The Lonely City (14 page)

I didn’t want that any more, if in fact I ever had. I didn’t know what I did want, but maybe what I needed was an expansion of erotic space, an extension of my sense of what might be possible or acceptable. This is what reading about the piers was like: it was like those dreams when you push on the wall of a familiar room in a familiar house, and it gives way, opening on to a garden or a pool you never knew was there. I always woke from those dreams flushed with happiness, and it was the same when I read about the piers, as if each time I thought about them I relinquished a little more of the shame that almost every sexual body bears.

One of the things I was reading alongside Wojnarowicz was
The Motion of Light in Water,
a radically candid memoir about living in the Lower East Side in the 1960s by the science fiction writer and social critic Samuel Delany. In it, he described his own nights on the waterfront, ‘a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it – now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality – and failed because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of such a situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred all but strangers is hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community.’

In a later book,
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,
he returns to this thought about community in greater detail.
Times Square
is a memoir-cum-polemic, in which
come
is the operative word. It chronicles Delany’s experiences in the Square, and particularly in the porn cinemas of 42nd Street, like the one that appears with its declarative
X
in the background of the Rimbaud photo. Delany went to these cinemas often daily over a period of thirty years to have sex with multiple strangers, some of whom became deeply familiar to him, though their relationships rarely transcended the location.

Delany was writing in the late 1990s, after the gentrification – the literal Disneyfication, in fact, considering the identity of one of the major investors – of Times Square; which is to say that he was writing in praise and grief at what had already been destroyed. In his thoughtful as well as practised estimation, what
had been lost was not just a place to get your rocks off, but also a zone of contact, and particularly of cross-class and cross-racial contact
-
a site that facilitated intimacy, albeit transient, between a diverse multitude of citizens, some wealthy and some poor, some homeless, some mentally unsettled, but all soothed by the democratic balm of sex.

His take wasn’t so much nostalgic as utopian: a vision of a lubricated city of exchange, in which brief, convivial encounters kept satiated those otherwise nagging and sometimes agonising needs for touch, company, playfulness, eroticism, physical relief. Furthermore, these interactions in stalls and balconies and orchestra pits created as a by-product the kind of weak ties that sociologists believe glue metropolises together, though admittedly they tend to be thinking of repeat encounters with shopkeepers and subway clerks, rather than amiable strangers who might give you a hand job once every three years.

As to whether these places did reduce loneliness, the city itself provided proof of that. Writing of the systemic closures that came in the 1990s, Delany regretfully observed: ‘What has happened to Times Square has already made my life, personally, somewhat more lonely and isolated. I have talked with a dozen men whose sexual outlet, like many of mine, were centered on that neighborhood. It is the same for them. We need contact.’

We do. But there was a glitch in this utopia, at least as far I was concerned. In the context of the cinemas, the piers, citizens meant men, not women. Once, Delany did bring a female friend with him to the Metropolitan: a small Hispanic woman who worked as an office temp, spending her evenings playing guitar
and singing in nightclubs in the Village. Ana was curious about the scene and so she joined Delany for an afternoon, dressed in boyish clothes, though that didn’t stop a kid muttering
fish
as she walked past, or the manager accusing her of being a prostitute. The visit passed off smoothly enough – plenty of easy-going action on the balcony to watch – and yet this anecdote reads more queasily than any of the more graphic encounters elsewhere recorded. What hangs over it, what looms unsaid, is the threat of what could have happened: the potential violence, the all too plausible act of rape, the peculiar mix of disgust, objectification and desire that the female form engenders, particularly when it appears in sexual contexts.

God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body, or rather everything that attaches to it. Maggie Nelson’s stunning
The Art of Cruelty
had recently been published and there was a paragraph I’d underscored and ringed in pen, struck by how well it explained my attraction to the world of the piers. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘not all “thingness” is created equal, and one has to live enough of one’s life
not
as a thing to know the difference.’ In parenthesis, she added: ‘This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn’t produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men
-
or white men, at any rate
-
don’t have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn’t immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy.’

