The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  This is how we acquired Paulie—one Memorial Day, as he was being arrested on Riis Beach for exposing his navel.

  He began singing “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” while the cop issued him a ticket. He had a commanding and classically trained tenor, and we turned to see where it was coming from. We were surprised to find a delicate, curly-haired boy, with elfin features that, we learned later, turned somewhat troll-like in distress. “Midnight Confessions” had been playing on someone’s radio: they turned it off. Paulie sang even more spiritedly then, and a couple of castrati joined in: And the people all said beware (beware!). In that moment Paulie seemed to all of us a leading man, though he would turn out to stay a chorus boy forever.

  Later, we took him out, to a restaurant on a patio overlooking the water.

  “Oh, don’t flatter yourself,” said Stephen, who was in his usual spirits. Not that it mattered much, at first: Stephen had the sort of face you didn’t want to give up on. “Everyone gets arrested on that beach. He’s been arrested on that beach.”

  He was pointing at Brookie, who was sprawled over the railing, trying to feed a french fry to a seagull that would neither take it nor go away.

  “Was that what you were arrested for?” said Paulie.

  “It was something sorta like this,” said Brookie. “The thing wasn’t a french fry, but the gentleman was a seagull.”

  We laughed, especially Paulie.

  “And is that where the long arm of the law caught you?” Paulie pointed to the scar on Brookie’s arm: this was a raised fascicle of flesh, somewhat smaller than a hand. “You poor dear.”

  He trilled his fingers on Brookie’s deltoid, waiting for someone to tell him the tale.

  Brookie had gotten the scar a few years back while protesting all-white hiring at a White Castle. This was a very good story, which was maybe why Brookie did not tell it—perhaps he’d vowed not to spend this currency on another white boy’s regard. Or maybe he was expecting one of us to tell it for him, compounding his valor with discretion; for whatever reason, valorous or otherwise, we did not.

  “It wasn’t about you,” Stephen said abruptly, and we all looked at him. His moods would reorganize, but never fundamentally alter, according to circumstance: he was like a compass, spinning around and around to always point in the same direction. “It’s because it’s a holiday weekend. They did the same thing before the World’s Fair. They did the same thing before the Chicago World’s Fair, when they hauled out all the horse manure.”

  “Stephen is incredibly interested in horse manure, you’ll find.”

  “Furthermore…” Stephen’s hair was falling in his face. It was feathery and light and we told him it made him look like John Lennon—or, when we were in a certain mood, Farrah Fawcett. “…if the police were really trying to arrest every stereotype on that beach—”

  “Stereotype!” Paulie cried. “Who’s a stereotype?” He cast a wrist over his forehead and pretended to fan himself. There was something aristocratic about Paulie, in spite or maybe because of his imperfect teeth and waxy skin—perhaps they subtly suggested Britishness, hemophilia. His eyes, one had to admit, were very blue.

  “—then they wouldn’t do anything else, and we’d see complete societal breakdown.”

  “A stereotype!” Paulie’s performance had veered Deep South, with notes of Scarlett O’Hara. “A stereotype! What ahn akuzaytion!”

  “I’m going to need the vapors myself, if this keeps up.”

  “A stereotype! My word!” Paulie paused a few beats longer than any director would have allowed. “Darlings, I’m the prototype.”

  The food arrived, with excellent timing, and Paulie clasped his hands together in supplication. He then declared in an impeccable Vivien Leigh that, as God was his witness, he would never go hungry again.

  * * *

  —

  Years later—when we were at the very beginning of the very end, and had stopped speaking of our aspirations as ongoing—Brookie suggested that this whole episode had been staged.

  “You knew everyone was looking,” said Brookie. “It was the biggest audience of your life! And here I’m thinking, why are the cops bothering this little white chickadee? Do they not see they have a black man right here, just sitting on a towel like he owns the thing? Are they just gonna let me get away with that?”

  Under his mask, Paulie smiled with his eyes.

