By 1980, Terrence’s shows at Pier 9 had become legendary. Hilarious and unique. Bitchy and smart. They were everything truly exceptional about being gay at that time.
Even when Terrence reused material, he would always find some way to transform it into a new experience for the audience. We were friends, but above all else, I counted myself as one of his most devoted fans. And like any true fan, I never missed one of his shows. Not until I moved away, of course, and I’ll never forgive myself for missing those shows. Let me tell you this: If you ever saw one of his acts when he performed as his female alter-ego “Better Davis,” you can count yourself among the lucky ones. Because there won’t be any more shows. I have to bring them all back from memory now.
It starts with a picture of one of Terrence’s costumes in my head. Then the other elements materialize around him: the makeup, the music cues, his brilliant Bette Davis cinematic allusions, the wicked camp, his fearless banter with an almost always adoring audience. Memory can be a cruel and crazy thing though. Unreliable most times, strangely insistent on amplifying details you’d much rather forget, coy and acidic even during bouts of nostalgia—whatever nostalgia is. Memory is a comfort but it is also a burn.
Except for Terrence, I had almost no contact with anyone from Washington, D.C. while I was living abroad for three years teaching English to Japanese salarymen in Tokyo. I could always count on my mother for the odd telephone call that was never quite synced up with our prodigious time difference. But the only person with whom I managed to carry on a regular correspondence during that time was Terrence, whose monthly postcards were the highlight of a lonely existence in Japan.
Terrence—God love him—would keep me updated on all the latest affairs, breakups, and D.C. gossip in short, digestible, witty missives—sort of like a gay Dorothy Parker. (Is that an oxymoron? Was she a lez? Well, whatever). He kept me updated on who had dropped out, who had gone back into the closet, who had started hooking, who had beefed up, who had the clap, who was … well, the list goes on. I still have all the postcards, including the one with a picture of Bette Davis in Now, Voyager where he asked if I’d heard of the new gay cancer.
His postcards always featured some gay Hollywood icon: Bette Davis (of course), Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Theda Bara, Josephine Baker, Merle Oberon—all those divas we loved back in our happy fag days.
The first postcard I received from him had a photo of Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage (in the death throes of tuberculosis) with a Scratch-N-Sniff sticker of a smiling piece of toast with grape jelly slathered on it. “Dear Harrison, Q: How do you separate the men from the boys in Greece? A: With a crowbar.” When Natalie Wood drowned, he sent me one with a still of Natalie and Warren Beatty from Splendor in the Grass and a simple note on the back: “Oh, Harrison, I’m in deep mourning for our dear Natasha. Do you think Warren cried? Love, T.”
By the time I returned to D.C. in late autumn of 1983, AIDS had already begun to ravage the Dupont Circle neighborhood that I knew so well. Terrence had warned me. Sure, there were new bars that hadn’t been there when I left (there always are) and new fall faces in the city as there seem to be every year, that annual crop of new college students, government workers, and other assorted faggotry who always repopulated our most transient of cities. However, I could tell that D.C. had also depopulated. People were missing. People I had known for years were just gone. People I had slept with. And it wasn’t just one or two guys. Whole cliques just weren’t there anymore. Entire social circles had evaporated.
Certain underground bars and sex clubs had vanished as well. There used to be a privately run bathhouse off Florida Avenue near 18th Street informally called The Depot. It was right near the Hilton Hotel where Reagan had been shot by John Hinckley while I was still in Tokyo. The Depot had picked up the nickname because of the legendary “trains” that guys would run on willing bottoms there. Back in the day, there would be a refreshment table on the ground level with chips, salsa, beer, and other assorted snacks and then a big tub of Crisco and bottles of poppers on the second floor.
“Can you imagine their hands passing from the bowl of Cheetos to the tub of Crisco to their assholes and then back to the bowl of Cheetos?” my friend Romeo had asked. He chided me for going to The Depot more times than I liked to admit. “Harrison, they put their hands back in the bowl of Cheetos.”
