It is a spectacular view, a right angle of glass scanning the center of town—to the extent that this episodic town has a center.
“The billion lights!” our host exclaims, taking Lucky’s arm. “The heights of rage and ambition! Right before our eyes, four hundred nobodies are becoming overnight stars through acts of indescribable corruption, one hundred sixty-five statesmen are selling secrets, seventy-eight people are trying to cure their herpes with leftover Kwell, and twenty-three innocents are being murdered by strangers. And you’re unnerved, you … explosively ripping object … because here you are in the city of passion and awe, and all you know is brotherly love. Is there much love in the west?”
“Depends on who you run into and what mood you’re in,” Lucky replies.
The Madcap Heiress turns to me. “So
distingué
! Will he move here?”
“I’m only here on business.”
“Terrified to guess what kind.”
Lucky is a hustler.
“Are you up for another movie perchance?
The Shoulder Caps That Devoured Biloxi? The Incredible Abdominals That Never Stopped Moving In and Out?
Or just
Young, Cute, and Lewd?
”
Later, Lucky asked me if the whole east side was like this. Of course
none
of the east side is like this, but after a while all of Manhattan is, because the rhythm of its humor takes the tempo of the queen and the gauge of its glamour observes the queen’s imperatives. My friend Tim came to New York bearing the open cool of Seattle and the precision of Washington, D.C.; two months after he arrived, he was referring to himself as The Marquise.
If the Madcap Heiress is basic Manhattan, then so must be the east side, for there are no Madcap Heiresses anywhere else. The rich don’t live where you live; they live where they live. A century ago, they had one of their meetings and decided that the rich sector was east of the Park. But New York’s rich is strange, like everything else in New York. If Lady Bracknell moved here, where would she abide? Only the very East Fifties would look right to her, but they move too fast. Bank Street would be slow enough, but the wrong chic. Put her on West Eighty-second for a week and she’d be mugging Puerto Ricans. New York is too commingled. It’s densely shared.
Lucky appreciated the Madcap Heiress. Effortfully polite, he asked about Crazy Bunny and the Dizzy Wizard, not realizing that these, like many of the people we know and count on, are fictional characters. If I had asked the Madcap Heiress about Crazy Bunny, he would have been peeved. You’re to listen, not ask. But devastating aliens may derail the patter. “Why, dear heart, Crazy Bunny is very simply the natural enemy of Colonel Snapper von Turtel, and you must take care, when they call, not to ally yourself with one or the other. So gruesome.” He moved closer to Lucky. “Keeps you busy.” He drew his finger along the curve of Lucky’s left pectoral. “I love it when they fight.” He circled the nipple, bold and high on the muscle. “I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you let me taste your quibble.”
* * *
West siders routinely attack the east side, I imagine because the west side is a slum. It acts like one, too. Here, only the gays are men; the straights are shapeless wimps in joke-shop eyeglasses. In a Yankees cap they think they’re preening, and when a weightlifter walks by they sneer. Lucky failed to notice them. He saw the Korean fruit stands, the boutiques, the old folks on the benches—and these are New York, but not New York enough for him. There’s too much there here, too many sights that obscure the character of the place. “Where’s the intellectuals?” he asked.
“They live in New Jersey.”
I took him to a west side party, so he could sample Manhattan wit. But the guests were glued to the television—not even entertainment-center video, but network ooze. At least it was Public TV. I blushed for New York at the sparkless comebacks thrown at the screen, but Lucky wouldn’t know irony from babble; just hearing people talking fast intrigued him. Half the gang were straights, so they couldn’t understand why he was shirtless, but they were too afraid of the answer to ask.
Guests came and went. The notable arrival was a tall but under-grown character who managed to be brutally bald and excessively hairy at once. He made numerous philosophical statements, each as valid as the advice you get on a cocktail napkin, and went on to put–down assessments of the hobbies, professions, and eating habits (remnants of Chinese takeout were strewn about) of the entire room. Then he settled down to some concentrated mugging of a program about a recent American assault on Everest. Lucky had tuned the rest of us out; mountains fascinate him. So, I expect, did the climbers, of that blond, bearded, lanky, affably laconic type that always turns up on documentaries of the outdoors. They were clearly as exhilarated as challenged, and I could see Lucky realizing that there is no one like this in New York. He was sad; he had hoped there would be mountains here. There is no one like this in L.A., either, but there are some in Oregon, whence Lucky derives.
