In the Shadow of the American Dream (8 page)

He turned his head as I passed. I turned and looked at him for a moment trying to remember and place him ten years later, aging and all. I walked on to the corner and hung out there for a while and soon he came up. I explained to him where I felt I knew him. He had indeed lived on 58th Street ten years ago, had friends who had apartments on 58th Street, but he didn't remember me. We exchanged phone numbers and I split, planning to get photos from Dirk and see Brian. As I left and headed toward Dirk's house I realized how much I must have changed visually for this guy not to remember me. When I met him his features were of a thirty-year-old, I guess, and pretty much formed (so I could recognize him years later). Yet I had changed considerably. In my wallet I had a photo from a Times Square photo machine and had I pulled that one out he probably would have had a start.

Later on Friday night I met a fella in Julius's bar. I saw him immediately after getting a coffee and walking near the front door of the place. His name was Phillip and he'd just returned from a trip out to Montana where he'd camped out and hiked through national parks of the nearby states. I liked him at once real friendly fella, smiling a lot, and I got an incredibly positive sense from him. He told me how he had broken up with a lover he had for eight years and took that Montana, etc. trip to get some deep thinking done, to get further in touch with himself. I thought about it and was touched and amazed at the thought of eight years with a fella. He seemed like someone one would want to spend one's life with on first meeting—I get carried away, huge tumble rush of glad-in-the-boots-up-to-the-eyes feeling, like meeting him was this big relief that came winging over my shoulders into my chest removing all the hectic thinking and musing and pondering of the last month. I told him a bit of my travels out in Montana, descriptions we offered to each other were immediately recognized and there was this toss-of-the-head mobile-shoulder-yah-yah of agreement about the whole sense of western country space beauty stillness and the giant image of rolling earth before one's eyes. He asked me if I cared to go back to his place and smoke—Oh man did I! He explained to me his work, how he never had been inclined toward working in the arts, trying expressions through a great deal of school and then he got into contact with clay and that's where it started—he's been successful in his growth in the medium—getting accepted in some ceramics organizations or groups that were difficult to get into. I felt glad for him 'cause, as he explained, getting accepted validated the works that he had done. I understand what that is, it's like my manuscript being held at City Lights—if they or someone else publishes it it'll be like a big push in the direction of my work, support from those you respect.

He showed me these beautiful pieces, like a show-and-tell, he said, the progression of his work over the last four or eight years. All throughout his house he had beautiful objects: tree growths/limbs/rocks/a huge wasp nest—his lover had gotten it for him. He became animated and excited over showing me the stuff and I was swept back, taken full force by his excitement, his great eyes so full of energy from form and design and the sense of touch. His ceramics were beautiful, a great deal of sensitivity in them. The thing that really hit me was his interest in nature—it brought me back fully into a huge cargo of senses and memory, the whole denial of the love for nature that had taken place from so much city living, that whole period where I ceased drawing and my desire for writing precluded just about every other sense, my many animal books down in some faraway basement uptown.

We made love and it was exhilarating, the passion something I had not felt to that degree in some time, mostly because of the concern over all events transpiring in last two or three months. He talked about
Findhorn Gardening
—have to read the book—it made him aware of the presence within a forest of all these living things. Sort of like an entity of its own. I didn't want to leave but had told Brian I would see him later. I left around 2
A.M.
and went home. I've been kind of in a dreaming daze from all the thoughts produced in that meeting with him and have not stopped thinking about him since Friday night. We might get together Monday night. I hope so as I'd like to see him again before I go. We made plans to correspond with each other while I'm in Paris and Normandy. I feel kinda confused 'cause my emotions have run away into an area of little control where I hardly know the fella but feel such a great deal for him. He's a teacher in a school that has a semiexperimental setup, a setup that every school should have. His contact with the kids is on the same level both ways: he's in touch with a great deal of their ideas and needs and desires, and he teaches arts and sciences, tries to merge the two, which by the looks of his work he succeeds greatly, by furthering the textures of nature in the surface of clay, always striving to bring it further along.

