City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [5]
I was afraid of ending up like Ezra. I forced myself to write plays and novels during the evenings after work—anything creative as a break from the torpor of an imagination-killing office job.
Chapter 3
I was making four hundred dollars a month. Stan’s and my apartment cost just a hundred. It was on MacDougal between Bleecker and Houston, in the heart of the old Greenwich Village, right around the corner from the Little Red School House, a bastion of progressive education, and directly across the street from Bob Dylan’s apartment, though I never once glimpsed him and didn’t quite see the fuss over a man whose singing sounded whiny to me. On the corner was the San Remo, which had until recently been a famous gay bar but was now straight. Here, in the men’s toilet, Terry Southern in his novel Candy had set an abortion scene. Frank O’Hara, the New York poet, had hung out there. I pictured thin gay men in Brooks Brothers suits, smoking, drinking martinis, their pale faces covered with light hangover sweat, their teeth brown from cigarettes, their bluish white hands shaking.
There was also a coffee shop across MacDougal called the Hip Bagel. Hip was for a while crossed out, then later reinstated, as the word itself was condemned for being square, then rescued through a second degree of irony. It had black walls and individual spotlights trained down on booths. In a back booth on the left I would sometimes drink espresso with an oversize girl who swore she was going to be a famous pop singer someday. I’d never heard of a fat singer off the grand opera stage, so I just nodded politely, though I was impressed to hear that she’d already appeared in The Music Man. A few years later she emerged as Mama Cass in the Mamas and the Papas, which meant little to me since except for the times it would provide the sound track for my romances I didn’t care for pop. By now I’ve loosened up a little more and have over the years learned, through repetition perhaps, to appreciate and even enjoy some of the popular music boyfriends have pressed upon me or played for me.
Another place where I’d sit and nurse a beer was the Bleecker Street Tavern, a barny old bar with many tables and few customers and a kindly waitress with a man’s face and dyed hair. Little did I know that this had been the first gay bar in New York, the Slide; in the nineteenth century all these tables had been crowded with transvestite prostitutes in crinolines and their top-hatted customers. In the basement were little rooms where the whores had taken their johns, and though the rooms are still there the place is now a heavy-metal hangout called Kenny’s Castaways.
The beatnik/hippie revolution was swirling all around me. After work I’d take the subway down and get off at the West Fourth Street stop and walk to our tiny, dirty, roach-trap apartment on MacDougal. On a warm evening my street was so crowded with kids with long hair and burgundy velvet jeans and mirrored vests and filmy shirts with puffy pirate sleeves that few cars would venture down it. It was still an old Italian neighborhood with little cheap pasta joints down two or three steps from street level (Monte’s was our favorite), cafés serving espresso such as the Caffè Reggio, and funeral homes with alabaster urns lit from within by electric bulbs, the stained-glass windows shrouded by closed beige curtains that were never opened. Our neighbors were Italian and spoke to each other every morning in, I guess, a Neapolitan dialect. Out our scrap of back window we could see old Italian wives cranking laundry across the air shaft on pulley-operated