Sometimes you want to be made meat; I mean to surrender to the body, its hungers, its need for contact, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be served bloody or braised. And
at other times, like Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud, you want to cruise, to pass unnoticed, to take your pick of the city’s sights. This was why I’d been so frantic for a mask at the Halloween parade: because I didn’t want to be the thing that was looked at, that could be rejected or disparaged.

I was always walking that winter, up by the Hudson, poking about in the gentrified remnants of the piers, pushing up past the manicured lawns, with their population of glossy couples pushing strollers. Here and there, I found small relics of the past. A set of old wooden pilings, sticking up through the pewter-coloured water like pins from a cushion. Two fallen stone columns, carved with wings. Skinny trees, growing out of rock and rubble, locked gates, layers of graffiti, a poster that read sadly
COST WAS HERE.

As I wandered, I kept trying to think of an image of a woman that could act as a counterpart to
Rimbaud in New York:
an image of a woman at loose in the city, free-wheeling, to borrow a term from Valerie Solanas (who had her own history with the piers and who was through with the whole business, writing with characteristic bitterness: ‘SCUM gets around . . . they’ve seen the whole show – every bit of it – the fucking scene, the dyke scene – they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier – the peter pier, the pussy pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex’).

I hadn’t at the time encountered the artist Emily Roysdon’s wry photographs of herself re-enacting the Rimbaud images, her face covered by a paper mask of David Wojnarowicz. Instead, I was looking at pictures of Greta Garbo, those tough dreamy
images of her striding around the city in men’s shoes and a man’s trench coat, taking no shit from anyone, out solely for herself. In
Grand Hotel,
Garbo said she wanted to be alone, that famous line, but what the real Miss Garbo desired was to be
left alone
, a very different thing: as in unbothered, unwatched, unharried. What she longed for was privacy, the experience of drifting unobserved. The sunglasses, the newspaper over the face, even the string of aliases – Jane Smith, Gussie Berger, Joan Gustafsson, Harriet Brown – were ways of avoiding detection, inhibiting recognition; masks that liberated her from the burden of fame.

For most of the years of her retirement, which began in 1941 at the age of thirty-six and lasted for almost five whole decades, Garbo lived in an apartment in the Campanile building on East 54th Street, not far from the Silver Factory, though considerably more salubrious. Every day she went on two walks: long meandering strolls that might take her up to the Museum of Modern Art or the Waldorf; walks for which she shod herself in tan or chocolate or cream suede Hush Puppies, which I once came across for sale on an internet auction. Often she went all the way to Washington Square and back, a loop of six miles, stopping to gaze in the windows of bookstores and delis, walking aimlessly, walking not as a means but as an end, an ideal occupation in and of itself.

‘When I stopped working, I preferred other activities, many other activities,’ she once said. ‘I would rather be outside walking than to sit inside a theater and watch a picture moving. Walking is my greatest pleasure.’ And again: ‘Often I just go where the man in front of me is going. I couldn’t survive here if I didn’t
walk. I couldn’t be 24 hours in this apartment. I get out and look at the human beings.’

This being New York, the human beings tended to ignore her, though Andy Warhol did confess in his diary in 1985 to passing her in the street and being unable to resist following for a while, taking sneaky photos as he went. She was wearing dark glasses and a big coat, her signature accoutrements, and she went into a Trader Horn store to talk to the counterwoman about TVs. ‘Just the kind of thing she would do,’ Warhol reported. ‘So I took pictures of her until I thought she would get mad and then I walked downtown.’ He laughs then, adding ruefully: ‘I was alone, too.’

