21 Gay Street

While Joyce Kendall slept in apartment 2-A, and while Terri Leigh and Jean Fitzgerald made love in apartment 3-A, Pete Galton in apartment 8-B pounded a portable typewriter and tried to forget a girl named Linda.

Galton was 26, going bald, a nervous chain-smoker with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. A few months ago he had been a reporter and rewrite man for a leading New York daily. A few months ago, for that matter, he had been a part-time bedmate and full-time lover of a girl by the name of Linda Medellin, a pretty little thing with black hair and happy breasts. Had been, that is.

You, he said aloud to himself, are nothing but a had-been. That seemed to call for a drink, so he answered the call by taking a liberal swig from a bottle that rested on top of the desk next to the portable typewriter. He would have kept the bottle in the desk drawer but that, he reminded himself, was a standard reporter’s gambit, and he was no longer a reporter. Nor was he a rewrite man, nor was he the part-time bedmate or full-time lover of Linda Medellin, girl of the black hair and the happy breasts, goddamn her to eternal hell fire.

It was a hell of a note, he told himself, a hell of a note. While the job on the New York Record had admittedly been less than the greatest job in the world, it had been a job, and a good job. He had liked the newspaper business and he had especially liked the New York Record, in spite of its myriad and occasionally classic faults. True, the Record took the bulk of its news copy almost verbatim from a top morning daily. True, the Record could have laid it on the line a bit by printing on yellow paper. But at the same time the Record was the sole liberal voice in New York, a crusading daily with blood in its eye. Pete had liked it.

That didn’t make much sense, either, but at least it called for another drink. That was something.

He put down the bottle, capped it, and went back to what he was typing. He was working, more or less, on a novel. But it wasn’t as though he had quit his job at the Record so that he could go to work on a novel. This was part of the stereotype, just as the vision of a reporter getting fired for drinking was part of the same stereotype. Neither notion happened to fit the case of Pete Galton. The case of Pete Galton was a unique one, and in order to understand it one has to understand what may be called l’affaire Medellin.

Pete had expected to marry Linda Medellin. They went for long walks together and had long talks together and made more than competent love together. Linda was a Brooklyn girl, a graduate of Brooklyn college, currently employed as some sort of minor flunkey in the midtown offices of a mammoth insurance company. They saw each other four or five times a week. At the conclusion of each evening Linda went home to Mama in Brooklyn and Pete came back alone on the Brighton line of the BMT. Sometimes the early part of the evening included a stop at 21 Gay Street for a happy roll in the happy hay, which pleased both of them tremendously. Not always, however, because the relationship they enjoyed was more than mere sex. Besides, as Pete always thought, they had plenty of time, because, after all, they were going to get married and live in a house in Connecticut with three daughters, all of them blondes with long hair.

And Pete, just as suddenly, was left Linda-less. It was a traumatic experience in the fullest sense of the word and hard-boiled newspaperman or no, Pete had cracked up.

It suddenly seemed extremely unimportant to become the Golden Boy of the New York Record, and dreams of Washington correspondentships, Pulitzer Prizes and City Desks faded at once from his vision. He started failing to show up at the Record at all, until finally, in the interest of fair play, he informed them that he was no longer working for them. They wanted to know why, asked if something was wrong, told him how much they wanted him back, offered a leave of absence and generally attempted to return him to the happy liberal fold. But Pete begged out. He wanted to cut the strings completely, to go all the way out on his own hook, to let things happen for once instead of trying to make them happen.

Which may in some part explain why he was sitting in his apartment that evening, drinking bourbon intermittently and pounding a portable typewriter, also intermittently, and thinking unhappy thoughts about Linda.

The book he was writing seemed to be coming along fairly well, though it was hard to tell. It was the first book he had ever written, for one thing. He’d done some freelance writing in the past outside of his newspaper work, some true crime stuff for the fact-detective magazines while he was on the police beat in Brooklyn, an occasional historical piece for the men’s adventure mags, a few short stories that had never sold any place. This was different.

