The Great Wide Open, page 46
‘I didn’t know the two of you were in contact,’ I told him as Duncan opened a bottle of red wine and poured out three glasses.
‘After finishing up at NYU I spent a year or so in San Francisco – quelle surprise – but eventually couldn’t take being around the word “mellow” much of the day. Naturally fled back east. Forced my way into New York publishing. And I am now working in the publicity department of St Martin’s Press. Handsome Boy here is signing a contract with us to write a big book on the decline and fall of 1960s idealism. When his editor walked him into my office, I started to jump up and down, screaming at Duncan: ‘“You were one of the few people at Bowdoin who didn’t call me ‘Tree Fag’.” He later told me that you were an occasional guest on his floor. I did write you after hearing what you’d lived through. And you don’t have to now say a justifying word about why you couldn’t see me then. I understood.’
I reached out and took his hand.
‘Thank you.’
‘But I decided today that I just had to come over and check you out. You do look amazing, girl.’
I told Howie that his talent for hyperbole hadn’t left him.
‘But I love your late-seventies style. Maybe we can have a really interesting discussion later on about how yams are good for your karma.’
‘I see you’ve hardly changed.’
‘Oh, I’ve changed plenty – thanks to finally landing in New York, slamming the door on the rest of the world, and keeping my horizons focused on Manhattan and Fire Island.’
During my next weekend in the city, Howie insisted on taking me out to dinner at the Magic Flute Cafe on West 64th Street, and then to see Rudolph Nureyev performing on Broadway, spending an astronomical $18.50 each for the seats in the orchestra. Over dinner he got talking about the Son of Sam serial killer stalking New York right now, murdering courting couples as they necked in cars. Just days before I arrived to spend the weekend in the city, a woman student at Columbia University had been randomly shot in the head by a young assailant who escaped on foot. Reading about all this had triggered all sorts of past trauma. When Howie brought it up at dinner it set me on immediate edge. Noting this he reached over and put a steadying hand on my arm.
‘Oh God, me and my big unthinking mouth,’ he said.
‘It’s fine, it’s fine. It’s just … ’
‘No need to explain. No need at all.’
I reached for my cigarettes.
‘I wonder: will I ever get beyond all that happened?’
‘Maybe not,’ Howie said. ‘Maybe you will always be scarred.’
‘Are you still scarred by what happened at college?’
‘Of course. Sometimes, in quiet moments, I wonder if the reason why I am even more flamboyant now – letting the whole damn world know that I am very out, very gay – is because all that happened in high school and at Bowdoin cut so deep. You know what’s the hardest thing for me? Trying to form something longer than a trick or two with anyone. Tonight, after you go back to Duncan’s, I’ll head down to the Mineshaft and find someone to fuck in one of the toilets there. Then, around three in the morning, I’ll go back to my “fabulous” apartment and get a few hours of sleep and pop a Dexedrine in the morning and go to my “fabulous” job. I will talk in a “fabulous” way to everybody and go to a “fabulous” lunch with some magazine editor I’m cruising for an interview with one of my authors, and then will start thinking about the “fabulous” book party I’ll be heading to around seven, and everyone I come in contact with will think: “Isn’t Howie D’Amato so ‘fabulous’ and so comfortable in his own queer skin?” The truth is a little more nuanced: I am totally “fabulous” … and lonely.’
Howie became again, after this dinner, a close friend – and someone who, out of nowhere, would ring me in Vermont at midnight and gab with me for two hours. Our friendship deepened and I began to talk more openly about all the turmoil within. What I surprisingly discovered in Howie was a true sense of discretion and what he called ‘Jesuitical silence’. The Roman Catholic reference was a deliberate one. Howie wasn’t just raised in the Church of Rome. He was also a serious practicing Catholic: one who went to mass every Sunday and believed in the purgative benefits of the confessional box. He even told me of a priest he’d found at St Malachy’s, on West 49th Street, who did not scold or condemn when Howie spoke of his gay sins of the flesh.
‘Even though he’s ultra-circumspect, I have the impression that Father Michael actually finds my sex life rather riveting. He even told me once not to go to any of the other priests for confession, as they might not be as sympathetic and lenient as he is. But it’s a church for Broadway Babies and arty types like myself. Which means that all the priests are going to get a sexual earful from their parishioners. Father Michael is, I sense, living vicariously through me.’
