by Jarett Kobek
—Can you see that building? asked Adeline. She pointed at the narrowest, tallest building on the park’s west side. Green copper ringed its roof. Each storey had three windows facing the park.
—That’s my dormitory, said Adeline. Not the whole thing. Parsons only has floors four through eight. I live on the sixth.
When we arrived at the building, I read the words carved along the length of its marble portico. BANK OF THE METROPOLIS. The address was 31 Union Square West, next door to 33, the building where Valerie Solanas fired 32-caliber slugs into Andy Warhol’s exploding plastic inevitable torso. But I didn’t know anything about Andy. Not then.
Adeline passed through the first door, stopping in the antechamber. Behind a glass window, a tired old man sat at a makeshift desk. He didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything. Just sighed and buzzed us through the second door, waved at Adeline and returned to his black-and-white television.
The lobby was narrow, with a set of steps at the back. There were two elevators. We rode in the one on the left.
—This is my first time in an elevator, I confessed.
—How do you find it, Baby?
—It’s faster on television, I said.
The front door of her suite opened into a big, dusty space that was half living room, half kitchen. The stove was filthy, caked with the debris from years of careless frying and boiling. A small hallway led to the bathroom and two separate rooms. Every wall painted dead white.
Adeline’s room was at the front of the hallway. The second bedroom, farther back, was shared by two girls from South Korea, Sun-Yoon and Jae-Hwa. They’d both adopted American names. Jane and Sally, respectively. It fell on Jane to try and keep the suite clean, but some places are too old. Even the carpeting rotted with mold. What could one girl do against decades of urban decay?
—Welcome to 6B, said Adeline.
We went into her tiny room. The floor was bare linoleum. Adeline’d covered her walls with images and photos. Famous people, fashion photographs, cheap reproductions. A poster of Max Ernst’s The Robing of the Bride. I didn’t recognize it. Another announcing performances by Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Hollywood Palladium on June 6 and 7. A full string of Christmas lights stapled around the window, casting a soft glow.
At the room’s center stood a ladder that went up a good ten feet before disappearing into a dark oblong space. I climbed up and poked my face through the hole. The ceiling was three feet from the crown of my head. Twin mattress, sans boxspring, on either side, recessed into crude wooden containers.
People lived like this, sleeping three meters off the floor.
—Put down your bag, said Adeline. We’ll find you food.
I planted myself on a half-broken couch in the common area, watching her slap lunch meat atop some very dubious bread. I noticed her toenails, their jagged edges and chipped black polish.
Sun-Yoon came out of her room.
—Jane, said Adeline, this is my friend Baby.
—Hi, I said.
Sun-Yoon didn’t respond. The mustard bottle made a wet farting noise.
—Baby will be staying with us for some small while, until he gets his act together. He rode in tonight from Wisconsin.
—Hello, said Sun-Yoon. She closed the bathroom door behind her. She turned on the shower.
—Sun-Yoon’s food is the one sacred commodity of this suite, said Adeline. She and Sally voice frequent complaints to the head of housing about my scavenging.
Sitting on the pillows in Adeline’s room, stuffing myself, it came to me that I hadn’t eaten since I’d stepped off the bus. Adeline handed me a cup.
—What’s in it? I asked.
—It’s liquor, Baby, what else would it be?
I sucked it down like Coca-Cola, burning the back of my throat. Alcohol takes hold fast, but I never know when it’s hit. What killed me was the tiny size of her room. There wasn’t any shelving for her clothes, so Parsons had provided an upright closet. That, combined with the crummy desk, occupied half the usable space.
The upright closet made me shudder.
We talked, we talked, we talked.
Adeline told me that she was from Pasadena, a city outside of Los Angeles. I asked if her family was in the movie business. She scoffed and said, no, her dad had been a well-regarded dentist and oral surgeon. He’d invested heavily, and wisely, in real estate. He practiced on famous clients. I squealed, asking who he’d worked on, but Adeline couldn’t think of anyone other than the time when her dad put a cap on the lower left incisor of two-time Academy Award winner Jason Robards. A few days later her father fell down dead in his office, victim of a burst heart, leaving Adeline alone with her mother.
