Once he told me about the death of his grandmother, who had lived with his family in New Jersey: as a youngster, he’d come home one afternoon and gone into her room to find her sitting in her chair. “And though she looked just as if she were asleep, as soon as I walked in, I knew she was dead.” It had been quite an uncanny experience for him. And, seventeen years later, when my mother called to tell that my own grandmother had died, shortly after I’d gone to see her at St. Luke’s Hospital, it was Ron’s story that came back to me.
We talked about sex a few times: Ron saw himself as straight; I saw myself, then, as bisexual (with lots of silent questioning about the “bi-”). Ron seemed mildly curious, but generally accepting. And there was nothing sexual between us, nor did I want there to be. Once, on the platform of the West Fourth Street subway station, when the conversation had, I thought, moved away from one or another of these somewhat sensational topics, Ron suddenly said, “You know, I was at beauty school.”
I looked at him, not sure of the transition.
“Yeah. Just after high school. That’s what I wanted to do. Set women’s hair and do makeup and stuff. So I enrolled in beauty school. Well, maybe I didn’t want to do it. I just wanted to make my parents mad. It did, too. I never told anybody about it — I mean, especially if you’re down in Texas, working on a fucking shrimp boat. But I did.”
But by now the subway had come, and we got on to roar off to wherever we were going.
I was never quite sure what Ron meant by this “confession.” A long-faced, hazel-eyed, Swedish American, burned darker than myself by his months on the Gulf and more good-looking than not, Ron would strike most as a boat worker before a beautician. He wasn’t trying to tell me that, really, he was queer. (“Gay” was not a word I used or thought with at the time: though I knew it, it then seemed to me, and to most others I suspect, insufferably campy.) I’m sure of that because he was too honest about the fleeting and, to him, uninteresting homosexual experiences he’d had. Perhaps it was a way of saying that he’d known other homosexuals before. But I never was too clear on it.
I knew only that it had been offered as something personal; and that’s how I took it.
Our initial plans were, after getting to Europe, to buy a cheap car and drive about the continent. Like so many other born New Yorkers, however, I’d never learned to drive. So on one of my visits to New Jersey, Ron attempted to teach me, using his father’s Packard. The lesson went well enough for the first forty minutes, as I cruised easily up and down the suburban streets with Ron beside me offering instruction and encouragement — then, somehow, I scraped the fender of a parked car. We stopped. A very blond woman in a very blue dress burst from a nearby doorway (where her bridge club was meeting), looked at the eight-inch scratch on her fender, and became hysterical. She’d had a car accident only the week before and was apparently on some sort of probation from her husband, to the effect that if she had another, he would never let her drive again. In the midst of tears, a bored policeman’s questions, curious neighbors who’d drifted out to see what was going on, and general guilt and recriminations, we exchanged necessary information. The scratch cost me ninety-two dollars of the money (only about fourteen hundred, by that time) on which I had planned to live for a year in Europe. Driving lessons were abandoned, and Ron and I decided that if we managed to get a car abroad, the driving instruction would be done there.
59.3. Back on East Sixth Street, Ana read over an early typescript of “The Star Pit” and said that it needed something more; and the next day I wrote what is now the opening movement of the tale, telling of Vyme and his commune on the beach beneath the double sun, as well as the transition into the story of Ratlit, Alegra, and Sandy as I had first written it. At that point, however, I felt it needed something still further — and stuck the ms. in the back of my guitar case to take with me to Europe, where I thought I might work on it more.
59.4. Bobs Pinkerton had recommended a young agent to me through one Hans Stefan Santesson: Henry Morrison, who was just starting his own literary agency at the time. Henry and I met in the small, cluttered office I believe he then shared with Hans, and we talked a bit on matters ranging from Kurt Vonnegut to the Ace Books contract on Babel-17 to the possibility of writing some restaurant reviews while I was abroad: I found him amiable, well-informed, and sharply intelligent; and we both agreed it was a good idea to have somebody in the States to handle my writing business while I was abroad. A day or two later I delivered to him a number of my adolescent novels — Voyage, Orestes! (1963), Those Spared by Fire (1958), Cycle for Toby (1958), Afterlon (1959), The Flames of the Warthog (1960), The Lovers (1960), and The Assassination (1961).
59.5. In the course of my last weeks in the city I’d managed, almost inadvertently, to acquire a lover, named Allan, who worked at a typing pool near Columbia. He was a thin, neurotic nail-biter (which first attracted me to him), though after our initial night (did we meet at the Christopher Street docks …?), he took to showing up at my Sixth Street apartment in large, colorful silk scarves, which just weren’t my style. I realized rather quickly that he was more attracted to me than I was to him. And I was thankful that the specter of Europe in a week or two’s time hung over our relation from the beginning, an immovable severance. As a going-away present, two days before I left, Allan took me to an opening day screening of the new Beatles’ movie, Help!
Allan was probably the first to suggest — tentatively and with much guilt, pain, and trepidation — that there was something sexual between myself and the light-eyed, dark-skinned, lanky Ron. There wasn’t. (Nor, to repeat, was I interested in there being anything.) Ron was simply an easy and quiet friend — though I think a couple of times I considered telling Allan that there was, if only in hope of more quickly terminating what had become an annoying relationship.
59.6. A memory seeks a margin in which to write itself.
To which column, it wants to know, do I belong?
The littered Lower East Side street was sunny and cool. From the corner of Seventh and Avenue C a young Ukrainian ran, then stopped — perhaps eighteen or nineteen (fourteen or fifteen the year Marilyn and I’d first moved into the neighborhood and I’d initially noticed him). His hair had always been crew cut, but other than one week in autumn and another in summer, it stayed too long, clutching his ears or clawing his neck, a pale brush all over of yellow-brown. His skin was the same sallow hue. Cantaloupe-round, his face still had large ears to the side and a feral chin under a full mouth.
A big-hipped boy, actually pearshaped, still he was not pudgy. His hands had always struck me as those of a laborer’s two or three heads taller than he was: nails long, wide, and dirty. Unzipped, his beige jacket blew back from a yellowing T-shirt ridden up over his navel’s crater. Torn at one knee, soiled khakis sagged below his belly and bunched above immense black-and-white basketball shoes. He looked over his shoulder to call something obscene and gruff to a friend, then laughed, full out in the street’s autumnal gold. Then he loped on by the vegetable stall sloping out from under the corner grocery’s awning.
Though every phrase I describe him with associates with the clumsy, the plain, the heavy, almost anyone who actually saw him could, I suspect, call him a good-looking youngster and find his otherwise ungainly body’s movements masculine and graceful.