Why did I finally tell Howie about my involvement with Toby? Perhaps because it served to cement our friendship. In turn, he informed me that he’d been arrested by the police last year for trying to pick up a man in the toilets of Penn Station before taking the Metroliner to Washington where he was due to shepherd an author through a series of press interviews.
‘Lucky me, deciding to accept the advances of an undercover cop.’
‘But wasn’t that an act of entrapment on the part of the police?’
‘Absolutely – and the ACLU lawyer who took my case got all the charges dismissed on the grounds that it was a nasty set-up. My bosses found out about my “crime”, as I missed the train and the cops subsequently informed them that I had been arrested for “committing a lewd act” in a public toilet – though, in fact, I didn’t even get that satisfaction. The cop showed me his badge around the time I was unzipping his fly. Happily, my boss likes me and smoothed things over with our corporate chief executive, but also warned me that a second brush with the cops would not be tolerated.’
Just like my other New York friends Howie told me that I needed to get out of Vermont, that I was treading water up in the north woods. But there I stayed, telling myself that I would make the move in 1980 when I was twenty-five. My jogging escalated into a serious obsession, to the point where I ran the 1978 Boston Marathon in four hours and thirty-seven minutes. I shaved two minutes off that time when I did the New York twenty-six-miler the following year. Duncan and Howie were both waiting for me at the finish line as I staggered across it. Duncan’s first book – Through a Glass Weirdly: How American Counterculture Altered American Consciousness – came out in late ’78 to very good reviews and very few sales. But his take on the sixties – the way its unbridled experiments in social and sexual flexibility had chinked the conformist armor of the postwar era – was lucidly argued and written with considerable wit and flair. Certain critics took exception to his belief that a new conservative revolution was coming – and one which was going to be a total refutation of all the progress made from the dawn of JFK onward. In a very interesting op-ed piece he wrote for the New York Times, Duncan also asserted that the Iran Hostage Crisis – in which fifty-two American Embassy staff and civilians were held at gunpoint by revolutionary students supporting the Ayatollah Khomeini, beginning in November of 1979 – was going to be the downfall of the Carter presidency and the clarion call for a new conservative movement gathering pace around the country. Duncan again took the flak from his liberal friends for heralding the rise of these new right-wing thinkers. Though Duncan himself was rather centrist in his political thinking, he was nonetheless an increasingly astute and highly regarded observer of what was now being known as the zeitgeist: the tenor of our times. In a piece for Esquire he interviewed Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Milton Friedman – all of whom were the intellectual boiler room of what became known as the neocon revolution. He pointed out that theirs was a vanguard to be ignored at our peril. Just as Duncan convinced Esquire to send him on the road for a month with that third-tier actor turned governor of California, and now someone seriously running for the White House a full eighteen months before the November 1980 election.
‘Please don’t tell me that Ronald Reagan has a chance against Carter,’ Howie said to Duncan as they took me for Chinese food and beer after my marathon.
‘In private the guy is distant, reserved, to the point where I sense that even the people closest to Reagan don’t really know him. But get him in front of a Middle American crowd and he has a way of connecting, of invoking a Norman Rockwell vision of the country, of reassuring everyone that Carter’s brand of national bleakness should be rejected.’
‘But it’s such a cartoonish view of America – and one that doesn’t really exist anymore,’ I said.
‘All conservatives talk about the past as if it was the best of all possible worlds,’ Duncan said. ‘Watch what happens when the Brits elect Margaret Thatcher and her party before the end of the year. She’s on record as saying that she fully approves of Victorian values.’
‘You mean, like hanging children for pickpocketing and keeping poor houses flourishing, and tossing piss and shit out onto the street?’ Howie asked.
‘My, you have a colorful way with words,’ I said.
‘I will take that as a compliment,’ he said. ‘But you do have me worried, Mr Duncan, that we might just have a B-movie actor in the White House in 1981. Maybe he’ll make Bob Hope Secretary of State.’
‘I think Roy Rogers might get that,’ I said.
‘And he can negotiate with the Soviets with his loyal dog Bullet by his side,’ Howie said.
