When I was around twenty and studying acting in New York, I lived in the building I described earlier that is now a homeless shelter.
I had a job working as a night watchman on the Brooklyn waterfront for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. I worked from midnight to eight at Todd’s Shipyards. My job was to patrol, in full uniform, empty warehouses and call in if I saw a fire or anything. I wasn’t armed, and somehow I happily never considered what “anything” might be. I was paid $1.62 an hour. I was paid a dollar an hour for guard work in Manhattan.
One day, before I got together with Julie and was living in my room with no window, I was walking through the lobby of the building (I wasn’t in uniform) and was approached by a woman who seemed about fifteen years older than I was who also had a room in the building. I had never seen her before, but she walked up to me, said hello, and told me her therapist thought it would be good for her if she had sexual relations, and I seemed like a clean-cut young man. Nothing even remotely like that ever happened to me before or since. I told her it was true. I was clean-cut, and I agreed to come to her room later.
I went back to my room, thought about it, and something told me maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I didn’t have a girlfriend at the time, but it all felt too strange, so I knocked on her door about a half hour before the appointed time. She answered it wearing a dressing gown. I explained I had to go to work. She nodded, and that was that.
Years later, I ran into her on the street, chatted a moment, and made a date. This was in a period when Julie and I were separated, but I still had some hope we’d get back together. She came to where I was living, and…
About a month later she called to tell me she was pregnant. I had taken precautions, but nevertheless there it was.
I have seldom been so distraught. In my brief encounter with this woman it was clear she might have had more than a few emotional issues and had even been institutionalized, but even now, growing up in the era that I did, I believe if you get a woman pregnant, you should marry her. I was unable to dissuade myself from that belief, even under those strange circumstances. It also meant the definitive end of my marriage, which had already ended, but I hadn’t fully accepted it.
I walked the streets of Manhattan for weeks in a terrible state. Then, one day I got a call from her saying she wasn’t pregnant after all, just “late.”
I actually went to see her to look at her face-to-face to confirm that it was true. I completely believed her and moved on with my life, although for a long time when the phone rang, which it hardly ever did, I feared for a moment it was her saying there was a baby. Thankfully, that call never came.
Many years later I found myself in bed with a beautiful actress. When I brought up the subject of birth control, neither of us had any. I got dressed and, I hope politely, took my leave. To this day, that woman resents me. I understand, but since, as I’ve said, I believe marriage must follow a pregnancy, I had no choice. I also believe in a woman’s right to choose simply because, as many have said, if a woman wants an abortion somehow she will get one, and if Roe v. Wade is ever repealed, abortions obviously would be done under less than safe circumstances.