—A month ago I ran into Mr. Robards, said Adeline. He lives outside of the city, in Connecticut. He hadn’t the slightest who I was, but I told him about Daddy. He felt sorry enough that he bought me ice cream at Serendipity. It was so kitsch.
After her husband’s death, Adeline’s mother sublimated her grief by entering a wild period of excess. I pressed for details, curious about the potential decadences of a middle-aged woman, but Adeline demurred, saying it was old news. Only recently, her mother’d calmed down and settled into a period of comfortable, blurry alcoholism.
—Mother’s become a pleasant enough souse, said Adeline, very much like Myrna Loy in The Thin Man. But Mother’s so much older than Myrna was when Myrna ran with William Powell. It’s a bit pathetic.
—Why don’t you have a roommate?
—Mother and I conspired, she said. I visited Dr. Jacobs, Mother’s analyst. I told Dr. Jacobs that I’d go simply mad if I had to have a roommate. The good doctor sent along a note saying that I suffer from an unspecified mental condition and must at all costs live alone.
Ashamed that I lacked any good stories of my own, no wild periods of excess, I talked about farming. About the empty lives in the middle of this American continent. Adeline gave me the impression that she’d only ever been in California and New York, leapfrogging her way over the great nothingness of the U.S.A., never confronting the dumb, open faces of this country’s people.
Through her window, I caught my first glimpse of New York daybreak, when the sky lightens and strips the earth of its color. Adeline pulled down the cheap plastic shade, plunging us into off-season Christmas illumination.
—Time for bed, she said.
—Adeline, I said, why did you invite me here?
—You’re a sailor without any port of call.
—But you aren’t expecting anything, are you?
—Expecting?
—You know, I said. Expecting.
She leaned forward. I stiffened, freaked out that I’d made an accidental pass. I didn’t want to be kicked out, not now, not after she’d been so nice.
—Baby, she asked, don’t you favor men?
My bag was still on the linoleum floor, beside her yellow shoes. A lot of good clothes in that bag.
—Yes, I said.
Which was the first time aloud.
—Then why should I expect anything?
—But how can you tell?
—You put up a decent front, said Adeline, but you won’t be able to hide here. This city is queerer than a three dollar bill. Take the spare bed and tomorrow we’ll cut that hair and find you some reasonable clothes.
—What’s wrong with my hair? I asked, but Adeline climbed the ladder without answering.
OCTOBER 1986
Baby Learns One or Two Things About Life in New York
The next morning, Adeline pulled opened her shade, and I looked out toward Mays and the other stores along the south side of the park. The Zeckendorf Towers were rising.
I did get my hair cut, by the by. Adeline herself wielded the scissors. For years I’d hidden myself beneath a bowl, only another decent lad from the badlands. Adeline chopped away the blond veil, exposing my bone structure and the general shape of my head.
For my clothes, we pilgrimaged around the building, taking al
ms offered by fashion students. These donations carried me through my first few days, until Monday next when Adeline rushed into the suite carrying several large bags, claiming that she’d gone to the Salvation Army on Fourth Avenue. I picked through the too-clean shirts and pants, noting in silence that someone’d forgotten to take off the price tags from Macy’s and Saks.
Six days earlier, I’d been a long-legged hick, a cornpone fresh from the farm. Now I saw myself in the mirror, with new clothes and a juicy haircut. I was dead sexy. And so, so, so clearly gay. I could see it in my lips and my hairline, in the tightness of my facial muscles. God, how did I think I could hide? I was such a homo.
We never spoke of the boy Adeline rescued from a squat in Alphabet City, that child who faded into a persona non grata, unmentioned, like a mentally retarded cousin spirited away to a Victorian country asylum.
Weeks rolled by. I wandered New York, its manic energy seeping into my bones. The pavement vibrated, resonating with billions of earlier footsteps, centuries of people making their way, the city alive with the irregular heartbeat of its million cars and trucks, of its screaming pedestrians, its vendors and hustlers. The roar and clamor infected my blood, transforming my walk. Gone was my lumbering gait, now I moved sleek footed and fast as a shadow.
