I.M.

by Isaac Mizrahi

  “I’m standing there waiting for my coat. It was sort of crowded at the coat check. Suddenly I feel someone pressed up against me. This guy was feeling me up. He was humping me from behind.”

  “And what was that like?”

  A long pause and then I burst into tears right there in the restaurant, and I blurted out, “I loved it!”

  Sarah understood the modern world, but was also firmly embedded in the Syrian community, so she got the darker implications of what I was telling her. In those days being gay wasn’t merely alternative, it was truly dangerous. One night in the early 1980s Peter and I were walking together to a restaurant on West Eighteenth Street called Joanna, which has since closed—what you might consider a gay-ish restaurant with a gay-ish scene in a gay-ish neighborhood, if there was any such thing at that time—when we heard a screeching car coming straight at us at high speed, jumping the curb and onto the sidewalk. I leapt up onto a fire hydrant and Peter just made it out of the path of the speeding car that was coming at us with the intention of heaven knows what kind of gay bashing.

  * * *

  I was living a double life those years at Parsons. There wasn’t a question of me living anywhere but home—one of my parents’ reasons for endorsing Parsons at all was its close proximity to Brooklyn. Living in a dorm was out of the question. But the more I became comfortable in the world as a gay man, the less authentic I felt at home. I was already out of the closet at school, while concealing my true identity from my family. Revealing that I was homosexual to them felt like suicide.

  It’s hard to put into perspective in this modern day when things are so much easier. Back then being gay was seen as a terrible fate for anyone. Factoring in the Syrian community made it worse. The enormous shame brought on me was something I might be able to handle, but the shame brought on my family would be intolerable. So while my friends at Parsons were whooping it up in their dorms, I was awake nights worrying and keeping my mouth shut at home. No matter how hard it was living within that family structure, it was harder to think about bombing it to smithereens by coming out at the wrong time.

  And the longer I went without having sex, the more dangerous and mysterious being gay felt. Sarah suggested that I see her shrink, Dr. David Kahn. I had money coming in from selling sketches, so I made an appointment with him without saying anything to my parents. Dr. Kahn was a good-looking older man with thick white hair and thick white dentures. I told him about the sex in the cabana with my best friend those years earlier, which he assured me was completely natural. He eliminated any question that what I was feeling was in any way wrong, which did so much to ease my stress at that time. He zeroed in on my fear of coming out to my family, which was exacerbating my fear of sleeping with men. It was a kind of vicious circle. I couldn’t bring myself to go through with sex without admitting to the world that I was gay—starting with my own family.

  The anxiety was making my sleeping issues worse than they’d ever been. It was around this time I became aware that other people were sleeping a lot better than me, and that I felt tired all the time. Dr. Kahn recommended I go to a sleep clinic, where they offered me sleeping pills and told me to stop drinking coffee and alcohol. But nothing helped any more than a tiny bit. One night just after my seventeenth birthday, at 3:00 A.M., after hours of tossing and turning, I rose from my bed and thudded downstairs to the kitchen, where I went about making a cup of tea as noisily as possible. After about ten minutes of this racket my mother appeared, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen doorway.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What is it? Why are you not asleep?”

  I started in on the speech I’d prepared with Dr. Kahn’s help, about how I was different from others and how this wasn’t as strange or abhorrent as she might think. Finally I blurted out that I was gay. A few seconds of silence. Then my mother cried, out of melodramatic obligation more than anything else. She said she hadn’t suspected a thing, which I didn’t believe for a minute. For her not to have noticed would have been either neglectful or delusional. Perhaps as a way of reassuring her, I told her about how I had sought professional help with a psychiatrist and paid for it on my own. That didn’t console her until I mentioned Dr. Kahn’s name, and suddenly she perked up, “Dr. David Kahn? Really? I took a class with him at The New School!”

