The Truth is Bad Enough: What Became of the Happy Hustler? (11 page)

Judy feigned utter surprise and humility as she introduced the legend who remained planted in the aisle, motionless, as Judy sat cross-legged on the edge of the stage in her characteristic pose and dedicated “Over the Rainbow” to “the great Joan Crawford.”

As if hypnotized, Joan moved toward the stage in slow motion with studied devotion and stood mere feet away from the teary star—a big blob of pink obstructing Judy from most of the audience.

After Judy’s final night, during which she was pelted with flowers for more than half an hour, my compulsive visits to the Stonewall increased.

One night when Alex and I were dancing, a short, dark and sinewy number tapped my partner on the shoulder, indicating that he was cutting in. “Joey,” he whispered in my ear, in a thick Italian accent.

“At long last love has arrived and I thank God I’m alive,” Frankie sang while Joey, as butch as they come, checked out my throbbing cock.

“Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and almost as an afterthought added, “In my cab.”

For my second lesson in the vagaries of who’s the fucker and who’s the fuckee, Joey took me to a dark apartment where he lived with his elderly mother, pulled down his pants, got on all fours, stuck his butt up in the air, and ordered me to fuck him as he stuck his head in a brown paper bag full of glue.

“Let me love you, baby, let me love you.”

I loved Joey and Alex as the summer unfolded, playing both the passive and aggressive roles, depending on which of my two Stonewall paramours I wound up in bed with on what night.

When I discovered a pus-like discharge dripping from my overactive penis, accompanied by a burning sensation, I assumed it was God’s punishment and headed for the nearest Catholic church. Nights at the Stonewall were juxtaposed with visits to, not the Palace, but houses of God, even though the drip and the burn persisted.

When I confessed my confounding dilemma to a brassy bleached blond queen who was a “neighbor” at the Y, she rolled her eyes and screeched, “Honeeeeey, you’ve got the claaaaap!” Not having a clue what “the claaaaap” was, I looked perplexed until he offered me a quick class in VD, punctuated by a few personal anecdotes.

He pulled out his wallet, gave me some cash and the name of his doctor. “Think of it as a rite of passage,” he said dramatically. “And think of me as your Auntie Mame.”

David Holiday was due in town while there were still remnants of dripping. (In those days, it took three heavy does of penicillin spread out over a week or so.) I told him the truth, almost proud of my indoctrination but terrified he’d reject me.

“Come over,” he said without the slightest bit of apprehension. “We can have plenty of fun with no danger,” he assured me. And we did. It was, I see in retrospect, my first safe-sex experience.

On one of my final visits to the Village, danger surfaced. I was on a pay phone, talking long-distance to my mother, when I noticed two guys circling the phone booth, tapping the glass and grabbing their dicks.

I simply assumed they were signaling for a sexual encounter so after I hung up, I followed them down a dark street and down a short flight of stairs, which was a secluded entrance to a darkened apartment.

One of them pulled his dick out and said, “Twenty bucks.” It took a while for me to realize that I was supposed to be paying this guy to suck his dick. The tables had turned.

I didn’t have a cent, so he took the bottle he was drinking out of and broke it against the wall so he could slice into my lower back, right at the base of my spine, to let me know how serious he was.

Feeling faint, with warm blood running down my leg, I managed to convince them to follow me to the YMCA, where I promised to get them twenty dollars. (Thank God for those improv classes.) I explained that they would have to abide by the Y’s rules, however, and wait outside on the corner. They believed me. With no intention of coming back with the money, I went up to my room and passed out on my bed.

When I woke up a few hours later, the white sheet was spattered with bright red blood. I was ready to go back to St. Louis.

CHAPTER 20
               

Caroline was frantic when she called, wondering why I hadn’t met her at our usual breakfast spot. I told her some version of the story and she spent the day with me, on foot, trying to find a hospital that would treat me. But by the time we found treatment—at Bellevue, I’m not kidding—the cut had already closed and stitches were not required.