‘One thing about Reagan,’ Duncan noted. ‘He is a true modern conservative. But he is not an autocrat, a demagogue.’
‘We’ll elect one of those eventually,’ I said.
Duncan had a bit of a minor heartbreak when Andrea left him for a fellow entertainment lawyer. Even though he quietly admitted to me that she was too ‘aiming for the social stratosphere’ for his tastes, his history with his mother and other women made him particularly sensitive to getting dumped. That was something I found both sad and self-limiting about Duncan: he took the breakups badly … and then fell in love again quickly thereafter. Duncan himself understood this, telling me:
‘I’m a bit of a romantic fool. I always need to be with someone, even if that “someone” isn’t totally right for me. I envy you, having your little thing with Mystery Man – and being able to detach.’
‘I envy you searching for love, Duncan. But I really hope that you stop trying to marry your mother.’
He laughed.
‘Howie told me the same thing a few days ago.’
Howie meanwhile had come into some money. His Auntie Marie left him the entire contents of her estate – which turned out to be, after taxes and death duties and the undertaker and the lawyers, around $40,000. He asked me if my mother would help him buy a bigger apartment. Since leaving my father Mom had reinvented herself as a canny, wildly efficient and super-hardworking businesswoman, telling me that by 1979 she was going to be her agency’s ‘number-one closer’.
She made good on her pledge, turning over almost $1 million in sales her first year and more than doubling it the next year. The fact that she was reaping a 22 percent commission on everything she closed meant that, by the end of her second year, she’d bought herself a lovely two-bedroom ‘partial Hudson-view’ co-op on 84th Street and Riverside Side Drive. She furnished it in a somewhat overwhelming Masterpiece Theatre/English country-house style.
Mom told me manifold times that the small second bedroom in her Upper West Side pad was mine. She found my insistence on staying at Duncan’s to be just a little insulting. Once, when out for dinner with Mom and her new boyfriend, Jerry, a rather flamboyant theatre producer, Mom started in on the ‘my only daughter is rejecting me’ routine. Jerry – with his thin dyed jet-black hair and his taste for shiny black three-piece suits and Windsor-knotted check ties said:
‘Now, Brenda, you know that this young lady of yours needs her space. Which, from what you told me, you never had from your own mother. In fact, the only time that the old lady finally left you alone was when she had the good taste to die. Surely you’re going to show Alice here what a classy, successful broad you are by not visiting on her the same dreck that your own mother buried you in.’
Way to go, Jerry! Even if the feminist in me was thinking that calling my mother ‘a broad’ was a little too 1950s for my taste. Then again, Jerry was sixty-four, which meant he was born when the First World War was just raging and, twenty years later, found himself storming Omaha Beach as an infantryman on D-Day. He was a big Democrat who, even as the Carter administration was beginning to implode, still vowed support for our morally honorable president and the liberal causes he espoused. As such I had to forgive him for sounding like a Damon Runyon character: a fast-talking, minor-league Broadway hotshot. His ability to curb my mother’s excesses also endeared him to me.
Dad, on the other hand, couldn’t stand Jerry.
‘The guy looks like a cross between an asshole rabbi and the sort of shyster lawyer whom you call after your upstairs neighbor has left the tap running and you’ve got a Niagara coming down on your bed.’
‘He’s been pretty nice to me,’ I said.
‘Because he’s gotten you orchestra seats for A Chorus Line and brought you to dinner at Sardi’s a few times?’
‘Because he knows how to handle Mom.’
‘No one can tame that crazy.’
‘Jerry seems to have found a way.’
Dad looked at me as if I had just spat in his face. He turned away, motioning to the waiter to bring him another Scotch and soda.
‘Next thing you’re going to tell me is how rich she is.’
‘I don’t think Mom would describe herself as that.’
‘Okay – it’s her clients who are rich.’
‘My friend Howie just bought a two-bed in Chelsea thanks to Mom and he’s hardly rich.’
‘He’s that fag, right?’
‘Don’t call him that, Dad.’
‘Am I saying something you don’t already know? I mean, when I last took you out for dinner in the city and he showed up to whisk you off afterwards and was getting all palsy with me at the table, I felt as if fucking Tiny Tim was trying to hit on me.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad – why say something like that?’
