How Long Has This Been Going On (53 page)

"Then all you could hear was sirens, and like a flash we hightail it out of there, more or less passing the cops who are hightailing it
in.
Finally, we're all outside throwing stuff, and they're all inside hiding. Man, it was war.

"And this is what I keep asking myself: What jerk in the police department decided there hadn't been enough raids that month? What's inside the guys who do this to us? What do they get out of it? And how come the asshole blues who strolled into the Stonewall that night didn't see by the looks on our faces that we weren't going to be picked off like ducks this time? I saw it. How come they didn't? Because, I tell you, they got what they invented."

What they invented was a stew of fury that boiled out of the bar into the street and expanded so quickly that despite frantic calls for backup the police found themselves under siege in the bar.
"Torch
it!" some cried.
"Burn
the
fuzz!"
But the major urge of the event expressed itself in the deep, rolling bass of the chant "Gay
power! Gay power!"
Garbage cans wereupended and browsed for suitable missiles, and bottles and such came flying every time the police opened the door.

The mob grew and grew and grew; Jezebel, Henry, and Jim were three blocks north of the bar when the density of the crowd forced them from a sprint to a shamble. Stonewall was a volcano, an eruption of noise and smoke. All around, they heard "Out of the closets and into the streets!"

"Yes!"
Jezebel gasped out. "Oh, Miss Jesus, at last!"

Henry and Jim looked at each other in disbelief and exhilaration.

"Gay power!" Jezebel now shouted, trying to force a way through the press of bodies. "Make way for the ladies of the evening!"

"Hey, I'm just as fag as you are," said a man Jezebel was trying to get past, and Jezebel threw his arms around the guy.

"The night," Jezebel cried, "was made for love."

"Is that a definite offer?" the man asked, taking Jezebel in.

"No, no, this is
history,
comrade. Come on with us and make it."

What the hell is going on?, Blue was thinking as he came up West Tenth Street. Ahead, he could see and hear what looked like a city on fire, with a screaming mob and things flying through the air.

Working his way through the crowd to Seventh Avenue, Blue saw another something or other whizzing through the air... burning newspaper wrapped around something, it looked like, falling to earth at that drag bar.

"What's going on?" Blue asked the guy next to him.

"It's the graduation dance. We call it 'No More Harassment.'"

"No kidding."

"Ask those fucking pigs, if you think it's kidding." Then, in a hoarse shout,
"Kill
the bastards!"

Another load of burning paper flew overhead, this one crashing through the bar's plate-glass window, and a scream of contentment rose up.

"Gay power!"

"No more raids! No more raids!"

"Civilian review boards now!"

"Sic semper tyrannis!"

"Kill the pig! Slit his throat!"
(This from a literary clique.)

"We're people, too!"

"Up the drag queen!"

Blue edged back from the fray, looking for a free phone booth.

* * *

"Shit, is that a TV news crew?" asked Henry, as a camera squad leaped out of a truck marked ABC.

"Oh, my Henry," said Jezebel, hugging him. "The politics is happening.
This
is the demonstration."

"Sacred Acts!" Henry declared.

"I been meaning to tell you, we
got
to change that name."

"How about the Union for Gay Liberation?"

"For Gay
Activism,"
Jim corrected.

"The Gay Activist Union," Jezebel said, trying it out.

"No!" cried Henry. "How about the—"

"Hey!" Jim called out, for Eric had found them, and the boy sailed right into Jim's arms.

"Aw," said Jezebel, approvingly. "Look at the future there."

"It's scary," said Eric.

"No, my young friend, it's thrilling. Whoop, there go another fire-thing in the air. If we burn this city down, will they start leaving us alone?"

The surge of people had pushed so far into the street that Seventh Avenue had become a parking lot. Cars that honked too aggressively or tried to drift forward were menaced by the crowd, turned over, a few even set on fire. One was commandeered with the intent of driving it straight into the front of the bar, but there were too many people in the way. The crush of bodies also handicapped sight lines for the impromptu show-girl parade (to bystanders' a cappella rendition of "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody") that some of the dressier queens performed around the tiny triangular block between Christopher and West Tenth Streets. But this was aberrant, for the rioting was no lark. There were injuries and arrests. Blue, of course, couldn't get away fast enough—just as well, for he didn't find an unoccupied phone booth till he was almost at Fourteenth Street. Pulling out his wallet, he found the card bearing the Kid's number, dialed for the operator, and placed a collect call.

The Kid was in a snappy mood. He had been reading yet another of Elaine's novels, hearing her voice in the words, enjoying her, admiring her. What if she did go ahead and write about the Other Side? It wouldn't seem quite so different or mysterious, then, would it?

Blue's timing was perfect. The Kid was in the mood for some on-site company, and delighted to hear that Blue was ready to blow into town.

"It's dangerous," Blue explained. "There's a riot goin' on a few blocks offa here."

"What kind of riot?"

"They're all the same, ain't they?"

"Do you need money? I could wire you some."

"Can I fly there? Never tried a plane before."

"Blue,
mon vieux,
this is on the level, yes?"

"Winter's too cold, summer's too wet, violence everywhere you turn. Sure, it's on the level."

"Okay, can do."

"Hey, you hold dances out there? Like the one a while back in Kingdom Hall?"

"Come.
No, we don't, but you'll show us how."

"I'm gonna do that."

"Revolutions."

"Huh?"

"Never mind."

