I was twenty-three, lost and loose in Greenwich Village, 1969. I kept afloat as a worker at a downscale auction gallery in the East Village. At the end of each day, my $20 salary was paid by Ziggy Zazlow, the jolly auctioneer who peeled twenty bucks from a fat roll of bills he kept stuffed in his right pant leg pocket, which stuck out on his hip like a goiter. Antiques were a big cash business and I never once saw anybody write a check. My days at the gallery began with cleaning up the poop of Splat, the vicious watchdog and feral stray, named for the sound of his farts, and who sank his teeth into my ankle each day as I walked past his food bowl, once sending me to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s.
Most mornings at the gallery I spent faking antiques from cheap Chinese import, softening the glaze with steel wool and motor oil. I also gently distressed furniture by dragging thumbtacks in a leather belt across the wood. On Saturday mornings the auctions were held at the gallery, but occasionally we held lawn auctions. Ziggy would drive us to a house on Long Island, where we tagged all the belongings of the owners who had died, or were moving to Florida, difficult to discern which, probably for them, too. It was sad to be foraging through the closets of other people’s lives, going over their personal possessions, shoes, picture frames, the mattresses they slept on, assigning them a lot number. I wondered if one day my own life would be tagged and priced and sold off to strangers. Or worse, not.
I never felt like I had reached a dead end working at the auction gallery. I figured I was just passing through, treading water, waiting for my number to be called in the bakery of life to get a slice of fresh, hot opportunity. Only you really had to listen hard for that number in New York, a very noisy place with a lot of people clamoring for things. Anyway, I liked working at the shabby gallery with the tin ceiling. I enjoyed the whole carnie of it, the big Saturday auctions held in the main room with its assortment of oddball antique dealers, cloisonné collectors, and netsuke mavens who came every week to bid and buy. I especially enjoyed Ziggy Zazlow, with his silver-tongued spiel about antiques that perhaps were not. At the Saturday auctions, I helped carry “restored” furniture up and down the center aisle so people sitting in the folding chairs could get a closer look. If I helped carry the merchandise out to a van or car when the auction was over, I was happy to get a five-buck tip so I could get take-out shrimp and lobster sauce for dinner.
I wound up living this way after attending New York University film school, which left me expertly prepared to do nothing. Albeit an impractical education, it was a wonderful way to go to college, sitting in a dark theater every day, stoned, watching films that were explicated by a young instructor, Martin Scorsese, with whom I studied, and who had a secret student girlfriend I ended up sleeping with, much to his outrage—I had no idea they were involved. When he found out I had slept with her, he screamed at me as we met face-to-face waiting for an elevator on the eighth floor of the Education Building. I tried to assure him that I was innocent, that it was a one-off, and that the liaison lasted exactly as long as Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog,” which played on her stereo, clocking in at 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Luckily for me, those four and a half minutes didn’t seem to affect Scorsese’s judgment as a teacher, because he still gave me an A on my final exam.
Yes, I slept with women. It was part of my homosexual cure with Dr. Wayne Myers, a talented Freudian psychiatrist whom I’d met at Payne Whitney, the time-worn but respected psychiatric clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I was willingly incarcerated there at age fifteen after a serious attempt at self-annihilation involving windowpanes. I was a gay Jewish kid who lived in a thicket of self-hatred above his grandma’s bra and girdle shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a shtetl twenty-five minutes by train and a chasm of erudition from Manhattan.
Dr. Myers, who was my psychiatrist at Payne Whitney, was touched by my deep despair and offered to help. Homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder, classified in 1952 in the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” However, even Freud didn’t believe that homosexuality was sociopathic, or that it could be cured, or should be cured. In his 1935 “Letter to an American Mother,” he wrote to a woman who asked him to cure her son: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). . . . By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible.”
And so, when I was fifteen years old, we set out to reanimate the blighted germs of my heterosexual tendencies, hoping I would be one of the lucky few to succeed. The principal was that if we figured out why I was homosexual, then I wouldn’t be one anymore. In the unraveling, the thing disappears.
I never believed for a moment that Dr. Myers meant any harm. He was a good man. Why did I continue to cooperate in my cure even though I knew it was hopeless? Didn’t I know, deep inside me, that I was hardwired gay? Of course I did. That reality crossed my mind a million times, but I fought it back, knowing that if I embraced the truth, it would mean spending the rest of my life on the fringes of society. As the years in analysis passed, I worried that I would be unhappy either way, as a closeted gay or as a fake straight. Norman Mailer, a writer whom I admired, wrote that the most respectable thing a homosexual man could do was not act on his desires. So I didn’t. All therapy and no play makes Jack a very unhappy boy.