  “So this is already highly suspicious. Then, as to the lewdness—on the one hand, yes, okay, here is this gorgeous boy’s exposed navel.”

  “Well—not only his navel.”

  “Meanwhile there are so many exposed cocks on that beach it’s a miracle no one’s put an eye out. Right next to me, mere moments ago, a soda bottle has disappeared into an asshole.”

  Paulie shook his head.

  “Hand to God,” said Brookie. “It was there, then it was gone. And that’s not the only thing. All around us we’ve got disappearing cocks, fists, dildos—”

  “Suspension bridges—”

  “Someone’s probably taken the cop’s gun and put that into an asshole—”

  “There’s probably someone out in the water trying to fist a shark.”

  Paulie was laughing soundlessly through his oxygen mask.

  “Now, there’s a menace to society,” said Brookie. “The guy out there with the shark.”

  “Why can’t the cops arrest him?”

  “Or at least one of these tired old queens who’s blocking my view of the water?”

  “Who knows where that parasol is about to go!”

  “—and out of this entire den of iniquity, the police wanna go after him? This beautiful boy and his beautiful navel?”

  We fell silent, allowing this injustice to spiral the room—while protozoa, pneumocystic and innumerate, swelled in Paulie’s lungs. We stared at his hands. There was a purple umbra where the IV went in—to help him eat, the doctor said, which was how we learned he couldn’t—and his nail beds, we saw, were turning the same color.

  “Of all the dens of iniquity, in all the towns, in all the world—”

  Paulie was shaking his head with a familiar, throwback sort of disapproval. He pulled off his mask.

  “Of awl the dehns of ini-kwity.” He paused, breathing shallowly. His Bogart was still pretty good: it was probably the last to go. “In awl the towns.” He paused for longer, then shook his head again and put the mask back on.

  “But we’ve got your number now,” said Brookie, once he could talk again. “We know the score. You’d spotted opportunity. You were trying to get discovered.”

  Paulie pulled off his mask again. Underneath his sores, we thought we saw the faintest pentimento of a smile—afterward, we said we were sure we did.

  “Well,” he said. “It worked.”

  * * *

  —

  In June, Paulie moved into the apartment on Fifteenth Street. The place then was all cinderblock shelves, tapestries strewn over milk crates. In the kitchen, we kept turntables on the stove burners. We had an ancient tub where we sometimes chilled champagne and where, one memorable Sunday, a corpulent lover of Stephen’s was discovered taking an actual bath. There were not, were never, enough bedrooms. Paulie’s had been a sewing room once: it had no heat and no closet (“Get it?” he liked to say, despite frequent assurances that we did). He slept there in a swirl of fake Twiggy lashes and Zig-Zag cigarette papers. He’d tried to put up a Funny Girl poster in the bathroom, but Brookie banished it after a week. “I just can’t piss with Barbra Streisand staring at me,” he said. “She always looks like she knows something.”

  It was a time of scheming, of radically expanding hopes. On a single afternoon in July, five hundred of us congregated in Washington Square Park—in broad daylight, on a Saturday. The Gay Liberation Front declared us at the precipice of a quantum leap forward,
and Brookie liked this phrase, with its Marxist undertones. All of us liked the GLF dances, and the fresh-faced youths who came from as far away as Baltimore and Amherst College (consciousness, among other things, newly raised) to attend.

  But only history moves in eras: lives are lived in days—and around the margins, our little lives were still stubbornly unspooling. We were trying to write plays and direct them; we were trying to memorize lines while demanding they be revised. We were trying to raise money for the theater company (we had taken Stephen’s sarcastic suggestion of putting up a donation box at a GLF mixer, earning us a handful of Canadian coins not worth exchanging). We were trying, all of us, to have sex.