Romeo told me that one night in 1982, a young man had fallen down the stairs at The Depot and broken his neck. Guys had stepped over him for the rest of the night thinking he was just passed out or high or something. It was only when the lights finally came back on that the owner himself discovered that the man had died. His nickname was “Caboose” going along with The Depot’s train theme.
“His face was the reason God created paper bags, but he was a very prolific bottom,” Romeo said. “He had a hot ass, but he couldn’t fuck forever.”
The Depot was gone by 1983, and the townhouse in which it had been housed had been renovated into a private home. I witnessed a heterosexual, yuppy couple exiting it together one morning on their way to work. I didn’t know if the place had been forcibly condemned after the death of Caboose or if its closure had been tied to the larger, pressing issue of the public health hazard the disease had brought to the community. It might have been abandoned altogether as men even then began to retreat into their plastic worlds of fear elsewhere in the city.
A certain pall had fallen over the District—and not just because the Reagans had taken up residence in my absence. So I went back, back into my memories of my happy fag days.
In one memory, Terrence was performing as Better Davis. During his peak years at Pier 9, there were always renditions of “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy” while done up as Baby Jane Hudson spliced with bits of Giorgio Moroder’s “Baby Blue” or Terrence All About Eve-ing all over the place with a cunty sneer and a lit cigarette in his hand. During those scenes, he would wear an exact replica of the dress Bette Davis is wearing in the “Fasten your seatbelts” party scene (hand-sewn by his best friend, Robin). But Terrence always brought down the house when Better Davis took on the role of Judith Traherne from Dark Victory, the rich socialite whose brain tumor has led to a battle with encroaching blindness.
“Where are ya, Ann? I can’t see ya, Ann! I think I’m goin’ blind!!!!” Terrence rasped as Better Davis, crawling all over the stage on his hands and knees, wearing dark sunglasses and waving his arms around like a spastic queen.
“She’s over there, Judy!” the audience would scream out on cue. “She’s over there!”
In the fall of 1982, right around the time that The Depot shut down, Terrence’s postcards stopped arriving to my address in Tokyo. I remember being worried and afraid for him, a feeling I’d never had about him before. Something Terrence would have laughed at.
When I finally got back to the States, I found out from Robin that Terrence had died of AIDS. He never even mentioned that he was sick. When I asked Robin about Terrence’s last days, she told me that when he died, he was almost completely blind.
I used to go to a bar called The Frat House. It was located in an old carriage house in an alleyway off P Street in Dupont Circle. When I got back to town, an acquaintance of mine named Richard told me that he’d been casually fucking a bartender who worked there now.
“You should try him, Harrison,” Richard said. “His name is Grayson.”
When I heard the name Grayson, I had an almost immediate physical reaction. I started to sweat under my arms and I felt my knees give way a little bit. Grayson was the name of the person who had stolen a man named Troy Lovejoy away from me. Grayson was one of the reasons I had left D.C.
It wasn’t just one event that had led me to leave. It was a wave of small cruelties that had peaked with one final injustice that I’d found too devastating to ignore. And off I went, booking a ticket to Tokyo practically the next day after Troy ignored me on the street, shutting down my life like the shuttering of a small business, once burgeoning and busy with foot traffic, but that has now fallen into dust and disrepair, no one caring if it ever opened again. Everyone seems to have a breaking point, however the moment of the actual crack! always looks different from gay to gay.
When I left town in 1980, the D.C. gays were petty and cruel. If you didn’t look a certain way or act a certain way, you were going to have a problem. It was the era of the “Clone” and, suffice it to say, I wasn’t one. I tried the look out one summer. I sported a pair of tight denim trousers and a fitted Lacoste shirt and grew my best bushy mustache, and Terrence wasn’t having it at all. The first time he saw me in my new look, he screamed like he was in a horror film.
