What I thought as I got into the self-service elevator with the scarred blue walls was: I have to be a man about this. Braveness is important in the larger scheme of things. I’ve got a fifty/fifty chance of coming out alive, maybe even seventy-five/twenty-five. Also, I might have fun.
I found room four-oh-something, knocked. He answered it with a smile above the door chain, then unhooked the chain; and I stepped in. Immediately he began taking off his clothes. “You know,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed in that tiny, eighteen-dollar-a-week room, “when I was comin’ up on the elevator, there was this bitch waitin’ next to me. She been wantin’ me to fuck her now for the longest time, every time she sees me; but she won’t say it out, you know? So she asked me, tonight,” and here he switched to an incongruous falsetto, “‘You wanna come up and spend some time with me this evening, sweetheart?’ So I just said to her, ‘Sure. I’m gonna take you up to your room, an’ I’m gonna eat out your pussy, then I’m gonna stick my black dick in your face and hump till I shoot my load all over your tonsils,’ and you know what?”
I shrugged, taking off my jacket and unbuttoning my shirt.
He said: “She got so scared she almost shit! She gave this little scream,” and he mimicked a feminine cry, “and run off down the hall. I knew she would, too.” He laughed, in his own voice. “But I didn’t care; I figured you was comin’ up, so if she’d a’ said yes, I’d a’ gone with her; but if she didn’t, I’d have you.” (I wondered, as I slipped out of my pants, whose benefit this story was for.) “Bet I get her soon, though.” With all his clothes off, he sat down at the head of the bed and stretched his legs out over the blanket, pulling absently at himself and hardening. While eleven inches was an exaggeration, he had nine plus, maybe ten, which I guess is enough to brag about. I lay down on the bed between his knees and began to suck him.
He didn’t move at all.
After about three minutes, he came, and immediately reached down without even a grunt, picked up a newspaper off the floor beside the bed, and started reading. I moved over his leg to lie beside him and wait. He read for about twenty minutes, then glanced at me and said, “You want it again?”
So I got back between his legs and blew him once more. Once more he remained immobile.
This time, he came after about six minutes. Again he picked up the newspaper, but this time, as he shook out the pages, he said: “That was nice.”
By this time, I’d realized I wasn’t with any psychotic murderer. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”
He turned a page. “You see, since it was kind of cold out, I just figured I’d go out to the park and get me one of them boy-girls, you know, and bring ’im here and have me some fun.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d never thought of myself as a “boy-girl” before, and wasn’t very happy with the notion. But all terror had vanished. Now I was just curious where all this was supposed to lead. He read the paper for another twenty minutes. I lay beside him, waiting. Finally he put the paper down and put his hand on one of my buttocks. “You wanna lemme fuck you in the ass, now?”
“Eh …” I said, “I don’t think so. I don’t really like that.” I’d already learned I didn’t particularly enjoy being sodomized. Still, from those who did, I know I’d gotten several compliments on my own fucking ability. Also I’d noticed that it was often the most traditionally masculine men who most enjoyed getting fucked. “If you want,” I told him, “I’ll fuck you …?”
He put the paper down and looked at me. “You fuck me? You must be crazy, Jim.” (It was the first—and last—time I’d ever encountered the term “boy-girl,” other than in print. It was also the first time I’d heard the term “Jim”—a sort of black “Mac”—that was to become common communications provender in the sixties.) “You must be crazy,” he repeated. I had a momentary intimation of murderous rage brewing, but a second later I realized he wasn’t even angry. Just surprised. He swung his naked legs off the bed and picked up his pants. “I think it’s time for you to be goin’ anyway, Jim.”
I got up and quickly began to get into my clothes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I just wanted to know if you wanted it. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah. Sure. I guess there ain’t no way to find out if you don’t ask. That’s sure true enough.” He put on his shirt.
I got my socks and shoes on, got into my army jacket, picked up my notebook. He opened the door for me and smiled, though it was the kind of smile you might give someone you’d asked to come in who’d put his muddy shoes on the mahogany coffee table and spilled ketchup on the Persian rug.
“So long,” I said at the door.
“So long.” He closed the door behind me.
No, it hadn’t been that much fun. Walking down the hall, I could think of many that were. (The twenty-three-year-old white postal worker who drove me to his basement flat in Brooklyn … the twenty-eight-year-old Hispanic pharmacist who took me to his place on Eighty-fourth Street and, after the friendliest sex, introduced me to half a dozen other characters who lived in his building …) But this had been pedestrian and make-do—and by far the most terrifying. And because it had terrified, it had been the most educational: for it had taught me where the terror lay—not in ragged, six-foot-plus black men, who could have broken my head with a blow, enticing me up into sordid hotel rooms—but in me. As I made my way down the elevator to the lobby, I found myself thinking: in all my encounters, I’d met a handful of people who were not pleasant, and many whom I could call neurotics or all kinds of “crazy”; but so far there had been not one dangerous psychotic in the bunch.