  The first thing she said upon drying her tears was “Don’t tell your father!” I had no great desire to tell him, but I also suspected that on some level he already knew. One day late that summer, my father and I were driving home to Brooklyn while the rest of the family stayed on the Jersey Shore. I brought up my plan to move out when I finished college, something he had previously agreed to. He said that after thinking it through, he would only allow me to move out if I married. A blowup fight ensued, and when we got home I confronted him in his dressing room. Determined to tell him everything, I shouted, “I am never going to get married!” He stood in front of me in his boxer shorts with a sad, knowing look on his face. Then he turned pale green and staggered, as though he couldn’t bear his own weight. He sank to the floor and sat there looking up at me. I thought he would die on the spot. I was ready to call an ambulance, but after a minute, he recovered. He said, “I know you don’t mean that.” But I did mean it. I didn’t force the subject, and we never really spoke of that scene again. My better judgment told me not to mention the encounter to my mother. I knew I’d made myself clear that day about who I was not; still, it dawned on me that not telling him who I was, explicitly, was a good idea.

  A few years later, after I moved out, I was home for Friday-night dinner and talking about how much I liked to cook and how it was taking on a bigger part in my life. Rather than allude to a future with a nice Sephardic Jewish wife occupying my kitchen, my father said, “Well, if you like to cook so much you better find a good cleaning lady who will do the dishes.” I’m not sure my mother or my sisters even noticed the implications of that remark. Maybe I was desperate to read a kind of acceptance into those words, but I took them as a confirmation that he knew more than he let on.

  Dr. Kahn agreed with my mother that it was a good decision not to tell my father. That surprised and disappointed me. It seemed there was less available love, more conditions placed on a human heart than I thought. Also, needless to say, I felt great relief. I was off the hook! The dreadful chore of telling my father was no longer necessary; the decision not to do so had been made by a professional—suggested in the first place by my own mother.

  * * *

  Technically I still had the problem of being a virgin. In therapy with Dr. Kahn I was repeating myself again and again about the same issues. About how intimidated I was by real gay men, about how they wouldn’t pay attention to me, about my feelings of sexual inferiority—any number of problems having to do with the subject of being gay. Finally he did something dangerous that still shocks me today: He forbade me from coming back to therapy until I had some sort of practical experience with sex. Basically he told me I was unwelcome there until I got laid.

  So I made it my business.

  About two months later I was giving Sarah a lift into the city where she had rented a room at the Hilton Hotel on Sixth Avenue and Fifty-third Street in order to get dressed for a party she was invited to in Midtown. I told her about Dr. Kahn’s ultimatum, and without coming out and suggesting anything specific, she informed me that the room would be empty after she left for the party and might come in handy for whatever purposes.… “What a shame for the room to go to waste!” Winking and smiling, she said she would leave the room key for my use if the need arose. I was baffled as to how I was supposed to execute this plan on such short notice, but I left my car in the garage at the Hilton with the plan to use the room even if alone. Later I took a taxi to meet a friend, Ginger, for dinner.

  Ginger, about ten years older than me, was always coming on to me so that night on our way home from dinner I came out to her. There in the backseat of the taxi, baffling as it mi
ght sound, she professed a great love for me and leaned over to kiss me. I recoiled and explained again that I was gay. Ten minutes later, in a total about-face, she insisted we go to this gay bar close to where she lived on the Upper West Side called Cahoots. No stranger to a gay bar, Ginger took some kind of odd pleasure in pimping for me that night. She instructed me on how to make eye contact, how to make small talk—basically, how to pick up a man. Under Ginger’s direction, while she remained in back, I made a foray into the busiest part of the bar, where a handsome guy smiled at me and struck up a conversation. He was a tall guy named Paul, with a prominent moustache, tight jeans, and cowboy boots, the gay uniform of the time. He was quite sweet and very gentlemanly and smelled good. After about fifteen minutes, Ginger approached the bar with her coat on and, with a wink, said good night. Paul and I were now at liberty to pursue our next course of action. I told him about the room at the Hilton, and within minutes we were in a taxi, one of the longest rides of my life, from West Seventy-ninth Street to West Fifty-third.