“Hon, what are you doing!?” And then he walked around me like he was my fairy godmother. “This isn’t you. No, not at all. Just be you, Harrison. It’s the easiest look in the world for you to pull off.”
I wasn’t even looking to date anyone, but a rare opportunity presented itself one night at Mister P’s when an old college buddy of mine introduced me to a well-built, shirtless man named Troy Lovejoy. Troy worked on Capitol Hill as some kind of policy wunderkind, whatever that meant. “The Hill” always sounded to me like such a magical place. It conjured up a shining white edifice built on a mount—solidity, intelligence, access—a truly exalted life. At the time, I was an aspiring poet who mostly waited tables at Annie’s on 17th Street and often had trouble paying my rent, so I looked at Troy in a very aspirational way. I got his number and asked him out. We started dating.
Is it okay that I fell in love with Troy’s name first before I fell in love with the actual person of Troy? Can I admit that I was that lame? It sounded like a fake name for a fake boyfriend that you pretend you had over the summer. I loved dropping it into conversation with Robin and Terrence.
“Troy Lovejoy grew up on a small farm in Michigan but he really was never meant to live that kind of pastoral life. He went to Princeton, you know.”
“Troy Lovejoy and I sometimes don’t speak for days but it’s only because I think it makes him want me more.”
“Troy Lovejoy made love to me all morning and then made us croque monsieurs served on his balcony with mimosas.”
While Robin played along, ooo-ing and ahh-ing at appropriate moments, Terrence was instantly suspicious of Troy, taking on the role of a 1940s Miriam Hopkins-style confidante who imparts warnings to the leading lady in drawing rooms with fireplaces.
“Troy Lovejoy? God, he sounds like a gay Tennessee Williams character. Troy Lovejoy dies offstage while licking an ice cream cone. Are you sure that’s even his real name?”
Terrence had always been a better judge of people than I was, a skill he took full advantage of as a drag queen. He had a kind of noirish instinct about where each person’s life was headed. His lack of approval made me very nervous.
“You don’t even date, Harrison. Ever. You’re a Bathhouse Betty. You once slept with twelve guys in one night,” Terrence said.
“It’s not that I don’t date. It’s just that I haven’t. So much. In the past.”
“Troy Lovejoy’s cum tastes like honeysuckle nectar and simple syrup!” Terrence said, rolling his eyes and affecting a Bette Davis in The Little Foxes accent. “Troy Lovejoy’s shits smell like cookies!”
But when you’re inside one of those cultish love bubbles, it’s very hard to view yourself with any sort of objectivity. Which is what eventually doomed my relationship with Troy Lovejoy.
In late April 1980, four months into our relationship, Romeo invited me and Troy to his birthday dinner at the Tabard Inn on a Saturday night. I had found it immediately odd and unnecessary for Romeo to invite Troy to the dinner. After all, it was only a small gathering that could best be described as a collection of close friends of Romeo’s who might or might not already know each other but who were all there to celebrate Romeo. Some instinctual prick in the back of my neck warned me that Troy shouldn’t be there. He was not supposed to be there. Troy and Romeo were not even friends.
When Troy and I arrived at the Tabard Inn, a man was sitting alone at a large circular table festooned with streamers and confetti. Troy sat down next to him and I sat down next to Troy. Troy and I both introduced ourselves to the man who said his name was Grayson Greene. He was one of Romeo’s friends, someone I did not know but whom I had heard Romeo mention briefly in passing.
When Troy and Grayson shook hands, I saw something happen immediately. It was unmistakable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the spark between two people like that. It would be too cliché to call it “electric” but it was as if someone had dimmed the lights in the entire restaurant and illuminated the two of them from below with a floor light, casting everyone else in the room as mindless extras who were only there to observe and comment on the two main characters discovering each other as soulmates. It changed the room, to put things lightly. And, in my mind, the most obvious thing that had changed was that I had instantly become the invisible man.