I went anywhere that Adeline asked. I never said no. Art openings, movies, sometimes museums. I remember one film that we saw together, Peggy Sue Got Married at the Quad Cinema, a corny fantasy about a woman attending her twenty-fifth high school reunion, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
As these things are wont to happen, Peggy Sue is crowned queen of the event. She suffers a panic attack at the moment of her coronation, fainting into darkness. When Peggy Sue regains consciousness, she discovers herself transported into her own past, trapped in high school and doomed to re-create the miseries of her youth.
At the film’s beginning, Peggy Sue has achieved a belated adulthood and decides to wrest control of her destiny by divorcing her unfaithful husband. By the end credits, she’s submitted to the humiliations of her adolescence, the knowingness of a grown woman being no defense against the idiotic mistakes of youth. Peggy Sue reverts to her girlish persona, awakens in the present, and stands by her man. Adeline hated the resolution, calling it antifeminist, but for me, the central premise was the true horror, this idea that the universe could take your life away on a whim, could force you back.
We also caught The Godfather at the Film Forum on Watts Street and Sixth Ave., an extended leather fantasy by the same director. The plot is pretty simple. Marlon Brando, the original motorcycle stud, rules over the Corleones, a family of closet cases. All of Marlon’s naughty boys are beholden to the eldest, an ultra-butch and hairy James Caan, who ruts around the family estate like a randy bull. Al Pacino gets a hard-on for the lifestyle after a silver daddy police captain teaches him to respect the whip. Al goes wild, dishing out damage on every bitch that he can find. It’s much better than Peggy Sue Got Married.
Adeline knew everyone, was invited to countless parties. In the East Village, the West Village, Greenwich Village, Alphabet City, SoHo, the Upper East Side, Battery Park, even the outer boroughs. We attended them all.
The only parties I didn’t enjoy were those thrown by people from Parsons. Adeline couldn’t help herself. Whenever she saw a gay classmate, she’d push us together.
—But Baby, you two have so much in common. Think of the discussions!
Yes, we do, I’d think, but I couldn’t, not really, not then. Plus, at a party? Who wants to sleep with someone they met at a party?
That’s a pointless question, because Adeline offered its answer. The inevitable narrative justification for our attendance was Adeline’s desire for suitable bedmates. In reality, despite her hours of flirting and dancing, she rarely slept with anyone. Which got me thinking about the difference between people’s idea of themselves and the way that they truly are, the vast gulf between human aspirations and the hard quirks of personality that nothing can efface.
A lucky few made the cut, earning a chance to initiate themselves in the mysteries of her orifices. Then I’d be out on the couch in the common area.
As a survival strategy, I befriended Sally and Jane. Or tried to, anyway. Jane never warmed up to me, although she appreciated my futile attempts to help her clean the suite. Sally and I got along, despite the language barrier, and she often fed me. Neither complained to the head of housing.
The longest lasting of Adeline’s young men claimed to be from Santiago, speaking with a heavy accent, but one time I walked with him across the park, to a deli, looking to buy pop. A Mexican kid worked the cash register. He tried talking to the guy from Santiago. En Español. Nothing, not even a response, the guy from Santiago’s eyes glazed over, not recognizing the language.
We walked back with Adeline’s boy-toy chattering on about American baseball, about the Mets, with whom he’d fallen in love while watching the World Series, about Bill Buckner being a divine gift from Tío Dios. I thought about saying something to Adeline, but why bother? I knew that he’d be gone in a few weeks.
Myself, I was too square, too backwards for rank promiscuity. I assumed it’d come, somehow, probably, but I’d only just admitted aloud my need for other men and their bodies. I envisioned looming decades of erect cocks. My pleasures now were simple. I was Adeline’s awkward friend, the quiet type standing beside her as she denounced Jeff Koons to her classmates. It was enough to keep my eyes on the glorious bodies, listening to their banal dialogues, enjoying some kind of wonderful.
