In the Shadow of the American Dream (23 page)

Oh they probably know each other, I said dryly.

He fiddled with his hands some more, and then his voice dropped two octaves, and he said huskily, Uh … do you want to get to know me?

No.

He sat there for a few minutes staring straight ahead and nodding every couple of seconds like he was digesting the information, then got up and walked away quickly.

I looked towards the railing where the young guy had been sitting and saw that he was talking to some other guy who'd approached him from the pathway. The guy who approached him was large and muscular, handsome in a way, wearing black cowboy boots that clicked as he stepped and shifted back and forth, laughing over some unheard thing, rubbing his hands and then reaching out and putting his hand on the side of the young guy's face, almost caressing it, but the young guy pulled back slightly. A blond man who'd once been overweight and this year had a new body, wearing a tan bodysuit beneath his white trousers, stepped over to me and began with, I know you don't remember me, but we met once before …

I got up and started walking, walked around under the lampposts along the Avenue side of the park past a bench where two boys sat, one in the other's arms lying on his back, a slow breeze flowing and the other guy stroking the sides of his head, around the temples, with long white fingers. He said, I wonder what the red sky means. I looked up and the sky had a red pale glow on the bellies of clouds. It was getting towards dawn.

I crossed the street at the center intersection and entered the east park. The regulars were sitting over on the side: these characters take over a few picnic benches and play some sort of card games until all hours of the morning. In the grassy sections of the park behind iron railings were men and women sleeping beneath dark covers.

I went back into the west section and suddenly felt very weary. I hadn't planned on meeting anyone but then I saw this young guy who seemed pretty interesting. He was attractive because he had a complete sense of himself. He was unhurried, sitting back on the rail in the shadows, cool black hair, looking around. I walked over by him, and he looked back at me. I passed him and sat down on a bench nearby, staring at the distances of the park, through the cool leaves, wind, empty benches, and lampposts, losing myself. I wanted to talk to him but felt tired and didn't know if I could handle lying down with anyone. But the idea of walking away and maybe never seeing him again made me stand up, turn slowly in the breeze, and look around at him. He had his head turned but it moved back towards me, and I ended up turning away again, walking a few feet towards the bushes, turning and walking back to the bench, sitting again and standing back up again. I felt absurd, tired, anxious. He kept looking at me. I realized that if I left the park without speaking to him, he might feel I wasn't interested, and at any time after that night if I saw him again he probably wouldn't try to speak with me. I walked past him a second time, felt absurd again, turned back slowly and walked over to him.

How's it going?

Fine, fine, he said smiling. It was one of the most charming smiles I had ever had made towards me. With a flash of white teeth—he was roughly handsome, smooth skin—he reminded me of someone I'd seen in my past, a guy years ago when I was getting on a train somewhere in the dusk of the city, a face among the crowds in the station, someone I never forgot. I sat down next to him, and we talked for a while about the things that we did. He was a photographer. I'd seen some of his things in a weekly paper and one or two books. I felt strange, not from knowing some of his work, but because he was so attractive to me. It wasn't just physical, it was a kind of excitement I felt realizing the distances one has traveled. I listened to his speech; he had a slow grace about him, contained, humorous, no harsh visions of life. His hands, his head and speech moved slowly like he was vaguely stoned but very clear. At some point we left the park and walked down to the Kiev restaurant for coffee. And sitting in the back against the wall we made slow sparse conversation. I knew I wanted to lie down with him but nothing was mentioned. I wondered how it would be approached, if at all. What words, what gestures.

When we left the restaurant I asked him if he was a little stoned and he laughed and said, Everybody asks me that. No. I laughed and apologized, feeling a little embarrassed. I asked him where he lived and he said 12th Street, and I told him I'd walk him part of the way. We headed west down the street glittering with lamps and pools of broken glass an emptiness in the dark air, a taxi in the distance bouncing over a hole in the street, the sound echoing.

On the way up Broadway we passed the church around 11th Street, which has a front yard with a large urn the size of four men side by side and dark green lawns and some trees and flowers that had recently lost their petals. The entire yard was bathed in night shadows but over the roofs and spires the sky was turning a deep cobalt. I turned to him and said, I haven't lain down on grass in ages … We stopped and rested our hands on the wroughtiron fence, white against gleaming black. Then I said, There's too much dog shit in the parks to lay down.

He didn't say anything, but turned and walked over to the gate and reached over touching the latch. It was open. He unhooked it and the gate swung open, and he turned to me and smiled. We stepped inside on the asphalt path and walked along it and then he stepped onto the grass and lay down on his back stretching his arms. I smiled and lay out next to him, the face of the buildings whose yard we were in joined the church, was part of the same architecture but had little shades half-rolled down the windows, some gauzy white curtains, and darkness behind them. I wondered if there were nuns and priests sleeping in well-tucked beds, I thought of clean white sheets, little bed stands with wire-rimmed glasses and handkerchiefs and beads and little plastic saints and angels like those on Avenue D dashboards. We lay there for some slow minutes with our hands beneath our heads staring up: large mobile clouds with reddish tinge to their bellies and the jigsaw sections of turquoise sky behind them, shuttering for moments until they were once again covered, one spire way up catching the gradually warming light of dawn way east of the river and tenements. The yard was still filled with a descending night, like some old Magritte scene. He reached over and touched my arm and I touched back, sliding my hand in between the buttons of his shirt and feeling his smooth belly, muscular and warm. Very warm. He turned on his side half-facing me and I climbed up over him, half on him, nuzzling my mouth against his warm neck, the palm of my hand so perfectly formed to the curve of his head, the soft black hair against my fingers. We kissed as the yard slowly turned light and a bus roared by. I felt very happy quite suddenly, like some chord had been touched, something that I hadn't been aware of needing was just at that moment fulfilled. We lay there in an embrace, not saying anything. It was cool quiet, the occasional sounds of a faraway city, the wet tips of grass and the warmth of him through his clothes. At some point a couple of bums walked by and I heard one yell, Hey you homos … get outta there. We released each other and lay there, one of my arms curved over his chest, and watched the air for a while finally rising from the ground and walking about looking for a place that still contained the night. Nothing. We looked in windows and saw a desk with envelopes and papers on it. He said it was a beautiful garden as we turned around to leave.

