The Farewell Symphony (52 page)
because I'd sufrercd so little—or rather, sufiercd intensely but only over abstractions such as lovelessness or unluifiUed ambition, whereas my married friends worried, year in and year out, over the practical family problems I'd faced only while Gabe and Ana lived with me?
I had no wrinkles, no grey hairs, nothing sagged, my hairline was receding only slightly. I was proud of my youth, which had been extended ten years longer than I'd ever expected, but I also saw it as an empty honor, a sign that I was like wax that had not yet been sealed, that had, perhaps, become too cold and hard to take an impression.
I moved downtown, back to the Village, or rather to the Colonnades, a rickety old terrace built in the 1830s by the Astors for remote relatives who wouldn't be inheriting. The Colonnades was in the no-man's-land between the West and East Village, an area that ten years later would be teeming with boutiques, restaurants, gyms, bookstores and bars but that then, at the end of the 1970s, was tentatively being called, half as a joke, NoHo (North of Houston), and that local residents thought might someday become prosperous.
I had a beau named Leonard who'd arranged everything. It was he who moved me into the Colonnades. I'd met him at the gym. He was tall, lanky and blond and he worked out every night with Billy, his constant sidekick.
Leonard was from Florida, he had a job as a secretary for the New York State Council for the Arts, he knew no women socially and he loved the company of men. He was sLx foot four but slightly hunched, as though he disliked being so tall, so conspicuous. He ate enormous quantities at all times, hoping to gain weight.
He had a loping walk, a shifty glance, blue-white skin and a speaking voice he'd forced down from tenor to bass. The arts of life—conversation, food, clothes, holidays—left him indifferent; perhaps he'd never thought about them. Talk was either grunts at strangers or a halting, sincere confession to his two or three intimates. Food was just grams of nourishment to be consumed according to a schedule for maximum weight gain. Clothes were gym clothes and sweatsuits and parkas and second-hand overcoats for warmth.
But he was involved in a grand remake of his external experience and even his character. He went from being a timid, skinny kid to a loud, smiling, lordly man in the space of three years. When I first picked him up at the gym he liked to talk dirty while I sucked his big, silky dick. The rest of the evening he'd tell me about his childhood and his plans.
The Farewell Symphony
He'd grown up in Florida in a trailer camp. His father had been a high school football hero and, later, a drunk in his twenties, always going on a bender every weekend when he was through working as a garage mechanic. Leonard was still just a scared little kid, malnourished on margarine and sugar sandwiches, when his father had a bad car accident and lost both legs. After that his dad would just lie in bed all the time drinking. Every time he saw Leonard he'd call him a creep. Leonard shot up, played a bit of basketball badly, studied hard, played in the Gainesville band, and his father hated his kid with all his heart. "You're a fuckin' creep. Look at you, lurking around the house, fuckin' nose in a book, like a faggot creep, blowing on some shitty instrument at halftime instead of playing sports. You're a fuckin' nerd, the kind of creep I used to beat up in high school."
Leonard finished at Florida State with top grades, his father's voice in his ears. He came to New York because there he thought he could be a faggot, a nerd, a creep in solitude. But once he arrived in New York he met Billy, ten years older, an equally shy boy who played the piano, read poetry, was in arts management, drank to excess. He was the one who found Leonard his job and launched him into weighdifting.
Billy was small and passive and profoundly indifferent to women. Because of his work he'd met some of the most celebrated painters and poets and directors of the day, all gay men, and they called him in the middle of the night to go out drinking or invited Billy and Leonard up to a cottage in Vermont or to an island in the Caribbean and so their humdrum life, which consisted of work, brown-bag lunches and workouts, would suddenly be shot through with a glimpse of ermine or flamingo pink, that is, black and white Vermont or Technicolor St. Bart's. For most of the successful older men they knew were every bit as strange as they— paranoid or cruel or alcoholic or profoundly self-hating—and they liked these two Southern guys, one taO and one short, one fair and one sandy haired, both taciturn and socially awkward, both fiercely cultivated.
