Rat Bohemia (19 page)

“Hello?”

“Hi, Dad?”

“Hello?”

“Hi, Dad. It's Rita.”

“Oh, Rita.”

I could hear the disappointment in his voice immediately. It devastated me. He was sorry he had picked up the phone.

“How are you, Dad? ”

“Everything's fine, everything's fine. Your brother Howie is here with his wife. They're staying here. Howie is washing the dishes right now. Oh, there he goes, turning off the faucet.
Hey Howie, it's your sister
. He's coming over to the phone. Okay, here's Howie.”

“Hi, Rita.”

“Hey, Howie, what are you doing?”

“We're just in town for a few days visiting Dad.”

“Are you having fun?”

“Yeah,” he said, totally blank. “We took him to Shea last night. The Mets suck.”

“Well, have a good visit, Howie.”

“Yeah, see ya.”

“Bye.”

I always keep trying and I always get destroyed. I get destroyed
by that father-son bond. What did Howie do to deserve it? When you compare us objectively, he's no better than me. In fact, I have a hell of a more interesting life. So, I know a lot more about living than Howie, who was always in.

What is it with these brothers and sisters of homosexuals? They love that special treatment. They love to take advantage of it. Would it ever occur to Howie to refuse to go to Shea until my dad invited me too? No way. He loves those special rights, those special privileges. You know parental booty is a limited thing. Why split it with your queer sibling if you don't have to. Why give up the one thing that makes a regular shmuck like Howie into something special—his normalcy?

That's why we'll never get rid of homophobia in this country. The brothers and sisters of homosexuals have too much at stake.

Phone calls like that set off a whole chain of reactions usually resulting in what I think of as “pain days.” Days when I walk around and every time I see families or people with their parents or see any children or hear anyone say the words “my father” or “my mother” I feel transported to Planet Pain. My molecules go there. It is unbearable. Do you know how many kids there are on television? How many families? It's a knife to the throat.

That first night, age sixteen, I started at Broadway and Forty-second Street at about nine p.m. and walked up the avenue on the east side of the street until I reached 125th. Then I crossed over and walked back down on the west side until I came to Wall Street, about seven miles later. Then I crossed the avenue and did it again. This first night of refusal—the world's refusal of me—was also the inauguration of the one factor I attribute most prominently to my survival—the institution of systems. I created mental systems to carry me through the punishment of the innocent. I had one pack of Salems, I had twelve hours until morning. That's twenty cigarettes into twelve hours. That's five cigarettes every three hours. That's one cigarette an hour plus two treats. But how to pass the time between? I had to look in the windows of stores until I saw clocks and that search for measured time occupied my mind.

That morning I showed up at high school for the first time in months—washed up in the bathrooms, washing my hair with soap. All day long people stared at me because it was so sticky and wrong. And I slept in the back of the classroom and ate off other people's abandoned lunch trays. A few nights I slept over in school—successfully avoiding the security guards and teachers—stretching out, fully clothed, on those gray industrial carpets. I stared at the fake paneled ceilings and the overflowing wastebaskets filled with leftover lunch. I ate other people's leftover lunch. I developed systems for hunger.

I walked up Broadway starting on the east side and stopped at every restaurant window along the way to read the menus and put
together my ideal meal. Appetizer, soup, entrée, and salad. Or just pizza with topping and different time-consuming ways to imagine it. That made the trip last ten times as long and gave me more filler for the hole in my heart. I left my feelings behind. There was Orange Julius.

I went to Nathan's on Fifty-seventh Street and filled plates piled high with free sauerkraut, having one serving with mustard and one without, washed down with abandoned old Cokes and old orange drink. I left my feelings there. A dirty teenage girl sitting alone in the corner of Nathan's nonchalantly sipping on someone else's drink. A shameful person. A disgrace.

