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By Root 1179 0

plastic furniture. But I was hoping to find something better. I tried to get a job in publishing. Tom Congdon, the editor who would nurse Jaws toward bestsellerdom in 1974, interviewed me. My seat for this encounter was a low child’s chair and his a high executive throne (in fact, there was a book out at the time about how to intimidate others, and this tactic of relative chair size and positioning was one of the key strategies). I also was interviewed by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the biographer and scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Then there was someone at Atheneum. They all told me that it was unheard of for a writer to be a book editor. In England, perhaps, that might work, but in America it would be a clear conflict of interest.

I found some freelance writing work and a one-room apartment on Horatio Street in the West Village, not far from the Hudson River, for a hundred dollars a month. There were a few scraps of furniture—a kitchen table, a pretty desk, two chairs, a single mattress on the floor. There was a closet and a small, dirty bathroom. The windows were covered with heavy metal gates, but through the bars you could see big green ailanthus trees. As soon as I turned on the light, cockroaches scurried off into hiding.

I never met any of my neighbors but most of them were young. I could hear them running up and down the stairs all the time, all through the night—not a heavy tread, just a light scampering. They, too, were roaches, fleet of foot and light-phobic. On the corner of Horatio and Greenwich Street there was a laundry run by a sweet old couple who had concentration-camp tattoos on their arms and were always smiling and spoke almost no English. Unlike my lady in Rome, they were indifferent to how their customers looked. On one side of Horatio were elegant brownstones from the middle of the ninteenth century. On my side were tenement buildings, shabby structures from the beginning of the twentieth century meant to be temporary housing for immigrants.

From my aerie I would swoop down on men of all ages and shapes, usually late at night. Not that there was much happiness in a life of pleasure. Once I was in the backs of trucks or in the ruined piers along the Hudson, I simply couldn’t make myself go home. Even after a satisfying encounter with one man or ten I still wanted to hang around to see what the next ten minutes would bring. What it brought was the morning light, the sudden explosion of expensively shod feet on pavement as well-dressed men and women, pale from too much work and too many late nights and too little sleep, rushed out of their apartment buildings and hurried off to their jobs and I, in need of a shave and a bath, slunk home in semen-stiff jeans and a T-shirt that stank, my spirits depressed, my body thoroughly reamed.

I mentioned that I sometimes felt I was too old for all this.

But gay men—like straight women—always feel they’re too old. I remember that my twenty-sixth birthday was the most difficult one, since suddenly I thought I was no longer a student who could get away with being sloppy and unfocused and riddled with bad habits. Having no longer any chance to be a prodigy, I now had to content myself with being a late bloomer, if I was going to bloom at all. I would do isometric exercises for my face (a new fad at the time), trying to avoid age lines and saggy pouches. I was on a lifelong diet (in three months I once lost fifty pounds with the help of amphetamines and a regime of steak, salad, and white wine). I who took no pleasure in sports was launched into a lifelong program of exercise. I who hated shopping and was too poor to buy new clothes would do whatever was possible within my means to obtain the latest “hot” look. I had my hair “relaxed” to resemble a surfer. I remember in the sixties glancing at the first gay men to sport mustaches and saying to a friend, “I could never kiss that!” Within three months I had my own mustache. Just as ten years later I shaved mine as soon as everyone else did. Long hair, straightened hair, crew cuts, long sideburns—I followed almost