Memoirs of a beatnik (14 page)

Georgie brought me Antoine. I had invited him to dinner one evening, together with Kip the drummer and Brenda, and arrived back from a modeling job to find not Georgie or Kip, for*they hadn't come yet, but a huge, stalwart-looking, solemn-faced man

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in tie and jacket sitting incongruously on a construction bench in front of the fire.

"Hello," he intoned with heavy accent. "I am Annntoine."

"Too much," says I, and it was.

"Georrrrge invited me to meet him here for dinner."

"He did, did he?" I muttered. Georgie was getting a bit far out for my taste.

"Just pull out that end of the mattress, will you?" I asked as brightly as possible. "I want to finish making the bed."

Antoine complied with solemn gallantry, inquiring the while, "And what—is yourrrr—philosophy?"

"Catch," I said, and threw a corner of the blanket to him.

He caught it and tucked it in, making really professional hospital corners while he continued, "Mine-is the philosophy-of rrresigned-desperation," as if he had rehearsed it, which I am sure now that he had.

Antoine was truly and actually French, and a writer, he claimed, showing me once after two years' acquaintance a two-line poem: something about salt and snow and a young boy walking through, very white-on-white effect, very French, I remember thinking. He had had a whore for a mother, or at least a lady of very questionable virtue, and, apparently, a Jewish father who was a Communist heavy of some sort in Paris. He had spent his childhood on the streets, living in bombed-out buildings with roving gangs of kids like himself. He had stories to tell in which the oldest of the urchins, a girl of twelve, bullied them, fucked them, and mothered them, cooked and cleaned and sent them out to steal chickens, and, in real emergencies, went out and hustled for them. When he was about seven he was selling dirty pictures to the soldiers. First the German soldiers and then the American ones.

I don't know how Antoine got to America, but he had, when I knew him, an American painter wife with a small but solid reputation, and a part-scholarship to NYU. We all got very fond of him, he had a mordant bitter wit and he came on like a G-man. When there was trouble, as there sometimes was, between us and the neighborhood street gang, I would go out with Antoine to the local hangout, and we would hold hands and drink a soda together, and generally make it known that he was my guy. His size alone was

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impressive: he was six foot four and weighed about 220 pounds. And his trench coat harked back to forties tough-guy movies.

He usually entered the house with a good bit of fanfare. I was awake as soon as he let himself into the kitchen, where he announced his presence by walking broodingly about. Then he would come into the front room and lie heavily on me while kissing me formally awake. He was good with his lips, as I have noticed Frenchmen are. They are not great cocksmen, being a little smug in that area, but they do tend to have good mouths. Great tongue-in-ear people, neck-nibblers, and cunt-eaters.

Antoine could usually be induced to get out of his clothes, but it wasn't easy: he operated on the principle that anytime, anyway, anywhere was the way to fuck, like on the floor if somebody was crashing in the bed. He was very insulted the time I refused, the kitchen floor being a bit too grungy for me. He expected me to be hot at a moment's notice, and I could usually oblige, for that spring I went to bed expecting someone or something to happen, and the nights when it didn't were fortunately rather rare.

He liked to go down on me, and had a good repertoire of tongue rhythms and twirls. He also like for me to suck him off. He was very meticulous about how; had a whole routine worked out of the rhythms and pacing he liked best. It was actually a bit like taking an exam. He always asserted that French girls went down on you best, claimed it was cultural—they were trained from the cradle in phallic worship by their mothers.

He was only a fair lay; his girth turned me off—that, and the fact that he almost never took his socks off. His cock was thick but rather short, and although thick cocks are nice, and make you feel good and full, I myself have never found that width made up for length-I like to feel them touch my cervix. Then too, he was inordinately involved with technique: fucking him was rather like a class in acrobatics, with a little hatha yoga thrown in on the side.

But fuck him I did, and fairly often. There was something strangely comforting about him: something solid and manly after all the boys I'd been going to bed with.

