21 Gay Street

The we he used was an editorial we, for Pete Galton was quite alone, seated in the chair in front of the table in his own apartment, looking at but not seeing the wall across the room. His eyes were out of focus and his head was spinning.

Where we do not go, he thought sadly, is back to the book. The book, such as it was, had come to a standstill that threatened to be permanent. The book had stopped, quite simply on the very same night that the twin introductions to Sandy and marijuana had been so neatly accomplished. Before he had gone out that night the portable typewriter had been stashed away and the pile of completed manuscript had been placed in a drawer. The manuscript, as far as he knew, still reposed in the drawer. The typewriter, as far as he knew, had neither been lost, strayed, nor stolen. He could not tell for certain, because he had been careful to look at neither manuscript nor typewriter since. He was interested in neither. He did not want to write anything and he did not want to look at what he had written and he especially did not want to think about the whole miserable scene.

He ran his hand over his face, which itched persistently because of his failure to shave. If he went without shaving long enough he would have a beard which would not itch, but for the next couple of weeks he was in a bind. What he had now was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a beard. It was a mess, and it itched, and there was little else to be said about it.

It was Wednesday and since Friday night he had been neatly transplanted to another world, a world that had begun with pot and Sandy. It was a weird world, more bad than good, but a world that he had neither the ability nor the slightest desire to leave for the time being. Just as Sandy had managed to be peculiarly more and less than pure sex, and this at the same time, so the new weird world was more and less than what he wanted. Confusing and weird and difficult to ponder accurately.

He had been saying to hell with a great many things lately. It began Saturday morning when he awoke, mouth dry, limbs heavy, but curiously refreshed, more refreshed than he had been in a long time. He had looked around for a trace of Sandy. True to her word, she was gone. No woman slept by his side. But he could still smell the very physical smell of her, could still remember the touch of her. He started to get out of bed, started to dress, and then discovered the brown manila envelope that Sandy had left behind, the marijuana that was her legacy to him.

He remembered that marijuana was illegal, that possession was good for a stretch of a year and a day. His first impulse was to throw it out, flush it down the toilet, or, more sanely, find Sandy again and give it back to her. But something kept him from doing just that. Instead, for some reason which he didn’t bother to inquire into for the moment, he picked up the small envelope and placed it in a drawer in the brown cigarette-scarred dresser.

Then he scrambled four eggs, because he suddenly realized how very hungry he was, and tossed a chunk of cheddar cheese in with the eggs for flavor. He ate the eggs right out of the aluminum skillet, wolfing them down like a man who had not eaten in days, and was surprised to find that he was still vaguely hungry after he had finished them. He put water on to boil and made himself a cup of instant coffee and toasted bread, which he ate while he waited for the coffee to cool. Then, over coffee, he smoked the first two cigarettes of the morning.

He thought about many things while he smoked the cigarettes and drank the coffee. He thought about the marijuana, about Sandy, about the book, and, inevitably, about Linda. What he did not consider was that his life had changed, that he was not going to work on the book that afternoon, or the next afternoon, or ever, that another plateau on the road to Where-in-hell-are-you-going had come too quickly upon him.

He realized that later, slowly, as he walked through the streets of the Village as he walked every day. It certainly did not come in a flash. It came gradually and in a hundred different tiny ways. It came with sights and sounds, thoughts and unspoken words. It came in a new type of perception of the world around him, a fourteenth way of looking at Wallace Stevens’ blackbird, a different manner of hearing sounds and seeing sights and smelling odors.

It was not the marijuana which had done this, nor Sandy, nor anything that simple. It was, in a sense, something that had been building since Linda Medellin had disappeared into thin air, had metamorphosed into somebody else’s wife. It had begun, truthfully, perhaps long before that—rooted in the person Peter Galton was and the person he was becoming.

The night, the pot and the woman—catalysts working changes that had to come. Not a new progression but a step along the lines of the old one, a step thoroughly consistent with quitting the job at the Record and living behind a typewriter and under a stone.

And so he had walked around, looking at the same people and seeing new faces, walking the same streets on somehow different feet, hearing differently, smelling, tasting and touching differently.

That afternoon he did not wind up back at his apartment settled behind his typewriter. He wound up instead in a tiny jazz club on the Lower East Side with hyper-modern music tearing at his intestines and abstracts on the walls howling at him like geometric banshees. The music had never reached him that way before and the pictures had never made as much sense. Nor did the people in the club—the long-haired girls who looked like Sandy, the hollow-eyed men who looked, to him, now, like himself—ever before seem so thoroughly akin to himself.

He went home alone, wanting to be alone, wasting a dollar on a taxi so that he could get home in a hurry. Then he had paced the floor of his apartment, trying to understand why he had come there, what it was that he had wanted or needed or craved. Then he thought of Sandy, and the envelope, and he knew.

He had never rolled cigarettes before, but he managed to teach himself, remembering the movements that Sandy’s fingers had made the night before. The first try didn’t work at all and the marijuana spilled on the floor. He had plenty, he could have afforded to leave it there, but something made him pick it all up and return it to the envelope. Then he tried again.

