Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [23]
Which were not quite bright enough to keep me from being miserable—oh, I was gloriously alive then, in those months of risk and passion, right on the edge, but it was also terribly hard, since I’d entirely rearranged my life (such as it was) to come to a new city, to live with a man I barely knew.
It happened like this. At twenty-eight, I was between lives. (“How many lives,” my friend Lynda wrote in another poem, “have fountained through my own…”) I’d spent most of my twenties in a heterosexual marriage, living in the Midwest. I’d married young, in flight from both my family and a sexual orientation that scared me half to death. In 1971, I’d been a freshman in college when I met Ruth, and I was dazzled and fascinated by her. The fact that I’d never met a self-identified adult gay person was also, of course, a serious shaping factor; I didn’t know, living as I did in a place and time where gay people were hidden, erased, what kind of life I could have. I thought maybe lots of men felt the way I did, and then went ahead and lived the way they were expected to anyway. Maybe if you ignored homosexual desire, it would go away.
Reality, of course, proved opposite. When the marriage ended, I stayed in Des Moines for another year, teaching, catching my breath after this dizzying change, and discovering what it was like to have a boyfriend, to enter into a new planet of activity. At twenty-seven, the divorce final, my temporary teaching job over, I realized I could go anywhere. With six hundred dollars to my name, and the kind of energy that springs from knocking down the closet walls and seeing around one a wide and unknown world of possibility, I put what I owned in the back of my little yellow Chevette and moved East, headed for the myth and actuality of Manhattan.
Young Gay Man Leaves Stultifying Midwest for the Urban World of Romance and Permission: a classic American story, and I won’t retell it here. Suffice to say it was thrilling, though the excitement was mostly about finding out that I could do it, that I had enough nerve and inner resources to land on my feet in a new realm. Though, truthfully, my days didn’t involve very interesting forms of struggle: finding an apartment was the hardest part, as mindless though reasonable work as a typist was everywhere available. I’d work every hour of overtime I could get, typing reports for marketing consultants in a glamorous firm on Park Avenue. I didn’t have the money to buy clothes I needed to wear to work, so I’d go out to a shopping center in New Jersey to use the one credit card I owned—a Sears charge, left over from my days in Iowa—to buy shirts. Of course I told no one.
The practical aspects of the day-to-day—how does one live in this city?—seemed to occupy all my time; New York, on a secretarial pool salary, was more about survival than pleasure.
I was lucky to have a part-time teaching job, in a program for writers in Vermont, a graduate school where students and faculty come together only for two weeks each summer and winter. It wasn’t enough to live on, but it helped, and it meant being able to feel like a writer instead of someone who did other people’s typing. This meant a trip north to Montpelier, and I decided to make the journey into at least something of a vacation, knowing there wouldn’t be many of those for a while. I went briefly to Provincetown, but it was rainy and cold, and I didn’t feel connected to its gay resort culture; I didn’t know how to thread my way in that unfamiliar world. (Strange to think that I walked then, another