The internet is full of images of her wandering the city. Garbo with an umbrella. Garbo in camel-coloured slacks. Garbo in an overcoat, her hands behind her back. Garbo drifting along Third Avenue, walking calmly between the cabs. In a copy of
Life
from 1955, there’s a full-page photograph of her crossing a street, islanded between four lanes of traffic. She cuts a strangely Cubist figure, her head and body completely encased in an enormous black sealskin coat and hat. Only her feet are visible, two skinny legs in blurry boots. She’s turned disdainfully from the camera, her attention caught by a gauzy explosion of light at the end of the avenue, into which the buildings seem to dissolve. ‘A LONELY FORM’, the caption declares: ‘Garbo crosses First Avenue near her New York home on a recent afternoon.’

It’s an image of refusal, of radical self-possession. But where do these pictures come from? Most were taken by Garbo’s stalker, the paparazzo Ted Leyson, who spent the best part of eleven years,
from 1979 to 1990, lurking outside her apartment building. He’d hide, he once explained in an interview, and she’d come out of her front door and look around. Once she was certain she was alone, she’d relax, and then he could sneak after her, ducking from doorway to doorway, ready to snap her out of solitude.

In some of these images you can tell that she’s spotted him, whipping a tissue to her mouth to spoil the value of his picture.
Candids
, they called them, a word that once meant pure, fair, sincere, free from malice. It was Leyson who bagged the final photograph, the last before she died. He shot it through the window of the car that was taking her to hospital, her long silver hair down around her shoulders, one veined hand covering the lower portion of her face. She’s looking at him through tinted glasses, her expression a queasy combination of fear, scorn and resignation; a gaze that should by rights have cracked the lens.

In two separate interviews, Leyson explained his behaviour as an act of love. ‘That’s how I express myself – in a strange way – express my regard and admiration for Miss Garbo. It’s an overwhelming desire on my part, something I cannot control. It became obsessive,’ he told CBS’s Connie Chung in 1990. To Garbo’s biographer Barry Paris he added in 1992: ‘I admire and love her very much. If I caused her any pain, I’m sorry, but I think I did something for her or for posterity. I spent ten years of my life with her — I’m the other “man who shot Garbo”, after Clarence Bull.’

I don’t want to moralise about desire, be it scopophilia or any other kind. I don’t want to moralise about what pleases people or what they do in their private lives, as long as it doesn’t cause
harm to others. That said, Leyson’s pictures are symptomatic of a kind of gaze that whether given or withheld is dehumanising, a meat-making of a profoundly unliberating kind.

All women are subject to that gaze, subject to having it applied or withheld. I’d been brought up by lesbians, I hadn’t been indoctrinated in anything, but lately I’d begun to feel almost cowed by its power. If I was to itemise my loneliness, to categorise its component parts, I would have to admit that some of it at least was to do with anxieties around appearance, about being found insufficiently desirable, and that lodged more deeply beneath that was the growing acknowledgement that in addition to never being able to quite escape the expectations of gender, I was not at all comfortable in the gender box to which I’d been assigned.

Was it that the box was too small, with its preposterous expectations of what women are, or was it that I didn’t fit?
Fish.
I’d never been comfortable with the demands of femininity, had always felt more like a boy, a gay boy, that I inhabited a gender position somewhere between the binaries of male and female, some impossible other, some impossible both. Trans, I was starting to realise, which isn’t to say I was transitioning from one thing to another, but rather that I inhabited a space in the centre, which didn’t exist, except there I was.

That winter, I kept watching Hitchcock’s
Vertigo,
a film that is all about masks and femininity and sexual desire. If reading about the piers expanded my sense of possibility about sex, then watching
Vertigo
was a way of repeatedly alerting myself to the danger of conventional gender roles. Its subject is objectification and the way it breeds loneliness, amplifying rather than closing
the gap between people, creating a dangerous abyss – the very chasm, in fact, into which James Stewart as police detective Scottie Ferguson finds himself tumbling, knocked off his feet by craving for a woman who even when alive is more enigma or absence than corporeal, sweating presence.