or join the throngs of beautiful men in the basement who were (as the joke went) engaged in their own brand of meatpacking. The club also hosted drag acts like the seven-foot-tall Euba who—perhaps taking the epithet “flaming faggot” a bit too literally—often livened up her songs’ finales by setting herself on fire.
When, after much trying, Jade got herself booked at the Anvil, Vinny, Michael and I stood in front of the stage to cheer her on as she lip-synced “Atomic,” a danceable torch/anthem by Blondie. On reaching the lyrics, “Oooooh, your hair is beautifuuuul!” Jade knelt down to Michael and lovingly tousled his locks—recently bleached arctic white—while he gazed up at her in starry-eyed rapture. This wasn’t a man in a dress aping femininity for laughs, but a solemn ritual in which an androgyne priestess channeled goddess energy for her audience of congregants. Raised by devout atheists, I’d never felt the slightest twinge of religiosity, but that night I joined the cult of gay Diva worship.
The worst thing about New York was its high cost of living. My paltry paychecks barely got me through each week, plus Michael had a habit of borrowing money and not paying it back. In desperation, I decided to become a gold digger, which actually made sense! Like all good gays, I’d spent countless hours watching movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age, swooning over sassy starlets who overcame adversity with moxie, pizzazz, and a ready supply of snappy one-liners. As a result, my subconscious was crowded with doddering dowagers, scheming chorus girls, and madcap heiresses. To these gals, becoming a gold digger seemed a perfectly natural career choice. So yes, my morals were deranged, but don’t blame me! Blame Fox, Warner, RKO, Paramount, and MGM.
I didn’t quite manage to marry a millionaire, but I did snag Spencer, a tiny, balding, bespectacled lawyer in his late twenties. He wore nice Armani suits, lived in a swank West Village apartment, and his cheeks dimpled cutely when he smiled. Also in his favor, Spencer introduced me to the music of Nino Rota and the new East Village art scene. Unlike sugar daddies in the movies, though, Spencer failed to shower me with diamond bracelets or rent me a swank apartment. Still, he did pay my way into chic clubs and take me out to dinner a lot. It helped.
We’d been dating a couple of months when Spencer’s gay and Teen Beat-ishly handsome little brother, Brendan, showed up. I would’ve found him attractive except that he dressed like a boring Preppie and radiated a slick, cold air of blasé entitlement. An aspiring photographer, he described his signature style as “bringing back Hollywood glamor,” which struck me as painfully insipid. Brendan got Spencer to introduce him around town and overnight his celebrity photos were appearing in glossy magazines. I’d known America wasn’t a meritocracy but watching Brendan’s effortless ascent filled my mind with fantasies of gulags and guillotines. Michael, who carried a big working class chip on his shoulder, was equally appalled. “You know why the ‘invisible hand of the market’ has to be invisible?” he asked. “So nobody sees it giving all the good jobs and success to well-connected rich kids.”
Shortly after Brendan’s arrival, Spencer asked me out to a fancy restaurant. It was a night like any other till we finished and he began toting up my share of the check. “Uh . . .” I stuttered lamely, “I think I left my wallet at home.” Thereafter, at random intervals, he asked me to pay my own way. Being a penniless teenager, this led to much embarrassment. I couldn’t understand why Spencer had started doing this till he let slip that Brendan thought I was a cheap hustler. “He’s crazy!” I said with unfeigned outrage. True, I had been hustling Spencer, but only ironically. I actually liked him. Spencer let it drop, but the next time he invited me over for cocktails he suggested I bring my own vodka. Naturally, I broke up with him. The rich really are different than you and me. They’re cheaper.
Soon after that came a night when I found myself without enough money for my preferred dinner of tuna and Swiss on rye with a side of potato salad. I needed to sell something for cash, but the only things of value I owned were my records and my body. Naturally, I chose the latter. Michael, who’d hustled a bit at my age, was also broke and offered to guide me through my first trick in exchange for dinner. “We’ll go to the Haymarket up near the Theater District. Just remember the ground rules: Ask for the money up front. Be clear about what you will and won’t do. And if the john wants you to stay more than an hour he has to pay extra.” We gathered just enough change for two beers and walked thirty blocks uptown to the bar.
Inside, the Haymarket was dark, as befitted a cesspit of depravity. We bought our beers, then sat near the pool table and waited. Sat and waited. Waited and sat. The bar wasn’t exactly hopping, just half a dozen middle-aged men in cheap suits leering at a dozen young guys playing pool and hanging around with wrong-side-of-the-tracks swagger. “Maybe I’m too old,” I said. I’d just turned twenty and was mortally afraid of aging past attractiveness.
“Nah,” said Michael.
I examined the boys more closely. Sleeveless tees revealed the taut, tanned arms of kids who played stickball in vacant lots. Deep voices boomed with cocky confidence and a total disregard for Standard English grammar. Even their un-hip feathered hair and crooked teeth oozed sexiness. “Maybe I’m too ugly.”
Michael’s eyebrows furrowed as if to say, “Shut up.”
I only had to wait a few minutes longer before a manatee in a dark blue suit bellied up to the table nearest me and leered. “Buy you a drink?” It was on. We taxied to his apartment, attractively furnished with Japanese rice-paper screens, where we shared a joint that made me feel like an undersea creature from the briny deep. In that odd condition sexing it up with a manatee didn’t seem so bad. A short while later I returned home with sandwiches, chocolate milk, and cash to spare. Victory!
I went back to the Haymarket only a half-dozen more times. The johns were mildly gross, sure, but what really bugged me was waiting to get propositioned. It often took hours, and sometimes it never happened. The other hustlers weren’t friendly and there wasn’t enough light to read so I’d just sit there going mad with boredom and self-consciousness. After one particularly annoying trick tried to stiff me on my fee, I swore off the whole business.
Michael and I weren’t living in Manhattan so much as glimmering across its surface like sunlight on water. We lacked the roots or entanglements that would have made us real New Yorkers. I knew this well, if only instinctively, and thus it wasn’t too hard a decision to leave town when I learned my father was dying and my mother wanted me back home. My only qualm was separating from Michael, but to my great surprise and infinite relief he decided to leave with me. It turned out that he, like me, was growing tired of the city’s downsides: yucky weather, murderous traffic, surreally high rents, ubiquitous roach infestations, and—let’s not forget—diseases.
Everyone said, “VD is no big deal. Just take some pills and in a week you’re good as new.” But I’d been infected twice (sweet, innocent little me!) and it made me feel filthy. The first time I’d gone to a city clinic where an exasperated woman demanded the names and contact information of everyone I’d slept with in the last six months. “You don’t want to be spreading disease, do you? They need to come in here for testing.” All I could do was shamefacedly stammer, “Uh . . . I forgot.” The second time, I went to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a new place where they didn’t grill you about sex partners.
Sitting in the tiny waiting room I read the bulletin board to kill time. One notice concerned the appearance of a rare cancer in a few otherwise healthy young gay men. Normally found only among elderly males of Mediterranean descent, it manifested in purplish skin blotches. I felt a wave of terror. That very morning I’d woken up with a few purplish blotches on my legs! Ten miserable minutes later I showed them to a doctor who assured me I only had an extremely mild heat rash. I left with some pills for my other problem and forgot all about the obscure disease making its gay debut: Kaposi’s sarcoma.
Chapter 6: Juan
BACK IN CALIFORNIA, MICHAEL AND I spent a rotten year watching my father die, then set about making up for lost fun. That was us teaching everyone at the house party how to dance the Shimmy Shimmy; us tripping on ’shrooms at the Frightwig concert; and us again,