CHAPTER 1

Lee turned his attention to a Jewish boy named Carl Steinberg he had known casually for about a year. The first time he saw Carl, Lee thought, “I could use that, if the family jewels weren’t in pawn to Uncle Junk.”

The boy was blond, his face thin and sharp with a few freckles, always a little pink around the ears and nose like he had just washed. Lee had never known anyone to look as clean as Carl. With his small round brown eyes and fuzzy blond hair, he reminded Lee of a young bird. Born in ­Munich, Carl had grown up in Baltimore. In manner and outlook he seemed European. He shook hands with traces of a heel click. In general, Lee found European youths easier to talk to than Americans. The rudeness of many Americans depressed him, a rudeness based on a solid ignorance of the whole concept of manners and on the proposition that for social purposes all people are more or less equal and interchangeable.

What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact. He felt some contact with Carl. The boy listened politely and seemed to understand what Lee was saying. After some initial balking, he accepted the fact of Lee’s sexual interest in his person. He told Lee, “Since I can’t change my mind about you, I will have to change my mind about other things.”

But Lee soon found out he could make no progress. “If I got this far with an American kid,” he reasoned, “I could get the rest of the way. So he’s not queer. People can be obliging. What is the obstacle?” Lee finally guessed the answer: “What makes it impossible is that his mother wouldn’t like it.” Lee knew it was time to pack in. He recalled a homosexual Jewish friend who lived in Oklahoma City. Lee had asked, “Why do you live here? You have enough money to live anywhere you like.” The reply was, “It would kill my mother if I moved away.” Lee had been speechless.

One afternoon Lee was walking with Carl by the ­Amsterdam Avenue park. Suddenly Carl bowed slightly and shook Lee’s hand. “Best of luck,” he said, and ran for a streetcar.

Lee stood looking after him, then walked over into the park and sat down on a concrete bench that was molded to resemble wood. Blue flowers from a blossoming tree had fallen on the bench and on the walk in front of it. Lee sat there watching the flowers move along the path in a warm spring wind. The sky was clouding up for an afternoon shower. Lee felt lonely and defeated. “I’ll have to look for someone else,” he thought. He covered his face with his hands. He was very tired.

He saw a shadowy line of boys. As each boy came to the front of the line, he said, “Best of luck,” and ran for a streetcar.

“Sorry . . . wrong number . . . try again . . . somewhere else . . . someplace else . . . not here . . . not me . . . can’t use it, don’t need it, don’t want it . . . sorry. . . . Why pick on me?” The last face was so real and so ugly, Lee said aloud, “Who asked you, you ugly son of a bitch?”

Lee opened his eyes and looked around. Two Mexican adolescents walked by, their arms around each other’s necks. He looked after them, licking his dry, cracked lips.

Lee continued to see Carl after that, until finally Carl said, “Best of luck” for the last time, and walked away. Lee heard later he had gone with his family to Uruguay.

Lee was sitting with Winston Moor in the Rathskeller, drinking double tequilas. Cuckoo clocks and moth-eaten deer heads gave the Rathskeller a dreary, out-of-place, Tyrolean look. A smell of spilt beer, overflowing toilets, and sour garbage hung in the place like a thick fog and drifted out into the street through narrow, inconvenient swinging doors. A television set was out of order half the time and emitted horrible, guttural squawks like a Frankenstein monster.

“I was in here last night,” Lee said to Moor. “Got talking to a queer doctor and his boyfriend. The doc is a major in the Medical Corps, the boyfriend some kind of vague engineer. Awful-looking little bitch. So the doctor invites me to have a drink with them, and the boyfriend is getting jealous, and I don’t want a beer anyway, which the doctor takes as a reflection on Mexico and on his own person. He begins the do-you-like-Mexico routine. So I tell him ­Mexico is O.K., some of it, but he personally is a pain in the ass. Told him this in a nice way, you understand. Besides, I had to go home to my wife in any case.

“So he says, ‘You don’t have any wife, you are just as queer as I am.’ I told him, ‘I don’t know how queer you are, Doc, and I ain’t about to find out. It isn’t as if you was a good-looking Mexican. You’re a goddamned old, ugly-looking Mexican. And that goes double for your moth-eaten boyfriend.’ I was hoping, of course, the deal wouldn’t come to any extreme climax. . . .

“You never knew Hatfield? Of course not. Before your time. He killed a cargador in a pulquería. The deal cost him five hundred dollars. Now, figuring a cargador as rock bottom, think how much it would cost you to shoot a major in the Mexican Army.”

Moor called the waiter over. “Yo quiero un sandwich,” he said, smiling at the waiter. “¿Quel sandwiches tiene?”