Did this mean that there were no psychotic maniacs, lurking to wreak torture and murder in sexual situations? Not at all. It suggested this no more than a life spent flying from one side of the country to the other means that there are no horrifying plane crashes in which a hundred-plus people are killed in moments. What it meant was that, in the same way there were not enough airplane crashes to bring the institution of air travel to a halt, or even statistically to endanger the average flyer, there were not enough psychotic maniacs running around to justify the total avoidance of sexual pursuits with strangers, or statistically to endanger the average man—or woman—seeking sexual satisfaction, in whatever sexual area, from straight vanilla to heavy S& M, of any leaning.
43.8. A black man.
A gay man.
A writer.
In the hospital I also thought a lot about dawn on that Central Park bench after my night with Marilyn when I’d sat pondering the romantic ambiguities attendant on the aspects of these as they’d seemed to apply to me. But now I began to see that what I’d taken as a play of freedom and mystical possibility had actually meant something quite different.
… you are neither black nor white.
You are neither male nor female.
And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer …
In my exhaustion, what I’d been experiencing was the comfort of—for those few moments—shrugging off the social pressures I felt from being black, from being gay, indeed, from being a citizen who made art. (Above all, perhaps, from being male.) But at that time, the words “black” and “gay”—for openers—didn’t exist with their current meanings, usage, history. 1961 had still been, really, part of the fifties. The political consciousness that was to form by the end of the sixties had not been part of my world. There were only Negroes and homosexuals, both of whom—along with artists—were hugely devalued in the social hierarchy. It’s even hard to speak of that world. But looking back on that morning and the mystical ambiguities that seemed so important to it, I saw that such moments were themselves largely social and psychological illusions—unless you realized that what they meant was that forces both social and psychological were at work to pull you toward the most conservative position you might inhabit, however poorly you might be suited for it.
The mystic experience was a psychological sign that you’d
reached a cul de sac where it was too exhausting to separate the personal from the social on the most conservative level. It was an exhortation to vigilance against this muddying phenomenon, for which I suspect, a few years later, the radical slogan “The Personal is the Political” was formulated.
44. My therapy group was composed of blacks, Hispanics, and whites in about equal numbers. In my individual hour, among the first things I’d brought up with Dr. G. was my homosexuality. After all, homosexuality was a “mental problem,” if not a “mental illness”—at least in 1964. But in group session, I didn’t mention it. Not talking about something like that in a therapy session seemed to me then a contradiction in terms. I discussed it with Dr. G., who said, bless him, that if talking to the group about my homosexuality made me uncomfortable, he didn’t feel there was any pressing need for it. But that felt wrong to me. Lorenzo and Peter were certainly not characteristic of my homosexual experiences. Most of those experiences were far more sanguine. But to the extent that Lorenzo and Peter represented the place where those experiences left the given homosexual institutions—the bars or the baths or trucks or the cruisy movie houses—and impinged on the range of more standard social situations, they were certainly a locus of strain where such experiences became problematic and frustrating, despite whatever lesson I might have learned at the Endicott. I decided to bring it up anyway.
Was I scared? Yes!
But I was also scared not to. My breakdown had frightened me. I had no idea, at twenty-two, if group therapy in a mental hospital situation would help. But since I was there, it seemed idiotic to waste the therapy if it was available. Therapy to me meant talking precisely about such things.
Therefore, talk, I decided, was what I’d better do.
Most of the group didn’t threaten me. One Hispanic woman was there because she’d killed her baby and had ended up in the hospital, rather than in jail. One poor pear-shaped, working-class white man was obsessed with his stomach—should he walk around with it held out (rich and successful men always seemed to do this, he would explain to us, very humbly but at as great a length as we could tolerate), or should he hold it in (because sometimes that’s what certain other handsome and powerful men also did)? While he was there, he never did quite get that his problem was his problem—rather than his inability to resolve it. His earliest memory, he told us, was of his father bloodying his mother’s nose with a punch, while she clutched him, as an infant, in her arms, and the blood gushed down over him. … There was a pleasant, birdlike single woman, Cecile, who, when she’d been forced to retire at sixty-seven from a secretarial job she’d held since her thirties, on realizing that her options and her monies were suddenly and severely limited, had grown frightened and depressed, had refused to come out of her apartment for several weeks, and had nearly starved herself in the process. “I realize now that there’s something very wrong with that—though, Lord knows, I couldn’t have told you what it was when I was doing it.” There was an elderly Jewish woman who had flipped out, apparently, when her eighty-six-year-old and terminally ill mother had committed suicide in the Park Avenue apartment downstairs from hers. She’d been placed in the hospital by her husband, to be “cured” by the time his winter vacation came up. And, yes, the day his vacation began, he summarily removed her from the hospital, over the protests of the doctors. She left us, on her husband’s arm, whispering about how of course she was better, she had to be better, it was time to go on vacation, and, yes, she was really much better now, she felt perfectly fine, oh, she’d be just wonderful, once they got started on the trip to Colorado, they’d have a wonderful time, he’d see how much better she was. Then she’d gnaw at the lace-rimmed handkerchief around her foreknuckle, grinding her teeth loud enough for us to hear across the lobby, while her white-haired, pin-striped husband tugged her, stumbling, toward the glass doors and car waiting outside. Also in the group was an older, white-haired man named Joe, who, from his demeanor, manicure, and sweaters, I just assumed was gay, though he’d mentioned it in group session no more than had I. There was also a black twenty-year-old woman named Beverly. Endless arguments and fights between her mother and a succession of her mother’s lovers had finally driven her to live on her apartment-house roof—which is where she’d been found before she’d been brought into Mount Sinai. In all the nontherapy programs, Beverly presented herself as a ballsy black dyke. But even with the identical people, during the group session she withdrew into a near-paralyzed silence, though she claimed to have no problems talking to Dr. G. in her weekly individual hour. His presence, along with a slightly more formal seating arrangement, were the only differences in the gathering she’d seemed so comfortable and gregarious with, minutes before the official therapy hour, or indeed, minutes afterwards. But somehow the location of a chair of authority—with someone sitting in it—had much the same effect on Beverly (I couldn’t help thinking) as the citadel of “the boss” had had on Sonny.
