City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [112]
Burroughs received us in the Bunker, his name for his apartment on the Bowery. He lived in the same building as the poet John Giorno, who at the time was writing poems on sugar, alcohol, and meat. Burroughs lived in the old locker rooms of the former YMCA and proudly showed us the ancient graffiti on the toilet walls. So often in Burroughs’s fiction a gray wind is blowing through half-remembered scenes of adolescent loneliness, and these nearly obliterated obscene drawings seemed to be the perfect emblems of that vision.
As the evening wore on, Burroughs became more and more stoned. Though technically homosexual, he seemed as sexless as Capote, though in a different way. I called my piece “This Is Not a Mammal,” using a remark that Susan Sontag had made to me about Burroughs.
In the late 1970s, a glory-hole venue suddenly appeared next to the other leather bars. You paid an entrance fee and then suddenly were in a large room full of little booths with doors that latched. The booths had waist-high holes through which you could suck the cock of your neighbor. It was a bit like a confessional booth in that no one could see what you looked like, though sometimes things became romantic and people kissed through the hole and even stuck their hands and arms in and caressed each other’s body and face. I remember that in the center of the room was a big booth with maybe eight glory holes, two on each side. Once I saw a man roaming that room sticking his big, hard dick in one hole after another, a restless minotaur. As I looked from my hole across the room at the other holes, they all seemed to be disconcertingly alive—protruding hands waving him over, mouths gaping, or liquid eyes pivoting and blinking. The minotaur was so angry and passionate, stabbing himself into each living desperate orifice.
One night when I was there, the boy on the door got me high because he was hoping to slow me down so that I would wait till he got off at two in the morning. That sounded like a good plan and I was chatting with him at the cash register when all of a sudden a hot young man with a dancer’s butt and turnout but none of the effeminacy stormed in. I was so high that I followed him closely, almost walking on his heels, and just as he was about to drop the latch on a cubicle, I pushed the door and entered his booth. That was against the rules but no one was monitoring the room.
I went home with him. His name was Chris Cox. He and I were lovers for the next three years off and on. He was on acid that night and couldn’t get it up, but he was basically a top and I a bottom, so he gave me precise orders about how to fuck him, and that was the last time I ever did that in our relationship. Even then as I was fucking him, I was completely under his spell. I looked at the stacks of books beside the bed and was surprised how many of the titles were the same as those in my room. He was so ardent—even crazy passionate—that I thought if he was this hot and also had all the same books, then we should be lovers.
The next morning he took pictures of me as I awakened. I look dazed and vulnerable and happy in the photos, a lot younger than my thirty-seven years, well fucked though I’d done the fucking, an anomaly that he immediately set to rights. He lived in a big, empty loft on Twenty-third Street with a skylight overhead and hanging spider plants above the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor. The bathroom was ancient, in a big, separate room. In those days an empty loft was the height of chic, and it was hard to know if a loft-dweller was really poor or just an artist pretending to be a minimalist. Chris’s loft had what seemed like acres of hardwood floors and windows without shades and a phone on the floor next to a metal folding chair and an ashtray. The space was large enough to be a dance studio and sometimes Chris did rehearse there, though he’d given up the theater