City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [64]
Quaaludes also made me sloppy. One night at Ruskay’s restaurant on Columbus Avenue I must have tucked the tablecloth instead of a napkin into my belt. When I got up to leave, I trailed the plates, glasses, and silverware behind me as I staggered along, saluting friends obliviously, heading for the exit, a big smile on my face.
My main problem, however, was drink. I never drank during the day, but in the evening I started sipping wine with dinner and kept on until I passed out. I could easily get through two bottles a night. In 1983 when I couldn’t get up the ladder to my loft bed, I decided that I’d become so absurd I should stop drinking forever—which I did. A year before I’d stopped smoking. Soon I’d gone from a skinny, boyish smoker, always talking and grinning drunkenly in the evening, to a fat, old-mannish sobersides who went to bed early. A profile in the newspaper referred to my “matronly” chin.
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Keith, like many Americans, had not grown up with classical music, though he was eager to be introduced to it. We were so poor we didn’t have many 33⅓ records but would listen over and over to the few we had, especially a magical recording of Schumann’s Kreisleriana played by Alicia de Larrocha, of all people (since she was Spanish, we thought she was supposed to play Spanish music exclusively, just as gay writers were by then only being allowed to write gay fiction).
To support my nephew, I had to take a job with a chemical company that had, last time I looked, generated sales of more than six billion dollars in one year. This was by far the worst job I ever had as a grown-up.
I was in the public relations department and my first task was to try to justify to stockholders and government regulators why the company should be making flammable children’s pajamas. Then I was supposed to justify its extensive holdings in South Africa under apartheid. I was sick to my stomach every day. We were supposed to be in the office from eight A.M. to eight P.M., at least, six days out of seven. I was in charge of shepherding through production the annual report to stockholders, a glossy four-color magazine that was designed to explain why the company was losing money. All of the vice presidents, and there were a great number of them, were tightly guarded by high-paid executive secretaries warding off every disturbance and insuring their constant repose within their calm offices on the highest floor. They struck me as fetuses being maintained in a warm chemical bath under artificial light. I would regularly send around to each of them a request for information that I could include in the annual report. But, invisible in their luxurious offices, each of the twenty vice presidents would then forward my request to the next vice president, making sure that none ever answered. Everyone in the building was afraid to make a decision, and the entire organization was paralyzed with fear. Even the annual report couldn’t be turned out by the company, but must be handed over to an expensive freelance outfit that specialized in business publications. I wanted a brilliant fashion photographer I knew to take the executives’ group picture, jazz it up, but my boss—a duplicitous, angry woman (and the only female vice president)—met my friend Edgar and explained, in a voice shaking with rage, that no gay person was ever to be allowed on the executive floor, and what had I been thinking?
My only consolation during this difficult period was the two Keiths, my nephew and the actor I was in love with. While living with me, my nephew reawakened to all the beauties of literature and began to write with great fluency and charm. At my suggestion he read Lord Chesterfield’s Letters and the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut and Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma. He worked hard at after-school jobs and got terrific grades at the private school around the corner