First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London WC1X 9HD www.serpentstail.com First published in the USA in 2017 by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House Copyright © 2017 by Jarett Kobek “You Like It Real,” lyrics by Christopher Means. © 1993 Holy Cow. Used by permission of Christopher Means. “Night Clubbing” by Michael Musto, The Village Voice, April 23, 1996. Copyright © 2017, The Village Voice, LLC. Reprinted with permission of The Village Voice. Hand lettering on page 132 by Sarina Rahman 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives plc The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78125 855 2 eISBN 978 1 78283 359 8
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O C T O BE R 1 9 8 6 Baby Learns One or Two Things About Life in New York
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he next morning, Adeline pulled opened her shade, and I looked out toward Mays and the other stores along the south side of the park. The Zeckendorf Towers were rising. I did get my hair cut, by the by. Adeline herself wielded the scissors. For years I’d hidden myself beneath a bowl, only another decent lad from the badlands. Adeline chopped away the blond veil, exposing my bone structure and the general shape of my head. For my clothes, we pilgrimaged around the building, taking alms offered by fashion students. These donations carried me through my first few days, until Monday next when Adeline rushed into the suite carrying several large bags, claiming that she’d gone to the Salvation Army on Fourth Avenue. I picked through the too-clean shirts and pants, noting in silence that someone’d forgotten to take off the price tags from Macy’s and Saks. Six days earlier, I’d been a long-legged hick, a cornpone fresh from the farm. Now I saw myself in the mirror, with new clothes and a juicy haircut. I was dead sexy. And so, so, so clearly gay. I could see it in my lips and my hairline, in the tightness of my facial muscles. God, how did I think I could hide? I was such a homo. We never spoke of the boy Adeline rescued from a squat in Alphabet City, that child who faded into a persona non grata, unmentioned, like a mentally retarded cousin spirited away to a Victorian country asylum. Weeks rolled by. I wandered New York, its manic energy seeping into my bones. The pavement vibrated, resonating with billions of earlier footsteps, centuries of people making their way, the city alive with the irregular heartbeat of its million cars and trucks, of its screaming pedestrians, its vendors and hustlers. The roar and clamor infected my blood, transforming my walk. Gone was my lumbering gait, now I moved sleek footed and fast as a shadow. I went anywhere that Adeline asked. I never said no. Art openings,
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movies, sometimes museums. I remember one film that we saw together, Peggy Sue Got Married at the Quad Cinema, a corny fantasy about a woman attending her t wenty-fifth high school reunion, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. As these things are wont to happen, Peggy Sue is crowned queen of the event. She suffers a panic attack at the moment of her coronation, fainting into darkness. When Peggy Sue regains consciousness, she discovers herself transported into her own past, trapped in high school and doomed to re-create the miseries of her youth. At the film’s beginning, Peggy Sue has achieved a belated adulthood and decides to wrest control of her destiny by divorcing her unfaithful husband. By the end credits, she’s submitted to the humiliations of her adolescence, the knowingness of a grown woman being no defense against the idiotic mistakes of youth. Peggy Sue reverts to her girlish persona, awakens in the present, and stands by her man. Adeline hated the resolution, calling it antifeminist, but for me, the central premise was the true horror, this idea that the universe could take your life away on a whim, could force you back. We also caught The Godfather at the Film Forum on Watts Street and Sixth Ave., an extended leather fantasy by the same director. The plot is pretty simple. Marlon Brando, the original motorcycle stud, rules over the Corleones, a family of closet cases. All of Marlon’s naughty boys are beholden to the eldest, an u ltra-butch and hairy James Caan, who ruts around the family estate like a randy bull. Al Pacino gets a hard‑on for the lifestyle after a silver daddy police captain teaches him to respect the whip. Al goes wild, dishing out damage on every bitch that he can find. It’s much better than Peggy Sue Got Married. Adeline knew everyone, was invited to countless parties. In the East Village, the West Village, Greenwich Village, Alphabet City, SoHo, the Upper East Side, Battery Park, even the outer boroughs. We attended them all. The only parties I didn’t enjoy were those thrown by people from Parsons. Adeline couldn’t help herself. Whenever she saw a gay classmate, she’d push us together. —But Baby, you two have so much in common. Think of the discussions! Yes, we do, I’d think, but I couldn’t, not really, not then. Plus, at a party? Who wants to sleep with someone they met at a party? That’s a pointless question, because Adeline offered its answer. The inevitable narrative justification for our attendance was Adeline’s desire for
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suitable bedmates. In reality, despite her hours of flirting and dancing, she rarely slept with anyone. Which got me thinking about the difference between people’s idea of themselves and the way that they truly are, the vast gulf between human aspirations and the hard quirks of personality that nothing can efface. A lucky few made the cut, earning a chance to initiate themselves in the mysteries of her orifices. Then I’d be out on the couch in the common area. As a survival strategy, I befriended Sally and Jane. Or tried to, anyway. Jane never warmed up to me, although she appreciated my futile attempts to help her clean the suite. Sally and I got along, despite the language barrier, and she often fed me. Neither complained to the head of housing. The longest lasting of Adeline’s young men claimed to be from Santiago, speaking with a heavy accent, but one time I walked with him across the park, to a deli, looking to buy pop. A Mexican kid worked the cash register. He tried talking to the guy from Santiago. En Español. Nothing, not even a response, the guy from Santiago’s eyes glazed over, not recognizing the language. We walked back with Adeline’s boy-toy chattering on about