I was surprised — and, at the time, somewhat disbelieving. It seemed too much of a coincidence. The Irving Shulman biography of Harlow that was to cling to the bestseller list so long had not yet been published. And Billy the Kid was mostly a joke, thanks to reruns of old westerns on TV And for a few minutes I really thought Bill was simply taking anything I said and just going it one better with any chance fabrication. But three or four years later, I was to realize it was not all that great a coincidence. In 1960 or so, I had purchased that thin literary magazine, Trembling Lamb, whose black-and-white matte cover had featured the close-up of Harlow; “I have three years left to worship youth. …” Already fascinated by prodigies in general and Rimbaud in particular, I ran into an article on Jean Harlow’s bizarre death at age twenty-six only a month or two later. Certainly that quote and cover had been the initial confluence of my interest in Harlow and Billy the Kid. Some years later, when I’d returned from Europe and had become friends with Russell FitzGerald, one afternoon as we were sitting around talking, Russell recalled a poetry workshop that had taken place in 1957 or ’59 in San Francisco, at which the then eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Michael McClure had astonished everyone by saying, “I have three years left to worship youth, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow, Billy the Kid. …” The line had been much quoted in precisely the circles Bill was detailing to me now, and had eventually been printed on the cover of some literary magazine. … For now, however, I was still curious — but neither he nor I made any other mention of my own writing.
I did tell Bill that my wife was a poet: that clearly intrigued him. He immediately began to tell me of all the people he could introduce her to who would help her with her career — “That is, if she’s any good.” I also told him that she would not be coming home that evening and if he wanted to come back to my place and spend the night, he was welcome. In the course of it, he told me that he too had been married once — also true, but which still contributed to the air of “I’m going to top anything you say,” a game I wondered why he was so interested in playing. As the conversation wore on, it began to lose Mr. McNeill points. Yet his enthusiasm and energy, not to mention his intelligence, was real enough. Also, with his occasional southern accent breaking through his acquired northwestern speech, he was sexy.
Finally we took the subway down to the Lower East Side. That, indeed, was the neighborhood where he was staying. By this time it was early evening, and we stopped off at the Odessa Restaurant on Avenue A, facing Tompkins Square, for pirogies. Bill by this time had told me that he had a lover (“I guess he’s about your age”) named George, a young painter who also lived in the East Village — not more than a block away from me, actually. Bill came back to the Sixth Street apartment, and we went to bed.
About one o’clock in the morning, while I was lying half asleep, with Bill on his stomach snoring beside me, there was a knock on the door. I got up, naked, went through the kitchen and the front room (something of a wreck by now, the combination storage room and writing room) to answer it. “Who is it?” I asked.
A gruff voice from the other side said, “Hey, Chip, it’s Sonny!”
I opened the door. Sonny grinned at me, thrusting out a six-pack still in its red cardboard holder. A man in his forties — i.e., work — with a tan jacket and glasses stood behind him. “Oh, excuse me …” I said. “I don’t have any clothes on.” (I knew Sonny well enough to answer the door naked.)
“Oh, that’s okay,” Sonny said. “He don’t mind,” thumbing over his shoulder at his friend. “Can we come in for a minute? Marilyn here? We got some beer.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “No, she’s not. But I’ve got company.”
I led them into the kitchen, turned on the light, and Sonny and his friend sat down at the round, wooden picnic-style table. Sonny tore cardboard and broke out three beers. “You see, him and me — what’s your name?”
It was something like “Joe.”
“—Joe and me was lookin’ for a place to, you know … fuck around a little.” Sonny leaned over to whisper to me. “He wants me to fuck ’im in the ass, see. But we didn’t got no place. I told him I knew a guy, but we might have to make it a three-way. You wanna fool around with us?”
I laughed. “It sounds kind of fun,” I told him. “Only I’ve already got somebody inside now. I don’t really know if he’ll go for it. Besides, he’s asleep. I think we better skip it tonight.”
“Well, okay,” Sonny said, disappointed. “You sure …?”
I didn’t really have a clear picture of Bill’s sexual tolerances, and it seemed to be pushing one-night-stand manners as I understood them at the time. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, he’s busy,” Joe (or whoever) said. “I think we better go.”
“Yeah,” Sonny said. “Well, okay.”
They got up, and I went with them to the door and closed it after them. I turned around and stood in the middle of my workroom, still naked, the length of a few breaths, then walked back to the kitchen and sat down on one of the two benches that served the table for seats, feeling the strange disorientation of debauchery coupled with coming travel. Perhaps thirty seconds later, there was another knock. Frowning, I went to answer it.
Sonny’s gruff voice came through the door again. “It’s me!”
I opened it again: he barged in, with a quick grin. “Forgot somethin’.” He strode to the kitchen table, picked up the remaining cans in their torn cardboard — I hadn’t even realized he’d left them — and hurried back to the door. “So long!” He was gone down the hall.
I closed the door again.
Our earlier meeting had no doubt put me in his mind when he’d picked up “Joe” that evening, and they’d needed a place to ball.
After a few minutes, I stood up, pulled the cord to put out the kitchen’s unshaded ceiling bulb, and went back through the glass-paned doors to the bedroom and climbed into bed beside Bill, who asked sleepily, “Who was that?”
“A friend of mine,” I said. “He brought some guy around and they wanted to ball.”
Bill turned over. “You should have told them to come in and join us.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I wasn’t sure.”
“It would have been fun.”
“Yeah,” I said. And we went back to sleep.
59.9. Late the next morning we got up. Bill gave me his phone number, and I wrote it down in my omniscient notebook. I was taking a couple of shopping bags full of old journals, manuscripts, and various papers up to my mother’s apartment in Morningside Gardens for storage while I was away; I locked the apartment behind us, and Bill walked with me downstairs and up Sixth Street toward Avenue C. Halfway along the block, he saw someone he recognized across the street; a young man in a faded plaid shirt angled out between the cars, with a shy smile, to say hello. Bill introduced me. It was George, who moments after the introduction, I remembered was Bill’s lover. When perhaps three sentences had been exchanged, I glanced up to see Marilyn walking towards us, on her way home from wherever she’d spent the previous night. I introduced her to Bill and George, and hastily explained to her that I was on my way up to take stuff to my mother’s, left the three of them there in the street, and walked on to the Second Avenue subway station, pausing now and then to set the shopping bags down on the sidewalk because the twine handles were cutting into my fingers.
In what had been my old room (and in which my grandmother now stayed) an upright orange crate stood at the back of the closet. In it were stored my various childhood papers and notebooks. To them I added what I’d culled from the wooden filing cabinet in our Sixth Street apartment of my last three or four years’ Lower East Side production. My mother reminded me, as she had done several times in the last weeks, that since my first stop was to be Luxembourg, a good friend of my Uncle Myles’s was a black woman, now the American ambassador there, Patricia Harris. Both my uncle and my Aunt Dorothy had urged me to visit her, if only to say hello. To this end, a week or so before, Mom had taken me to Bloomingdale’s and bought me a brown suit. When, during the fitting, it had come out that I was going to Europe and was hoping to get to Greece, the salesclerk had told us of his own trip, the previous summer, with much enthusiasm about his time on the Aegean island of Mykonos.