During this period, Dr. Myers’s office was up on East 74th Street in one of those white bathroom tile, doorman buildings that had sprung up all over the Upper East Side. There was a simple waiting room, a blank white space with a few chairs. His sessions were fifty minutes with ten-minute intervals, so the waiting room was always empty. There was a set of back-to-back soundproofed doors that led to his office. Dr. Myers was in his early forties. He had blond hair, kind blue eyes, and he was a careful listener. He also had the unique talent to have a blank expression that was not judgmental, and yet seem interested and concerned. I didn’t look at him very much, because I was in formal Freudian analysis, and every session I lay on my back on a beautiful leather divan, facing away from him to lessen his presence so I could free-associate without distraction. In front of me was a framed print of the center panel of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights hanging on the wall. This is the panel that depicts a paradise of lust, with lots of cavorting naked figures, including one with a flower planted in its anus.
I had a problem with the foot covering on the couch. Why was it there? Are you supposed to keep your shoes on or take your shoes off? I began to worry about how clean my socks were before I went for a session. Sometimes I took my shoes off, but not if I wore sneakers. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask him if I was supposed to take my shoes off, his response was, “What are your thoughts on having your shoes off?”
There was also an issue with rituals. Dr. Myers asked if I followed any specific pattern before therapy, and indeed, I had a slice of pizza before each session at Original Ray’s Pizza up the block. I don’t know if he asked me this because he smelled the pepperoni, but once I’d admitted to having a slice and a Coke before sessions, he asked me to stop. The sessions were at random times for a reason, he said, and he didn’t want it to be part of a convention I had developed that might inhibit my free associating. I figured, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and if I was going to be analyzed, I better do it right, so I stopped having pizza, most of the time anyway.
Six years and $100,000 into analysis, nothing had changed. At twenty-one, I was a pressure cooker of testosterone. My head ached from priapism, and at times I felt like my eyes were bulging out of my head with bottled-up desire. Finally, Dr. Myers gave me an ultimatum: Either I took the plunge with a woman, or there was no sense continuing therapy. If I changed my mind about becoming straight, he would recommend me to another psychiatrist, whom, I assumed, would help me make the best of it while I wallowed in the swamp of homosexuality.
Cheered on by Dr. Myers, I became a serial affairist. It wasn’t hard for me to meet young women; my sub rosa indifference was a turn-on. Since I approached the whole sexual thing as more of a tourist than a native, I became a connoisseur of the female body in the way a Jew appreciates the Vatican. It was a matter of honor to be a tender, satisfying partner, so I performed all the obligatory sexual acts in appropriate order. Petit déjeuner, déjeuner, and diner. But making love is not the same as lust. Even psychiatry didn’t claim to know how to make people lust. And lust is the glue of love. Oh yes it is. At least at first. Over the years I had a lot of fun with women in bed, and some of it was passionate, but no matter how good it felt physically, it completely lacked spurca libido, Latin for “filthy lust.” It’s filthy lust that makes sex and love ignite. In my unseasoned mind, heterosexuals tried to find love and expected lust to grow. And gay men tried to find lust and hoped love would grow.
It was a depressing and guilty time for me. I was a cad. Many of the women I dated were sincerely in search of a lifetime companion and progenitor; when inevitably I moved on, it was heartache, sometimes for them and always for me. There were women I thought I could love, but not completely. I was hard wired to love a man more, and I was frustrated and furious with myself.
Then, just like in fairy tales, I was strolling down Columbus Avenue one April night when I was smitten with a girl I saw on the street. Smithy (not her real name, but an appropriate pseudonym) was laughing at something one of her friends had said, all of them fresh-faced Columbia grad students, pretty and smart women and handsome men, great white smiles and good hair, at the prime of their lives, none of whom would ever again be as beautiful as they were that spring night. I couldn’t help myself from staring, they were all so striking, and Smithy saw me looking and I thought I could see from that quick glance she saw something in me, too. Or maybe she caught me staring at the guys too long, I don’t know. I thought she was smashing and debonair, and it wasn’t just the way she looked, it was her spirit and spunk, I could tell just from watching her walk down the sidewalk.