I kept going to work in the city and cashing paychecks, washing my hair in Woolworth's shampoo, brushing my teeth in school, walking around on Saturday nights, Sunday nights. The trick in those days was to find a comfortable stoop on a quiet street, maybe on the West Side of Manhattan. There was no competition back then for a quiet spot to sleep.

And I learned through my systems how to achieve self-hypnosis by staring at car headlights and keeping my mind blank. Sooner or later you forgot you were alive and could zone out that way for up to forty-five minutes. Then, at around five a.m. it was safe to fall asleep because no one would be coming by. There were not ninety thousand homeless people then, going through every garbage can.

Finally, after a while I snuck back into the building to Claudia's house. I stared up at my father's window from across the street and knew he was there but offered nothing. He did not reach out even though I was the child and he the adult. When I got to Claudia's her mother was waiting, all loving kindness. She knew nothing in particular and would never suspect such a repulsive reality. So I
concocted some sham story about a family argument, assuring her it would all be over soon and so, from this—my first confrontation between my homosexuality and the world—I lied from the beginning. I know to this day that I was treated better that way. I know that lying was the only thing I could do.

Mrs. Haas was cooking a hot meal. I was starving. I wanted it so badly. She chatted away, stirring and stirring and, absurdly, I rattled on about my new life—about all the little details that never happened and the silly conversations that never took place—all the time Claudia looking on with horror because that was the moment that she decided that she did not want to know either. She did not want to know what was happening to me.

I lied continuously, entertaining them, working my way towards that meal, perfecting my systems for keeping people interested enough to feed me. To casually force them to feed me. And just as Mrs. Haas was setting the cracked plates out on the tiny kitchen table, the telephone rang and it was my father, keeping me from my meat.

As he spoke I saw her expression shift to one—not of shock—but registering rather that everything had simply changed. For the second time that week I was humiliated, because I knew that my father had exposed my true and horrendous self to the one person who was offering me a meal.

“I see,” she said into the phone, stirring the pot of stew. “I see.”

When she hung up the phone she could no longer look at me. But she did put the meat on my plate. And that was my second lesson about being a homosexual. Not everyone would refuse me, but there would never be a full embrace.

I ate as fast as I could as Mrs. Haas walked off into the other room and sat quietly, alone in the old armchair. I looked at Claudia. She was not my savior.

“I want to go to college,” she said.

Claudia's mother made her own peace with the facts and they never came up again. I knew better than to ask to stay over, but she did send Claudia to school with extra lunch in her bag for me. Extra tuna fish and hard-boiled eggs chopped up together in a washed-out margarine tub. Extra apple. Claudia and I made love passionately everywhere—in bathrooms, classrooms, elevators. She was in love with me, of that I am still sure. We made love in stairwells, during her lunch hour. She did go off to college, a good one in another town. And I got a second job as a cashier, stealing twenty-dollar bills from the cash drawer to take the train to see her. Terrified, we hid in barricaded dorm rooms and made love with silent terror, not romance. We could give up everything pure and joyous for the one most important desire—to never be caught again.

As Claudia took pre-law and studied in the library keeping up her grades to keep her scholarship and her parents proud, I got a room in the basement of a theater, worked ten to six at Chuckles and seven to one at Baskin-Robbins. I ate ice cream for three meals a day and systematically pilfered bananas. I convinced Italian vegetable vendors to let me have their rotten ones. Those were days of no competition for garbage. That night I would cut out the bad sections of each squash or tomato systemically, and chop the remainders into undifferentiated shreds.

Claudia got an acceptable boyfriend who knew nothing about me. I was expected to go along with all of this and did, unquestioningly. Finally she confessed to him and he pointed to the passage in the Bible where God says it is wrong. I was utterly alone. She got a new boyfriend after that, became a sophomore. I sold pot to kids from suburbia in Washington Square Park. They weren't afraid of
me because I was white. There was no explanation for me. There was no explaining my predicament.