With its Judy-and-the-Stonewall motif, that summer would foreshadow the summer that would alter the course of history for gays and lesbians. I returned to my senior year of high school; among the bonds forged in high school was an unbreakable one with Brian Clarke. Brian was (and still is) a musician with unflagging charisma. In those days of bursting pubescence, Brian ruled in a way that awed me; unlike so many of his more myopic classmates, Brian’s self-assured maleness resulted in his being open to difference. I was different.

Brian remembered having seen me “several times in the hallways at Normandy between classes. It was impossible to miss you. Slim as a pool cue, you still seemed somehow too big to fit in the hallways. One day, I saw you coming. Only this time your path veered way off course and you were suddenly standing right in front of me.

“I looked up. The silence was absolute, but very short. You burst out with, ‘You should come and try out for
Tom Jones
. Okay!’ It wasn’t a question. Your voice didn’t go up at the end of the sentence. I was to be there. I thought you were aware that I wanted very much to be there.

“And so I have been there ever since.”

I assistant directed
Tom Jones
with “Eddie” (as Brian insisted on calling Mr. Ewald) while applying for various universities and acting schools.

I was accepted, thanks in no small part to Ewald’s sterling recommendation, to attend Goodman School of Drama, part of the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago.

But before I was put through the maniacal rigors of training for three years at Goodman, I had the obligatory summer stock apprentice experience at the Colony Theater in Latham, New York.

Prior to leaving for my summer stock gig, I met John Leavitt, a boy who was as brainy as he was beautiful. Since I’d cast myself as the equivalent of what is now referred to as a “bimbo,” part of my attraction to a lover was based on his intellectual superiority. I’d be smart by association. I had scanned the books in his apartment when we met, introduced by a mutual friend who would not leave us alone. On the shelves were Whitman, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti. John wrote poetry; I ached for him.

In spite of the fact that we hadn’t yet had sex, I received a letter from John days after I arrived in Latham. Not only was it written in florid handwriting, on delicate stationary imprinted with that photo of Marilyn Monroe digging her teeth into a string-of-pearls necklace; it contained a quote by Allen Ginsberg: “Taste my tongue in your ear.” It was my first bona fide love letter.

Even though I had John’s long-distance protestations of love, I had two memorable summertime sexual liaisons. One was with a closeted Hollywood actor, twice my age and movie-star handsome, who gave new meaning to me being an apprentice.

The machinations were elaborate: several hours after the curtain fell on the show he was appearing in, I would take a cab to his hotel and—“carefully and quietly,” he instructed—go directly to his room. “No one can know about this,” he insisted. “Absolutely no one.” In addition to the cab fare, he provided the beer and sexual expertise. The message I received was clear: actors aren’t supposed to be gay.

The other dalliance was with a fiery Italian chorus boy whose wife was also a member of the chorus. He was scheduled to do two shows that summer, separated by several weeks. After flirting during week one, he sent me a postcard (signed “Love,” not “Fondly”) and our clandestine romance was consummated during his second week at the Colony. My introduction to smoking pot and the combination of being high on grass and making love to this humpy chorus boy behind his wife’s back was incomparably intoxicating.

On the plane trip back to St. Louis, I prayed that John was waiting in the proverbial wings. My desire for John was fulfilled that summer before I headed off to Chicago; the relationship continued, consistently sexually charged, for the next two decades.

In the fall of that year, I moved to Chicago and into a world that would prove to be as endangering as it was edifying. While I already felt a certain level of comfort with my gayness, the ostensible openness that was fostered at the school would provide a safe haven. However, even though being gay was not an issue in the classroom, homophobia subtly presented itself when it came time to cast shows performed by students.

Classmate Bruce Boxleitner (who would go on to achieve prime-time television stardom in the Eighties) and I were a similar type, with one glaring difference: Bruce was blazingly heterosexual. We were constantly competing for the same roles, and while no one questioned my acting ability, if the role was a heterosexual, Bruce would automatically be cast. This wasn’t necessarily because I couldn’t “play straight”; it was because I was known to be gay: the precise reason Bruce, not I, went on to achieve a mainstream television resume.

My reputation at Goodman was initially defined by my sexual pursuits. This was not uncharacteristic of my co-students, gay and straight, all of whom seemed to have hormones out of control. The first year, I managed to have a rather tabloid-worthy affair with a teacher about twenty years my senior.

