Baker’s voice, motherly, called to children now past comfort. Her voice berated itself for subtractions far past anyone’s controlling.
In this weather, in this shower,
I would never have sent the children out.
They were dragged out.
I was not allowed to say anything against it.
In this weather, in this storm,
I would never have let the children go.
I was afraid it would make them ill,
but these were vain thoughts.
In such weather, in this awfulness,
I would never have let the children go out.
Past Robert, my old lady now shook with a grief far larger than Carnegie Hall. I wondered at the number of her children lost, disappeared into what ice storms, what trains, what horrors of history? Gone without their lunch money and galoshes, making her feel even worse at mothering. Decades later, her crying still came as fresh and unashamed as someone shaken by three sneezes in a row, her usual quota.
When, at intermission, all the lights assaulted us, the widow saw me notice her, she turned her face, not away, but directly toward mine. The look she gave was so frozen and defended. It showed all the unasked-for poise of Antarctica. Herded and banished by world events, her pain had evolved in an isolation so complete. A mother’s terror long past shame. Would I ever deal with such agony? How had she borne the complexities of even acquiring a ticket to tonight’s music? Small, wet eyes seemed far past caring what I thought of her. And yet, those very eyes remained steadied, immense in their pert, acid pride. Her pride was the pride of someone who has kept alive this high level of honored pain. If it was her children she’d sat recalling, then her dead offspring tonight seemed nearly as alive to me as Mahler’s own. Her face said direct into my innocence, “Zhey are all gone. I am still here. Vhat do you expect?”
I knew that, in the conventional lexicon of emotion, losing one’s children is considered fate’s worst blow. But, still an untried kid myself, I guessed that, apart from the progeny my sperm donations spawned, I would never have any real kids of my own. I remember—(and I admit this with shame)—I half envied her. I felt I would never know the sensation that gave this eighty-pound woman the weight of the entire Old World, Bible-black. I coveted her knowledge.
It’s one of a fairy tale’s tricks—you offer the idiot third son one wish for anything—then you distract him so he’ll ask, not for all the world’s gold, but one glass of water, please. Anything on earth? I’d just wished for the stature of that lady’s tragedy joined to my own lite-tuneful happy ending, please.
And it was that night at Carnegie, it was amid the battling perfumes and accents in the lobby at intermission, it came with Robert standing off to one side in the usual group of iron filings drawn to him and calling him by name (he would later say he’d never seen any of them before). I was leaning against one of those big columns, reading the translations of one song for one dead child. I was congratulating myself on having got it mostly right when somebody said, “Excuse me, coming through,” and, irritating, a bike tire almost crushed my foot. I recognized Ed, now pushing someone old in a wheel-chair. Chair and driver took a place on the far side of the lobby, making sure to stay near the middle facing outward, for, it seemed, the amusement of the chair’s passenger.
I saw Ed recognize me and, polite, I waved across the crowd. I returned to studying my program but soon grew interested in the seated person. I’d never seen anyone so sick in public. He was yellow-gray and the hair was mostly gone and a bone structure was apparent, even to the way the human jaw is hinged.
Slowly, I came to understand a weird militance in Ed’s stance, his placing the chair mid-lobby. It came clear to me that the chair’s occupant, head held up as if with an effort, fighting to seem natural here, was not old at all. He looked like some boy freeze-dried ancient, burned there from the inside out.
They had covered his legs with cashmere tartan blankets, and he wore a sort of improvised paisley shawl and sat there, stork, anomaly. Settled like a jar lid atop his bald head, a Moroccan cap of geometric stitchery, festive. How eventual was the crowd’s slight clearing from his side of the lobby. It became easier and easier to see Ed and his patient and the two other gay men, banding together yet facing outward, as if to fend off some expected insult or harsh look. A voice spoke to me so close I jumped. Robert, “See him? Know who that was?”
I said no.
“That’s Horse from the Boy Bar.”