August 29, 1978

We drove onto the upward ramp and into the second-story platform of the garage, hunted awhile for a space, found it and parked. We walked down the ramp, he with his hat on, the fine drizzle sparking the night, and my feet were fluid. I could walk for years just thinking about possibilities and the endless listening which somehow became so important to me, like I wished I knew him for all of his thirty years just so that I could say or respond to what he was talking about in the way that would most put his mind/heart at ease. I could see how much he was troubled by it all, the story of homosexual lifestyles and drawbacks that could very well be spoken similarly by Dennis, Harold, myself, and Brian, and so many other people I have known. What knocks me away is that there are all these men who feel similarly but they never find each other or partners in each other. Here I feel like I could spend a great deal of the time with Phillip but am struck by the seeming senselessness of this thought because I met him now for the second time and I'm channeling all this emotion and thought to him—how right is all this? how possible for it all to work out someday in this lifetime for all of us? But it isn't senseless in that I do see the heart of men by and through their eyes, that space of liquid in the aperture of the head that reveals energy and life and sensitivity, all the positive energy rushing from him in the things he desires for his own mind (the fool who left him after eight years).

I gave him a long massage and from his head to his toes, kneaded and rubbed to work the tension out—what feelings I try to move through the tips of my fingers. We went to bed without having sex and I really didn't care, sleeping next to his warm body was enough and when I woke the seven times during the night startled awake from high-strung senses from realizing I would not see him again after tonight I wanted the night to move so much slower wanted the breath to leave me drifting when dawn finally came through the windows drifting in some nameless sleep that none of us know until that point where we become speechless and unconcerned with the journey of our bodies and environments. A separation from the senses so as not to feel the loss. When I woke in the morning the sun was filling the courtyard and windows painting a fine white line across the sills, and I had a great need for a cigarette, went into the kitchen and leaned against one of the counters among the various smooth/rough instruments, bowls, seated objects fashioned from clay, and there were rusks of binded husks from wheat and big seedy bulbs of dead sunflowers and a cuckoo clock and a pastel of a forest and in among all that I recalled with a slow drawing on the cigarette the night before and the emotions of the two of us towards sleep the continual brush of lips and hands and the warmth of skin, the surfaces of our two bodies instilling so much love and confusion in this weary and runaround heart of mine, and then I went back to bed and climbed in under the covers and put my arm across his smooth chest and slowly drew it back and forth and slowly he responded and I slipped further beneath the covers touching his chest with the tip of my tongue and running it around his breasts and down his smooth sides and across his belly into his legs and took him into my mouth and he reached down taking hold of me and there followed a slow sex that turned frantic as he crossed the threshold of sleep and we both came simultaneously and I wearily dropped down into the blankets my heart like some red horse galloping in the nervous arena of my chest and lay there looking around the room—on one wall the tied stalks of Montana wheat from where he drove and drove and drove through endless roads past endless fields of rich green wheat in the summer heat and down there somewhere in that western country he stopped his Volkswagen and grabbed a handful because it startled and amazed him into some kind of dream state.

After a while he got up and made coffee and toast with some Norwegian goat cheese and let Willow his pet rabbit out for a walk and I remembered how he named his Volkswagen Huck and how with the letter to him explaining as much of my senses from our contact and the piece of driftwood in a box waiting to be brought to his doorstep tomorrow morning I have this sad heart because of what might well have been, no longer possible, and now what might possibly be affected by this letter, this gift but regardless, I give it up to him with a true feeling in my heart, a real sense expressed and I don't think negativity could possibly come from up-front emotions regardless of the range and the disquieting fact that we hardly know one another at all.

September 1, 1978

Harriet Tubman Park

Okay, so I'm in front of the Chinese Laundromat where my clothes are undergoing tumble, morning with clear light, sifting through last night's dead mysteries, a coolness to the hot breeze within my cheeks and arms. Chance has taken another turn making me undecided about whether I subscribe to chance. Ha, don't have a choice it seems but were it to turn in the directions it does at these times I may well get over all formal mental expectations for the cranking whirl of this great planet and throw myself back into the heaping whirlwind of mobile shift philosophies—no denigrating stud-shoe dance in particular, but let it be as it be—don't struggle.