But Leonard benefited from a brief historical moment, the triumph of clone culture at the end of the 1970s. He became a huge man with a massive chest too hard to sleep on, shoulders as wide as a Jaguar's fenders, a back so bulked with muscle that his spine had become a very deep indentation, and a butt you could have balanced a martini on. His legs stayed skeletal and thousands of squats under a bar so loaded that it looked as though it might snap in two did nothing to beef them up. He trudged
about the gym as though his shoes were made of lead and cement and he belched like an active volcano.
The landlord liked him and asked him to supervise the construction of two major gay venues. First he wanted Leonard to draw up some plans and oversee the total facelift of a sauna that had been a foul-smelling steambath for half a century. I used to visit that place with its come-slippery tile steps, its green pool growing slime, its steamroom decanting fifty years' worth of toe jam and ear wax, where saurian old clients flickered into life only once a century. In its place Leonard put speakers wailing Diana Ross, grey industrial carpet, spotlights trained on minuscule grey-green tiles in the wet area, a state-of-the-art hot tub and dozens of private rooms sheathed in solid metal walls painted black or terra cotta.
The lights were flattering and the sheets and towels impeccably white. There was no clock except at the entrance and time was banished along with any crack in the pleasure machine that might indicate whether it was day or night outside. Everyone looked tan, everyone was young—except now youth had been extended to include hot men in their forties. Hunky daddies as well as twinky kids. Beauty—facial beauty, fine bones, flawless skin, a full head of straight hair—was no longer important since a fighter's mug or a lantern jaw could be a turn-on, the latest antibiotics and sun treatments ensured good skin and a bald head had just been deemed sexy.
The other place Leonard built was a disco—a huge high-tech dance floor installed under whirling lights and booming speakers, the whole inserted into a historic theater. I didn't go often but when I did it was on acid tempered by downers and grass and I'd dance for hours, bare chested, my trousers soaked through v^th sweat, my body slipping against hundreds of other naked torsos. Some guys were wearing just silk shorts and whisdes dangling from a cord around their necks. All week long these men would be pumping iron and swallowing vitamins so they could dance from Saturday at midnight to Sunday at noon on heavy drugs. They alternated five days of temperance wdth two of debauchery. The admission price was stifl" since no one drank liquor—I'm not sure there was even any liquor for sale.
Around dawn I'd go up to the shadowy balcony where guys were stretching out singly or in pairs, smoking cigarettes and looking down through eyeleted metal sheathing at the domed dance floor and its orchestrated writhings. Sometimes I'd kneel between another man's legs
The Farewell Symphony
and suck his salty, sweaty cock. After a few months I reahzed I could skip the drugs and dancing and just arrive fresh and cool at sLx or seven in the morning and go straight up to the balcony and give some head to weightlifters who were starting to crash.
Freed from my parental duties and determined to take advantage of the Indian summer of my looks, I went to the baths or the balcony three nights a week. I wasn't what I would have called a sex maniac. I had dinner with Joshua or Butler or Max or a beau every night of the week, usually in a restaurant. I never cruised by day, even though while I was writing my sex manual, working against a tight deadline, I became excited and frustrated. But late—toward two or three in the morning—I couldn't distinguish between loneliness and horniness. Well, it certainly wasn't simply loneliness, since if a friend had called after midnight seeking company I would have found it intrusive.
Leonard had built these two palaces, though I doubt he ever made much money from them. What he did obtain was the goodwill of the landlord, who became a rich man and who backed Leonard's own gym. Leonard designed and built it himself in the same sober but chic industrial style he'd used for the baths and the disco. He outfitted it with the best and newest equipment and hired hot Cuban and Italian instructors who were so macho they never smiled and were even rumored to have girlfriends. The most famous gay porno stars look out memberships and the young professionals from Chelsea joined up in the early spring to prepare for the annual summer migration to Fire Island.
In the midst of his wheeling and dealing Leonard found time to create my studio apartment. An old man had died after living there for fifty years in the most primitive, rent-controlled squalor. Leonard had the place fumigated, the linoleum ripped up and the parquet restored, the ceiling lamp concealed, the hundred-and-frfty-year-old wood shutters dug out of the walls and rehung, the white marble fireplace stripped clean, the walls painted a pale grey, a loft bed built over a walk-in closet and a new galley kitchen and toilet and shower stall wedged in behind a brand-new wall. The ceilings were fourteen feet high and the two noble casement windows looked out on a jungle of fire escapes, dirty back yards, glowing exit lights, gingko trees, twenty-story buildings and water tanks perched on distant roofs. When the East Side local headed downtown from .Astor Place the whole building shook.
