My [Brief] New York Life

A New York and St. Louis story of the 1970s

Tonsillitis may have saved my life.  Because it gave me an ego-saving excuse for running away from New York, back to the provinces, at a pivotal time just before AIDS.  But more about that later.

I started my life in New York staying with the Vanderbilts.  Well, not so much WITH the Vanderbilts, as AT the Vanderbilt – the Vanderbilt Y.M.C.A. If I hadn’t been such a New York gay novice, I’d have picked the West Side Y instead. That’s where the real gay action was. I learned that later. But the Vanderbilt had the sound of OLD NEW YORK grandeur about it (only the sound, as it turned out, none of the grandeur), so I picked it as my entrée to the CITY.

It was 1973, I was 25 and gay and just returned from a couple of months in Paris and London – not the indefinite starving-writer sojourn I’d been planning for the last half-dozen years – and to tell the truth, more like six weeks - but long enough that, once in a while, when pertinent, I could drop in conversation, “I’ve just been in Paris, writing.” 

I looked good, if I do say so myself, in the midst of that charmed time between the fats, when baby fat had fully burned away, and before nascent middle-age spread.  Back then, years before the Village People and Macho Man, “buff” had to do more with floors than bodies, so even middling-toned muscles like mine could make out OK, as long as they were young.  I was young. I was going to make out marvelously.  I was going to set New York on FIRE!

When my Paris adventure didn’t pan out, I went back home – to West Texas – to regroup, to consider next steps, to find myself. Another venture that didn’t turn out quite as I’d hoped. What I found, instead of myself, was crabs – brought back with me, picked up in Paris  (how ever could that have happened to a nice boy like me?!), first discovered, to great shock and dismay, in Canterbury: “The gentleman says he has crab lice,” the crab-apple cheeked young chemist’s assistant yelled megaphone loud in her pert English accent (which made my affliction sound infinitely more charming, I’m sure) to her older, more experienced in such disgusting things, colleague. Discovered in Canterbury, but clearly not eradicated there, English pharmaceuticals being no match for French parasites, apparently.

What do you do when you discover that you’ve brought crabs into your parents’ house? Say nothing, apply A-200, wash the sheets, pray for a miracle, flee to New York. At least that’s what I did. In retrospect I realize that may not have been the best, certainly not the most courageous, stratagem, but so often, in the heat of crisis, we make decisions that are not our best. I never heard if there were repercussions back home, but it’s not the sort of thing that would have been mentioned on Christmas or Thanksgiving visits, not in our family. Still, I’ve sometimes imagined scenes between my parents, if my unwanted gift kept on giving there.

But not all was lost, even though my Paris plans had foundered, and despite the crabs. If I wasn’t going to make it in Paris (not this time, anyway), the next best thing would be making it in New York, no matter how or why I got there.

And so there I was at the Vanderbilt, itching (a pun too much?) to dive into my new, sure to be fabulous, gay life in the City. I worked the “young” card adroitly, though not consciously – I was still too naïve for that – and charmed my way into the night desk attendant job at the Vanderbilt. Perhaps the manager saw his young, New York newbie self in me. Or perhaps no one else proved clueless enough to take the job – no one with plans of launching a wild gay City life, that is.

One might have thought the Y night-desk job would be a gay paradise, sex all night long. One would be wrong.  Sex on the premises was strictly forbidden, though I suspect that some may not have followed the rules, since every brick and bed sheet in the place seemed sex permeated. But as an employee, whose free room and pittance of pay depended on at least a minimal level of following the rules, I found myself tied to the desk through all the prime hours of debauchery five nights a week, including weekends.

Even so, there were the daylight hours, and even in the daylight, New York had much to offer, much of what I was looking for. And I was eager to take it in. I wrote my friend, Claudia: “It seems that I've finally made it – to the BIG CITY that is. I arrived last Saturday and I have a job already. After all these years, here I am. At last I'll have my fling in New York.”

I was just beginning to make my mark – a faint pencil mark, but still a mark. I’d found my favored watering hole, Uncle Charlie’s South. Like Doris Day in That Touch of Mink, I’d learned the joys of automat eating at Horn & Hardart. I’d made “friends,” some even willing to help me “network” at brunches and parties. I’d applied for a job at Parke-Bernett Galleries, which I didn’t get, of course, but points for trying. After hardly a month, the City was embracing me. I was on my way in New York.

But then it crashed. I woke one morning in my included room at the Vanderbilt, room 1010, with tonsils swollen up like red, raw tennis balls, and a fever that didn’t even need a thermometer for proof. I could hardly drag my no-longer-buff-feeling body down the hall to the communal bathroom. I had no one I could call for help, not even my networking friends. I felt low. So low.

It was the first time I’d been sick, alone, far from anything resembling “home,” whether that be my parents’ house in Texas, my college dorm, a friend’s apartment in St. Louis. Even though technically an adult, nothing in an only-child childhood, or a “he’s different”  adolescence had prepared me for the shock of such aloneness. Those made of sterner stuff, or those with no alternative, might have found the grit to soldier through. But I was not made of stern stuff; I found no grit; I had an alternative: I could decamp. It had quickly come to be my pattern.

I wrote Claudia again, philosophical even in sickness:

“It's not the city that's overwhelming. That's bearable. The ability to live here can be acquired.  I'm frightened to see, as I did when I boarded the bus in St. Louis, that all I've learned in all these years is how to leave. I can cut ties but I can't keep them.  It's the case with people as well as places. I wonder where it's going to stop, if it's going to. I have the unpleasant feeling that for some of us (meaning me) life is going to be a perpetual effort to get our feet on the ground and a perpetual uncertainty as to just where the ground is.”

As soon as I could get out of bed, I packed my bag. I cashed my emergency cashier’s check, thanks to a softhearted banker (iagine that!) who took pity on me – yes,  even in New York: he had a daughter who’d just gone away to college, who might need a banker’s pity herself someday. I bought a one-way ticket on the Greyhound back to St. Louis, and that friend’s apartment, and so, ignominiously ended my life as a New Yorker. I went back many times over the next few years, always thinking I’d return for good. I never did.

And then AIDS hit, with New York as epicenter. Millions have died of AIDS elsewhere, of course, but I wonder what my chances would have been – young, gay, on the town in the Big Apple through the 70s – if tonsillitis hadn’t struck when it did. Not the best odds, I suspect. One more month of rosy health and I’d probably have stayed. Instead, I retreated to St. Louis; I met a partner (now my husband) just as AIDS was spreading there; we settled into our, by now, long life together. And so that’s why I say that tonsillitis, in the nick of time, may have saved my  life.

Still, I sometimes drop in conversation, when it’s pertinent: “You know, I lived in New York – for a while.”