Like Don, for instance. He was still on the scene, would come over, silent and long and sad, and slip into bed. Or more often would wake me by whispering that he had a taxi waiting, and why

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didn't I go with him, hack to his pad on Central Park South. And I would get up and scramble into some tattered jeans and we would cab back through the city and slip past the disapproving doorman. He would have put on the electric coffeepot before he left, and the coffee would be ready and the phonograph would still be playing as we walked in. We would wander from room to room over the pale blue wall-to-wall carpet, shedding our clothes. We would switch from coffee to cognac, shower in the dazzling bathroom, rubbing each other down with the thick, deep-colored towels and exotic Indian oils, and wind up on the huge bed in the draperied bedroom.

Don's reticence was mainly verbal; physically he was quite there, an electricity under his pale brown skin that set my blood tingling, though I couldn't have said quite why. It is an interesting question, this question of "sexiness." Shy Don certainly was, and he had a certain awkwardness, but—a big "but" this—he turned me on, literally set my head spinning, and I set this down finally to a charge in the flesh like static electricity, a superabundance of life force (animal magnetism? orgone?)—a something that crackles, palpably, at the touch.

Making it with him was more tantalizing than satisfying. There was a certain sadness in it, a turning and turning away. His cock was really beautiful, long and slender tool, infinitely expressive; his coloring was indescribable; and he had beautiful hair; curling in tight ringlets like a cap all over his head. He was the size and shape I liked best too: a little too long and too thin-an exaggerated, elongated elegance. But none of this was the essence of it. His essence was shadows, and colorless gleams in the dark. Or the flash of his warm skin, golden sheet-lightning. Elusive. A sideways mover with a glint in his eye, looking back at you over his shoulder.

Mornings, Don's and my scene bordered on the incestuous: a certain amiable brother-and-sister quality, Cocteau-like, as we lounged about in simplistic nudity on the large stuffed chairs, reading and sipping orange juice, or watching the early morning news on television in the large curtained living room.

Sometimes the door would open and it would be Ivan, grinning, returned from some exotic city in the center of the country, and ready to leap into bed in the middle of the afternoon. He had

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married and was back in school, would reek of ivy and crumbling academic walls and the endless dusty breezes off the plains of the Midwest. But not to be believed, his professorial airs, for the old glint was still in his eye, and I no sooner got him out of his tie and gaiters than he was tipping me over on the wine satin quilt and checking out all my reflexes with tongue and tool.

I was always glad to see Ivan because I knew he would fill the bill, big enough to meet all my requirements. A wholly absorbing cock, that left me neither latitude nor thought for anything else. We would romp the daylight away on the totally familiar fields of each other's body, and then go out in the twilight and roam through the city, taking a taxi up the West Side to the north tip of the island, End wood Park, going down on each other in that damp and chilly wood, while all around the faint rustle of wildlife was the rustle of the gay boys cruising. Then we'd ride the subway to a Chinese restaurant in Harlem, and walk back to Sixtieth Street through Central Park, dodging the cruising police cars (for there was by now a curfew on the parks), crouching together behind boulders and bushes, feeling each other up for the hell of it in our breathless criminal excitement.

We would return to the pad hungry and smoke hash and get hungrier, devour everything in the kitchen-down to Bosco sandwiches on whole wheat toast-and fall into bed sticky with milk and honey to fuck till dawn, our flesh glowing silver and magic in the moonlight that bounced off my fire-escape.

Ivan was always excitement, riches, a certain sparkle in the air. Pete was home, and dumpiness, and Swiss cheese sandwiches on rye bread for lunch. Making it with him was like having crumpets and tea—with a certain vague awareness that the crumpets were communion wafers, but no idea at all what to do about that. We had, after all, shared a bed for some six months or so before we started screwing: had agreed at the beginning of that previous fall not to make it until the first snow. And then the first snow had slipped past us somehow, and it was well into the winter, after my job with Ray Clarke, before we got together.