“Naw. Can’t be. We saw him at that Fassbinder thing not six months ago, guy still looked like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. The speed is unreal. Science fiction. Robert, but what got him?”
“‘It,’ Hart.”
“‘It’? As in ‘Check for spots and unexpected bruises’?”
“Ditto, that it.”
“Funny, I’ve lived in New York long enough so I started believing I’d never again see anything really new. This, though, is, right? I better go over and speak. Just say hi to Ed. The one pushing? he’s the window treatment guy in boots from that first night. ‘Bored of Ed,’ remember? I’ll just step over there, weigh in. Look how sad they look. Everybody’s playing like they don’t quite notice why they’re flocking away. Really should, just as a sign of … whatever. I don’t have to say ‘How are you?’ or anything, just to, you know, pop over there would be the …” Our bell rang, lights blinked once and so, shrugging, I turned back toward the hall. “No.” Robert looked my way, Robert a fraction aghast at me, I fear. “We’ll step across together, ‘ll only take a sec, won’t it?”
“That’s right,” I said. So we did. They really seemed to appreciate it. You could see that. Especially with its being Robert Christian Gustafson who bent down beside the chair and said something funny if dry, all charm. Stooping there, he reminded Horse of some Italian beauty Horse had won away from Robert last thing at the door one night. I was there with my pleasantries, of course. Ed seemed easier to approach; Horse, after all, had never known me to speak to. After Robert and I headed back into the hall, I saw a few others rush toward the wheelchair, just before the doors swung shut—barring us all from our mixed reward, further Mahler, songs of a wandering solitary youth—the concert’s final half.
Like us, these guys had been tucked back, small among the giant columns. Ready, in a way, to be heroic—but uncertain when they’d really have to start.
Last Natural Exits
art of the fun was bumping into things that stirred you by mistake. Given how New York was all the earth’s distant orange groves made into so local a concentrate, we had all we needed on our block. Ossorio’s for nerve stimulation, good talk, and a little short-term credit on pastries if you had nothing else to eat.
Mrs. Park’s vegetable stand stayed open all hours except between two and five a.m., and she seemed to sleep sitting up at the register with a hose in her free hand blasting the arugula: With money earned here she was putting a daughter through MIT and a son through, incongruously, Vassar. Modern Dry Cleaning presided over by the gifted, if seldom heard mezzo (our Nina—being of a different, straighter, older generation—could not be asked to do our cleaning for free: but she would put a “rush” on a suit if you told her you required it, not just for a job interview, but an “audition” Tuesday early); The Honored Owl, our basement stall where great used books could be had for coins, and it didn’t matter that they were peppered with ancient cracker crumbs or stank of mildew if they cost 10–98 cents.
Robert found and forced on me Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. “It’s a real page turner,” he said, “you’ll want to see how it all turns out.” Robert explained that Defoe had not personally experienced the plague he’d put on record. He had interviewed old, old survivors, he used published memoirs and the public lists of deaths. Defoe’s book was like Stephen Crane’s acrid, honest account of Civil War battle; sometimes the best records get written by those listening kids born one generation late. “Like this,” he read,
It came
me very warmly into my mind one morning, as I was musing … that as nothing attended us without the direction or permission of Divine Power, so (the plague’s) disappointments must have something in them extraordinary, and I ought to consider whether it did not evidently point out … that it was the will of Heaven I should not leave London now the plague had really started.
It immediately followed in my thoughts, that, if it really was from God, that I should stay, he was able effectually to preserve me in the middle of all the death and danger that would surround me; and that if I attempted to secure myself by fleeing from my habitation, and acted contrary to these intimations … it was a kind of flying from God, and he could cause his justice to overtake me when and where he thought fit.
Robert became a convert to Walt Whitman and, like nine out of ten young gay composers in New York, he set a few Whitman poems for voice and piano or guitar.