  When we were finally alone in the hotel room, one thing quickly led to another, clothes were shed and within a few heart-stopping minutes we were in each other’s arms. I think Paul got a kick out of being my first. I was lucky he was so nice—not a moment’s feeling of remorse or rejection or pain. My body, even at its thinnest, is paunchy and hairless and green-white to the point of looking ill. Not very attractive. Paul’s body was tanned, toned, and perfect. But the few self-conscious moments gave way to the fascination of sex—especially because Paul seemed to be entirely engrossed. All through the experience I understood how important these sensations and emotions were, and I knew how lucky I was to be having my first real adult sexual encounter with such a nice guy. When we were finished and had our clothes back on, saying our goodbyes, I knew I would never see him again, and that was fine.

  I pulled the big brown Cadillac into a spot in front of the house in Brooklyn and sat in it for a good forty minutes with the windows open as daylight broke. I listened to the birds chirping and thought about all those months of fear and loathing that had preceded this, and the ironic contrast with how natural and pleasant sex actually was. It seemed all those months of worry were completely unrelated to the simplicity, the organic joy of the night before.

  * * *

  By the time I finished Parsons I was officially out as a gay man—except in the old neighborhood. There, the only people who knew my secret were the two Sarahs and my sisters, whom I came out to in a fit of rebellion. I’m sure my mother would have liked it better had I not told them; I think she was waiting for me to grow out of some phase, for this ugly truth to somehow go away. One evening my sister Marilyn and I were alone in the house, and I blurted it out. She seemed physically jolted, as if by a damaging electrical current. But after a beat she understood. A few days later I told Norma, who had a similar reaction. Like sentries, they guarded my secret from my father and the community at large. But I couldn’t live much longer with a huge part of me tucked away under lock and key. It wasn’t enough for a select few to know. I wanted the world to know.

  Everything happened with great speed around that time. Both of my sisters got married within two years. Those weddings became the center of the family story, and I diverted my own drama as the dress designer for all the festivities. (Some of those dresses were quite fabulous. My sister Norma’s engagement dress was a highlight: a strapless lavender-suede bodice embroidered with pearls, attached at the waist to a full, multitier white organza knee-length circle skirt. The wedding dresses were fabulous, too, both the epitome of 1980s wedding dresses, complete with huge white lace leg-o’-mutton sleeves; Cinderella skirts; and big, floppy, satin bows.) Then I graduated from Parsons. And the minute that happened I started looking for a place of my own. It was the deal my father agreed to, and it couldn’t happen soon enough for me, though it took a great while—almost a full year—for me to find a place I could afford. It was a large sunny studio on West End Avenue and Seventy-first Street that cost four hundred dollars a month. It was one spacious room with great views, a two-by-four separate kitchen, and a five-by-seven bathroom with a window. Enough room for what I needed and no room for much else. And it was in my old stomping grounds on the Upper West Side, close to Kevin and Gina and even closer to Lincoln Center.

  I had bought a new Sony Trinitron TV a few months earlier in expectation of my new life. My affection for that set was outsize—TV played such a big, weird part in my sleeping disorder—it was more like my best friend than an appliance. I couldn’t trust it to the moving men, so I hand carried it in a taxi the day before my move when I went to paint the place. That night I sat in the apartment, shafts of light slanting in from the street, the scent of fresh paint, the newness of the environment affecting my equilibrium. I was never one to acknowledge joy in the present. Worry and second-guessing are my stock-in-trade and have always affected my ability to feel happiness in the moment. But for that winter night in 1982 I allowed myself to feel blissful. I knew that it was to be the best night of my life—that the anticipation I felt would be better than anything to come after. And to a great extent, I was right.

  The day I moved there was a snowstorm that threatened to delay me another week, but I convinced the movers to work in the ice and snow. With very little drama otherwise, almost unnoticed, and with no goodbyes, I slipped out of my parents’ home. It felt more like an escape than a moving day.

