Starf*cker: a Meme-oir (23 page)

We didn’t spend all day laughing at aspiring authors, I promise. We were good people who diligently spent most of our time reading a steady stream of earnest inquiries and helping authors whip their work into publishable shape. I plucked a mystery writer from the pile and helped sell her first book, attending her book-signing in a vest that looked like I’d cut it off a shabby-chic couch. I went back and forth with a horror writer on the topic of his gory novel featuring silent movies, the Black Dahlia, group sex, and vampires, rewriting it at length and with no regard for how dispiriting it must be for a writer to have a 19-year-old scratch out whole chapters and insert new plots and subplots. In the end, the book was his and I improved it while learning to have not
quite
so heavy a hand.

But as much of an education as my time with Jane was, I only ever wanted to live in New York City. I’d taken my first trip there in 1988 to see Madonna in
Speed-the-Plow
, then had spent most of my time complaining bitterly that I had no money to spend on collectibles at the mind-bogglingly well-stocked music-import stores Record Runner and Rebel Rebel, and that hamburgers cost $5. My friends I’d traveled with had cash to burn—I stayed with a buddy whose parents lived on Central Park West and had what looked like a Mir
ó
in his foyer—so didn’t think twice about dragging me to eat lavish Ethiopian meals. Most Ethiopians were starving and so was I, unable to chip in on more than some bread.

Even though I was poor, I’d immediately felt like New York City was where I was born to be, walking from Downtown all the way to Central Park and drinking in the random architecture, outrageous trash aroma, and ethnic faces. People didn’t look the same there. Nobody looked like they were made of ticky-tacky. My roomie John and I had always teased each other about our obsession with New York City boys, but the feelings were real—Italians, Latinos, African-Americans, Jews…the place was lousy with tall-dark-and-handsome. Suddenly, JFK Jr. looked average. I sensed immediately it was a sexy city. Men were looking at me in a way that suggested we go back to their walk-ups and figure out how to insert their penises into me for an hour or so. In Chicago, the hottest street action I ever got was a wink at a cash machine. Once.

After that teaser of a trip, Jane had taken me to NYC to attend the big ABA bookseller convention and to be her lackey, and that had sealed the deal on my love affair with Manhattan. Walking around the Javits Center, ducking free copies of
Dianetics
and not-free copies of the La Toya Jackson memoir, I was surprised when Jane gave me a ticket to my very first Broadway musical,
The Will Rogers Follies
. From the mezzanine, I spotted humorist Erma Bombeck—it’s that dry wit—and felt like I was in celebrity-spotting heaven, but then the whole audience stood up and cheered when Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf entered. Even New Yorkers were buying that whole Operation Desert Shield thing?

Her politics begrudged poor people a roof over their heads, yet in practice, Jane was a very generous woman. She didn’t want to lose me to NYC, but knowing I longed to move there, she threw herself into helping by calling up all of her contacts and asking if I could have informational interviews on a trip back toward the end of my tenure at MPD. I had something like 50 appointments, many with top editors like Craig Nelson, who’d been zinged in
The Andy Warhol Diaries
so was like a god on earth to me.

In mid-1992, I showed up in New York with a shiny olive suit and a loud ‘90s tie that was the sartorial answer to the
In Living Color
opening credits. It was all I could afford after spending all my money on Madonna and hair products. I remember walking in a sweat from skyscraper to skyscraper to get to meetings with the editorial decision-makers who might offer me the job that would let me become a Manhattanite. In the claustrophobic lobby of one elite publisher, a young girl with hair sprayed so expertly it would never move again was seated at the front desk, grinning at me the whole time I waited for an editor. She finally blurted out, “I
like
your suit.” It was one of those situations when someone is telling you the opposite of what’s on their mind to make you feel better. After that, I had a green suit and a complexion to match.

One editor handed me a 400-page, complicated manuscript and made me read the whole thing overnight so I could offer my thoughts the next day. I hated it and told him so, unaware it was a book he’d just bought and planned to make a priority.

But most of the editors were really lovely to me, partly because they respected Jane or found her to be as much of a character as we did, so used their meetings with me to not-so-subtly push me for details about how she ran her office. I couldn’t tell them we’d only just gotten a fax machine, that roaches the size of Shih Tzus would clamber out of the old sink in the room where we kept all the USPS mailers we were stacking to re-use, or that Jane used paper clips to keep her hair out of her face when she was reading the mail, so I just played dumb on what they were fishing for and played smart when they asked me things about publishing.

The meeting that landed me a job was a short visit with an appropriately bookish editor at St. Martin’s Press named George Witte. George was extremely welcoming and, when his referral got me hired to assist both a sci fi editor and a woman in charge of trafficking all the information on each season’s titles, I believe George pocketed the $100 fee for finding the company a new employee. Years later, he was one of the top editors in the biz, a man of great literary taste and common sense. To have been recommended by him made me feel like a bestseller, or at least a literary triumph that should’ve been one.