After years of living on the depressing Upper West Side with Kevin and then the kids, I was alone and back in the Village. Everyone in the build-
ing was gay —not the piss-elegant window-dressers in suits I'd lived next to uptown but young Village guys in jeans and bomber jackets and three days' growth of beard who sometimes got blind drunk at dawn and fell asleep with the same record playing at top blast over and over and over. My apartment was burgled right away—someone just stepped in ofT the fire escape outside my windows and after that I started closing the heavy wood shutters and barring them whenever 1 went out.
Nothing could have been more streamlined than that life. I took my meals in coffee shops open twenty-foiu^ hours a day. I was free from the need to clean or cook or do anything but run the garbage down or take the laundry to the laundromat once a week and pick it up three hours later or cash a check every ten days. Leonard, I realized, wasn't just buddies with Billy. No, they were lovers and they'd recendy moved a younger redhead in with them, an Irish kid from Brooklyn whom they introduced as "Nick, our lover." Nick worked at the gym behind the desk, sometimes going down to the shower room to break up orgies. "Okay, fellas, knock it off. One more warning and you'se outta hiyah."
I could still draw on Leonard sexually, however, if I wanted. I was dating a handsome litde slave from Kentucky who was always looking for new thrills. I'd seen Leonard in black leather chaps, motorcycle boots and a chain-festooned black jacket. I stripped my slave naked and tied him up in one room and then, as prearranged, I buzzed Leonard in. In the living room he took off his shirt and jeans and put his boots, chaps and leather jacket back on. When we went into the bedroom all my slave could see in the half light was a six-foot-four sadist with a hard-on and leathers, his face cast in shadow by the bill of his motorcycle cap. The slave moaned and came before Leonard even touched him.
What he couldn't see was that this was Leonard the creep from Gainesville, the faggot who'd still blush if a woman flirted with him, who liked Thom Gunn's poetry and Robert Wilson's plays, who'd sat through the entire Ring cycle twice and liked to swing incense at "Smoky Mary's" Upper West Side church on Sunday mornings. This was the warm, smiling, genial Leonard who encouraged Billy to learn Schubert and Schumann, who gave dinner parties for all men at which the guests would linger till dawn, discussing life, love, art, money, morality. He wasn't competitive, he loved nurturing other people's talents, he'd learned, all on his own, the arts of life, but he didn't promote them in order to intimidate or impress other people but simply in order to communicate his curiosity and love. Billy was his partner, Nick was their lover, but Leonard was also
The Farewell Symphony
in lo\e with Walt, a big, soft-spoken fireman who once gave me a N\'FD gold and blue T-shirt which I wore for years until it turned to shreds. By that time Leonard and the fireman were both dead. Leonard and Walt would go off on gay motorcycle rallies. Once they even went to Reno to a gay rodeo. To look at them you would ha\e said they had nothing in common with the opera queens I'd known in the fifties; if you ran into them on a dark street you might even be scared. But they weren't afraid to show their lo\e of the arts and Leonard could weep when Billy played the Kinderszenen or sang in his quav'ering, pale voice Schubert's Erlkbnig.
I suppose the most distinctive thing about them was that they li\ed in an all-male societs' in which they adopted (and e\en exaggerated) a virile manner and an interest in sports. They took on hyper-male jobs (work in construcdon or the fire department). They spoke in loud, deep voices and looked like a lord and his bra\os when they went out to the clubs at two in the morning in a phalanx of fi\e or six guys in T-shirts and leather jackets, all of them o\'er six feet tall. But they were not merely male impersonators. They were just as capable of staying in all evening around a table, nursing brandy and cigars, talking about Balanchine or Mallarme, of Fred Halsted, the tough-guy porn-film director {L.A. Plays Itself), famous for his fist, or Halston, the celebrity dress designer. They were no longer creeps—or if so, then only on a bad, fearful morning. They could walk girders on a building site twent\' stories up or enter a blaze in search of a "crispy" (fu-eman's slang for a burn victim).
