The Beautiful Room Is Empty (21 page)

SEVEN

        In my senior year of college I was accepted into a graduate program in Chinese at Harvard, but my father was unwilling to keep me on his payroll, and his income was too high for me to qualify for a fellowship.

That summer after graduation I didn’t know what to do with myself. I lived with a childhood friend, Tommy, in the basement of his family’s house. He found a job as an apprentice bus driver and entered a training program. I was driving a pickup truck in Des Plaines delivering fruit juice and eggs door to door. When I heard middle-class executives, my father’s crowd, say they deserved to be highly paid because their jobs involved assuming responsibilities and making decisions, I snorted with impatience. I knew that such exercises of the will were gratifying, whereas driving a truck in the July sun through the Chicago suburbs was no picnic.

Lou told me he was moving to New York. He invited me to come along. Just like that I decided to go, even though I had only two hundred dollars to my name. “I’ll send you the busfare back to the Middle West when you strike out,” my father told me.

Lou and I stayed in the YMCA on West Sixty-third Street. I spent ten of my precious dollars having my resume typed and duplicated. I mailed it out to a few places, but that seemed hopeless, or at least abstract.

I had a single suit too heavy for the heat, three wash-and-wear short-sleeved white shirts, a greasy tie, two pairs of black stockings, and one pair of black lace-up shoes badly scuffed on the sides. I had never learned how to groom myself. My mother had ignored the whole issue. In prep school I’d showered because I’d had to, but in college my hygiene and wardrobe had become impressionistic. I was a sleepwalker.

Now I had to look alert, reliable. The job market appeared capricious and cruel, so unlike the meritocracy of school, in which study was duly rewarded with high marks and one level led naturally to the next. The working world seemed so vulgar and simple-minded that I couldn’t imagine why we’d been taught so much Confucius, Kant, and Renoir. I had an interview for a trainee position writing copy for a trade magazine in electrical engineering. Of what use now was my course in the music of Bartók?

All day I’d sit hunched over a cup of coffee in the YMCA’s basement cafeteria trying to get up my nerve to place a phone call, visit an employment office. By three in the afternoon, headachy and suicidal, I’d return to my room, masturbate, and take a nap. I thought I’d ratKer die than call a stranger and ask a favor.

Lou’s very slickness made me seem all the more bumbling. His room was just as crummy as mine, but he kept his appearance impeccable. He was being sent out on interviews by an executive headhunter. He was considering salaries of forty thousand dollars, whereas starting positions for writer trainees in 1962 paid only five thousand dollars.

August was approaching, and soon everyone would leave town for vacation. “The whole city shuts down,” a lady at an
agency told me. She asked me questions, listened, bathed us both in her cigarette smoke, coughed a full minute, and finally said, “You’re kinda weird, you know, but I like it. I like the whole package. I think I can sell it. Tell me I’m crazy. Yes, I’m crazy. But I think I can sell it.”

Lou cruised the corridors of the Y and came back with descriptions of what he’d found: “All these pleasant fellows, the regulars, sitting around in the fake Moorish reception room watching TV and sipping orange soda and scanning the transients checking in. After the late movie on the tube, off to bed, but not before Fred from Toledo stops by for a cup of instant Sanka that Bill from Tampa heats up with his electric coil. They listen to the new Ferrante and Teicher album. You see, Bill’s made his room real homey, soft lights and all. Fred gets the great idea they’ll spend Thanksgiving together, never too early to plan for these lonely holidays, we’ll have turkey dinner at Schrafft’s, it’s not too expensive and it’s very nice, and then we’ll take in a show at Radio City. They agree and kiss coldly. Neither gets an erection, so they laugh and say, ‘Isn’t it silly for us to kiss when we’re just sisters?’ ” I suppose Lou made all that up.