Angie lived on Thompson Street, but kept a studio on the Lower East Side; since the day she took top prize in the Georgia public schools fish and birdlife mural “paint-off” held in Athens (Georgia), slapping up a sunfish the size of an archery target, she had always “painted big.” She’d sure used up a lot of pigment, Angie. You could tell by just looking at her hair and fingernails. Another friend, that rawboned fellow new here from Montana, sublet a crash pad far up near Harlem. At three a.m., downtown Angie phoned her uptown pal, waking Ansel.
“I’m working like mad. Pearl Paint is closed, and I’m like fresh out of cerulean blue. Damn mouse got the last good dollop. Gone, the Winsor-Newton I bought instead of paying all my water bill? I’m clean out. —Look, I know it’s late, but do you have any handy, any cerulean? And I’m afraid I mean, now?”
“Unh hunh,” he, half asleep. And, wearing the motorcycle jacket and boots and jeans and his U. of Montana at Missoula pajama shirt—Ansel slouched toward the subway—holding before him the new tube like a single birthday candle. The price tag was still gummed to it, and he transferred at Grand Central and forty-three minutes later knocked on her door.
“Great.” Angie took it without feeling the need for a single thank you. Unscrewing the white cap, she literally ran back to her overloaded easel. So Ansel aimed again toward the street and then a train that would empty him into bed. Ansel had handed it over and—not invited in for coffee, silent, still half sleeping—headed home.
It was that automatic. A sense of fatalist mission joined us. If you made sacrifices for your art, your friends were included as your artform’s own extension, its first audience, the fellow sufferers, its penniless patrons. Since “tension” or “battle” is the subject of all art, even at its most serene, your work did homage to your friends’ own daily struggles in theirs. What I best recall from my present subway platform (called incoming Address Book Number Fourteen), is an unadorned idealism and how little we held back from it, and from each other.
Do I idealize our early idealism?
Let me.
The truth is, our community would meet a waiting test beyond imagining. Picture that last tea-dance in the first-class ballroom of the Titanic, just before the ice. Imagine how all these pretty people presently being charming and sociable and complimenting each others’ foxtrotting will soon line up for too few lifeboats.
Imagine how the band now buoyant with a mindless “Bicycle Built for Two” will veer toward a noticed heartfelt “Nearer My God to Thee,” then silence. String instruments (being wooden, buoyant, lifeboadike) float, then don’t. Wind instruments (like us, being vertical esophageal hollows) submerge almost at once.
Imagine that—through the ultimate life-and-death emergency—civility and affection somehow improbably hold. (Sure, there is one cad who dresses in his wife’s clothes and tries to take advantage of an exemption called Women and Children First.) But mostly it is “After you.” It is mainly people gesturing each other toward the single valued lifeboat: “No, you go, please. We’ll clean up here. ‘ll be along in time. You next. Here, allow me to help you in, please. No problem. So long. Soon …”
Let me idealize, please. The coming pandemic “made men” even of the ones it killed, especially those. It made “men” of those men still today considered too fey or artistic to openly serve in our armed forces. It made “women” of the girls in whose Class of 1980 we’d wildly arrived. It gave us a war’s casualties and a war’s proud, guilty (and therefore overtalkative) survivors … forgive me.
It created a warfare’s frontline, very isolated and quite pure. Even subscribers to Soldier of Fortune—those guys monthly seeking our planet’s “hot spots” likeliest to prove kilns for true maleness—even some of those men slowly understood that—trench warfare requiring the ultimate testosterone—was blazing away in a most unlikely frontier called Greenwich Village Basement Apartments.
Confusingly, perverse, all this soon blazed alongside healthy career advancement.
Phantom Ranking
f our fame was still asymptomatic on a national level, we were at least beginning to enjoy it on the head-turning map of our own West Village. Conceive the joy in overhearing someone younger point to you on the street and whisper, “Psst. Don’t stare now, but I think that over there looks like … (imagine your name here). His last story, in that little magazine, made me laugh, then cry buckets. Same alphabet as ours. But how does he do it? And physically, still so well preserved.”
Hometown friends, having jetted in to shop or “see the shows,” invited us from our downtown ghetto for complimentary meals at expense-account restaurants where oil execs fed. “Up” we came from the The Sewer’s lower depths.