For one thing, it wasn’t aimed anywhere in particular. It was just going along, a slow-paced low-keyed story about a guy not particularly unlike Pete Galton, a book that moved along a page or so at a time, with no outline, no plot held firmly in his mind, no big message, no particular notion. It was just a book.

The working title was Song of Experience, a reference to the poetry of William Blake. That was all he had so far—a title, an opening quote and around thirty pages of copy. He didn’t know when the book would be finished or how long it would run. He didn’t want to be finished, for that matter. When the book was done he wouldn’t have anything to do with himself.

Not that he did much now. He had enough money set aside—savings from his job which had paid quite well, plus a tiny inheritance that he had never gotten around to spending. It had been over three weeks since he had left the Record and there still seemed to be plenty of money on hand. He didn’t spend much. His life was simple and inexpensive. He got out of bed at eleven or so, scrambled a pair of eggs, browned a few link sausages, and washed the meal down with a jolt of instant coffee. Then he would go out for a walk, wandering rather aimlessly around the Village, enjoying the relaxed pressureless atmosphere of Greenwich Village in June. His walk usually wound up in Washington Square Park, where he sat on a bench and smoked, talking to people some of the time, watching people the rest of the time, watching and listening, and thinking his own thoughts.

He would have dinner out, a hero sandwich on Macdougal Street, a plate of fish and chips at the Brittania on Sullivan, an Italian meal at the Grand Ticino or Joe’s. Then a few beers at the Kettle, then more walking. If he ran into somebody or if there was something of interest going on, that took up the evening. Otherwise, he went home, stopping at a liquor store on Seventh Avenue for a pint of bourbon. Then he stationed himself with bourbon and typewriter, knocking off a page or two and punching a hole in the pint.

The writing was tougher now. For one thing, bourbon had a way of making his fingers hit the wrong keys. For another, there was an outside force which was disturbing his composure. The outside force consisted of the pair of girls in 3-A.

Damned little dykes, he thought. I don’t mind how frequently you make it, but you could at least have the decency to make it quietly.

He listened to the squeaking of the couch and he remembered what the girls next door looked like and he imagined how they must look at that particular moment, lying naked in each other’s arms and finding cute little things to do to each other. The thought made writing out of the question. He limped to the bottom of the page, then took the sheet of paper from the typewriter and added it to the stack of completed manuscript pages. He was too dragged to do any more writing. It was, he reasoned, the fault of the dykes. By a single couch-squeal they had accomplished three things—they had made him realize how much he needed a woman, and how alone he was, and what a prison the apartment was becoming.

Pete Galton stood up, returned the typewriter to its carrying case, and placed it in the closet to discourage burglars. He sipped once more at the bourbon, leaving enough in the bottle to take the edge off the morning after. Then, thoughtfully, he placed the bottle by the side of his bed. That way he would be able to reach it without so much as opening his eyes.

On hot days like this one he generally wrote in his undershorts. Writing in your undershorts is acceptable anywhere, but going out on the street in them is out of the question, even in the relatively liberal atmosphere of Greenwich Village. He got dressed—a blue shirt with the sleeves permanently rolled up and a pair of light-weight summer slacks—and left the apartment, locking the door behind him. On his way out he growled angrily at the closed door of the apartment where the couch was still squeaking in a rhythm as old as the human race itself.

It was almost as warm on the street as it had been in his apartment. He stood in front of 21 Gay Street for a moment, not sure where to go. He wanted something to happen, something fast and furious with nothing coming behind it, a quick sexual outlet with no strings attached, no hangover, no claims.

He walked from Gay Street to Christopher, over Christopher to Bedford, until he found the place he was looking for. It was a cellar bar on Bedford Street, a place you only found if you were looking for it very carefully. Tourists never found it and most Villagers were unaware of its existence. Not even it’s name, Ariadne’s Web, appeared anywhere outside.