Patrick Henry was a dramatic presence; dressed in long, black, Draculalike capes, he had rather pointed yet appealing features when he smiled, which was rare. His hair, long and rather wispy, served as a prop that he constantly used for emphasis—shaking it, stroking it, sweeping it off of his forehead. He was excruciatingly funny and just as sadistically sarcastic.

In spite of the wife and two kids, it was simply an assumption that he was the gayest of the tribe of homo teachers. In addition to Theater History, I was in his Makeup class. One shuddered on the day that he was going to instruct us in the art of “corrective” makeup.

When he got to me, he noticed that I’d applied virtually no product to “correct” or enhance my face. “It’s perfect as it is, huh?” he whispered in my ear as we both gazed into the mirror.

“Yep,” I answered with a big smile. He moved to the next victim.

It was only a few weeks later that I found out I was chosen to be his assistant on a main-stage production he was directing. This meant daily contact, with sexual tension building toward a climactic scene.

We didn’t sleep together until after the drunken opening-night cast party. I have no recollection of how I got to his apartment, but I do distinctly remember the sound of his toddler daughter shouting “Daddy, wake up!”

CHAPTER 21
               

I was literally on top of him, sound asleep until I heard her sweet morning greeting. I jumped up, got dressed as fast as I could and stumbled out of the apartment before running into any of the other family members. Although I thought he had fallen madly in love with me, I would soon learn that I was just another one of his many one-night conquests; when he was finished having his way with me, it was curtains.

Being in the classroom wasn’t much more fulfilling. With the exception of Eugenie Leontovich (who originated roles in
Anastasia
and
The Cave Dwellers
on Broadway), the teachers at Goodman taught by intimidation. If I learned anything, it was a certain discipline that was brutally enforced. At the end of each school year, you were judged as to whether or not you would be invited back. Miraculously, I survived.

Before returning to St. Louis, I briefly met a directing student who, for whatever reason, had never crossed my path. I was instantaneously turned off by his grandiosity. He was wearing a full-length beige corduroy coat, not unlike Mr. Henry’s flowing cape, that looked like something Dina Merrill might wear.

I don’t know why, but we exchanged addresses and promised to write over the summer. I received a letter from Thom that was overloaded with pomposity but also gushing with compliments. Meanwhile, my homegrown boyfriend, John, was my obsession.

I spent the summer working part-time for Lena, the florist, and doing St. Louis community theater, including taking on the succulent title role in
Dracula
.

Across the country, the Stonewall Riots erupted in Greenwich Village, signaling the onset of gay liberation, poetically coinciding with the long-anticipated death of Judy Garland. It has been suggested that the gay men, drag queens and leather types among them, who fought back when police raided the Stonewall bar were pumped up after digesting news of their icon’s overdose. Garland somehow came to represent the gay man’s wounded psyche—from the genuine innocence of Dorothy Gale in
The Wizard of Oz
through her string of unhappy marriages and myriad addictions.

By the end of my second year at Goodman, Thom Racina and I were hysterically in love and living together, as married as married could be. The dynamic, from the beginning until the end (seven years later), was the same, based on predictable patterns I’d acted out with other men.

Thom was ostensibly (but not really) smarter than I was, more powerful and less attractive. While he was only a few years older, his studied but specious sophistication made him seem older. I was the sexpot; he was the Svengali. Low-rent Marilyn and Arthur.

While my studies at Goodman remained conflicted, I was inhaling my craft. A few other teachers appeared who encouraged me, unlike Bella Itkin, the belittling daughter of the Moscow Art Company’s David Itkin. Especially after Thom and I became The Most Celebrated Fag Couple on Campus, she loathed me. Thom’s ingratiating skills were not limited to men only; he manipulated the opposite sex as well and beastly Bella was jealous. I was mostly smug, as only a nineteen-year-old drama student can be.

I had my own female pals, one of whom bothered Thom as much as I bothered his beloved Bella. Carley Himmelfarb and I shared the anguish of being outcasts because of the insecurity that resulted from teachers who targeted our vulnerability. But when we had a chance to act together—in Leonard Melfi’s
Birdbath
—there were lightning bolts, perhaps because we were both playing versions of our tortured selves.