One other telephone call of that night from New York to San Francisco interests us: Frank's, to Larken. Where so many saw in the Riot a promise of liberation, to Frank it only dramatized the might of oppression. He was well aware that his movies were more or less criminal acts, and that the law gave no protection even to his day-to-day work as a bartender in a gay hostel, and he was tired of living a totally illegal life. Larken's talk of San Francisco as the place where a Frank was not only possible but necessary had made a strong impression on him, and he became obsessed with the idea of moving out of New York and coming home.

"Well, it really is the place for us," Larken told him, with gentle certainty.

"Hell, I've picked up and never looked back before."

"Oh, Frank, it would be incredible to see you again, and have our talks and everything."

A few hundred yards from Frank's apartment, thousands of men and women had massed to express their disgust with state persecution; through his open window, Frank heard the sirens and the crashing and the upheaval of a forbidden people shouting their name.

"God, what a battle we have before us," he said.

"Are you coming, Frank? Really? Because this town is ready for you, boy."

Indeed, Frank was coming: because destiny wanted him to. Frank has a date with his future, which needs him in a certain place some years from now, to save the life of someone he has never heard of, a young man named Lonnie Ironword. Some of us float, some of us make choices, and a very few of us, like Frank, are Summoned.

T
OM DATED WOMEN but he thought about men. When he launched his business in renovating old houses, he started keeping a diary as a permanent record of all his transactions—notes on restructuring, decoration, materials; cost estimates and final tallies; reports on the subcontractors' work; and so on. He meant to set down his experiences for reference in future work. But he also wrote in this diary his thoughts on certain men he met, saw, even imagined. I quote at random:

This guy in the sandwich place next to the hardware. Twenty-nine, light brown hair cut short and smooth. Always gives me a smile and says, "Right you are, now." Sometimes he moves slow and dreamy, his eyes are half-shut. He can get the order mixed up, like his mind's on other things.

Mr. Larsson walked onto the site today. He was in a suit but you could see his arms swell through the coat, even his chest muscles inside his shirt. Well, he's in construction himself, so he knows what's doing, and he's real aggressive about asking questions. He took his coat off, and I was watching his ass, which is two melons doing a samba.

I see two guys, one very experienced and the other guy is young and not sure. The older one says, Come on, you'll like it once we get going. The young guy says no, but then they're locked up together, rolling and shouting. I don't know which guy is me.

There is nothing about women in the diary, though Tom is an energetic bachelor, dating up and down the Twin Cities and impressing the women he knows as thoughtful, pleasing, and scrupulous but never—in his whirling, moody way—committed. Women have always loved Tom and forgiven him; that's how he gets away with it, along with his looks and his thriving business. He's a catch. He's the Eligible Man of Urban Scandihoovia: tall, handsome, and unpredictable Tom Uhlisson, so isolated from what he is that he's leading two lives, one based on what he does and one based on what he won't admit he wants. This does not strike him as abnormal. It doesn't strike him at all: It's how he lives. If he did ponder it, he'd probably decide that many men live like this. What else can you do? Ask the guy in the sandwich place if he'd like to go out?

Does Tom ever think of Luke? He writes of him in the diary, in inconclusive vignettes that, like dreams, dissolve just before the climax. For instance:

Luke comes over with a six-pack, so he talks about college and dating. They are dates like I have. His women are similar, in every respect. I know this because we proceed to describe them, in detail—this is about the complexion of the skin that runs down the curve of the back, the taste of the nipples. Everything. So then it turns out that we are both seeing the same women. Luke is not really in college. He has been living in Minneapolis. This is strange but true.

There is a knock at the door. It is Sandy, a girl I was seeing. Now she is different. Her neat hair is braided and piled up top in a come-on way, cheap. And she is slinking around. She knows Luke, it seems. She says he has brought out the real woman in her. She wants to hold a pussy-stuffing contest and see who's best. Luke is already pulling off his shirt.

The diary sits locked in a desk in the "office" of Tom's house, a rambly Victorian on the west side of Minneapolis. It's a big place for a man alone, as many a daughter's mother would tell him; and I call it a gloomy place, because there is so little life in it. Tom never gives parties or dinners, though he goes to them. (He's a sociable fellow, in his disjointed way. That is, he'll come to your Saturday Night, then go into a trance and madden everyone.) Some of the rooms in Tom's house are empty. You wonder. But then, what's he supposed to do with them? He sleeps in the bedroom, relaxes in the living room, works in the office, eats in the kitchen. The rest of the place is redundant. When Tom bought and began renovating it, he thought of it as a show house, as a proof for wondering customers of the kind of work he could do. Then he thought, Fuck it.

This is why Tom's cousin Walt is coming, to help fill out the rooms. The two haven't seen each other since the autumn of 1968, when Tom moved to the Twin Cities, but it seemed that Walt got into some sort of trouble back home, and, in solemn conclave, the Uhlissons decreed that Walt shall join Tom in the metropolis and learn Tom's trade. Of course, now that Tom is on his own he has no need to obey any edict issuing out of Gotburg; but it immediately occurred to him that he could use some company around the house, and it might be nice to take a bit of family into the Uhlisson Company (Tom Uhlisson, Proprietor and Director).

Walt is coming by bus—the Orient Express of the Midwest—and Tom will drive down to the station to pick him up. It's a Saturday evening in early December, and Tom has long had the traditional survival kit for the Minnesota winter set up in the trunk. As a teen, Tom was playful, helter-skelter; as a man, he is orderly, prudent, assigning certain days of the week for chores, maintaining things-to-watch-for lists in his head for every current renovation project, keeping his diary locked in the desk even though he lives alone.