City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White
Authors: Edmund White
Ads: Link
and, in another corner, a drawing board covered with pastels of “famous” lesbians. She liked lace curtains worthy of a concierge from the Pas-de-Calais and a strength-sapping sofa heavy with bolsters and pillows.
I was surely a strange, edgy, difficult friend—excessively polite and docile, patient and indifferent, but then rebellious, on the lam, a master of the disappearing act. Chain-smoking and filling the air with my noxious clouds. Some of my primitive fears of women, based on my dread of my stifling mother, attached to Marilyn—except she was herself elusive, quick to cancel appointments, horrified by the idea of marriage. She made a cult of friendship but scorned the family, though she was wonderfully kind to her ownmother and siblings. More than two evenings out in a row spent even in our unintimidating, undemanding society would give her a splitting headache. She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light. Marilyn certainly was as full of contradictions as I was—she was a sensualist who loved baths and delicious little meals, but at the same time she was virtually a Stalinist in her politics, as far as I could tell, though at other moments she alternated between a superrational, unforgiving Aristotelianism she’d acquired during years of study at the University of Chicago and a highly Romantic love of lush, swooning verismo operas.
I’ve forgotten to say how funny and affectionate she always was, how much warmth she radiated, what good humor she brought to every occasion, how much interest she lavished on her friends, how forgiving and tolerant she could be. She loved turning her back courtyard into a little vernal paradise in the summer, where she’d serve cold Riesling and warm potato salad.
In the summer we’d fill the tub with ice and thirty bottles of white wine (a bottle per guest) and run about with old friends from the Midwest and a few new ones from the East Coast, men and women, and it seemed those exciting days of youth and independence and exaltation would never end.
Chapter 5
In 1964 Stan and I moved to West Seventy-first Street, to a spacious apartment that cost $175 a month. We each had a bedroom and we shared a living room and a dining room. We furnished it at Goodwill with big, heavy oak pieces that were ugly but that looked solid and respectable to us. The neighborhood itself was run-down. Puerto Ricans would throw beer bottles from the window. On the corner was a big Cuban restaurant that reeked of black beans and slabs of roast pork. Next door to us was a bodega where black-magic candles were sold, poured into glass jars and smelling of bubble gum; they were for everything from placing a curse on an enemy to winning back an errant husband. Our neighborhood was so dangerous at the time that it was called Needle Park. A Life reporter wrote a nonfiction book, The Panic in Needle Park , that was adapted into a violent movie about the heroin trade, from a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. One winter night, walking home from Marilyn’s at two in the morning, swaying a bit drunkenly, I saw a man in an overcoat and a fedora brandish a gun and shoot another man under the marquee of a shabby hotel. A woman in high heels threw herself on the body and shouted, “ ¡Ay, Dios! ” It seemed like a bad sequence in a film noir, something that would need to be reshot. I hurried home, undressed, went to bed, and only the next morning over breakfast did it occur to me to tellStan what I’d witnessed. I decided not to report it—no one had much of a sense of civic responsibility in that wild city back then, least of all me.
We knew which blocks were safe and which were dangerous—it really went according to a block-by-block pattern. We’d say to out-of-town relatives and friends, “Oh, don’t go down Eighty-fifth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, though Eighty-sixth is perfectly safe.” Our apartment was robbed once, despite all the gates on the windows and the
I was surely a strange, edgy, difficult friend—excessively polite and docile, patient and indifferent, but then rebellious, on the lam, a master of the disappearing act. Chain-smoking and filling the air with my noxious clouds. Some of my primitive fears of women, based on my dread of my stifling mother, attached to Marilyn—except she was herself elusive, quick to cancel appointments, horrified by the idea of marriage. She made a cult of friendship but scorned the family, though she was wonderfully kind to her ownmother and siblings. More than two evenings out in a row spent even in our unintimidating, undemanding society would give her a splitting headache. She loved solitude and needed it as a plant needs light. Marilyn certainly was as full of contradictions as I was—she was a sensualist who loved baths and delicious little meals, but at the same time she was virtually a Stalinist in her politics, as far as I could tell, though at other moments she alternated between a superrational, unforgiving Aristotelianism she’d acquired during years of study at the University of Chicago and a highly Romantic love of lush, swooning verismo operas.
I’ve forgotten to say how funny and affectionate she always was, how much warmth she radiated, what good humor she brought to every occasion, how much interest she lavished on her friends, how forgiving and tolerant she could be. She loved turning her back courtyard into a little vernal paradise in the summer, where she’d serve cold Riesling and warm potato salad.
In the summer we’d fill the tub with ice and thirty bottles of white wine (a bottle per guest) and run about with old friends from the Midwest and a few new ones from the East Coast, men and women, and it seemed those exciting days of youth and independence and exaltation would never end.
Chapter 5
In 1964 Stan and I moved to West Seventy-first Street, to a spacious apartment that cost $175 a month. We each had a bedroom and we shared a living room and a dining room. We furnished it at Goodwill with big, heavy oak pieces that were ugly but that looked solid and respectable to us. The neighborhood itself was run-down. Puerto Ricans would throw beer bottles from the window. On the corner was a big Cuban restaurant that reeked of black beans and slabs of roast pork. Next door to us was a bodega where black-magic candles were sold, poured into glass jars and smelling of bubble gum; they were for everything from placing a curse on an enemy to winning back an errant husband. Our neighborhood was so dangerous at the time that it was called Needle Park. A Life reporter wrote a nonfiction book, The Panic in Needle Park , that was adapted into a violent movie about the heroin trade, from a screenplay by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. One winter night, walking home from Marilyn’s at two in the morning, swaying a bit drunkenly, I saw a man in an overcoat and a fedora brandish a gun and shoot another man under the marquee of a shabby hotel. A woman in high heels threw herself on the body and shouted, “ ¡Ay, Dios! ” It seemed like a bad sequence in a film noir, something that would need to be reshot. I hurried home, undressed, went to bed, and only the next morning over breakfast did it occur to me to tellStan what I’d witnessed. I decided not to report it—no one had much of a sense of civic responsibility in that wild city back then, least of all me.
We knew which blocks were safe and which were dangerous—it really went according to a block-by-block pattern. We’d say to out-of-town relatives and friends, “Oh, don’t go down Eighty-fifth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, though Eighty-sixth is perfectly safe.” Our apartment was robbed once, despite all the gates on the windows and the
Similar Books