Next to them all, I guess, I felt pretty sane.
My fear of talking about my own homosexuality, however, centered on one patient. Call him Hank.
Hank was white, about my age, and a pretty aggressive fellow. Once a young woman patient had become hysterical because she didn’t want to take some medication. Nurses, orderlies, and a resident had physically restrained her to give her an injection—when Hank had rushed up at her screams and started punching, putting a very surprised psychiatric resident on the floor. His own problem had something to do with his feet. They were perpetually sore, and it was often painful for him to walk. Nothing physical had been found wrong with them. He’d been transferred to the mental ward for observation on the chance his ailment was psychosomatic. Aside from occasional moments of belligerence, he was an affable guy. I rather liked him and, I guess, wanted him to like me. But his affability also included the odd “faggot” joke, which left me dubious over talking with him about being gay, even in “group.”
Nevertheless, I’d made up my mind.
So Monday morning, when the eighteen of us were seated around on our aluminum folding chairs, I launched in: as I recall, it was the most abject of confessions. I explained the whole thing, looking fixedly at the white-and-black vinyl floor tile. I had this problem—I was homosexual, but I was really “working on it.” I was sure that, with help, I could “get better.” I went on and on like this for about five minutes, then finally glanced up at Hank—whom I’d been afraid to look at since I’d started, and for whom, in a kind of negative way, the whole performance was geared.
And I saw something.
First, he wasn’t paying much attention. He was squiggling around in his chair. And you could tell: his feet hurt him a whole lot.
Now I explained that I’d really been most worried about his reaction—to which, as I recall, he was kind of surprised. He looked up at me, a little bemused, and said that homosexuality was just something that, gee, he didn’t know too much about.
Joe, I remember, made a measured comment during one of the silences in the discussion that followed:
“I’ve had sexual experiences with men before,” he began. “Maybe this is just something you’re going through, Chip. I mean you’re married—comparatively happily, I gather—and you say you don’t have any sexual problems there. Perhaps it’s just something you’re trying out. Soon it’ll be behind you. And it won’t worry you anymore.”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. First off, I’ve been going through it ever since I was a kid. And, second, I don’t want it to stop. I like it too much. But.…”
Which returned us to that unanswerable silence that seemed, if anything, more and more the heart of my “therapeutic” confession.
Hank’s only real comment came about an hour later, when most of us from the group were now in another room, making our potholders or picture frames. Hank suddenly turned to Joe (in his lavender angora sweater) and baldly announced, “Now, you see I figured you were that way—” while Joe raised a silvery eyebrow in a Caucasia
n version of one of Herman’s grandly black and preposterous protests in the chapel.
It was lost on Hank. “But you?” He turned to me. “Now that really surprises me. I just wouldn’t have figured that for somebody like you. That’s real strange.”
I don’t know about Joe. But right then I began to wonder if perhaps the “therapeutic” value of my confession wasn’t after all more sociological than psychological. Certainly Hank wasn’t any less friendly to me after that, as we continued through lunch and the various occupational sessions for the rest of the day. But he didn’t tell any more “faggot” jokes—not when Joe or I was around.
The most important part of the lesson resolved for me that night, however, while I was lying in bed, thinking over the day:
Thanks to my unfounded fear of Hank’s anger (the guy—like most of the world—just had too many problems of his own), what had I managed to tell them about homosexuality, my homosexuality?
There in the hospital, I had not been dwelling on the physical pleasure of homosexuality, the fear and power at the beginnings of a political awareness, or the moments of community and communion with people from over an astonishing social range, or even the disappointment that came when fear or simple inequality of interest kept encounters for one or another of us too brief; what I’d been dwelling on was much more like the incidents I’ve just recounted. (But in my therapy session, I’d told them nothing of my frustration with Peter’s rejective silence, my dislike of Lorenzo’s frenzied oblivion, or my boredom with the sheer banality of the Endicott dweller; nor what I’d learned from each; nor anything of the extraordinary range of alternatives the institutions that had grown up around us, however oppressed, offered us nevertheless. Where, then, had all the things I’d said that morning come from?
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 41