Whatever, I followed Smithy and her friends into one of the noisy Upper West Side Yuppie bars on Columbus Avenue. I ordered a vodka martini and stood near her group, stealing glances. After a few minutes of pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping, she nodded to me over her friend’s shoulder and I smiled. I felt such a tug. I went over to her, shy and embarrassed, and introduced myself. I couldn’t think of anything to say, my usual glibness dried up.
“I like a martini with a twist guy,” she said to me, toasting with her gin and tonic.
I liked her. She was a student at Columbia Law, and she intended to become a public defense attorney to defend the poor and downtrodden. She laughed when I said she should become a private attorney and defend the rich and unjustly accused instead. “There aren’t that many rich people unjustly accused,” she said. “It’s usually the poor ones who get caught.”
After we ordered a second round, she asked if I was gay. “I’m not gay,” I said, trying not to look flustered. “Why, do I act like I’m gay?”
She gave me a skeptical look, so I invited her back to my ramshackle apartment to prove my manhood. I was prepared to roll out my well-rehearsed sexual repertoire; instead I went off autopilot and it was intense and dirty. I thought the top of my head would blow off. Out of nowhere, this happened. “Yup, you’re right, you’re not gay,” she said as we were soaping up each other in the shower. She was correct. Those couple of hours I spent in bed with Smithy, I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t anything.
The next time I saw Smithy, she gave me a set of new sheets. “If this is going to continue, we can’t have sex on Dudley Do-Right sheets,” she said. I thought the Dudley Do-Right sheets were ironic, but I guess she didn’t get the joke. She gave me a nickname, too, the first time I had a petit nom d’amour: “Cowhead.”
“Cowhead,” she called me, lying in my bed, tugging on my forelock when I couldn’t remember whether George Eliot was a man or a woman. “You’re too smart to be so dumb.” She said it didn’t matter to her that I moved furniture at an auction gallery to pay the rent, because she didn’t think I’d be working there for long. She didn’t say exactly where she thought I might be instead, but still, wasn’t that encouragement?
So it was that after several months of dating hot and heavy, I was invited to meet her family at their home in Rye, where her father, Peter, who was a managing director at the marketing firm, JK Allen & Co., owned a house with a fireplace in every bedroom. On the way up on the train with Smithy, I fantasized about what would happen at dinner, how I would charm them into approving of me and I would become a part of the family, marry their smart daughter, and live happily ever after, financially cushioned by my rich in-laws.
Smithy’s older brother, Tiernan, was waiting for us at the Rye train station. He was God’s cruel prank, a dybbuk sent to remind me of what was really possible in my life and what was not. Just one look at him, standing at the curb next to the family’s Saab station wagon, dressed in jeans and black ski parka with lift tags from Vail hanging by the zipper, I knew the whole weekend would be hell. Tiernan was Smithy, but as a man. He was twenty-eight, athletic, a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, a junior partner in a corporate law firm with fifty-two names. I was so deranged by my intense attraction that I couldn’t raise my head for fear of gazing at him. To make things exquisitely worse, Smithy’s demon younger brother, Colin, sixteen years old, pimply and mean, was on to my game and shot me sideways glances whenever his older brother entered the room.
Smithy’s dad, “Call-me-Pete,” played squash at the New York Athletic Club, because “tennis is for girls,” he said, sipping McCallan’s neat. He had primate hair on his knuckles, and I could see his overriding, square jaw in the faces of his handsome children. I wondered, if Smithy and I had children, would they have the boiled potato essence of my Eastern European stock, or the chiseled Anglo-Saxon features of the Smiths?
At dinner, Smithy’s mother questioned my “Cowhead” nickname and Smithy told her that I was sometimes “absolutely brilliant” about things, and other times I was just a plain “Cowhead.” Her mother nodded sympathetically at me. When Pete asked what I did for a living, I said I worked at an auction gallery.
“Sotheby’s?” Pete asked.
“I’m afraid not, no,” I said. I explained the more down-to-earth establishment I worked at. To be amusing, I thought, I told them about Splat the watch dog, and I explained how we faked antiques. The Smith family stared at me incredulously.
“Isn’t that a crime, faking antiques?” Tiernan asked, cutting into a juicy steak.
I mumbled something about the antique gallery being responsible for how it represented its merchandise, not me as an employee.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Pete-the-lawyer said, shaking his head. “Not if you’re knowingly involved in faking the merchandise.”