Sleeping with Pete was like sleeping with a life-size teddy bear: furry and affectionate and stolid. I got to like it. Antoine had to hurt one a little before he was excited, a few scratches on the back

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or some bites here and there; Georgie had to hurt himself. Don needed mystery and silence and great orderliness all around him before he could let go, and Ivan throve on a certain sparkle and elan that wasn't always easy to come up with. But with Pete things could be exactly as they were: there could indeed be mouldy sandwiches at the foot of the bed, dusty oatmeal for breakfast, turned-off gas and electric. One could be excited or excitable or neither, let one's hair down—even have a bit of dandruff. No great enchantment—a kind of bread-and-butter sex.

Soon after we started making it, Pete moved back into the pad, having fled Big John and his furnished room after a night on which—so he claimed—he had come home and found that his roommate had taken a wet, seven-foot oil painting to bed with him. It was a good and fine thing.to have Pete as roommate and available lover, and it didn't cramp my style. He was—or seemed to be—totally unjealous, and if he came home and I was busy with someone else, he'd simply go out for an English muffin and coffee. Or I would get up after he was asleep and slip out with Don or Ivan, coming back before dawn to a bedfellow who hadn't stirred.

The only guy at this time who came from downtown, who really came from the downtown scene, was Dirty John. He brought a certain funkiness with him, a certain down-to-earth ambience: rank odor of old clothes and roach killer.

Dirty John really earned his name: he was known for the infrequency of his baths. In the winter he never bathed at all, never even changed his clothes. When November came he put on a certain dark blue hooded sweatshirt that framed his thin, dark, furtive face and made him look like a ghetto vampire, and took it off again the following April. If spring was early, that is. He had a seven-dollar Timex wristwatch with a wide band and when he went to bed he would take off the watch, and the strap would have left a white mark on his grey-colored arm. Color of ashes, bright ferret eyes peering out of the hood. Lithe, limber body-the body of a good second-story man, and the ability to come six or seven times in as many hours.

Dirty John was good fun, was always full of schemes for getting rich quick. My favorite was his plan to buy up a piece of the Arizona desert on one of those two-lane straightaways that cuts

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through it, and there incorporate a town, and singlehandedly vote in a fifteen-mile-an-hour speed limit, and enforce it with incredible fines as the folk tore through at night. Not a bad plan, actually; I have since been through several towns in the U.S. which subsist in just that way. Orem City, Utah, for example.

Dirty John seldom came to the house, but when he did it was always a special occasion. I remember several times that year when we went to bed about seven and made love six or seven times before getting up around two in the morning to go out and eat something at Rudley's luncheonette on the park. Then, reinforced with extra sandwiches for later, we would wend our way home and fall to again, falling asleep after it got light.

Dirty John was from the Pittsburgh slums, and he was full of a dark paranoia and hopelessness that I recognized in myself, but had never encountered in anyone else. He was sure it was all going to go wrong, finally. He was probably right. But in bed he was a pleasure, there was a fine understatement in his lovemaking, it came on slow and strong, snuck up on you unawares, so that blue lights as of cocaine were melting in your gut before you were quite aware that anything had started to happen. He didn't hold out and wait for you to court him, like Don did; wasn't dumpily there, a mountain in your kitchen window, like Pete was; didn't come on like a heavy who really KNEW, like Antoine; he was just easy, an easy lover who took you apart when you least expected it. Dirty John was good times, camaraderie and good fucking, a small slim body that fitted mine well, and though he never bathed in the winter he did OK that Spring, 'cause he never smelled bad when we got together, and his cock was always clean-what more can a girl ask?

He left me with a good feeling when he split, because I knew the games I dug were being perpetrated in some other corner of the city, silently and secretly carried on. Like the time he told me about, when after three days of solitude and heavy meditation he had gotten in touch with the flying saucer people. They were just coming in through the window to take him away with them, like he'd asked them to, when, he said, he suddenly realized that he wasn't ready yet, and told them so, and they obligingly split. People like that were rare in the middle-1950's, and I treasured Dirty John—a good friend who would arrive on his stolen motor-

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cycle and walk absolutely silent through the kitchen whenever I thought hard about him: sent out a call.