It was our blooming underground notoriety that these distant, prospering friends would never understand. They themselves were so Aboveground, so Mainline, and therefore so utterly out of it. The cover of Time and nothing less would do. Nothing else would convince them we had “won.”
They didn’t understand that, living in neighborhoods as wonderful if risky as ours, we’d formed an “All for One, and One for All” fraternity-sorority. We now spoke pidgin Spanish or Polish or Italian. Angie, a second-tier Episcopalian out of Savannah, had arrived in New York with lucky brunette hair. She (“Angelina,” not Alabama there) passed for Italian, got herself a great bargain of a place on Thompson Street. She faked for so many years, she’d become something of an honorary “paisan” in the eyes of her vigilant stoop-sitting Italian widows. She flirted with their sentimental leg-breaking sons who so perfectly defended Angie and her naturalized neighborhood.
We belonged here now. We walked like natives, direct, unflappable, observant; our shoulders tacitly signaled other pedestrians when we were about to make a turn. I could now study our block the way I’d seen my dad scan our old backyard, with a proud and factual vigilance. I felt safe on our street while wearing my nightshirt. Summers here, I even went without shoes.
Maybe more important than any single work of art we had yet made—we’d founded this ragged-ass impromptu village. Insane, fleeing towns of ten thousand in order to found another just two hundred strong. But its unity would lead us, goad us, bully us—toward our greatest masterpiece—the nursing, cheering, burying of our own.
—Denied the cover of Time, indeed.
Flipping through Robert’s Defoe, I came upon this:
My friend Dr. Heath was of opinion that (the plague) might be known by the smell of their breath; but then as he said who durst smell to that breath for this information, since to know it he must draw the stench of the plague up into his own brain in order to distinguish the smell? I have heard it was the opinion of others that it might be distinguished by the party’s breathing upon a piece of glass, where, the breath condensing, there might living creatures be seen by a microscope, of strange, monstrous, and frightful shapes, such as dragons, snakes, serpents, and devils, horrible to behold. But this I very much question the truth of, and we had no microscopes at that time, as I remember, to make the experiment with.
I put that book down so fast.
False Positive
s
irst there was no test to let you know who would get it and who might live. Then a jackleg test existed but one riddled with false positives, terrible reversals. An acquaintance received good news, he threw himself a major bash, then next morning got the “oops” phone call. He packed at once, moved home to Utah.
A fate worse than death, or was it? Finally, one accurate battery of blood samplings existed. I put off even considering it. I gave myself so many excuses. Even if you knew, what could you do about it, except feel suicidal, or move south, cave in? My decision was: Whatever distanced me from my untested friends, I didn’t want. If it spotted me, I’d spot the spot; I’d know. Otherwise, I’d rush until the leash ran out.
Looking back, you forget how suddenly it all came on us, how few choices it offered us. It was, as Angie said, “The Lotto called Blotto.” I did urge a few others to go get tested but only because they focused so singly on the test itself, the worry was literally driving them mad. I wondered if I’d ever find nerve for that Russian roulette of knowing. I recalled my address book, lost without my own name written in it anywhere. Even as I carried soup upstairs to one friend with a cold that wouldn’t quit, even after chatting up our familiar pharmacist about his grandkids in North Carolina, I somehow held off knowing. Knowing about my pals’ life expectancies, knowing my own best-if-used-before date. Partly, I was being existential. Largely, I was being chickenshit.
New York had already battered me to where I was never again asked for photo ID. I’d not got laid for two months; lately I couldn’t get arrested. Having eased Robert through his being jumped and mugged, I eventually took note: I myself had stitches up my side, and not ones sutured by some artful plastic surgeon. I lied that they were “distinguished,” my Heidelberg dueling scar. They gathered, raw, a pink side seam on Dr. Frankenstein’s rush-job humanoid. They and my address book: early proof that I had lived.
Plays Well With Others Page 24