I had a second glass of wine. Smithy’s mom asked me if I was related to Charlotte Gaines from Arlington who was in her college graduating class in 1950. I said I wasn’t, and I considered for a moment telling her that my family were Askenazi from Eastern Europe and that we’d chosen our family name from a car dealership on Flatbush Avenue, Gaines Oldsmobile, but thought better of it. When she asked what my father did for a living, I told her he was a child guidance counselor in a New York City high school, and she said that she “admired” that my father was a “civil servant.”
“Indeed, except for the civil part,” I cracked. It fell deader than a sparrow in a snowstorm.
Then death stopped by the table. I felt the rare steak I was chewing slide halfway down my throat just behind my Adam’s apple and coagulate into a mass. I’d heard about this feeling, this moment, when the food won’t go up or down, it’s a solid block, and you can’t take even the tiniest breath or exhale, and in a split second you know this is how you’re going to die. I recently read a magazine article about people dying from choking on food. One of the Kennedys—Joan Skakel, Ethel Kennedy’s sister-in-law—choked to death on a piece of meat in 1967.
I knew I had only a few seconds to ask for help, but nobody was paying attention. I abruptly stood up, pushed my chair backward, and when they all turned to look at me, I pointed to my throat. Smithy asked, “Are you choking?” Before I could even nod, her brother Tiernan jumped up, spun me around so my back was toward him, wrapped his arms below my rib cage, and pulled up with a mighty tug. The steak came shooting out of my throat like a shot put. It flew in an arc and landed on the white tablecloth near my host’s salad plate. It was a disgusting half-chewed piece of rare meat. My first instinct was to scoop it up with my napkin so no one would have to look at it, but suddenly the strength went out of me. It was the oddest feeling, my legs had no substance and I started to sink. Big, strong Tiernan grabbed me under my arms and kept me standing while Smithy put the chair under me. There was a small dark spot on the front of my pants where I had peed in fright. I was sorry I hadn’t died.
“You’re as white as a ghost,” Smithy said, offering me a sip of water. It took me five minutes or so just sitting in the chair to revive, during which time I apologized, about 100 times, and thanked Tiernan another 100 times, and died inside 1000 times.
“This is what a close brush with death will do to you,” I lied to Smithy later, shivering at the Rye train station, waiting for the last train to the city. That night there was an early frost and I could just about see my breath, but it was shame that had given me the shivers, not the cold. Smithy linked her arm in mine and walked me over to a bench in front of the closed ticket booth and we sat huddled together in silence waiting for the train. “Do you know that I love you, Smithy?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t know you loved me.” She tightened her grip on my arm and pulled me closer. “That’s sweet of you to say, but there are all different kinds of love.”
I always knew she was a clever girl. In another minute or two, the train came.
I dropped her off in a taxi at her apartment building near Columbia University, and I never saw her again. I called her a few times, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She was a girl who was going places and looking for a traveling companion. “I’ll always have a special place in my heart for you, Cowhead,” she told me a few weeks later, bidding me farewell on the telephone.
“Promise me you won’t call anybody else ‘Cowhead’?” I asked her. She promised she wouldn’t, and I believe she kept her promise. I saw her twenty-five years later, still beautiful, a talking head on a cable TV news show. She was a public defender in San Francisco.
ions of alarm. He tried to think of a reason for the Austrian soldiers’ presence—a prank of some kind or a misunderstanding about the nature of the school. But no, he could tell already that the soldiers had come to take them away.
t age six, there was Bradley with freckles and a voice oddly raspy for his age, the same as mine. A witty boy who laughed a lot; his freckles glowed with humor. We walked to school together holding hands. He grew up to manage a Las Vegas casino and, as rumor had it, dealt drugs on the side. Not suitable at all for the long haul. I can see us hand in hand, walking down East New York Avenue, looking both ways at every corner, finally making it to the schoolyard and running to our respective lines. This was true love. Our romance was brief, but all the years through high school, when we met in the halls, we greeted each other warmly, ripples of memory passing between us.
he spring of 2018, as I was finishing the second year of my three-year MFA program, I came into the office of my graduate advisor and said, “For my thesis, I’d like to write a book about growing up in Soviet Russia and being an immigrant in America. Obviously, it’ll be informed by my own experience, but do you think I should make it fiction or nonfiction?”