  We had our feuds, with the city and each other. Stephen could not tolerate the bongo drummers that hung around Bethesda Fountain. Brookie had a habit of keeping LSD in sugar cubes, which clashed with Stephen’s habit of drinking actual tea. Paulie was always huffily gathering up detritus—bank statements and LIRR timetables and copies of One magazine—and leaving them in reproachful puddles outside our doors. These grievances were prosecuted in a performative, sitcom-y spirit: we thought ourselves hilarious and, some of the time, probably were.

  By the fall, it was agreed that Stephen was becoming a real problem. Years ago, he’d attended a lecture about homosexuality as mental illness—at the Mattachine, of all places, where the speaker received a standing ovation—and ever since, he’d conducted himself as though we were all sufferers of a disease that he alone was brave enough to acknowledge.

  “It’s a shame,” he’d say—sounding regretful and contemptuous, in the way of older women discussing vices not their own.

  He liked to keep us apprised of possible treatments, such as a British procedure in which female hormones were implanted in the leg. One of the more maddening things about Stephen was how reasonable he could sound while being completely insane. He looked like an Oxbridge man with a hangover—you wanted to ask him where Aloysius the bear had gotten off to—and he had a tendency to discuss all ideas abstractly: the virtue of suicide, the certainty of despair. This made such conversations feel oddly bloodless; he’d adopt a tone of intellectual jousting, and you’d forget he was a fanatic.

  Or if you didn’t entirely forget—tell yourself you did. Who is there now to dispute you?

  The worst fight came in October, with the publication of Time’s cover story on “The Homosexual in America.” It was an enduring mystery how a copy of Time came to be in our apartment: we all denied knowledge of its origins. The article contained a broad overview of the many lamentable traits of us “inverts,” drawing heavily on some of Stephen’s favorite theorizing. A doctor called Berger was quoted at length. Brookie was furious, and planned to join the protest at the Time-Life Building. The rest of us called for peace while indulging in secret provocations. One of us cut out pictures of Dr. Berger and pinned them to Stephen’s lampshade in the shape of a cock. We began alluding to the article when talking about anything at all (“That’s just your homosexual irrational jealousy/homosexual megalomania talking, my dear Helen”). One day in November, Stephen tried using the article’s terms to explain Brookie’s own anger to him—calling it a function of his innate masochistic brutality, etc. etc.—and Brookie responded by calling Stephen supercilious and whimpering. Stephen smiled superciliously and whimpered that if he was, that only proved his point.

  “You know what, Stevie?” said Brookie. “If you want to sit around drinking tea and reading Time and pretending your most cherished wish is to live in Levittown with some clueless fish—oh really, Paulie? Now you’re a prude? Forgive me for disturbing the Mount Holyoke prayer group! Can one of you ladies be a dear and point me toward Greenwich Village?”

  Brookie shook his head, disgusted with us all.

  “Fine: Stephen can go on pretending that his most cherished wish is to live in Levittown with a liberated and highly respected capital-W Woman, excuse me, where he will lie back and think of the Carmine Street public pool. What’s not going to work, however, is taking all of us down with you. Because that is what he wants, you know.”

  Brookie turned to the rest of us, a look of the purest, most well-intentioned fear-mongering on his face—remembering that moment now, it seems clear that he could have been a politician. But then, Brookie could have been a lot of things: some people are funny that way.

  “That’s not what I want,” said Stephen quietly. “I want us to get better.”

  In college, Stephen and a boyfriend had gone to therapy, trying to go straight together. Brookie was not supposed to know about this, and one hoped he would not bring it up now.

  “But here’s the thing, Stevie.” Brookie was speaking slowly now. Perhaps he felt the carnage could not be undone, only clarified; perhaps he felt that stopping now would just be lazy. “We don’t have to do that anymore. Neither do you.”

  Stephen was sitting on the radiator, looking stunned.

  “What’s the phrase—there’s nothing novel under the three moons of Jupiter?” Brookie was breathing shallowly, in that way that meant a beginning or an end. “Choosing fear is every weak person’s only idea. People like you are everywhere, Stevie. It’s just that you never hear about them, because there is never anything to say.”

