging anyone else. Nobody even noticing anybody else. Noisy, rowdy, laughing people loading themselves with spaghetti, stuffed cabbage, and cardboard fish. This was my town. After, we went to Chumley’s on Bedford Street. Right around the corner.

  Mrs. Chumley was there-Violet Chumley, the owner. Chumley’s had been a speakeasy. There’s a kind of turnstile, where you go up a little flight of stairs and back down again, to keep the police busy, I guess, and a back door, where you can run out into a little courtyard, onto Barrow Street, and disappear around a corner. There was a Chinese bartender, who always seemed drunk. And Violet Chumley in a corner nursing a drink, with a little pair of white gloves on the table.

  She was a small woman who looked something like one of the Seven Dwarfs in a white wig and a neat little dress. She was always rather drunk and talked incessantly. Except, because she was drunk, she didn’t realize she wasn’t projecting and no words were coming out. I sat at her table occasionally to keep her company and I always pretended to hear her. Her little mouth opening and closing, with lots of smiles and chuckles. I certainly didn’t keep saying “What?” Once I leaned in very close to see if there weren’t some words perhaps that were audible and I heard, as though on a very bad connection from far away, her voice saying, “I’ve got a terrific sense of humor.” And then she chuckled. She certainly always seemed to be very satisfied, smiling and nodding and talking to herself through the long evenings.