The Farewell Symphony (39 page)

When Joshua, Eddie and I went for a walk after a dinner at the baroness's and fell into whoops of drunken laughter, I changed my mind. No, after all, Proust had been right when he'd said that great artists make

The Farewell Symphony

the best friends, for they alone are at once sympathetic to the life around them and sufficiently detached from it to see it. They may be unworthy of their work and falsify its values, but if writers are merely distracting as ex-egetes, they're good value as friends. No matter how crusty or irritable a writer might be, in the right mood he or she can assume any age, remain open to everything, become at once satirical and kind. Certainly Eddie was that way with me, for if he found me by turns self-hating and pretentious and teased me for it, he also knew, as he said, that I'd been made to wait too long. "Your first novel, this so-called first novel of yours," he said, "is so good it must be your fourth or fifth?"

"Fifth."

"In another, better era you would have been encouraged and published from the very start. You were made to wait too long. Of course that means your work springs fully formed and armed from your mind—but that will only intimidate other beginners, no?"

I laughed, blushed and stammered, since I had never thought about such a thing. Eddie's praise and understanding were the first I'd received from someone I admired so intensely.

"No wonder you have that whipped-dog look," he said, "that fear of being ridiculed." He scrutinized me closely, trying to take in the full extent of the damage. "We complain," he said, "about paranoid writers, but look how we treat them!"

When I returned to New York I went to the Candle, a local leather bar on Amsterdam. I couldn't afford leather chaps and a matching motorcycle jacket, nor would I have wanted to make such a commitment to a scene that back then was neither as acceptable nor as potentially ludicrous as it was to become. It was still frightening.

A raunchy, smiling guy close to forts' in worn black leathers with a worn, leathery face and quick, intelligent eyes came up to me and put his gloved hand down the back of my jeans. He cupped my bare ass in his hand. "Hey, you're nice."

"Thanks," I said. "You, too."

"Live near here?"

"Yeah." I liked his speed, his self-assurance, so rare in gay pick-ups, which usually advanced with the slowness of an auction between misers. "Want to come home with me?"

"Yeah, and with ten other guys. Let's get an org)' off the ground."

"Great!" I said. Because I felt confident that this guy, Herb, was sexy, I had no hesitation in going up to someone handsome and saying, "See that guy over there, the guy with short black hair and a mustache and a silver eagle on his sleeve?"

"Yeah."

"Well, him and me's tryin' to git a litde group action off the ground. My place's about ten blocks away—wannus to deal you in?"

"Yeah, I guess. Sure. Why not."

"Don't leave without us, you hear. S'goin' to be hot. We got grass, wine, poppers, downers."

When five guys and I walked into our apartment, it was after two a.m. but Kevin was still up, painting. He was stoned and he'd placed clip-on work lights all around the living room. He was listening to Phoebe Snow, whose bluegrassy voice, with its coppery inflections and guitar-string glis-sandi, negotiated treacherous jazz tunes with coolness and lightness. We listened to her day after day, night and day, because we only owned half a dozen records.

I brought my boys in to meet Kevin. I asked him if we could use his room, since he had a large foam cube for a bed. He said sure. I was afraid he would be angry at this invasion, but he wore a crooked smile and looked at my squirming catch with desire.

Suddenly I was proud of my knack for rounding them up, a social magnetism I could exert at those rare times when I wasn't feeling unsure of myself, an excitement that worked a charm in gay bars, where everyone was paralyzed with fear. The best way to cruise, for me at least, was to come to a bar with two noisy friends, talk and laugh with them in the center of the room, then at the crucial moment disengage myself from them and tackle someone who'd been watching our group with a faint smile that echoed our laughter. I didn't have the sort of brooding looks that silence and mystery could enhance; I looked my best when I was the liveliest.

Now I passed joints, Quaaludes and wine around rather nervously to my five guys, worried that in the bright lights of Kevin's studio their erections would melt and they'd remember they had to get up in the morning for work. Kevin was explaining to one guy how he wrote backwards for hours and hours and, at a certain moment of inspiration, continued producing his reverse calligraphy with colored inks on expensive drawing paper. The guy, round eyed, was standing with his hands clasped at crotch level as though he were a cowboy holding his hat and respectfully listening to the rancher's wife.