I feasted on humanity, on people.
Like that man on the eleventh floor. By that glorious being alone may we describe New York City in the Year of Our Lord, 1986.
How did he appear? Portly, not fat. Tall, graying goatee. Often seen wearing a ridiculous fedora. I espied him on occasion, typically in the elevator, but never attached him with any undue importance. He appeared as only one of many adults wrestling with the unhappy fact that four floors of their apartment building were under occupation by an invading force of drugged and dissolute college students.
And then one day, Adeline pointed at the man from the eleventh floor as he walked out from beneath the portico. She whispered:
—Do you see that fellow? That man’s name is Thomas M. Disch. You won’t know his work. I gather he’s some sort of science fiction writer. Which is a lot of dreadful stuff, don’t you think? Robots and spaceships.
Science fiction.
Among his many flaws, my father had spent most of his life as an inveterate aficionado of the genre. Stacks of rotting paperbacks in the barn, yellowing books that he tried to get me to read. I refused. The closest I came was The Fellowship of the Ring. Which broke his heart, really, because the old man was a hardliner who believed in a strict division between genres.
One year he left the family behind and drove to MiniCon, a science fiction convention held in Minneapolis. A writer named Spider Robinson was the Guest of Honor. My father loved Robinson’s books, all of which I gather take place in a ribald saloon located somewhere in outer space. When the old man came home, he couldn’t shut up about the experience. The writers he met, the books they signed, the panels he attended. We got sick of hearing about it. Spider Robinson is a fucking idiotic name.
I started a lonely vigil, keeping an eye out for Thomas M. Disch, imagining that I’d seen his books in my father’s collection. But that was wishful thinking, I’m sure, misremembering volumes by Gordon R. Dickson with some hope of a connection to my distant, dead parent.
I saw Thomas M. Disch three or four times, perhaps five. On one occasion, he was in a heated, screaming argument with another man. I’d seen this other man around the building with greater frequency than Thomas M. Disch. From their voices and postures, I understood they were having the complicated kind of fight that my parents took up on blank nights when the television offered nothing and there was no other outlet for their attentions.
A lovers’ quarrel. So th
at was it, then. A queer science fiction writer living at the top of Union Square. A queer science fiction writer with a steady boyfriend. Now I really wanted to talk to Thomas M. Disch, now it went well beyond my father. I wanted to ambush Thomas M. Disch in the elevator and ask how? how? HOW? HOW?
How do you live like this, how did you learn this, how did you become a gay man writing about robots? How do you manage your steady beau?
But I was too shy.
I did the next best thing, walking to 12th and Broadway, to the store I’d seen on my first night in the city. Above its plate-glass windows ran flat red rectangular panels with white block letters: STRAND BOOK STORE. EIGHT MILES OF BOOKS. Embedded within the panels were smaller white signs with black lettering: LIBRARIES BOUGHT and OLD RARE NEW.
As I stood across the street, looking at the store, a little man on his dirty bicycle pedaled past, a boombox wedged into his wire handlebar basket. Tinny music rose above the clamor of cars: Yeah, heard about your Polaroids / that’s what I call obscene / tricks with fruit / it’s kind of cute / I bet you keep the pussy clean.
I’ve originated a baroque theory that the Strand is in some inexplicable way a microcosm mirroring the city’s greater social experience. In recent years, they’ve remodeled the place, made it as clean as an infant’s nursery, and opened up the second floor. By contrast, Patti Smith starved there in the ’70s.
In ’86, it was a studied disaster, fucked up, cluttered and devastated. Entering its single door, there was a bag check at your immediate right, a crap desk surrounded by poorly carved wooden cubbyholes and staffed by the least pleasant person in the building. After passing this modern-day Cerberus, you’d lose yourself on the overstuffed ground floor, wandering beneath green fluorescent lighting, examining books crammed into wooden and gray metal shelves, arranged in arbitrary distinctions that separated ‘Fiction’ from ‘Literature’. The basement was a labyrinth of half-price review hardcovers and all the other weird shit that couldn’t fit on the first floor.