  Stephen moved into the theater then, to wait out the rest of the sixties.

  * * *

  —

  That winter, we spotted Matthew Miller on television.

  We had a teetering black-and-white Zenith that had moved into the apartment with Paulie; we’d consented to its presence only because we swore we’d never watch it.

  “Well, well,” said Brookie, when we spotted Matthew. “If it isn’t Clarence Darrow.”

  And so it was: the lawyer, of the mild manner and riotously green eyes.

  We’d all come to like the lawyer, in the end. There was an understated choreography to the way he’d marched us out of jail—he kept maneuvering us behind him, obscuring the other prisoners’ views as we proceeded down the hall. It was something like the way musk oxen protect their young, said Stephen, though that might have been the concussion talking. Matthew Miller did not invite our gratitude for this, and we found we liked that, too—how he did the things he said he would, brusquely and without ceremony, and then abruptly went away again.

  But now, it seemed, he was back—on TV, giving an interview about the comic Dougie Clay, whom he was apparently representing in an obscenity case.

  “We may not like what Dougie Clay has to say,” said Matthew Miller. We had evidently caught him at the tail end of some kind of soliloquy. Next to him stood a tiny, skittish, flat-faced woman who could not possibly be his wife. “I, for one, find it reprehensible, and only medium-funny.”

  At this, we laughed—even Brookie. The woman next to Matthew Miller smiled, exuding the approximate charisma of a seahorse. Alice, oh poor Alice! She seemed somehow aware that the ship she was on was sinking, though it is doubtful she could have imagined the depths to which it would eventually descend.

  “Dougie Clay?” said Paulie. “I don’t think I know who that is.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Brookie. “He’s got that filthy joke about Jackie O.”

  “Who is that woman, though?” said Paulie, pointing.

  “And I’m not going to misquote Voltaire at you gentlemen, either,” Matthew Miller was saying. “Defending to the death your right to say it, and all. I certainly hope it won’t come to that.”

  And we laughed, a little, again.

  “Is that woman possibly his wife?” Paulie sounded sorry for her already. Something about Alice elicited an instinctive surge of pity even then, long before she strictly deserved it. The isotope of pity is, of course, contempt. And standing there before us—with her pale baggy blouse, her thoroughly defeated hair—she was already taking the shape of a running joke.

  “And I’m not going to bring up the slippery s
lope song-and-dance, either,” Matthew Miller was saying. “The road to hell is paved with slippery slopes, but you could say that about anything. Instead, I’ll end with paraphrasing Mill. ‘Truth gains more even by the errors of one who thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.’ ” It was clear that this was not, in fact, a paraphrase. “We should be proud—and grateful—to live in a country that doesn’t lock up our vulgarians. Even—maybe especially—Dougie Clay. Thank you.”

  We stared for another long moment in silence.

  “What was that woman even doing there?” said Paulie.

  “Softening his image, maybe?”

  “Softening his image, ha!” said Brookie. “I bet his image isn’t the only thing she has a softening effect on.”

  Then he shrugged, and laughed, and changed the channel, and Matthew Miller was forgotten. Most of us remembered him only occasionally, and only when we were reminded.

  * * *

  —

  But there was, perhaps, one exception—one among us who felt a minor, jubilant shudder whenever Matthew Miller’s name was mentioned. It was still very faint, and notable mostly for its accompanying sense of privacy: the triumphant feeling of hiding (but happily! successfully, for once!) in plain sight. For even then—in the waning months of 1969, at the brutal precipice of a strange new decade—when, notwithstanding Stephen’s exile, we were closer than we’d ever been before: even then, we had our secrets.

  One of us was auditioning for other, better theater companies.

  One of us had already started lying about drugs.

  One of us had taken a double dose of Quaaludes and slept for twenty-seven hours: a dry run for the real thing.

  And one of us had seen Matthew Miller—several times, in fact—and never told a soul.

  THREE

  cel