American baseball, about the Mets, with whom he’d fallen in love while watching the World Series, about Bill Buckner being a divine gift from Tío Dios. I thought about saying something to Adeline, but why bother? I knew that he’d be gone in a few weeks. Myself, I was too square, too backwards for rank promiscuity. I assumed it’d come, somehow, probably, but I’d only just admitted aloud my need for other men and their bodies. I envisioned looming decades of erect cocks. My pleasures now were simple. I was Adeline’s awkward friend, the quiet type standing beside her as she denounced Jeff Koons to her classmates. It was enough to keep my eyes on the glorious bodies, listening to their banal dialogues, enjoying some kind of wonderful. I feasted on humanity, on people. Like that man on the eleventh floor. By that glorious being alone may we describe New York City in the Year of Our Lord, 1986. How did he appear? Portly, not fat. Tall, graying goatee. Often seen wearing a ridiculous fedora. I espied him on occasion, typically in the elevator, but never attached him with any undue importance. He appeared as only one of many adults wrestling with the unhappy fact that four floors
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of their apartment building were under occupation by an invading force of drugged and dissolute college students. And then one day, Adeline pointed at the man from the eleventh floor as he walked out from beneath the portico. She whispered: —Do you see that fellow? That man’s name is Thomas M. Disch. You won’t know his work. I gather he’s some sort of science fiction writer. Which is a lot of dreadful stuff, don’t you think? Robots and spaceships. Science fiction. Among his many flaws, my father had spent most of his life as an inveterate aficionado of the genre. Stacks of rotting paperbacks in the barn, yellowing books that he tried to get me to read. I refused. The closest I came was The Fellowship of the Ring. Which broke his heart, really, because the old man was a hardliner who believed in a strict division between genres. One year he left the family behind and drove to MiniCon, a science fiction convention held in Minneapolis. A writer named Spider Robinson was the Guest of Honor. My father loved Robinson’s books, all of which I gather take place in a ribald saloon located somewhere in outer space. When the old man came home, he couldn’t shut up about the experience. The writers he met, the books they signed, the panels he attended. We got sick of hearing about it. Spider Robinson is a fucking idiotic name. I started a lonely vigil, keeping an eye out for Thomas M. Disch, imagining that I’d seen his books in my father’s collection. But that was wishful thinking, I’m sure, misremembering volumes by Gordon R. Dickson with some hope of a connection to my distant, dead parent. I saw Thomas M. Disch three or four times, perhaps five. On one occasion, he was in a heated, screaming argument with another man. I’d seen this other man around the building with greater frequency than Thomas M. Disch. From their voices and postures, I understood they were having the complicated kind of fight that my parents took up on blank nights when the television offered nothing and there was no other outlet for their attentions. A lovers’ quarrel. So that was it, then. A queer science fiction writer living at the top of Union Square. A queer science fiction writer with a steady boyfriend. Now I really wanted to talk to Thomas M. Disch, now it went well beyond my father. I wanted to ambush Thomas M. Disch in the elevator and ask how? how? HOW? HOW? How do you live like this, how did you learn this, how did you become a gay man writing about robots? How do you manage your steady beau?
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But I was too shy. I did the next best thing, walking to 12th and Broadway, to the store I’d seen on my first night in the city. Above its plate-glass windows ran flat red rectangular panels with white block letters: STRAND BOOK STORE. EIGHT MILES OF BOOKS. Embedded within the panels were smaller white signs with black lettering: LIBRARIES BOUGHT and OLD RARE NEW. As I stood across the street, looking at the store, a little man on his dirty bicycle pedaled past, a boombox wedged into his wire handlebar basket. Tinny music rose above the clamor of cars: Yeah, heard about your Polaroids / that’s what I call obscene / tricks with fruit / it’s kind of cute / I bet you keep the pussy clean. I’ve originated a baroque theory that the Strand is in some inexplicable way a microcosm mirroring the city’s greater social experience. In recent years, they’ve remodeled the place, made it as clean as an infant’s nursery, and opened up the second floor. By contrast, Patti Smith starved there in the ’70s. In ’86, it was a studied disaster, fucked up, cluttered and devastated. Entering its single door, there was a bag check at your immediate right, a crap desk surrounded by poorly carved wooden cubbyholes and staffed by the least pleasant person in the building. After passing this m odern-day Cerberus, you’d lose yourself on the overstuffed ground floor, wandering beneath green fluorescent lighting, examining books crammed into wooden and gray metal shelves, arranged in arbitrary distinctions that separated ‘Fiction’ from ‘Literature’. The basement was a labyrinth of h alf- price review hardcovers and all the other weird shit that couldn’t fit on the first floor. A meager science fiction section occupied the far end of the ground floor, between fiction and sociology. Mostly paperback and kept in no sensible order, runoff trash stocked on the off chance some loser might wander in, jonesing for his fix of fruity elves and space opera. Like me. I was that loser. Wedged between Mercedes Lackey and Ted Sturgeon, I found an early-’70s reissue of Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration. Beneath the title and copy advertising THE MOST ACCLAIMED SCIENCE FICTON NOVEL IN YEARS was a painting anchored by the crude torso of a male nude pulled open by its own hands. The price was penciled inside the front cover. $2. I dodged yuppies
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hovering around display tables, and took the book to checkout, a long desk that ran parallel with Broadway. —Next! shouted a ginger-haired girl. I gave her the book, she looked at it and laughed. —This looks terrific, she said. —It’s for a friend, I said. I prefer Hemingway. —Sure you do, she said. It’s two dollars and seventeen cents.
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