one of the Gabor sisters gone punk, and was, in fact, the lead singer of her own band, The Blowdryers. Gay men invariably adored her on sight and, once they got a load of her campy sensibility, worshipped her. Together we tromped down to the South of Market neighborhood where, on a desolate street full of closed auto repair shops and brick warehouses, we found and entered The Stud.
Being underage, we furtively slunk past the bar without buying drinks and settled against the back wall. The Stud’s dark, wood-paneled interior made it look like an Old West Saloon, but one in which the cowboys and gold miners had been magically replaced by new wave hipsters, glitter queens, gay punks, underground artists, hippie holdovers, beat poets, madwomen, and a smattering of unclassifiable oddballs—people who, when they finished putting on clothes, were not merely “dressed” but “working a look.” I had no doubt that each and every denizen of this depraved demimonde lived a life of fearless and noble eccentricity. And they were all having such a good time! People threw their heads back and cackled like maniacs, hoisted their cocktails with piratical heartiness, swished about with femme fatale belligerence, and danced with anarchic abandon to the best music ever: Siouxsie and the Banshees, XTC, Gang of Four, Joy Division, and the Flying Lizards.
Jennifer and I had been loitering for perhaps half an hour when a poetically thin and prodigiously freckled redhead leaning at the bar caught sight of us. Raising his thin eyebrows in a theatrical greeting, he strode our way with a bouncing gait. His outfit—tattered jeans with huge cuffs, a hole-y striped tee shirt, and a disintegrating black vinyl jacket held together with silver electrical tape—impressed me to no end by looking at once confidently bohemian and adorably little boyish.
“Hey, I’m Michael. You’re Jennifer Blowdryer. I saw your band play at the Mabuhay. Great show. I love that Farfisa organ, it’s so ’60s.”
“Thanks,” said Jennifer.
“I’m Alvin,” I volunteered.
Michael glanced at me. “Oh, hi.” He turned back to Jennifer. “So, when are you going to play again?”
For the rest of the evening, Michael did his best to entertain and enchant Jennifer, serving up compliments and flattering questions along with witticisms, grousing, and gossip. As he spoke, I marveled at his eyebrows, which were always arching, furrowing, or wiggling so as to offer meta-commentary on whatever blarney came out of his mouth. He almost didn’t even need to speak; all by themselves his eyebrows cracked jokes, made acerbic comments, and recited blank verse. (If this sounds implausible, please note that Leonard Bernstein once used only his eyebrows to conduct Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 in a live performance by the Vienna Philharmonic.) On learning Jennifer and I were teens, Michael—fully legal at twenty-one—bought rum and Cokes for us. When the B-52s came on, he jumped around the dance floor with us. When the night ended, he invited himself home with us. Then, once inside our flat, Michael turned to me with a be-dimpled smile and put his hand on my shoulder. “Which way’s your bedroom?”
I couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d stuck a wet finger in a light socket. My heart raced and thudded wildly as we fell onto my single, unmade bed. Michael’s skin felt silky warm and he smelled like playing in the backyard on a sunny summer day. Then he kissed me and I saw stars. Explosions. Implosions. Transmogrifications. Fireworks. The Earth moved, time grooved, and I fell through a crack in the space-time continuum to find myself inside an imaginary David Bowie song, a lost track from the Ziggy Stardust album all about Michael and me and our cosmic communion.
After making out for a while, we began trying to fold part A into slot B and such, but nothing quite fit anywhere. As I fought off waves of self-recrimination and panic (wasn’t the first time supposed to be magical?), Michael got out of bed and found his jacket lying on the floor. He produced a pint of bourbon from the pocket, took a long swig, and held it out my way. “Want some?” Unused to hard liquor, I took a tiny sip and handed it back. “Thanks.” Michael rejoined me on the bed and began talking. Over the next hour I learned he’d grown up in a working class Irish Catholic family, to whom he wasn’t “out.” Mom cashiered at a supermarket and Dad worked nights as a mechanic at the gigantic GE plant straddling his hometown, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “Appropriately named ’cause it’s the pits,” averred Michael. He’d suffered all the usual gay persecution and had to get around town crawling through shrubbery and ducking behind parked cars like a spy.