It was an unprepossessing place. The walls had been painted flat black in the twenties and left untouched since then. The heavy oak tables were the same as they had been many years ago. And the men and women, sitting and staring into wine glasses like absinthe drinkers, looked as though they had been there for years, and as though they would remain motionless until the end of time.

Pete found a table. He ordered a glass of red wine from the bearded waiter and paid for it when it arrived. It was sour but delicious, and he sipped it slowly, wondering how it would mix with the bourbon. Poorly, he decided.

Pete glanced around the room. In one corner a boy of about eighteen slumped in his chair, head thrown back, eyes fixed, staring at the lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling. The boy’s pupils were little black dots and his nostrils were distended. His fingers drummed a rigid tattoo on the tabletop.

A few men and women whom Pete sized up quickly as heroin addicts sat immutable, occasionally raising a heavy hand to scratch a chest, their eyes opening and closing in remarkably slow blinks, their breathing shallow. They were waiting patiently for the Man, the Connection who would make everything good again.

Pete drank his wine. Get in deep, he thought. Be the world’s greatest spectator. Watch human sickness through a neat knothole and if you ask me I could write a book. What else?

The waiter came around again and Pete ordered another glass of wine. He drank half of it and discovered that he was a little bit drunk. The discovery was not at all unpleasant.

The front door swung open. Heads turned—junkies waiting for the Man wheeled around to see if it was Him. They saw a girl instead, sighed, turned back and waited once more. Pete Galton stared at the girl and watched her walk to a table.

He looked at her, appraised her and decided that this was the one, this would do for the evening, it would be quick and easy and good enough for a night, with no strings attached and no hangover, no heartaches on either side, no nothing, nothing but quick relief and quick abandon.

She was not beautiful, but she did not have to be beautiful. She was young, maybe too young, maybe under eighteen—God, were there girls left in the world under eighteen?—but she was there and she didn’t look like a junkie. She knew what was happening and she wouldn’t mind if it happened to her. She had dirty blonde hair and she wore it in a pony tail. Her eyes were eye-shadowed, her lips gummed up with white lipstick. Beat? That was this year’s classification. And what would next year’s classification be? And did anybody care?

He walked over to her, taking the remaining half-glass of wine with him. She looked up and studied him, saying nothing, her face expressionless. He sat down without waiting for an invitation, raised the glass of wine in a mock toast, and drained it.

Her voice was low, disinterested. He didn’t answer her. Instead, he stared into her eyes. There was no worry, he decided. She was over eighteen.

“I want to make it with you,” he said finally. He grinned inwardly at the way he shifted gears automatically, talking hip talk now as if it were his native language. “I want to take you to my pad,” he went on, “and tear your clothes off and toss you on the bed and play games with you.”

She thought that one over. He stared at her breasts and his desire for her began to turn into a physical thing, strong and demanding. It was too warm to be cool.

“First, like I never have eyes to make it straight. When I make it I like to make it on pot. You dig pot?”

“It makes everything cooler,” she said. “Deeper. You hear the notes and the space between the notes. But,” she explained, “I’m out.”

She shrugged. “I like . . . have my own kind of kicks. You might not have eyes for them.”

“Like there’s one thing you got to do to me first or I won’t be able to cook. You know what I mean?”

She smiled. “Groovy,” she said. “Hit me with a nickel. Then wait here while I cop. I’ll be back in like five, ten minutes.”

He took out his wallet, gave her a five dollar bill and watched her disappear through the door again. She swung her behind when she walked and her dungarees were tight on the swinging behind, which made a pleasant picture. Pete wondered idly whether he would ever see her again, whether his five dollars would disappear with her. It didn’t make too much difference but he sort of hoped she would be back. For one thing, he wanted her. For another, he had never had marijuana before, despite what he had told her. He’d been planning on trying it for months but had never gotten around to it.