Phillip called the store yesterday around one o'clock, my stomach was like a clutch stuck in shifts. We made plans to get together for lunch down in the West Village around Sheridan Square. I was down there around two, he showed up and we went over to Bleecker and West 4th bar-restaurant and sat outside in the cool wind—me with a mushy bowl of chili, just 'cause it's cheapest on the menu, and two coffees. He talked back and forth with me but I was in back of my mind waiting for a word about my letter and suddenly he leans forward and says the letter was beautiful—he'll be glad to be caretaker for shelf figure piece I gave him. I'm startled, all relief coming out the back of my head mixing with West 4th Street wind, so much relief, so worried was I that he'd be frightened by my letter. I couldn't even remember what exactly I'd written, I mean if tone was frantic-adolescent, but straight from the heart. I could hardly eat. He seemed slightly uncomfortable and we got into such heavy subjects—parents, alcoholism and parents, Al-Anon (its good points), therapy, etc. When we left we walked down to Houston Street and he outlined children's book he was writing and I asked if I might have a crack at illustrations. He said he'd send pages to Paris for me.

If anything is difficult to do it's writing about someone you care for a great deal while all emotions and projected dislikes, etc. take their places in the shifting balancing act for more clear perspective. I see that all I've written this morning awakens different strong senses in eye and heart and am not sure where my sense of self is drifting.

So we say good-bye and he tells me: I won't wish you a good trip yet 'cause I'll probably see you over the weekend, if not I will speak to you (he canceled his trip to Montauk). So I return to work, arms and legs tense, feeling relieved but unhappy that I was in such a state of mind as to not be able to relax and enjoy fully the get-together. The call was so sudden and the anxieties of whether I'd done silliness again in my life—big risk of the heart. Jimmy and the people at the store bought five bottles of champagne and a big cake and six joints and everybody got blasted and started running around and cracking jokes and monologue routines. Jimmy said, Nobody wants any more cake? and slammed his face into the cake and walked around the store all globby, cake cream filled in the pockets of his eyes, and then Ricky pummeled his own face into the cake and there were a lot of hoots and hollers and racing around transfixed customers and the air drifting down from the office onto the floor reeked of champagne that foamed all over the tables and cake smeared on the floors and smoke of grass wafting in and out making it all smell like weird vinegar fifty years old open on shelf in some hot kitchen. I got real weary and talked with everyone in good-bye tones and finally at 9:45 when store was closed down stood outside Madison Square Garden and the whole thing hit me hard—I was leaving. I felt uncertain about Phillip, how he felt, and so I went down to West Village and ate a sandwich at Sandolino's. The waitress there—the one who has a new wave sense and French accent whom I've gotten to like a lot for all her darned words and perceptions, like the time Brian and I walked in there buzzing from two massive peyote milk shakes and I went to use the bathroom and she went up to Brian and hit his shoulder with the back of her hand and said, Psst, whatcha guys on? She's real nice to me and I refrain from saying, Hey I'm leaving the country possibly for good and I'm gonna miss ya. After the sandwich I check paperback corner for Krishnamurti books, they're out of stock on 'em. As I'm leaving the store I think of how it is that in working on making contact with something I may run into them or someone like that, but in the lamplit street rush of outta-towners here for Labor Day weekend I don't see him, I rush past the darkness of Sheridan Square Park and down a couple of streets to Julius's for coffee, maybe for sexual contact. I'm feeling a lot of bumming in my head. I order coffee at the busy counter and looking over I see Phillip sitting there. I cover my face in mock embarrassment but he looks right past me three times. Finally he sees me and we get over to the bar and talk. He says he was gonna go either (1) to a movie, (2) to the Al-Anon meeting, (3) to the baths tonight. He chose the meeting and we talk for a while. I finally can't take it and tell him I was feeling funny about the letter, how it might've been taken. He says, Hey, look, I'm telling ya I thought the letter was beautiful. I'm gonna keep it 'cause of that. I understood what you were saying, how our meeting woke up all these things in you. Ya can't go back into the past and try to figure out my thoughts or anybody's thoughts, like did he take it this way or that way 'cause it doesn't matter, it doesn't make a difference how someone perceives something like that. You wrote it and said what ya had to say and what I take it as isn't your responsibility. If I take it wrong or other than you intended then that's my problem if it's a negative reaction that results. It's just something that you can't do anything about. That's the way it goes and you shouldn't worry about it. If it's disappointing then still you've done what you thought was right and that's all you can do. When I first read the letter I went, Uh oh … Oh no … and then I said, Lemme read this and take it just as it is and not add anything more, not read my own ideas into it. And I realized that it was beautiful—it came from this core within you, straight from the core, and that's really good—