So for ten dollars a week, Terry laid a place for me at dinner; and at six-thirty I would climb up to the top floor, knock on the door of the apartment diagonally across the hall from where ours was down on two, and come into the small, busy kitchen, where clothes were washing in the washer, or little Billy, a devilishly handsome child with a perfect median complexion between his Italian mother’s and black father’s, just over one, crawled around underfoot.
“Besides, I figured,” Terry said, our first dinner together, little Billy in the high chair beside her, while Big Bill opened another bottle of beer, this one for me (laundry made a kind of white-and-blue maze under the ropes across the ceiling), “you were working on your book. It would have to be easier if you didn’t have to worry about getting your food — even if you cooked like God Himself! I want to read it. This way, I figured, you might finish it faster.” Then Terry sighed and said, “I hope Marilyn writes lots and lots of poems in Mexico. She’s so good. Maybe she will, once she gets away from you! The way you’re just working all the time, I wouldn’t be able to do a thing around you myself!” Terry had read Marilyn’s poems — and had had her compliments rebuffed. But though it hadn’t stopped her friendship in any way (it was the last week in June; Marilyn had left that afternoon), she was sensitive enough to realize that it was best not to mention writing in front of Marilyn — Marilyn’s or mine.
By now the topic was too delicate.
19
19. Months before, a painter named Simon had told me about the trucks parked under the highway out by the docks at the river end of Christopher Street as a place to go at night for instant sex. (Simon’s vivid and precise canvases seemed more luminous to me than any art since Cary’s. Once, his downstairs neighbor, another artist named Shirley, was hired by some businessman to copy several Vermeers. Often I, and occasionally Marilyn, would sit in Simon’s tiny fourth-floor flat, with intricate iron-scrolled railings upright for gates in the windows and driftwood and brass bells on the sills, while Simon worked at his easel and, at the table, artbook open beside her, Shirley worked on her copies — and, from time to time, Simon would point out to her the way around some technical problem, such as how Vermeer had used the texture of the canvas to suggest the wattle behind a bit of fallen plaster, or the way a line between two subtly different grays opened up the space between as a storage for light.) That Simon was also gay came as a jarring surprise after I’d known him almost a month.
I went once to the docks, stood across the street, under the street lamp, watching the trucks almost twenty minutes — and saw nothing of the mass orgies Simon had described. Now and then, a lone man in jeans wandered across to disappear among the parked vehicles — some driver checking his van?
But that was all.
“No,” Simon told me the next afternoon, “you have to cross over and walk around between them. And you still probably won’t see very much.”
“Isn’t that kind of scary?” I asked.
“You got it,” Simon said.
A few nights later, I went back. And crossed over. And discovered that, from about nine in the evening on, between thirty-five and a hundred fifty (on weekends) men were slipping through and between and in and out of the trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in, numberless silent sexual acts, till morning began to wipe night from above the Hudson, to dim the stars, to blue the oily water.
I stayed perhaps six hours, had sex seven or eight times, and left, finally, exhausted.
19.1. Now, with Marilyn gone, the plan was to finish up Out of the Dead City over the eight weeks. I hoped to work on the book during the day, have dinner with Billy and Terry in the evening, and perhaps stroll over to the West Side docks after a little while — but after only a few days, I found myself drawn to the growing Voyage, Orestes! Every once in a while, I’d try to return to the trilogy. But I seldom wrote more than a page or two on it. Once, I even mapped out an alternate SF novella, The Ballad of Beta-2. I worked on it intensely for four days; but at the three-quarters point I bogged down in the fragmentary tale. The next day I was back on Voyage, Orestes! The trips to the dock, however, became an almost nightly excursion. More and more I skipped dinner with Terry and Bill. For a good deal more was going on that summer, with Marilyn away, than just writing.
19.2. Among the first nights that I went out in June, on my way back I met a guy about twenty-four or — five. His name was Al and he wore an incongruous watch cap on a warm evening. Talking in some doorway on Greenwich Avenue, he seemed nice, if somewhat preoccupied. I took him back with me to Fifth Street. The sex was very good. He worked, he said, at the vegetable seller’s on the corner of Greenwich and Sixth. Sex with men was fairly new to him — he had a girlfriend and didn’t know quite what to do, as his own predilections were moving him more and more toward homosexuality. I told him a little of my own situation. He said he liked talking to me. We should get together again. I was pleased. That he was, yes, another nail-biter didn’t hurt.
Perhaps, I thought, we might even start a regular thing that would endure the length of Marilyn’s trip.
Two days later, though, when I went to the vegetable stand and asked if an Al worked there — the one who wore the cap — I was told, yes, he’d been there. But he’d only been taking someone else’s place for a few days. He lived out in Brooklyn, and none of the Village Italian men working there now was sure where.
19.21. Just a year later I saw him, again working at the stand; then, once more, he was gone.
19.3. Within a night or two of meeting Al, when I was coming home from the docks through Tompkins Square Park at one or two in the morning, I saw a guy in an uncharacteristic (for the neighborhood) suit and tie standing near the public john — a pleasant-looking thirty-five with glasses. He was still watching me when I looked back. I turned around, came back to say hello.
Hello. His name was Harry.
Mine’s Chip. I was going home to Fifth Street. Did he want to come?
That’s very nice of you. Sure.
The sex was satisfactory enough. But later, as we lay awake talking into dawn, I learned that Harry worked in a bank uptown and that he was passionately in love with a twenty-four-year-old part-time hustler named Eddy, who lived in the neighborhood. This largely unrequited affair (I think they’d had sex, he told me, only half a dozen times) had been going on for five years, now. Harry’d been looking for Eddy that night — and had only gone with me when he couldn’t find him.
Over the next hours, while sometimes I drifted off, I heard encyclopedias of Eddy’s history, his relations with his foster parents, his various adventures at the boys’ correctional home where he’d spent three years, his problems with his girlfriend, tales of his other johns, his drug preferences — all dim today. One image remains from that dawn dossier of lumpen biographia — because, a few years later, I used a version of it in a story.
Once Eddy had come to see Harry at his apartment uptown and arrived drunk with a case of lemons that had been sitting outside a grocery down the block and which Eddy had decided to filch. Harry had answered the door. Eddy had stepped in, grinning, and declared, “You want some lemons?”—at which point one of the slats had suddenly given way along the case’s bottom and lemons had cascaded all over the floor of Harry’s living room.