He had another glass of wine while he waited. For some reason the wine wasn’t reaching him now. A few minutes ago he had felt drunk, and now he was almost sober again. It was strange.

She did come back. She walked in, looked at him and looked away quickly, then motioned toward the door. He waited while she looked around the place and left. Then he walked out after her and joined her on the sidewalk.

“I copped,” she said. “A nickel’s worth. He threw in some paper, too. You know how to wheel?”

“Then I will. I’m not too good but I can roll something smokable. We’ll manage. My name’s Sandy, by the way. Where did you say your pad was?”

He showed her. They walked side by side, back over Bedford to Christopher, across Christopher to Gay Street. They did not hold hands or talk, and Pete knew suddenly just how necessary the pot was going to be. Now the whole thing was ridiculous, ludicrous, a man and a girl going to a bedroom with nothing in common but a vague and undirected sexual urge. They would have to get high, he thought, or they simply would not have the slightest inclination to make love. They would have to get high or they would be bored with each other.

He led her into his building and up the stairs to his apartment. He unlocked the door and they walked inside. The apartment—one room plus a miniature kitchen plus a bathroom—was a mess. There were cigarettes butted on the floor, circles from glasses on the furniture. The bed was unmade.

They sat on the edge of the bed and he watched while she rolled the marijuana cigarettes. The marijuana came in a small brown envelope. She opened it, held a piece of gummed paper between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, spilled a little of the green-brown stuff into the paper and rolled a cigarette. She rolled it very thin and twisted the ends. She made six cigarettes, then closed the envelope.

He knew how to smoke it. He took one of the cigarettes and put it in his mouth, then lit it with a match. He sucked the smoke straight into his lungs in a long drag, keeping his lips slightly parted. The smoke was hot and burned the back of his throat. The taste was hard to describe—not bitter, not sweet, very distinctive.

He passed her the cigarette, holding his breath until she had done the same thing and was passing the cigarette back to him. Then he let the smoke out in a rush and took another drag on the cigarette. This time he didn’t notice the heat of the smoke as much as before.

He shrugged. He was patient, awaiting the reaction that he was certain would come.

“You got to help it along,” she was saying. “Relax, try to feel it moving inside of you. Like it’s music and you’re trying hard to listen to it. Like tuning in on it.”

They smoked. His arms grew loose, heavy, and he could feel the blood in his veins, the movements of his internal organs. Things moved very slowly, very slowly, and he could see with his eyes closed and hear without listening.

“You’re getting there, baby.” It was Sandy’s voice but it seemed to be coming from a hundred miles away, filtering slowly through to him. “You’re going way up, baby. We’re both flying. You get that, baby? Flying!”

She started giggling and he couldn’t understand what was so funny. Then, unaccountably, he was laughing too, giggling hysterically over nothing at all. He couldn’t control himself, just kept laughing and laughing like a lunatic.

They smoked, laughed, talked and said nothing. Then all at once the marijuana was gone and they were sitting side by side on the bed, looking very intently at each other, and Pete knew that it was going to happen, that in its own way it was going to be very good, that he needed it now more than ever.

It wasn’t that pot was a stimulant, he thought to himself. His sex urge was no greater than it had been before. It was just the way the drug had of making all the connections, of showing you the spaces between the notes. Wasn’t that how she had put it? Something along those lines.

They did not know each other, and did not particularly like each other, and under other circumstances kissing would have been ridiculous. But they did kiss, now, and it was good—a sensual kiss, with his tongue plunging deep into the confines of her mouth, tasting the sweet taste of her, tasting the un-bitter, un-sweet taste of the marijuana, tasting and caressing.