It seemed that outside the Y everyone was living on the streets and no one ever went to bed. Lou and I took the subway to the Village, emerged at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, and walked up Greenwich Avenue. Most of the strollers were straight couples, but here and there, flashing past like a parakeet, was a gaudy little queen, a paste clip on a shirt that might have started life as a blouse, her gait complex with extra motions, micro-motions somehow added, as though a mad scientist, after breaking walking down into its components, had had trouble reassembling the elements into a convincing continuity.

“But we all walk that way,” Lou said. “We queens are so self-conscious, our little heads so drugged on just the sheer
thrill of existing publicly, that we can’t even cross a room without simpering and mincing. It’s not that we start out wanting to appear effeminate. It’s that we use effeminacy after the fact as an alibi for our embarrassment, our florid but somehow ill-timed gestures, the bizarre tilt of our heads, our—” But here his lecture dissolved into a tearful laugh, for Lou loved to assail us in terms that were pushed to such an extreme that even he saw the absurdity.

We were passing below the women’s prison on the corner of Eighth and Sixth, just next to the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, and two women on the street were calling up to the metal-shuttered windows. “Lorine, you cheat on me, bitch, I beat yo’ black ass, hear? I love ya’, honey, save ya’ love for mama.” Over the motor hum and the tocsin of impatient horns, these women called out to each other, their New York voices penetrating and forlorn.

“Look at them, Bunny, they’re so heroic, these dykes, they don’t give a shit about all these Village Beatniks and dull-normals, they just want to wail out their love, keep that prison cunt faithful till release, ah!” and Lou pressed a broken hand to his chest as though he were a Saint Sebastian pierced by melancholy, “it’s so beautiful, this beautiful poetry of gay life.”

On this hot July night the streets were thronged with people. Here a crowd circled a sidewalk artist sketching a solemn young man with waved hair and spotty skin. The sitter was posing as though his profile were about to go on the coin of the realm. He was the only one who couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along, this disappointment being patiently prepared for him. There, in the little park across from the Waverly movie theater, an impromptu game of basketball had broken out and bare sweaty black and tan torsos flashed through the dark, reflecting the lights surging up Sixth.

Cars on MacDougal slowly waded through people like buffalo through flooded paddies. The sound of voices, of street musicians, rang off the brick walls of tenements. Above the streetlights shadowy families sat on metal fire escapes. Now we passed an ornate Italian coffee shop, flyblown mirrors hung in gilt frames dimmer than a helmet in a Rembrandt. The eagle atop the espresso machine flew imperiously through a cloud of steam.

No faggots appeared to have strayed over to this side of Sixth Avenue, but once we recrossed it we were back among what Lou called the “Cha-cha queens, hairburners, and glandular cases.” A hissing trio like rattled snakes in an agitated basket were hanging out on a stoop, their lips flecked with foam. Another pair were dancing in the water of an open fire hydrant, shirts tied to expose their tummies. Lou was in a delirium: “Bunny, we’re home, you can press your ear to the pavement and hear the heartbeat,” and even though he made me feel such a prig, my heart did leap at all the possibilities this city offered to meet men. Before, I’d caught only half glimpses of queers, but like a hunter who pursues his deer deep into the night forest, at last I’d come upon a moonlit clearing filled with thousands of moving antlers, all these men.

Lou had the address of a gay restaurant in the Village. When we were led by that majestic personage called the Mater D to our table in the garden, we were studied by other customers, and only after we’d sat down, ordered our oysters Rockefeller (with Pernod sauce on a bed of spinach), and sipped our daiquiris did we relax and look around.

A gay bar, a cruisy toilet—that I understood, but a gay restaurant? The suggestion that gay men, like Negroes, might want to enjoy one another’s company astounded me.