Of course, Troy and Grayson ended up having tons of things in common too: They were both from Michigan. They both shared an affinity for some University of Michigan football player, quoting statistics, offering up niche biographical information about him with which they were flirtatiously one-upping each other. I could feel myself slowly sinking into a Plathian depression that could only be solved by taking a dive into the nearest oven.
Their repartee all felt extremely rude and only seemed to momentarily pause once Romeo and the rest of his guests finally began trickling into the restaurant, before starting right back up again for a brand-new audience.
I knew at Romeo’s birthday dinner that Troy would eventually leave me for Grayson. There was no truer thing in the world. It was almost as if, after the end of the dinner as we were making our way back to his car, he already had.
I didn’t hear from Troy for the next week after the birthday dinner. When this had happened in the past, I would convince myself that he was giving us space, allowing the both of us to yearn for each other more. To lust from afar and then reunite at the moment it felt like we might forget the passion we had last shared. It was really, really stupid. The reason I wasn’t hearing from Troy was not something I was ready to confront.
I went alone to Friends, a piano bar at 21st and P Street, on a Monday night. As soon as I walked in, I saw Troy at the back of the bar and began to make my way to him. Excited to reconnect with him after a week or so of not talking, I was smiling and suddenly felt lighter. As I got closer, however, I spied none other than Grayson standing beside him, both of them laughing and smiling. Troy looked up at me, startled.
“Harrison! This is Grayson Greene. Grayson, Harrison,” Troy said.
“We both met him on the same night a week ago, Troy,” I said.
“Hello, Harrison. Great to see you again,” Grayson said. He went to get some drinks. Grayson was the kind of rival who didn’t even know he was your rival which I just found doubly annoying.
“Grayson and I hit it off at Romeo’s dinner. And he reminds me of back home,” Troy said. “He’s just a friend, Harrison.”
“A friend with whom you have way more in common than you do me.”
“Oh, stop it. Let’s just have fun,” Troy said. Grayson came back with drinks.
A very scrawny, small, leather-harnessed and capped older man with more missing teeth than actual teeth went up to the piano. With full-throated vigor and without a trace of irony, he sang “What I Did for Love” from A Chorus Line.
There was no mistaking it: I had intruded on Troy and Grayson’s first date. I don’t even remember what happened the rest of that night, I got so drunk.
A week later, as I was walking down Connecticut Avenue, I saw Troy coming toward me. He spotted me but immediately looked away pretending like he hadn’t seen me. Then he quickly rushed across the street to the sidewalk on the opposite side.
And that’s when I left town.
So, there was Grayson now working behind the bar at The Frat House three years later.
“Harrison! How’s it going? I haven’t seen you in years. What can I get you?” Grayson asked.
“Yeah, I just moved back recently. I’ll have a whiskey sour.” Grayson began to mix the drink, eyeing me while doing it. “How’s Troy?” I asked.
“Oh, you haven’t heard? Troy died like five months ago.”
I did an exaggerated gulp and put my hand up to my chest.
“He broke up with me after a year. I took it pretty hard. After that, he seemed like he was having the time of his life. But then he got sick and, well.” I took a sip of my drink and had trouble swallowing it. “He went back to Michigan. He died at his parents’ house.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I am.”
“I’m sorry too, Harrison.” He looked at me and held the look.
“Thanks. It really doesn’t matter now. I don’t think we were ever even a real couple. If it’s real, you shouldn’t have to put so much effort into it. I pretended to myself that we were more than we really were.”
“Troy liked that though. He liked it when the other person had to try harder than him.”
“You’d have thought he’d live forever,” I said.
Grayson pushed free drinks to me while we caught up on mutual people we knew. I couldn’t remember having a better time. Grayson almost made everyone else around us disappear with the strength of his natural sparkle. I could see why Troy had fallen for him.