Even better, St. Martin’s Press had a famous gay publishing program. Even though I wasn’t working in his office, I was excited to know that I would be around the corner from Michael Denneny, who had published
And the Band Played On
in 1987, influential writers like Paul Monette, Tom Bianchi’s
Out of the Studio
, and let’s not forget about
The Simply Divine Cut-Out Doll Book
.

My move to New York was uncomplicated. I had no furniture, only hundreds of Madonna magazines, posters, and pop-culture kitsch. I boxed it all up and UPSed my entire life to the city that doesn’t sleep, but that
does
have a fuck of a lot of rules about where and how you live in it.

I had crashed with Sandra, Jane’s former assistant who’d fled to the East Coast ahead of me, staying with her in her Hoboken apartment with her cats Kidget and Xinth and her boyfriend, listed in order of importance, while hunting for a living arrangement. Sandra is one of my favorite people, partly because she has a twisted sense of humor, but partly because she is tough. When her boyfriend carelessly damaged a fragile Japanese doll that had belonged to her dead grandmother, she destroyed one of his childhood photos, telling him, “Now
you
have no history, either.” I like decisive women.

It was not easy to find a place to live when I had no money and was accepting the kind of job more suited to a trust-fund baby, for which I was being paid $16,000 a year. On top of that, there was the gay thing, which was a real concern when it came to rooming with people in close quarters. I had no interest in moving in only to find out my roommate had a baseball bat with my name on it. I called one guy in Hoboken about his ad and we had a great conversation until the end.

“Just one thing I wanted to bring up,” I said. “I’m…gay.
Isthataproblem?
”

Pause. “Yeah, it kind of is because we’re not and we all have girlfriends, so...”

Huh?

Another guy let me come over. He was a built cop poured into a wifebeater and jeans who told me he had no problem with gays; his last roommate had been one, something he only found out because dudes kept casually walking out of his room on Saturday mornings. But he had a gun
on the table
so I ignored my instinct to turn the interview into porn without a camera and passed on moving in.

I finally found a nice man in Weehawken who took me in. He was older than me, had great stories of being a bartender in the Village and serving “that lush” Tennessee Williams until he passed out, and also had a young, straight-boy roommate whose presence made my rent so reasonable I couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity.

I bounced my first rent check anyway.

As financially shady as that was, I was definitely not the worst roommate in the situation, something I learned early on when I came home and found my roomie/landlord sprawled on the carpet in the main room in his BVDs. He was Tennessee Williams-wasted, which definitely put a damper on my plans to watch the Arsenio Hall anniversary special. Instead, I had to thumb through his vintage porn and hope that the next call I made wouldn’t be to 911.

He lived.

Another time, I showed up to find him standing outside our place, swaying as he attempted to connect the key to the keyhole. There was no telling how long he’d been there, but I assumed it was quite a while; just watching him from up the block as I approached felt like hours. It was like the first scene in a zombie movie whose working budget had not been raised but whose director had decided to go for it anyway.

My room was no frills, but suburban enough that visiting family wouldn’t freak out. I found a box of stuff in the closet that had belonged to the previous tenant, who if memory serves had died of AIDS. The first thing in the box was a program from the first-ever
MTV Video Music Awards
in 1984, which even then felt to me like finding the lost Ark of the Covenant. No snakes in the closet, but more porn and a sock that we can assume had been raped too many times to count.

My landlord was a really nice man when he wasn’t drinking. He was actually a nice man when he
was
drinking, too, but it was so desperately over-the-top that it stressed me out to witness it. To this day, I’ve never had a proper drink of alcohol, in part because I’d had to lift one grandparent off the floor as a teenager and did not like that view, and in part because I think I’m such a control freak that the idea of letting go for even a little while threatens me. Yes, I’m the life of every party. When I was young and told people I didn’t drink, they’d slur, “Good for you!” Now, they ask if I’m in recovery. Soon, it’ll be, “What medication are you on that prevents it?”

But while I have been known to be a bit of a killjoy, especially when I was younger, in this situation I was able to rationally assess matters and decide that it wasn’t about me being uptight around alcohol so much as it was about my landlord being self-destructive.

My other roommate was more interesting to me. Tall, lanky and seemingly hung (I guess he’d been brought in on a “No underwear? No problem!” policy), he was an aspiring actor who also aspired to prove that he was not in any way uncomfortable around two homos, even the one (me) who kept drawing anatomically hopeful portraits of him in the raw.

“What’s that?” he asked me one time from my doorway. He was in a flimsy pair of shorts that in 2014 would be high camp and yet in 1992 still passed as normal. I showed him the abstract portrait of him with his muscular legs spread so far his neon-pink asshole was winking. He didn’t know it was a rendering of him and his junk so just nodded and told me it was great. “You should try
me
sometime,” he offered. If only he’d meant it.

But though he never seemed uncomfortable living with two generations of gays, his attitudes were more fucked that I was at that point. During the space of one conversation, he told me in graphic detail how a drunken encounter with a girl had led to sex in Central Park, then he referred to gay men with AIDS by noting that “you play, you pay.”