The city seemed like a Bring-Your-Own party that had gone on too long. Even children were still playing at midnight.
A blind woman stood on a corner singing in a quavering voice the song my mother had sung to me at bedtime when I was a child: “I’ll be seeing you in apple-blossom time.” At stoplights cars shouldered each other out of the way, jockeying to gain a few inches at the starting gate. As we headed up Park Avenue in a taxi (Lou was treating), we leaned our heads back and looked up at the illuminated spires streaming past. At another stoplight a group of Puerto Rican teenagers dressed in baseball uniforms shouted at each other over the roof in raucous voices. In Chicago there’d been the Loop, but it had been virtually deserted after dark; here people seemed to live in the center city, and I expected to see lines of wash strung between skyscrapers.

I got a job. I had to wait until the second week of September to start work and I wasn’t paid until six weeks after that, but at least I had a small purchase on this island. Lou staked me until I received my first check, for he was writing copy now for a top vodka account in a small agency. We both moved out of the Y into apartments, he into six rambling rooms on the Upper West Side, I into a tiny three-room railroad flat in the Village, on MacDougal above Houston.

At school I’d already grown used to assuming and shedding disguises. In New York the costume ball continued. At work I wore a coat and tie and behaved with circumspection, but in the Village I dressed as a “hipster” (the new word). Lou had already taught me the hip vocabulary, but the old jazz hipster was being replaced by the image of someone young, white, innocent, loving, and permissive, someone who drank wine and smoked pot but avoided heroin, someone who put into spiritual practice the socialist injunctions against owning personal property; like the flowers in the field, this child toiled not.

This evolution in style seemed to me a purely local phenomenon. I knew that the Detroit and Chicago of my
childhood would never change. They represented the eternal, if distasteful, verities. I was sure that what was happening was only a new eruption of the old bohemian spirit.

I’d found a job as a writer trainee for a national magazine. During the first six months I had to rotate from one department to the next, working first as a researcher in the library, then as an expediter in the mailroom or the production department. At last I was permitted to write a single caption, edited by three different hands before the picture was dropped in the final layout at press time. By the end of the year I had been given my own cubicle and phone and a door that closed. I was still researching and writing the odd caption.

Once a month I’d be invited to a luncheon for twenty people held in a small dining room on the top floor of the building, overlooking all of Manhattan. The older editors would do most of the talking. At my university I’d met professors who, of course, were experts in their field but had no sociable way of talking about this knowledge and knew nothing about anything else. These editors—sharp-featured, capillaries broken from discreet alcoholism—seemed to know everything and to have done everything. They had flown as fighter pilots, one had served as interpreter for MacArthur in Japan, another had traveled with Margaret Bourke-White to the South Pole, or helped expose a city hall scandal, taken a sympathetic look at the Hollywood Ten, researched the profile of Marilyn Monroe at the Actors Studio … They mentioned books about the Ballets Russes, the Wright Brothers, Jefferson’s slave mistress, Churchill at Malta, and everyone had a wisecrack about the author, an anecdote to relate about once tying one on with him or her in Singapore or Lisbon. One editor knew the best expert to consult on Persian rugs, another spoke of his hopes for the Bermuda Cup, a third named the best greens in Scotland. The current
congressional expense-account scandal drew a quick laugh. Mary Leakey’s dates for the first hominids were greeted skeptically.

The range of their knowledge was stunning and peculiarly personal, since everything they’d learned they’d picked up on a story. A quick prep and then two thousand words on the endangered statues at Abu Simbel, or two columns on Robert Moses’s plan to pave over lower Manhattan. A quick visit to Sidney Janis and some lively copy on this new Pop Art, its star Andy Warhol, the guy who’d said on TV Pop Art isn’t satire, it’s just a way of liking things.

I could never speak as fast as these editors. The little knowledge I had I wore heavily. It had never occurred to me until now that almost all the news got made and reported by a small elite who’d met each other at a few Ivy League schools.

Although I barely made enough money to squeak by from one check to the next, lived on spaghetti, and purchased my new suit on a revolving credit plan, I scarcely thought about money. On the floor I’d count out ninety-nine pennies for a ticket to the highest balcony at the City Center for the ballet and walk the fifty blocks home; Wilde’s idea that the luxuries are necessities, and the necessities luxuries, became my slogan.