“Why do you do it?” an interviewer asked a climber.
“Because you’re a schmuck,” said the hairy baldo.
“Say, excuse me,” Lucky began, and I froze. The last time Lucky said, “Say, excuse me,” he chopped three San Franciscan teenagers into messes on Sacramento Street for making homophobic allusions. Like all Oregonians, Lucky is easygoing except about one thing for which he will not only fight but die—everyone raised in the state gets to choose his thing at the age of fifteen, then must stick to it for life, even if he leaves home. Lucky’s thing is mountains.
By hap, the fight was taken out of Lucky’s hands, for the others had had enough of hairy baldo, too, and they more or less harried him out of the party. Or maybe they had suddenly realized why Lucky doesn’t wear a shirt: he punches bad guys.
* * *
“You must take care not to ally yourself with either side,” the Madcap Heiress had warned us, so we flee both west and east and proceed to Below Fourteenth Street, a city itself. Here, many of the principles of uptown are observed in reverse. Dressing for success is despicable; punk, prole, and various nonaligned grotesquerie are the norm. Moving fast and intently, as if one’s day were full of Enviable Destinations, is suspect; downtown, you lurk, wander, or at most stroll, and going into a trance every block or so is good taste. Up north, everyone carries something—an attaché, a gym valise, a tiny shopping bag filled with leisure-class chotchkes; down here, everyone is openhanded. In the caverns of Businessville, street musicians, break-dancers, and monte sharps are intrusive; around Washington Square, they’re the only things happening.
I hate it here; everyone looks as if he might glow in the dark. Lucky loves it. “Look at you!” a woman in a Mohawk enthuses at him, apropos of I’m not sure what, and a couple of uproarious kids covered with tattoos call out, “Hey, Jive!”
“I thought New York was unfriendly,” Lucky says.
“That’s not friendly. It’s cultural harassment.”
Stand anywhere in Manhattan, and no matter how busy you look or how involved in conversation, a crazy will come up to share the most idiotic secrets. Once in a movie theatre, the man in front of me turned around to say, “This is the night when I like to eat cabbage, but I’m afraid of how it smells.”
“Hey, Jive!” Lucky echoes, pleased with it.
“Friendly?” I mutter. “It’s a city of lonely maniacs.”
“
Hey,
Jive!”
“Don’t do that.”
He tousles my hair. “You have to loosen up.”
“If New Yorkers loosened up, this might as well be Cincinnati. And if my hair must be tousled, it ought to be by someone old enough to be my father, not by…”
“By what?”
Now I tousle his hair and he cries, “Hey,
Jive!
” and a black baglady across the street warns, “Children! You play nice, now!”
“This is New York,” Lucky whispers, not for me to hear. “This is the jive.”
* * *
We move on to Christopher Street, gay tourism’s Bridge of Sighs, but Lucky is pensive and watches with but one eye. “What does ‘lewd’ mean?” he asks.
“Well … going around without a shirt and making porn movies could be thought lewd.”
“Are you sore at me for that? The movie?”
We take in street ballet: a lot of skin, and anyone not in shorts is a goon. Two devastatos, approaching on the same side of the street as imperious as nabobs on howdahs, burn glances each into each, pass on, turn around to look again, both, and, at the same moment, turn and move on.
“What’s the matter with this place?” Lucky asks. “Don’t those hunks know how to cruise?”
“They weren’t cruising. They were admiring themselves in the mirror.”
“I take it back about New York being friendly. I’ll bet I couldn’t even give it away here.”
It is a city of browsing eyes. The favorite question is “Should I have heard of you?”—but the words mean “What are you like in bed?” As a rule, trolls are the most impetuous (they will do anything to be liked), hunks the most inspiring (but hard to reach), romantics the most expert, and cynics the most intense. Which are you?
“Show me another sector,” Lucky suggests. “I don’t need this one so much.”
“This is the gayest part, you know.”
“Show me the most New York part. The most…”
“Typical?”
“Yes.”
