City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [35]
But the sexual abundance and opportunity struck me the most. Even though I was only thirty, I felt too old, too late to enjoy the new dispensations. Yet when I entered a backroom or the back of a truck parked under the piers beside the Hudson, or went into the abandoned piers themselves, I didn’t worry about my age or psychic readiness. At first we didn’t get into the holds of trucks but rather the gay boys crouched under one truck and the “straight” teens from Jersey stood in the narrow space between two trucks and got sucked off. The brackish smell of the cold water flowing nearby and the dance of New Jersey lights on the small, faceted waves in the wake of a passing barge filled me with a cool romantic ardor. This was the chase, the adventure. We heard of bodies discovered floating down the river, of horrible mutilations, of drive-by murders, but nothing could make us abandon the prowl.
In one of the old piers there’d be no lights at all beyond the occasional flare of a match seeking a cigarette, a sudden phosphorus flash revealing that what you thought was an embracing couple was actually a thick stump of wood with a rusting chain wrapped around it, or what you saw as a gull’s wing was really someone’s shirttail. Ramps led up to rooms with missing doors and floorboards, to a seething Laocoön entwined by snakes or by arms as he held fast to his sons or lovers…
I had a joyful, drunken reunion with Richard Howard and in my sentimental excitement about seeing him sent him a wrong signal. He said, “Oh, darling, I was hoping you’d feel that way someday,” and I was too polite to clarify the point. Richard spirited me away for a bucolic weekend at the country house of Coburn Britton, a rich poet from Cleveland who was publishing a little magazine called Prose. Coby had an old apple farm in northern New Jersey. We all went over to visit Glenway Wescott, the novelist in his seventies who had been a beauty back in Paris in the 1920s and who’d written one classic, The Pilgrim Hawk. Now he no longer wrote anything beyond his journals but devoted most of his time to being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I thought that was a terrible fate—and now that I’m in my late sixties I, too, am serving on the awards committee of the academy.
After my all-too-apparent physiological lack of interest in him, Richard politely withdrew and never said a word about it. He was tactful and worldly in the best sense.
For a few weeks I lived with Marilyn. I’d grown my hair long and I’d come back from Rome with a blue velvet jacket and a white suit. I was skinny and not healthy looking. I’d drunk so much white wine and eaten so many olives and so much bad bread that I looked jaundiced. Italian words kept flitting through my head; I was translating everything I thought into Italian, but badly. In Italy a man could not be seen carrying laundry or groceries; he had to put everything in a suitcase as though headed for the train station. I went along with that. He dared not step outside even to go to the corner without wearing a coat and tie; I went along with that. The last day I was in Rome was a steaming day in July. I went in shorts to pick up my laundry and the laundress complained, “I work day and night to make you look well dressed and here you are disgracing me.”
In New York no one south of Fourteenth Street ever wore a tie or anything but a ripped T-shirt and dirty jeans and sneakers or cowboy boots. Gay men held cologne and jewelry in abhorrence. Some of the bars posted rules forbidding cologne, hair spray, dress slacks, cuff links, and even underpants. For New Yorkers the streets were considered “backstage,” and even beautifully dressed women wore gym shoes on the street and put their heels on only when they arrived at the office, a dinner party, or the theater. For Romans the street was the stage. In returning to New York, I felt as if I’d boarded a forward-flying time machine.
Now in New York a friend of a friend offered me a job as a stock boy in his shop on Madison Avenue selling clear