City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [37]
I felt I’d come down in the world. Before Italy I was living in the nicest apartment I’d ever had, I was wearing suits, and I’d had a retirement plan. Now I was thirty and unemployed and living in a roach trap. But at last I’d become the long-haired hippie in dirty jeans and torn T-shirt, even if the era for hippies was gradually passing. I wasn’t sure if I preferred the living death of respectability linked to a dull job or the peril of living on the economic edge, free to keep my own hours—and to fill them up with tedious, ill-paid freelance work.
Richard, with a complete lack of resentment and a nearly unique generosity linked to his natural ebullience, fixed me up with not one but two different young men, one after another. There was a bright, skinny writer, impotent from heroin; we spent an uncomfortable New Year’s Eve together. There was a dark young doctor who was always depressed, whom I was half in love with. He lived in another city and spent weekends with me in my pitiful apartment. I didn’t see how bad it was, nor did I ever think of myself as poor. Broke, perhaps, but not “poor.” Maybe because my father had been rich, maybe because I’d had a well-paying job I hated, maybe because I thought of my life as enviable, maybe because it all felt like gleeful slumming, and anyway an average tidy studio apartment in a doorman building would have seemed like even a bigger comedown after my father’s house—better the gutter than the curb.
New York was a broken city, literally on the verge of bankruptcy. A woman I knew bought a brownstone in the Village for thirty thousand dollars and said to me, “I know I’ll never get my money out, but I’m sentimental about the city.” Uncollected garbage piled up along the curb. The sidewalks were cracked and tilted by tree roots. Streetlights burned out and weren’t replaced. The crime rate was high. My little apartment was broken into, despite the metal gates on the windows, and my radio and typewriter were stolen. I hired a burglar-proofer who, he assured me, was a convicted thief himself and therefore knew “all their tricks.” He lined the front door, which had painted glass panels, with sheet metal. Into the window frames he put long metal pegs that had to be extracted before the windows could be opened. As the man said, “They only have two or three minutes from the time they break the glass and the time they have to hop in and clear the place out. If the window is too complicated, they won’t bother. But of course they could always get into the apartment downstairs and bore their way through.” Heroin addicts, everyone said, were responsible for the thefts. Burglaries were so common that no one paid much attention to them except the victims. I was haunted by memories of New York when I’d first moved there in 1962 and lived in the Y and had to borrow money from friends just to eat. Now, just less than a decade later, I was back down to five hundred dollars again. I’d blown my profit-sharing money inviting everyone out to dinner in Rome, though I didn’t regret it.
I began to see David Kalstone all the time. He’d moved up to Twenty-second Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues, the block where I live now. He lived in a floor-through of a brownstone in a lovely disorder of half-filled teacups and freshly opened “little” magazines, of ballet programs and long telephone cords, of cast-aside Missoni sweater vests and extra pairs of reading glasses, of a big silver bowl full of freesias as fresh and unbent as spring onions still in the ground. He loved Maria Callas and I pretended I did, too (worshipping her was an article of faith among gay men in those days). To my ears, she sounded shrill and flat, though I was prepared to believe she’d been a great actress, never mind the screeching.
David never had much money because he was always saving up from his salary, and the extra income he earned as one of the several editors of the Norton anthology of English literature, for his extravagant summers in Venice, where he would rent a whole floor in a palazzo. Chelsea in those days