He invited me to his apartment and we went there: a small attic studio with two rooms and a kitchen. There was a tree, a small one, or maybe a large branch, nailed to a board on the floor. It was for a photo he was shooting. He said he was going to add a box of fake snow to it. He said he was using some kids in the series of photos but that it was held up because they had all gone to summer camp and wouldn't be returning until the next week. On one wall was a photograph by some French man: a group of male and female children mannequins, in the countryside seated at a picnic bench by a bank of trees, some of the kid mannequins half-rising from the benches with wine bottles in their hands and plates of half-eaten food on the table, and some standing nearby looking dazed by their postures. They were all turned or moving towards an enormous wall of flames not more than ten yards away, trees and hills of the countryside stretched out before them and behind the flames. They all looked drunken, like some scene from Brueghel.

He asked me if I wanted to shower with him and I said yes, and sat down on a nearby couch and began unlacing my ratty sneakers, for a moment embarrassed by them in the dawn light coming from a skylight. He took off his clothes and I was amazed by his tan, a healthy brown band of lighter skin where he had once worn underwear. He turned on the shower and went into another room and I looked at a small photograph of himself in some foreign country on a beach, with a red towel over him, cross-legged, leaning over a book whose one white page he held between his fingers as if in turning, and the sense of him in that photo was even more clear than how I saw him in the park hours before, seated on the railing: that intense sense of completion, of knowing himself and being comfortable with himself, the distances he'd traveled and the life he moved within. Nothing I can really articulate here but it was contained in his posture, his body, his face and fingers.

In the shower I lifted a bar of soap to his back and began rubbing it with handfuls of water over his smooth skin. He turned around finally and did the same to my back, then turned me around so that I faced him and rubbed the soap over my chest and working down to my belly and he raised my hands in the air and smoothed soap beneath my arms in the hair of my armpits down across my belly and beneath my balls, soaping with one hand and smoothing with the other. Then he took some gel from a bottle of shampoo and eased it into my hair, rubbing with the tips of his fingers and it was a sense I hadn't felt since I was a kid, too young to recall, of being vulnerable, of placing my body in another's hands, a sensation that was beyond sex but still very erotic, an emotional sense of relief.

After the shower we made love, and it was a little awkward for me. I wasn't sure of everything, of what movements to make, either because I was weary or because I was overwhelmed. And then we slept. Later, hours later, when we woke up, we made love again and then I pulled on my trousers in a semidazed state. Not enough sleep, some sort of warm delirium from all the coasting images of the previous hours. I had a head full of things I wanted to say but couldn't. I tied my sneakers and left his apartment, walking down the carpeted stairs past curving walls with green printed paper, old and musty but with a sense of unspoken class. Then I was out on the street. It was overcast, which I was grateful for, it felt very easy on the eyes, the city traffic in the afternoon, people standing on street corners, streets filled with cars and buses humming, and even though it was overcast there was some startling nature to the light, everything graphic in detail, a heavy sense of rain in the cool air, and turning a corner to head east and downtown I suddenly smiled, seeing grass stains on my trousers for the first time in years.

September 21, 1981

After the bust at Danceteria I seemed to have lost trust in any situation or thing. Everything became groundless, apt to fall apart at any moment, nothing offering security or permanence. It wasn't just the arrests or the eventual loss of work, but rather a period of time in which I grew tired of all the scenes I'd been involved with. It shows in a lot of my work: some influences, assimilation of trends or contemporary creative stuff, but at the same time I'm always running from those things, letting my work stem from mostly what affects me in my life, a work composed of impulse and desire to hold particular senses at one time, sometimes embracing them and then discarding them.

Meeting this guy Peter [Hujar]: I was slightly drunk, standing in The Bar on 2nd Avenue, he stared at me and I looked back several times. I guess I wanted him in a strong way, his invitation, a look in the eyes, a feeling of quiet desperation knowing how easily you can hold a person, just wanting that moment to come in time when you have the chance, rather than seeing it slip away in a crowd, glimpsed and then lost. I'd pretty much stopped walking the streets, the coolness of winter and weariness from work in the new club keeping me asleep or lounging and uninterested in walking through the door.

We went back to his place because I had a dog that barked. In his loft he reached into the darkness of a shelf and retrieved a book of his: portraits of life and death or something similar. I knew it, knew it well, and there was that instant where I'm confronted with the enormous image of a person, image gained from previous contact with them, through their work or through pure association with the idea of them in a meeting, like some rogue on the river to whom all the attachments and ideas of Jean Genet I connect, in whom I can place shadows of fiction in the first minute of meeting and speaking, so that this unknown character can assume the air of islands and prison and mystery, something foul and wonderful at the same time, criminal, loner, drifter. And yet the poor guy could be nothing more than a bank employee slumming in the dangerous air of the river, someone with a collection of stone owls at home, with fancy drapes and a Formica kitchen, a new dishwasher, and lace doilies on antique countertops.