She was wearing a white jersey tee-shirt that he pulled over her head and dropped to the floor. She was not wearing a brassiere. Her breasts were big and soft, nothing like the pert happy breasts of Linda, but now Sandy’s breasts seemed eminently desirable. He cupped one in the palm of his hand, closing his eyes and feeling the softness and smoothness of the breast. He could see it through closed eyelids, see it and feel it and—

They took off their clothes. He kissed her on the mouth again, then crouched over her and began kissing her breasts. Taste, touch, smell—all sensations were magnified incredibly and he found himself wanting her urgently, needing to take her and possess her at once.

He looked at her, unable to understand what she was talking about. What on earth had he promised?

“Like what you would do,” she explained. “Before we make it there’s something you have to do.”

He remembered now, very vaguely. Then she showed him what she wanted him to do, and he did it the way she wanted him to do it.

The caress set her on fire. She writhed and squirmed and moaned and she was ready and it began. Their lovemaking—except that it was not lovemaking, not by any stretch of the imagination. It was valuable and it was necessary, but it was not lovemaking and could never be called anything of the sort.

It was furious yet lacking in fury, intense yet curiously detached, profound yet meaningless. It was a new experience, a new batch of sensations, a brand-new and totally different approach to the same old thing. He felt everything, everything there was to feel, and yet in the depth of his being he felt absolutely nothing at all.

In a strictly physical sense it was better than anything that had preceded it. It lasted longer, for one thing. Time lost all importance—there was only him and the woman, only what they were doing, removed from the world in space and time. There were moans and groans, twists and thrusts, hands on flesh and mouth on mouth. That was all. Time and space were unknown quantities, pointless decimals lost in a void of smoke.

But in any sense other than the physical, in any frame of reference other than the purely sensual, there was nothing happening, nothing going on, nothing at all. There was no rapport, no feeling, no meaning, no depth.

Which was strange. Very strange and very hard to comprehend in its totality. Better to ignore the missing depth, the missing meaning. Better to explore the physical, to feel anything and everything, to make an eternity last forever.

They were lying on the bed. Their bodies were not touching and their eyes were closed.

“Let’s like fall asleep, Pete. It’s good, falling asleep while you’re still a little bit high. You get a good sleep that way. Two or three hours and you get as much rest as a night of straight sleep. It’s good that way.”

“That was a gas, Pete. Tell me something. You never made pot before, did you?”

“I’m not putting you down. I just wanted to know. Dig, I’ll be gone when you wake up.”

“Like I’ll go home. You’ll probably want to be rid of me by then anyhow. You ever want to connect with me, I hang around Ariadne’s Web a lot of the time. Or the Fishhook. That’s over on the east side off Cooper Square.”

“It’s a good place. But listen—I’m leaving the rest of the pot here. I mean, you paid for it. And we only used maybe a quarter of it. It’ll last you a while. You want to cop, I can always put you hip to a good connection. Just get in touch with me.”

She stopped talking and he let himself drift off in the general direction of sleep. He was still very high, although the full force of the marijuana had been dissipated slightly by the sexual activity. He was still high enough for his mind to follow strange and unfamiliar thought-patterns, racing along over strange trails and hitting weird resting-places.

He didn’t fight it. He relaxed and let himself think about Sandy. He wondered who she was and where she had come from and what she did and where she lived and what her last name was. He felt as though he was having a glimpse of a new world, or as if he was looking at the same old world through somewhat different eyes.

He wondered vaguely what was coming up next. More of the same? Or a retreat, a trip back to the relative safety of a job on the Record, stories to write and people to see and a steady seventy-five hundred a year, then a wife and kids and a happy happy home in Connecticut or Nassau County or—

The thoughts trailed away and he watched a parade of colored lights across the retina of his mind. He thought about Sandy and the two dykes next door and Linda and the girl who had just moved in that night—he had caught a glimpse of her but couldn’t remember what she looked like.

Then he thought about nothing at all, merely watching the mental lights, eyes closed. Sandy slept at his side but he was not conscious of her now, had, in fact, already forgotten her. He watched the colored lights, watched them glimmer and twinkle, and finally watched them fade slowly, very slowly, to blackness.