My lying improved enormously. It became quite natural, quite quickly. I got a phony credit card number from an old guy named Adam Purple who handed them out on purple paper from his purple bicycle. I called Claudia from phone booths on cold Greenwich Village street corners. She went to college basketball games. And from that point of divergence, our lives continued apart.

I found out where I belonged and after being turned away from a gay bar for being underage, I managed to get into two or three. La Femme with a fat old man at the door and a suited con walking back and forth across the dance floor. The Dutchess, overseen by Danny of the Israeli mafia, a male bouncer at the door and windows painted black. Black dykes hung out on the west side of Washington Square Park or wandered to Bonnie and Clyde's with the black women downstairs by the pool table and bar and the whites eating pasta in a “women's” restaurant on the second floor. Chaps and Rusty's by Chrystie Street with girls in suits and others in party dresses, the first time I ever socialized with Puerto Ricans. But it was all a game about how long you could avoid the attention of the bartender, while staying constantly on the lookout for some other lost kid who might end up to be that friend I desperately needed.

Afterwards, I could walk over to the pier on West Street and watch the leather queens getting blow jobs or fucking in the open at all hours. You'd walk up and down the aisle and there would be fifty of them. Now, they're ghosts. That's where the gay children were—kids like me with nowhere to go. We sat around listening to someone's radio, and I could lie down at the end of the pier, staring out at old illuminated New Jersey and actually go to sleep knowing
I wouldn't wake up raped because gay men don't do that to us.

One night I was so alone. It was my seminal aloneness—every solitary moment since then reminds me of that one spot. Alone with nothing and no one on my side. There was no one out there who was
for
me. And I looked up at a passing boat and saw a rat climbing out of a hole on the dock about three feet from my face. Then I saw that there was a whole swarm of them, that they owned this place and could do as they wished. And instead of running, I just sat there with the rats because there was no other place for me to go.

My first rats. They were the symbol of my condition. And I have to say, that although it is a blasphemy, I thought of my mother and compared myself to her. We had both been punished and neither of us had done anything wrong. Is it really bad of me to compare myself to a Jew?

Evil is so logical. It is so inventive. The problem is how to keep us out, and the answer is a logical system of solutions. My mother could not go to the same movie theater as her friends. She could not sit on the same bench. She never told me this, but I know it from reading history books. Claudia and I could go, but not as what we were, which is lovers. If we wanted to kiss we had to hide in the ladies' bathroom.

I don't go back to Jackson Heights. I haven't been there in years, not since the Indians took over. I have nothing against anyone, but I need to keep my own little nostalgia intact. Yet, sometimes when the isolation is too great, I go up to Eighty-sixth Street and First Avenue and walk around the ruined remnants of Yorkville—Manhattan's version of Kraut-town. My dad told me that my mother used to get dressed up and go over the bridge for some pastry at Café Gieger or a copy of the
Aufbau
. Walk past the old Bund building that had been converted into a more benign “gymnasium.” Sat on the sidelines watching demure “ex” Nazis marching in the Von Steuben Day Parade. Blonds in lederhosen, with accordions and floats.

For me, I only have one destination—Schaller Und Weber, the smoked-meat deli that still sits there on the corner. I can go in once every couple of years and look over all the different kinds of wursts and sausages. The packaging is still the same from when I was a kid and that smell—that swine smell—brings me back to our tiny kitchen, the old refrigerator, hot summer afternoon windows wide open and neighbors sitting out on the sidewalk in folding chairs. Card tables. Black-and-white TVs. Good books. Thick black bread. Strong mustard. A glass of beer. Old records, Bach on the scratchy radio competing with someone else listening to the game. The ball game. A rehashed old argument about something that happened back home in a Germany that could never exist again—a paradise. The last place any of these people was Somebody. The last place any of them had a family. The last place they'd ever belonged. Their
last good night's sleep. I guess Jackson Heights was my version of Bremen. Now, I too am in exile, staring through a store window in a foreign part of town. I would never buy anything at Schaller Und Weber, though. The taste would be more than I could bear.