Lucking Out - James Wolcott [99]
After a disgruntled jazz musician and his girlfriend, about to be evicted, turned on the oven and stove burners and all the water taps before stealing out into the night, flooding my apartment and nearly turning the entire building into a minor replica of The Towering Inferno, I moved from my digs on the Upper West Side to a studio apartment on the farthest end of the West Village on Horatio Street. It was there that I was audience to a different sex show each weekend, with a quite distinct and varying cast. Moving into Horatio, I felt I had arrived: my first real New York apartment, the first empty space to call mine that didn’t have someone else’s history hanging around, the perfect snug fit for man and cat. Western light bathed the room with a warmer benediction than I had ever gotten in my old hideout (where the morning light seemed bloodshot), and my new place’s one redbrick wall was a sign that I had finally landed my own parcel of the bohemian experience. It even had a fireplace, what could be better. I slept on a captain’s bed, its three bottom drawers holding all sorts of bachelor necessities, and worked at a desk on a typewriter whose electric purr I would later associate with the sustaining hum of Transcendental Meditation.
It was a quite modern building, which meant that sound muffling seemed to have ranked low on the list of the Mafia’s construction priorities. I could hear every sneeze and cough in the next studio as if the wall were a tent flap, and was able to follow the psychodrama of every loud telephone conversation as if it were an ongoing improvisation based on Jean Cocteau’s Human Voice, a monologue once found in nearly every college drama department repertory. The young man in the adjacent apartment to me was having chronic boyfriend problems with Billy, whose name received extra l’s whenever my neighbor was distraught. “Billllllllly, why do you keep doing this to me?” Whatever it was that Billy was doing, he kept doing it, because the same desperate plea bargaining was played out over the phone again and again, as if the plaintiff were stuck to a script written on flypaper. Sometimes Billy would come over, and they would fight for a bit and then go out, or go out and then fight when they got back. I would pound on the wall, they would pound back, and really that’s what being a New Yorker was about then. One of the regulars I would come to recognize in the hallway at 92 Horatio was a porn star named Marc “10½” Stevens, whom I had seen on-screen without considering myself “a fan of his work” and who sometimes appeared at parties painted silver, like a spaceship dashboard ornament. While in the army, stationed in Germany, Stevens found himself in the same bank of urinals as fellow soldier Elvis Presley. Legend was that the less endowed Elvis made a quick appraisal of the hose Stevens was holding and drawled, “Ya’ll better take care of that thang.” Words to live by, and Stevens’s thang was later photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, no mean judge of hangage himself. I would often see Stevens in the company of drag queens who partied down as if they had LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” playing nonstop under their wigs. They sometimes popped poppers in the elevator on the way down to the first floor, wanting to hit the streets with an extra goosy bump.
Sunset aside, my studio hadn’t much of a view. The windows overlooked a stretch of the underpass of the original High Line informally known as “The Trucks,” named for the fleet of trucks parked there at night. My first summer on Horatio, I was standing at the window, wondering who the hell was honking the idiot car horn below (a perennial New York question), and noticed a man entering a gap between the trucks while another man exited from a different gap. Then another man emerged from that same gap, as if whatever business were being conducted with the first