I went home with him that night and we had sex and we had a lot of it. It was spectacular. Was it revenge in some way? Probably. Who knows. Who cares? It was hot and I wanted him.
Before I left his place in Logan Circle, Grayson made it clear that he was up for it again any time. I was thrilled.
I suggested that we meet up at P Street Beach late night after his shift at The Frat House, thinking that he would never agree to it. But he did. There were several discreet places in the area where men could have sex and I fucked him in each one of them.
Afterwards we sat on the grass like children and talked about nothing. And everything.
“Thank God you pitch and catch,” I said. “I don’t.”
“And don’t ever change that.”
Grayson lit a cigarette.
“So, did Troy just love dating guys who were in the service industry or what?” I asked.
“Ha! I don’t know. He was so successful and I don’t think he liked competition in that department. At all,” Grayson said. “And I’m not destitute, you know!”
“I didn’t mean to say you were,” I said.
“Oh God, it’s fine, Harrison.” Grayson locked his leg around mine in the grass. “You see, actually, I came into some money a couple of years ago when my grandfather passed away. Nothing extraordinary but enough to put a down payment on a condo somewhere which is something I’ve always wanted to do here. I consider D.C. my hometown now, not Lansing.”
“That’s nice. I wish I had enough money to buy a dinner at 1789! Alas,” I said, taking a puff of his cigarette before I gave it back to him.
“An acquaintance of mine named Cleary, who is a realtor, started badgering me about buying a condo. We didn’t even know each other that well, but he had somehow overheard me talking to one of my regulars at The Frat House about maybe buying a place and it was like I suddenly became the most important person on Earth to him. He would call me constantly suggesting that we go look at condos and townhouses together. I don’t even know where he got my number. It was … a lot.”
“Cleary sounds like a vulture,” I said.
“Yeah, well, a lot of these gay realtors are here. It’s all very transparent. I mean, I get it. You work on commission and have to hustle. I do the same for tips at the bar. But calm down a little.”
“So, what happened with him?” I asked.
“Well, I never did follow through with him and decided to just tuck the cash away and keep paying rent on my place in Logan Circle. Well, last year, I found out about this elaborate Christmas party Cleary had. Like, I think over a hundred people had been invited. He was in the bar around New Year’s and I said—half-jokingly, really—that my invitation must’ve gotten lost in the mail. Which, I know, was aggressive, but it just slipped out. And I did smile after I said it so I thought he would take it as a joke.”
“Did he?” I asked.
“No, he did not. It really set him off. He said that he was sorry if I felt ‘slighted’ in some way. But in this very patronizing tone. He then went on about how many holiday parties he had attended that year and how much travel he had been doing lately and how busy he was. Then—and this was the kicker—he looks me right in the eyes and says, ‘I cannot be everything to everyone all the time and for that I am sorry.’ Can you believe that? Who even talks like that?”
“Oh God,” I said. “What a fucking queen.”
“And then he told me that I should quit smoking! I mean, the balls on him,” Grayson said. “He was pretty hot back when he was younger, but he looks like an old worn-out Halston now.” Grayson paused for a moment. “I heard that he latches himself onto rich gays with AIDS now. He convinces them to sell their houses to avoid unnecessary taxes when they die. He got one of them to sell his house way under market and then the poor guy ended up dying alone in a hotel room in Southeast!”
“He’s not a vulture then. He’s a succubus.”
“I know. People are so obvious.”
“Can I tell you something personal?” I asked.
“You’ve had my ass every which way possible in this park,” Grayson laughed. “So, yes.”
“Before you, I hadn’t had sex in almost three years,” I confessed.
“Why not? You’re very good at it,” he said.
“There were very few opportunities available for me to have it in Japan. They’re weird over there about sex. And I’m not attracted to Asian men.”
“It’s okay,” Grayson said. “You know, if you think about it, the past three years is probably the best time not to have had sex in the whole history of the world. This has been a pretty good party for you to miss.”
