City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White Page A

police lock (a stout metal standard that fitted into a socket on the floor and braced the door against intruders). Everyone we knew had had his or her apartment burgled. We would just shrug and say gallantly, “Oh, well, private property is a crime anyway.” One evening at six o’clock my friend Stephen Orgel and I were robbed at gunpoint on Christopher Street while other people streamed around us. The thief had torn the inner pocket out of his overcoat and was able to point the pistol inconspicuously at us, the gun shielded from view by the bulk of his coat. Not that anyone would have helped us in any event, even if he or she had seen the weapon. The man told us to give him our wallets and to walk to the end of Weehawken Street without looking back; if we called out or looked back, he’d kill us. Once we were out of sight and around the corner, we saw a cop car and told the policeman what had happened; the cop just laughed and shrugged and asked with a weary chuckle, “Wanna file a complaint?” We didn’t.
    When I moved to Rome in 1970, I suggested to an Italian friend that we switch sides of the street to avoid confronting three teenagers coming toward us. “Why?” she asked, astonished. In New York we paid the cabdriver to wait at the curb till we were safely inside past the locked front door. We were always aware of everyone within our immediate vicinity. You never lost yourself in conversation on the street, but had to be alert at all times. We made sure we had at least twenty dollars with us every time we left homeso that a robber wouldn’t shoot us in frustration, but were also careful not to carry more—nor to be too well-dressed. Whenever we went out in the evening, we always left the radio and a light on to discourage thieves. As we approached our apartment building we prepared our key in our pocketed hand so that we wouldn’t fumble at the door a second longer than necessary. We walked in straight lines down the sidewalk and only at the last moment did we veer off toward our door, not wanting to signal our intentions or our vulnerability to a watching mischief-maker. On the subway we didn’t look at other passengers.
    Stan and I discovered Puerto Rico for holidays. So many Puerto Ricans traveled back and forth to San Juan that the plane was virtually a commuter flight. The round-trip cost $140. In San Juan we’d stay at the YMCA in the Old Town and take the Number 10 bus out to luxurious Condado Beach, where we met a beautiful local teenager so proud to be pale he belonged to the Castilian Club, restricted to the descendants of Spanish settlers. The girl who sold ice cream on the beach was so dark that the other local teens called her King Kong. They laughed; she didn’t. The boys we pursued all lived at home but would slow-dance with us in clubs late into the night and smelled of achiote powder. They were romantic and would make love to us in public parks, since we couldn’t sneak them past the vigilant desk clerk into the Y. When we’d get on a bus, an old man would sneeze theatrically. I asked my Puerto Rican friend why he sneezed. “The word for gay is pato , ‘duck,’ and he’s sneezing because one of our feathers got in his nose.”
    The streets were lined with blue cobblestones that had been brought over centuries before in Spanish galleons as ballast. Because it was a hot tropical country, the cooler nights stretched almost to dawn. Even at three a.m. you could always find someone sipping a tall rum drink in a dimly lit courtyard bar behind a lockedgrill while a guitar rambled on to itself. The only Spanish word I knew was corazón , but luckily it featured in nearly every song being wailed out of the jukeboxes.
    We met boys who soon joined us in New York for a vacation of a week or two. Stan’s was called Pepito, and although he’d been manly and “Castilian” back in San Juan, in New York he evidenced a disturbing propensity for drag. He wanted us to call him Pepita and encouraged