City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s by Edmund White Page B
Authors: Edmund White
Ads: Link
us to think of him as a great lady, as a great Hollywood star. Suddenly Stan was completely turned off. Mine was less imaginative, a stolid macho named Angel who didn’t have the wit to want to be a woman. Though less handsome than Pepito, he turned out to be better value.
New York in the summer was itself tropical with people sitting on their stoops and drinking beer from the bottle and listening to the salsa station on the boom box. Men strode around in sleeveless, collarless T-shirts, the kind called wifebeaters. They sat side by side on stoops and talked without looking at each other. They sometimes listened to deafening Spanish-language broadcasts of the baseball games.
After Pepito returned to San Juan, Stan took up with a sexy New York Puerto Rican named Jimmy, who was a student at New York University and read everything and knew everything about the history of cinema but worked hard to maintain his Latin identity. He was sweet but macho. He and a friend practiced Latin dances every afternoon. I’d always envied those twirls and syncopated steps on the dance floor, the sudden dips and unfurlings and unexpected recouplings—and stupidly assumed they came “naturally,” as if a genetic code inscribed in Puerto Rican infants facilitated salsa. Now I saw that they worked it out, segment by segment, over long hours of careful rehearsal, punctuated by a sudden cry of insight or a groan of confusion as they got tangled up and bumped into each other. Stan and I were besotted with thesetan-skinned, uncircumcised young dancers with their “Aztec” faces and slim, rotating hips inside pegged trousers and thin black lizard-skin belts, their rapid talk that derailed quickly from English into Spanish, these boys who lived on “Christians and Moors” (rice and black beans) and wore crucifixes or white enamel medals dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen dangling from a thin gold chain. Their combination of sweetness in bed (Angel would kiss my closed eyelids while fucking me) with their street-smart switchblade reflexes excited the Midwestern nerds in us. Stan and I had both grown up watching westerns in which the only men we ever saw in loincloths were Indians (in reality, Italian-Americans). Now we had our own Cheyennes between our legs, their cold religious medals grazing our mouths; or we could overhear them in the next room endlessly rehearsing tonight’s salsa as they lost count, made a false step, got caught up in an elaborate body pretzel, and broke down in a sudden gust of laughter.
Chapter 6
My shrink, Frances Alexander, convinced me that I’d never get “better”—go straight—unless I moved away from Stan. I took the plunge and got an apartment of my own on West Thirteenth Street just off Eighth Avenue. As I left, Stan looked stunned and sat around listening to a 45 called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” I loved him so much but back then no one could defend a homosexual relationship; it was by definition “sick,” spiritually impoverishing, infantile, doomed to repeat itself in a horrid circle of compulsiveness. To the degree that someone was “intellectual” like me, one was au courant with Freudian theories and knew how to torment oneself with extra zeal. At that time I read a book about the Salem witch trials in which the author pointed out that it was precisely the Puritan “intellectuals” who believed in witchcraft. They had the subtlety and instruction needed to detect the presence of the devil in the loony actions of eccentric old ladies and the hysteria of teenage girls. I resented my shrink for pushing me in this direction. Yes, I agreed that homosexuality was second best. But what if I never found a woman as kind and funny and loving as Stan?
I’d never lived alone before. When I’d come home from work to my new solitary apartment, my heart would start to beat harder as I approached the door. I bought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began to prepare elaborate meals,
New York in the summer was itself tropical with people sitting on their stoops and drinking beer from the bottle and listening to the salsa station on the boom box. Men strode around in sleeveless, collarless T-shirts, the kind called wifebeaters. They sat side by side on stoops and talked without looking at each other. They sometimes listened to deafening Spanish-language broadcasts of the baseball games.
After Pepito returned to San Juan, Stan took up with a sexy New York Puerto Rican named Jimmy, who was a student at New York University and read everything and knew everything about the history of cinema but worked hard to maintain his Latin identity. He was sweet but macho. He and a friend practiced Latin dances every afternoon. I’d always envied those twirls and syncopated steps on the dance floor, the sudden dips and unfurlings and unexpected recouplings—and stupidly assumed they came “naturally,” as if a genetic code inscribed in Puerto Rican infants facilitated salsa. Now I saw that they worked it out, segment by segment, over long hours of careful rehearsal, punctuated by a sudden cry of insight or a groan of confusion as they got tangled up and bumped into each other. Stan and I were besotted with thesetan-skinned, uncircumcised young dancers with their “Aztec” faces and slim, rotating hips inside pegged trousers and thin black lizard-skin belts, their rapid talk that derailed quickly from English into Spanish, these boys who lived on “Christians and Moors” (rice and black beans) and wore crucifixes or white enamel medals dedicated to the Virgen del Carmen dangling from a thin gold chain. Their combination of sweetness in bed (Angel would kiss my closed eyelids while fucking me) with their street-smart switchblade reflexes excited the Midwestern nerds in us. Stan and I had both grown up watching westerns in which the only men we ever saw in loincloths were Indians (in reality, Italian-Americans). Now we had our own Cheyennes between our legs, their cold religious medals grazing our mouths; or we could overhear them in the next room endlessly rehearsing tonight’s salsa as they lost count, made a false step, got caught up in an elaborate body pretzel, and broke down in a sudden gust of laughter.
Chapter 6
My shrink, Frances Alexander, convinced me that I’d never get “better”—go straight—unless I moved away from Stan. I took the plunge and got an apartment of my own on West Thirteenth Street just off Eighth Avenue. As I left, Stan looked stunned and sat around listening to a 45 called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” I loved him so much but back then no one could defend a homosexual relationship; it was by definition “sick,” spiritually impoverishing, infantile, doomed to repeat itself in a horrid circle of compulsiveness. To the degree that someone was “intellectual” like me, one was au courant with Freudian theories and knew how to torment oneself with extra zeal. At that time I read a book about the Salem witch trials in which the author pointed out that it was precisely the Puritan “intellectuals” who believed in witchcraft. They had the subtlety and instruction needed to detect the presence of the devil in the loony actions of eccentric old ladies and the hysteria of teenage girls. I resented my shrink for pushing me in this direction. Yes, I agreed that homosexuality was second best. But what if I never found a woman as kind and funny and loving as Stan?
I’d never lived alone before. When I’d come home from work to my new solitary apartment, my heart would start to beat harder as I approached the door. I bought Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and began to prepare elaborate meals,
Similar Books