“What do you want?” Lee asked, annoyed at the interruption.

“I don’t know exactly,” said Moor, looking through the menu. “I wonder if they could make me a melted cheese sandwich on toasted whole-wheat bread.” Moor turned back to the waiter, with a smile that was supposed to be boyish.

Lee closed his eyes as Moor launched an attempt to convey the concept of melted cheese on whole-wheat toast. Moor was being charmingly helpless with his inadequate Spanish. He was putting down a little-boy-in-a-foreign-country routine. Moor smiled into an inner mirror, a smile without a trace of warmth, but it was not a cold smile: it was the meaningless smile of senile decay, the smile that goes with false teeth, the smile of a man grown old and stir-simple in the solitary confinement of exclusive self-love.

Moor was a thin young man with blond hair that was habitually somewhat long. He had pale blue eyes and very white skin. There were dark patches under his eyes and two deep lines around the mouth. He looked like a child, and at the same time like a prematurely aged man. His face showed the ravages of the death process, the inroads of decay in flesh cut off from the living charge of contact. Moor was motivated, literally kept alive and moving, by hate, but there was no passion or violence in his hate. Moor’s hate was a slow, steady push, weak but infinitely persistent, waiting to take advantage of any weakness in another. The slow drip of Moor’s hate had etched the lines of decay in his face. He had aged without experience of life, like a piece of meat rotting on a pantry shelf.

Moor made a practice of interrupting a story just before the point was reached. Often he would start a long conversation with a waiter or anybody else handy, or he would go vague and distant, yawn, and say, “What was that?” as though recalled to dull reality from reflections of which others could have no concept.

Moor began talking about his wife, Jackie. “At first, Bill, she was so dependent on me that she used literally to have hysterics when I had to go to the museum where I work. I managed to build up her ego to the point where she didn’t need me, and after that the only thing I could do was leave. There was nothing more I could do for her.”

Moor was putting down his sincere act. “My God,” Lee thought, “he really believes it.”

Lee ordered another double tequila. Moor stood up. “Well, I have to be going,” he said. “I have a lot of things to do.”

“Well, listen,” said Lee. “How about dinner tonight?”

Moor said, “Well, all right.”

“At six in the K.C. Steak House.”

“All right.” Moor left.

Lee drank half the tequila the waiter put in front of him. He had known Moor off and on in N.Y. for several years and never liked him. Moor disliked Lee, but then Moor didn’t like anybody. Lee said to himself, “You must be crazy, making passes in that direction, when you know what a bitch he is. These borderline characters can out-bitch any fag.”

When Lee arrived at the K.C. Steak House, Moor was already there, and with him he had Tom Williams, another Salt Lake City boy. Lee thought, “He brought along a chaperone.”

“I like the guy, Tom, but I can’t stand to be alone with him. He keeps trying to go to bed with me. That’s what I don’t like about queers. You can’t keep it on a basis of friendship. . . .” Yes, Lee could hear that conversation.

During dinner Moor and Williams talked about a boat they planned to build at Zihuatanejo. Lee thought this was a silly project. “Boat building is a job for a professional, isn’t it?” Lee asked. Moor pretended not to hear.

After dinner Lee walked back to Moor’s rooming house with Moor and Williams. At the door Lee asked, “Would you gentlemen care for a drink? I’ll get a bottle. . . .” He looked from one to the other.

Moor said, “Well, no. You see, we want to work on the plans for this boat we are going to build.”

“Oh,” said Lee. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. How about meeting me for a drink in the Rathskeller? Say around five.”

“Well, I expect I’ll be busy tomorrow.”

“Yes, but you have to eat and drink.”

“Well, you see, this boat is more important to me than anything right now. It will take up all my time.”

Lee said, “Suit yourself,” and walked away.

Lee was deeply hurt. He could hear Moor saying, “Thanks for running interference, Tom. Well, I hope he got the idea. Of course Lee is an interesting guy and all that . . . but this queer situation is just more than I can take.” Tolerant, looking at both sides of the question, sympathetic up to a point, finally forced to draw a tactful but firm line. “And he really believes that,” Lee thought. “Like that crap about building up his wife’s ego. He can revel in the satisfactions of virulent bitchiness and simultaneously see himself as a saint. Quite a trick.”

Actually, Moor’s brush-off was calculated to inflict the maximum hurt possible under the circumstances. It put Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer, too stupid and too insensitive to realize that his attentions were not wanted, forcing Moor to the distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram.

Lee leaned against a lamppost for several minutes. The shock had sobered him, drained away his drunken euphoria. He realized how tired he was, and how weak, but he was not ready yet to go home.