Is there one? Lucky’s tour tells me that there scarcely are sectors at all, that all New York’s parts are equal, because everyone goes everywhere. The architecture varies—glass and chrome stupas in Businessville, cast-iron frames in Soho, belts of brownstones. But the characters are often interchangeable. I note lawyers on St. Mark’s Place, artists in the East Eighties, Poles in Yorkville, Italians in Chinatown. Mr. Peachum assigned his beggars their uniform and location in John Gay’s London. Is someone assigning New Yorkers posts and routes? We need a sense of neighborhood, a disintegration of atmosphere. We need muzzles and handcuffs on all straight male teenagers, a ban on radios, and the death penalty for littering.
“There is no typical part,” I tell Lucky. “It’s consistent right the way through.”
“Then show me the opposite of typical. The outstanding place.”
“There is none.”
“I know one. I’ll take you there.” It was my apartment.
“See,” he showed me. “You have no famous view and no Crazy Bunny.”
“I can see the whole of Fifty-fourth and Third.”
“You won’t when the new office building goes up. And you don’t wear a quibble. Or have friends who come in and mock everything other people believe in.”
“Like Chinese food.”
“No one can come up and bother us,” he goes on. “No one has strange hair or dervish clothes.”
“Dervish?”
“Wacko.”
“I thought you liked dervish behavior.”
“Not in my friends.”
“Lucky, don’t you realize that New York is the city of the dervish? My apartment isn’t atypical—it’s asylum.”
“That’s why it’s outstanding.”
“Resistance is taboo! They don’t like to let you take shelter here. That’s why Bloomingdale’s clerks are snotty and cab drivers play loud horrendous music on their radios. Privacy is offensive. The week I had my phone unlisted, people who hadn’t bothered with me in years accosted me on the street, demanding the new number.” I pace, I worry, I exult. “Death to spies! I am invisible!”
“I have to go to the airport,” he says.
“Now?”
“Now.”
With Lucky, everything happens without warning. He picks up his satchel, shakes my hand, smiles, drops the bag, hugs me, won’t let go. “Do New Yorkers do this?” he asks.
“Only when you’re here.”
“Any city with friends,” he observes, “is a nice city. The others aren’t nice. That’s the difference from one to another.”
I consider offering to keep Lucky in New York—he’d be better off as a houseboy than hustling. But I doubt New York could stand Lucky on any terms. Thieves and crazies, yes. Queens and ruffians, surely. And vicious wimps especially—New York can’t get enough of them. But brotherly love is an affront.
At that, could Lucky stand New York? After he goes, alone in my apartment, I practice saying “Hey, Jive!” in an affable manner. A dangerous silence ensues: and I hear the city screaming.
A tale of taboo and regional style, from which some readers may turn away in confusion or distaste.
There isn’t all that much to do in The Pines on the best of days, but there is
nothing
to do when it rains. I keep Monopoly and Risk on hand just in case; but one must be prudent. Once, one of my best friends landed that summer’s Hottest Man on the Island and brought him to my house thinking we were all at the beach. Instead, the two of them found six of us huddled avidly around the Monopoly board. Worse yet, quaint show albums were tooting away on the stereo—the kind with Helen Gallagher or George S. Irving. Worst of all, someone had just landed on Boardwalk, and Teddy Anders, who maintained a hotel on the property, announced that this was the most exciting thing that had happened to him all summer.
Well, the Hottest Man on the Island took a penetrating look at this pathetically maidenly tableau, dropped a withering glance upon my friend, and strode off. As the others gaped in bewilderment, my friend slowly told me, “I will never … never … never … forgive you for this.” And he never did.
Mind you, I don’t defend this point of view. One cannot be having sex or hunting for it every minute, even in a place as rampantly erotic as The Pines. Still, perhaps a day-long Monopoly game is too comradely an activity for the ruthless beach, too fraternal. Do you want to be known for a hot house or for clubby chastity?
At any rate, you can’t be hot when it rains, and I recall one afternoon eight years ago when sheets of water were ripping down as if the next Flood were upon us: Dennis Savage, his lover Little Kiwi, Little Kiwi’s fiasco of a dog Bauhaus, Carlo, Ron, and I. All possibilities in reading, eating, and laundry had been exhausted. There was nothing left to do but lie around grumping, one activity Dennis Savage really excels at. Conversation lagged, till he suggested we trade Shameful Anecdotes. “We could start,” he said, “with The Worst Thing I Ever Did to My Lover.”