Michael had been about to board a Greyhound for the start of his second year at U Mass when, on a whim, he’d switched buses. He arrived in San Francisco carrying only his dad’s WWII duffel bag stuffed with clothes, and settled into the National Hotel, an ancient and decrepit red brick SRO on Market Street. He found a job selling porn at a store in North Beach on Broadway near the Condor: a club notorious for its gigantic sign depicting a bikini-clad Carol Doda, queen of the topless dancers, with flashing red lightbulb nipples. Then, he took up poetry.
“Really?” I found this shocking. Who wrote poetry?
“I was into Jim Carroll and Patti Smith, so I bought some yellow legal pads and just started churning it out.” Michael’s eyebrows indicated he was being sardonic and modest. “It was about losing faith in church and state, the city’s squalid underbelly, the horrors of human perfidy, Beatnik-y stuff like that.” I wondered what perfidy meant but was loathe to interrupt his flow by asking. “I didn’t know what do with my poems, so I’d stand outside bars at last call to read them. I was not a smash hit so I gave it up and started hanging out at the Mabuhay where I saw your friend Jennifer.”
I managed to interject the first bit of my own bio: atheistical leftwing half-Jewish family, bookworm, and aspiring writer of comical essays—but before I got any further Michael yawned and rolled onto his side. “Well, g’night.” His breathing quickly grew slow and regular. He was sleeping. For a long while I lay perfectly still, so smitten I could barely breathe. Eventually, I molded my body against his and drifted off. The next morning, I rose gingerly so as not to disturb the sleeping beauty beside me and tiptoed to the kitchen to fix English muffins. When I came back, Michael was stretching himself awake. He cast a bleary glance at my alarm clock. “I should go.” As Michael threw on his clothes, I scribbled my number for him on slip of paper. He thrust it into his jeans pocket and gave me a little wave. “Later.” As he clomped down the front stairs, I wondered if he’d call.
Michael did call. And call and call and call. At first, he did most of the talking, lecturing me on European cinema, existentialism, Stephen Sondheim, radical labor history, German expressionism, glam rock, and similar arcana. Eventually I began talking back and we got into a series of unresolvable debates. Was Franz Marc a great painter? Was US entry into WWII justified? Were the Monkees really better than the Archies? After a few of our epic gabfests my six roommates jointly demanded I quit monopolizing our shared telephone, so I started hanging out at Michael’s place.
Everything about the National fascinated me, from the 300-pound mannish leather dyke at the front desk to the communal bathrooms (ick!), to the mysterious residents—down-and-outers, new-to-towners, and suspicious characters who looked like they might be “on the lam.” Michael’s room was miniscule, so eventually we’d sally forth into the city to drink at dive bars, eat greasy Chinese food, shop at thrift stores, dance at clubs, crash parties, see bands, or just roam the streets from dusk till dawn, both of us always talking, talking, talking.
Often as not, our conversation devolved into airy persiflage.
Example #1: Say that anti-gay demagogue Anita Bryant let loose in the press with another “homosexuals will destroy civilization” tirade. Me: “She might be right. Bonds of male loyalty—team spirit, party affiliation, and nationalism—feed on sublimated homosexual longing. Desublimate it and men will unbond, plunging society into a war of each against all.” Michael: “Which would actually be quite refreshing. Western Civilization is becoming intolerably repetitive. We’ve had so many wars they’re not even naming them any more, just giving them numbers. World War One, World War Two . . . It’s like they’re not even trying.”
Example #2: Say we hear someone playing new wave pretty boy Adam Ant’s cover of the Doors’ song, “Hello I Love You.” Me: “Adam Ant has made Jim Morrison redundant.”