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"Let's go in the other room, guys," Herb said, for he and I were sending inaudible bat cries back and forth across the room about the necessity to act quickly. "Come and join us, Ke\in," I said with an ofThandedness that sounded convincing, at least to my ears.

I could describe the way Herb undressed the slender blond whom we mistakenly had thought would be shy. I stood behind the blond and breathed on his nape, his ears and down his spine between his shoulder blades while reaching around and tuning in Venus by turning his nipples. Within seconds he was a lion holding Herb down with a tawny paw and jabbing his mouth full of a long, straight but flexible penis. I could say how every man in that room looked to me like a package to be opened with just one soft tug at the big bow. Now that I'm in my fifties I see most men as social beings who have a pedigree and a past, a nature open or closed, someone fun or boring to talk to, remote from me or no more than sL\ or seven acquaintances removed through snob golf, but back then, in that bedroom illuminated by a single candle on the siU, they were just wide cocks or thin, balls light and tender as seedless grapes or big and veined like walnuts, insensitive and straining in their leathery sac; they were a short-sleeved coat of black hail- as closely woven as a knight's mail singlet—or just a tuft at the neck, as though the filaments were the exuberant waste siphoned off from the column of breath. A man was the surprising assertiveness triggered in the litde guy with the pinched breastbone and a lowered sight line as he realized he was being given permission for once to dominate another man and accordingly he widened his stance and squared his shoulders. Or a man was this thick-thighed mesomorph who, through a trick of the wiU, became light, reversed the metamorphosis from tree trunk to nymph and was lifted in Herb's strong arms, lifted and screwed. The guy threw his head back dramatically and extended the line of his long neck with a flung-back arm, an Adam's apple and an elbow becoming the only knobs in such long, smooth, weeping branches. The Quaaludes relaxed our muscles, turned us into slow-motion divers plunging into one another's bodies.

Herb talked dirty, verbal kindling until we all caught fire, then he went silent and let us listen to the slap and sigh of the general slow conflagration. In the flickering cancUelight and in the transitory Roman-candle highs induced by the passed poppers, our bodies may have resembled those of Laocoon and his sons but our desire writhed around us like the snakes.

Kevin came in, already naked as a child, and in the melee I was able to lick the instep of his foot and inhale the crushed-dandelion smeO of the

sweat under his arms, to feel the cool heft of his buttocks, at once firm and yielding, and to see the leonine blond's cock emerge taffy-apple shiny from Kevin's mouth. Hadn't I staged this whole orgy just so I could touch him in the anonymous confusion?

One man would never join in. He crouched in a corner, naked, chin in hand, despairing as Blake's Job, looking at us with huge eyes. We tried to encourage him to enter our fold, but he disapproved of us, it seemed.

When they'd all gone and the daylight was developing and printing Kevin's body, he knelt above mc, his knees burning into my pinioned biceps, and with infinite peacefulness he watered my mouth and face and chest with his bitter, hot urine.

Sex was a shadow we cast wherever we went, which traveled at our speed, like the calm shadow of its wings that an airplane inevitably projects onto the fields and forests below, that assumes the shape of the changing landscape and yet remains constant. None of our friends would have said we were "obsessed." That was a word heterosexuals used, or older, envious homosexuals. We thought having sex was a positive good, the more the better. A straight guy I'd known when I was an office worker and whom I kept up with, said to me, "You fags are so fuckin' lucky, always getting laid. You know what a fuckin' pain in the ass it is for us? We gotta wine and dine the chicks and dish out all this sweet talk and they still don't always fuckin' put out, whereas you fuckin' horny bastards just grope each other in the public crapper or at the back of the fuckin' movie thee-yay-terr without so much as a 'thank you ma'am.' Not that I could fuck some hairy guy's hairy asshole, for Chrissake, I like that sweet hon-eypot pussy." He pronounced it "puss-JO)'."