“Like that Christmas party you didn’t get invited to?”
“Oh, I always find a way in,” Grayson said. “Even if the party’s already over.”
Robin called me and asked if I would take a walk with her along the Anacostia River in Southwest one day that fall in 1983. She didn’t say why but I hoped it was to talk about Terrence. We could talk about anything, I didn’t care. But I really hoped it was to talk about Terrence. I needed to talk about him. Everything had changed. Enemies were now lovers. Sex dens were family-friendly townhouses. We had to use rubbers now.
I could use some fresh air.
Robin and I met at the Titanic Memorial next to the water. It was a thirteen-foot granite statue of a barrel-chested, god-like man clad in a long robe with his arms outstretched toward the sky. The inscription below him said that the memorial was dedicated to “the men who had given their lives so that women and children could be saved during the Titanic disaster.”
“Can you believe that shit? What about the women who sacrificed themselves for other women? And children? Where’s their memorial?” said Robin.
“I don’t know. Honestly, I didn’t even know this one existed.”
“So typical. It’s all about the men. Always. Even fucking AIDS,” Robin said. “I’m sorry I said that. I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s okay. You’re probably not wrong.”
“Here, Harrison. Terrence would want you to have these.” Robin held out a tin commemorating the wedding of Charles and Diana that had once belonged to Terrence. “They’re his ashes.”
“Oh. Yeah. Okay, I just didn’t know. What about his parents?” I asked.
“They’re both dead. His life insurance policy covered cremation, but I never knew what to do with the ashes. They’ve been sitting on a shelf in my hall closet for the past year and I feel guilty every time I walk by them. You know Terrence would definitely not like to be back in a closet,” Robin said. “I’m surprised he’s not haunting me about that.”
I felt a certain amount of guilt myself. Guilt about not being there when AIDS was taking out whole blocks back home. Japan had had very few cases of the disease while I was there. I had not really thought about it at all. It made me feel ashamed that this thing that had so completely taken over Terrence’s life had not even been on my mind when he died. The guilt was embarrassing.
“I wish I could have been here for him, Robin. I feel terrible,” I said.
“He went so fast, there wasn’t even any time for him to be mad at you for not being there. He knew you had to leave. He knew you had to get away. Maybe you’re alive right now because you did.”
“I’ve thought that too,” I said.
Robin looked out at the water and I followed her gaze to its target—the Georgetown University crew team gliding by, the small coxswain at the front of the boat barking out commands to the rest of the rowers who were all synchronized in their movements, their strong arms glistening in the sun. I thought of the lifeboats that surrounded the sinking Titanic. I read somewhere once that there was a man who had dressed up as a woman trying to fake his way onto a lifeboat. I thought about how large-scale trauma brought out the best and the worst in people.
“Let’s throw him into the water. It’s so beautiful right here. I think Terrence would have liked us to do it together,” I said.
“And then he’d dress up as Better Davis and do a Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte number on that ledge over there, wearing a blonde wig and swinging an ax around,” Robin said. We both started laughing and then held each other by the edge of the water.
I opened up the tin and pulled out the plastic bag. We grabbed onto it together with both of our hands and tossed Terrence over the railing. The ashes landed in the water at the edge and just sort of sat there, mixing with the oily whorls that shone in the late Sunday sunshine, sloshing up against a cement piling, only briefly leaving a little bit of Terrence caught between land and water.
“You just know he would’ve hated that,” Robin said. “Smeared on a bit of concrete for all eternity like bird shit.”
“Possibly, but I think he’d love the crew boys stroking nearby,” I said.
“You’re right,” said Robin. “He would.”
“Maybe Terrence really was a better Bette Davis,” I said. “Better than the real one, I mean.”
Robin leaned in and took my hand. I had started to cry.
“What if the Bette Davis we have now will never be enough?” I asked. “Maybe there’s a better way to live.”
***