‘Because it’s the fucking truth.’
‘Your truth, your ignorance, your nastiness.’
‘Now don’t go all self-righteous on me, young lady.’
‘I am not your “young lady”. I am nobody’s “young lady” – and I truly object to the fact that –’
‘What? What? The fact that, after a few drinks, my tongue gets a little loose? You want to hang out with homosexuals – there, I used the right word! – be my guest.’
‘You’re still bereft, aren’t you?’
‘Is that why I paid for your fancy education … so you can use big, fancy words like “bereft”?’
‘You paid for my education so I can discern the difference between decency and brutishness – and yeah, there’s another big word to chew over. Now if you’ll excuse me … I’ve actually had enough of your –’
But as I stood up Dad reached out and grabbed my hand.
‘Please don’t go … please don’t leave me … ’
‘Then don’t make me leave.’
‘I’m sorry. Sorry about so much … ’
He lowered his head. He began to cry. I returned to my seat, pulling my chair closer, my hand still in his.
‘I’m an asshole,’ he hissed. ‘A total jerk who killed it all. I screwed around on your mom all the time. Now she’s having her payback.’
I pushed his Scotch and soda toward him. He took a long, steadying sip.
‘Now I don’t know much about this stuff,’ I said, ‘but isn’t it hard to be faithful to someone when the two of you are fighting all the time?’
Dad looked at me quizzically. ‘So when did you start having an open-minded view of all this?’
‘All I know is: when it comes to love nothing is simple or straightforward.’
Dad then gulped down the remnants of his Scotch and soda and told me that he’d just been eased out of his job.
‘I haven’t been fired or anything. The asshole company president – Mortimer S. Gordon, the original fat fuck – called me into his office last week and announced that my work in Chile was finished. The mine was up and running, the privatization complete – and “we now need a younger guy running around the world for us”. He wanted me to become Senior Vice President in Charge of Internal Operations – which is a highfalutin way of turning me into the office manager. I asked him what he would give me if I decided to leave the company now: stock, bonds, a payoff, all that golden parachute shit. He told me a year’s salary – sixty thousand dollars – and nothing more. Twenty years with that company – and their kiss-off to me is three grand a year for all that work, all that profit I brought to them. Naturally I kicked up shit, yelled at that tub of jello, told him he had to give me more. Immediately he said: one hundred thousand, one year of medical, and I was fired on the spot.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘Like a has-been. Called your mom yesterday, told her what happened, she let me know that she didn’t want her rightful share of the house or anything else from me. In fact, she wanted nothing to do with me whatsoever. Which made me feel even more like yesterday’s guy.’
To his credit he found a new executive position a few weeks later – heading up a trading division that specialized in commodities. He was appointed a senior vice president. He told me he would be making the same sort of money he did before ‘but with big opportunities for profit participation’. And he was moving into the city, renting a furnished one-bedroom place in Tudor City, an old 1920s complex way east on 42nd Street. He sold the family house. He gave away all the furniture. He offered his three children the opportunity to take anything we wanted from the place we once called home. Peter and Adam took certain practical things – guitars, skis, a set of exercise weights (for Adam), books (for Peter). But all I asked for was a photograph of my dad in his Marine Corps uniform, and of my maternal grandfather on a field in Flanders during World War I. I also took away with me a picture of Mom when she was working, right out of college, at NBC – standing next to an early antediluvian TV camera, clipboard in hand, looking like the very model of early fifties comeliness and sexual reserve. I wanted nothing else – except certain notebooks and school essays and the remaining LP records from my collection that I hadn’t taken with me to Vermont. Dad got just above one hundred thousand for the house. Goodwill Industries stripped it of everything. Adam joined me that Saturday afternoon when the house was emptied, Dad packing up his clothes, a few keepsakes (his honorable discharge from the military, his college degree, photos of us as kids), then piled it all into Adam’s car. Adam had agreed to move Dad – and it was Adam who turned all moist-eyed as the last of our old furniture was packed up by the gruff Goodwill men and driven away, leaving us to stare in at the empty, scuffed, dusty shell of the place where we used to live, now devoid of any hint that we once called it home.