We believed that women held out in order to force guys into the servitude of marriage, that pussy was scarce so men would have to work for it, and that religion conspired to make men believe they were doing the right thing when they put on the iron collar and manacles. We thought that if women were as horny—as disinterestedly horny—as men, then everyone, straight or gay, would be having sex on every street corner

We were free. We didn't fall for any morality bullshit—anyway, the Christians had already assigned us to hell just for looking at men: the thought was as bad as the deed and the offending eye had to be plucked out. Before we plucked it out, we wanted to wink with it. If we picked up a case of clap the cure was just one shot away. Courtship was a con, again part of female culture. If we loved one another it wasn't something we confused with glandular deprivation. Even "love" was a suspect word.

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smelling of the bidet. Guys just sort of fell in with each other, buddies rubbing shoulders. We wanted sexual friends, loving comrades, multiple husbands in a whole polyandiy of desire. Exclusivity was a form of death—worse, old hat.

If love was suspect, jealousy was foul. W'e were intent on dismanding all the old marital values and the worst thing we could be accused of by one of our own was aping the heterosexual model.

I went to bed with a straight man, a young hippy writer who thought he should try sex with another guy and chose me because he liked my work. He treated me as he'd obviously been trained to treat women, with litde fluttering kisses along my brow, a tender tracing of my erect nipple, jokes whispered in my ear. We smoked some grass laced with PCP and when he found himself fucking me brutally and slapping my ass, he was so horrified by his violence and my pleasure that he hurried into his clothes and still half-undressed, half-erect, ran away, never to be seen again.

We equated sexual freedom with freedom itself. Hadn't the Stonewall Uprising itself been the defense of a cruising place? The newer generation might speak of "gay culture," but those of us thirtv' or older knew the only right we wanted to protect was the right to suck as many cocks as possible. "Promiscuity" (a word we objected to, since it suggested liberti-nage, and that we wanted to replace with the neutral word "adventuring") was something outsiders might imagine would wear thin soon enough. We didn't agree. The fire was in our blood. The more we scratched the more we itched—except we would never have considered our desire a form of moral eczema. For us there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a backioom and plundering body after body.

There had been no radical break with the past (we'd all heard about the orgies in the navy during World War II), but at least since I'd first come on the scene in the 1950s three things had changed: in New York City the cops weren't closing down our bars any more or harassing us if we held hands on the street; we now had a slogan that said "Gay is Good" and we'd stopped seeing shrinks in order to go straight; and there were more and more, millions more, gay men with leather jackets and gyTn-built bodies and low voices and good jobs. We used to think v\e were rare birds; now the statistics said that one out of eveiy four men in Manhattan was homosexual. When we marched down Fifth Avenue every June there were hundreds of thousands of gay women and men, many of them freaks, but the bulk of them the regular kind of people we liked. These

were the kinds of guys I had sex with several times every week. If I had sex, say, with an average of three different partners a week from 1962 to 1982 in New York, then that means I fooled around with 3,120 men during my twenty years there. The funny thing is that I always felt deprived, as though all the other fellows must be getting laid more often. A gay shrink once told me that that was the single most common complaint he heard from his patients, even from the real satyrs: they weren't getting as much tail as the next guy. I was so incapable of fitting my behavior into any general pattern that I would exclaim, aghast, "You know Liz has been married ^w times!" If my marriages had been legal, they would have been legion.

Nor did all this sex preclude intimacy. For those who never lived through that period (and most of those who did are dead), the phrase "anonymous sex" might suggest unfeeling sex, devoid of emotion. And yet, as I can attest, to hole up in a room at the baths with a body after having opened it up and wrung it dry, to lie, head propped on a guy's stomach just where the tan line bisects it, smoke a cigarette and talk to him late into the night and early into the morning about your childhood, his un-happiness in love, your money worries, his plans for the future—well, nothing is more personal, more emotional. The best thing of all were the random, floating thoughts we shared. Just the other day a black opera singer, who's famous now, sent me one of his recordings and a note that said, "In memory of that night at the baths twenty-five years ago." The most romantic night of my life I spent with an older man on the dunes on Fire Island, kissing him until my face burned from his beard stubble, treasuring the beauty of his skin and skin warmth and every flaw as though it were an adornment. When he walked me home through the salt mist floating in off" the sea and the sudden coldness of dawn, we strolled arm in arm as though we'd been lovers before the war, say, any war, and were reunited only now.