  17

  Way before there were what we now call internships, there were things called summer jobs. Toward the close of my junior year at Parsons, Ann Keagy sent me to interview for a job at the Public Theater costume shop, which was run by a wonderful guy named Milo Morrow. Walking into that workroom was like being struck on the head by a brick of glitter. It was a huge ground-floor space in an old cast-iron building across the street from the Public. It had thirty-foot ceilings and was filled with sewing machinery, miles of fabrics on industrial shelves, and sketches of over-the-top costumes strewn among the work tables and pinned to corkboards. And when you looked up, a literal heaven of costumes. Stored hanging from the ceiling were hundreds of fabulous old costumes showing their undersides: eighteenth-century panniers, Elizabethan doublets, suits of armor, friars’ dresses, clown costumes, sparkly fairy dresses, all hanging from the rafters. I knew if I took that job I’d never be bored. When I got back to Parsons, a satisfied-looking Mrs. Keagy told me I got the job. But that same day she also sent me on an interview with Perry Ellis, who was looking for another assistant. I was told he had not found anyone in the graduating class and wanted to hire one of the juniors for the summer and perhaps ongoing after graduation.

  The interview was late that day and very last minute. The first thing I did when I walked in was apologize for the clothes I was wearing, which made him smile. I had on what I wore to school that morning, a pair of exaggerated, striped, pegged linen pants I had made. It was the fashion for linens to be slightly wrinkled, but by the time of the interview my wrinkles were way past the fashionable limit and I looked a mess. Perry Ellis had straight, shoulder-length brown hair and features that seemed too big for his head, including almond-shaped eyes and huge, horsey white teeth. His physique was sylphlike, as though he would fall over if you exhaled on him. I’m scared of skinny people in general, and everything about him was intimidating. He had an enigmatic, reserved way; an off-putting, WASPy demeanor that he used to his advantage. His generosity and humor only became apparent over time, and I was terribly uneasy around him for months.

  He was wearing his signature blue oxford shirt with “dimple” sleeves (his term for a pleat in the shoulder which he invented and I always found a bit insipid) and khaki pants, which he wore almost every day I knew him. Behind him on a console were the most beautiful flowers I had ever seen, a massive bundle of marled pink peonies, his favorite flower, which were always kept around the studio, perfuming the days and looking like they were about to shed their petals in ecstasy. Leaning up against the walls of the confe
rence room were photographs and illustrations of models in his clothes. Hanging in the reception area there was a beautiful Avedon portrait of him, which was commissioned by Vogue, and had him glancing impishly at the lens in mischievous contemplation.

  Another consequence of the last-minute interview was that I didn’t have any sketches to show him other than the ones from my final project, which I had made triple-sized. There was a visual comedy to this skinny man manipulating that huge, heavy stack of sketches. I’m not sure he knew what to make of them, and a few months later, when I was firmly entrenched in the studio, he said, “Darling, I knew from those sketches that you were crazy and that you’d fit right in here.” Whatever it was that motivated him, he offered me the job on the spot and didn’t flinch when I asked for the salary Mrs. Keagy suggested, which was higher than the usual summer-job salary.

  While the interview was taking place I had the strong feeling that I was being scrutinized. First a tiny woman with boyish black hair and bright red lips and wearing a fox-hunt-scene printed bouffant skirt and black patent leather mules walked by slowly, craning her neck to look in. Then a tall chubby man with thinning light-brown hair and wearing coral pants and cordovan loafers peered in and asked a question of Perry, nodding cordially at me. Finally the most captivating, glamourous figure glided by, sneaking looks on her way to the Xerox machine in the next room. She was wearing a striped fisherman’s T-shirt, men’s trousers, and boat shoes, and she had chin-length curly brown hair. After my interview with Perry I was asked to wait to meet a few others in the studio, which is when I met Patricia, Jed, and Laura, the three who’d spied on me earlier. Patricia Pastor was the design director. She and Jed Krascella worked predominantly on the designer collection, while Laura Santisi handled all the licenses. I immediately apologized again about my last-minute attire, and I think that endeared me to them.