The second attempt was better and the third was better still and as he continued rolling slender cigarettes and twisting their ends, he began to glow with a feeling of accomplishment. He rolled all of the marijuana, making an impressive total of fifteen cigarettes. Ten he returned to the envelope, which he replaced carefully in the dresser drawer. The other five he smoked.

He smoked slowly, alone, the windows of the apartment shut to retain the smoke, his lungs straining to hold in each dragful of smoke as long as he possibly could. He smoked all five of the cigarettes, then fitted the butts, the roaches, into a pipe he had received long ago as a present from Linda. It struck him funny, using the pipe she had given him to smoke marijuana, but he also found something vaguely appropriate in the act.

When he was through smoking, he wanted merely to lie down and think about things. He stretched out on the bed, still fully dressed, and let his mind wander. Hours later the drug began to slip free from his mind. He closed his eyes then and let sleep come to him, deep sleep that was deliciously satisfying.

That had set the pattern. The next day he smoked four more of the marijuana cigarettes immediately after eating breakfast, then went out for a walk as usual. The marijuana was different from liquor and his coordination was unimpaired, his gait steady. The sunlight hurt his eyes and he stopped at the Whelan’s at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street to buy a pair of sunglasses. Then he walked to Washington Square where a crowd of people were gathered around the fountain in the center of the park, playing guitars and banjoes and singing folksongs. He listened to them for a while, then bought a chocolate eclair Good Humor from an Italian vendor and walked over to a bench in the shade to eat it.

He hadn’t intended to mention to anybody that he was high on marijuana but he found himself talking about it to the light-skinned Negro girl who sat down beside him. She was a young girl with old eyes and perfect light-coffee skin.

He looked at her and remembered the girl named Sandy. He looked her over carefully, looked at her pointed breasts and her wide hips, and he felt a warm rush of desire.

He remembered Sandy and he decided that it was his marijuana, his apartment, his turn to impose conditions. He knew that she was willing to sleep with him but he decided that he wanted more than that, that there was something special he wanted from her, something on a par with what Sandy had wanted from him.

He told her about it. And she was willing, completely willing, and they left the park with benches and shade trees and folksingers and chess players and walked the several short blocks to Gay Street, number 21, apartment 8-B.

They smoked the six cigarettes before anything else. He was still very high from before and the marijuana he smoked now merely sent him higher and higher, turning him on to brand-new mental and sensual connections, making everything just that much clearer and rosier and greener.

Then they stood up, the two of them, bodies apart, and they began to undress. He watched her remove her clothes and saw that the body beneath them was a good one, a superb one, with firm sloping breasts and strong thighs and wide hips made for love. He looked at her, studied her carefully, and then he sat down on the edge of the bed. Waiting.

She knew her lines. She walked away from him to the opposite side of the room, then turned slowly and headed back toward him. He watched her come, slowly, very slowly, and it was torture to wait for her. But he waited and slowly, very slowly, she came to him.

They were together all that afternoon and all that night. From time to time they slept, and when they awoke their bodies rejoined and locked in combat. She was still there in the morning and he took her fiercely then, awake and hungry. And when it was over he remained in bed while she dressed and left him.

Now it was Wednesday and he was alone, smoking ordinary cigarettes with nothing except tobacco in them, wondering where he would go that night, what he would do. He had half-decided to go once again to Ariadne’s Web, perhaps to find Sandy, perhaps to meet someone else, perhaps merely to sit and drink red wine.

He thought about the girl who had bothered him on the steps, the girl who smelled of innocence, the girl with sun in her eyes, and he remembered how he had brushed her off, the sound of his own words, the hurt look that momentarily replaced the sun in her eyes. He thought about her and he wondered how she could have looked at him without seeing what he was, that he inhabited a different world and saw different things and lived a different life. He thought about taking the girl to Ariadne’s and he had to laugh. She probably would not even know enough to be shocked. She would merely fail to comprehend what was taking place.

He left then, went to Ariadne’s, and ran into Sandy. She was glad to see him, or said she was, and there was a party set for that night, and he was invited.

“Too many people,” she told him. “Deep people ready to ball. Probably turn into an orgy. They usually turn into orgies. The big sets, I mean, not the small scenes with little people who know each other and like that. The mob scenes where everybody goes to get screaming high and make it with whoever is closest. You probably won’t want to come. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“An artist, man. He says so, anyway. Also a poet, also a sculptor, and occasionally a musician. He had real trouble with the last, you dig? I mean, you buy paints, you can fake being a painter. You know what words are, you can fake the poetry scene. You buy clay, you’re suddenly a sculptor. But you aren’t a musician unless you know how to blow an instrument. He got lucky.”

“Bongo drums. You buy bongo drums, you’re a musician. It’s a cruel world. Art doesn’t support Freddie. So he has parties. His friends come free. The Madison Avenue types who want to learn what hip is pay ten bucks apiece. He thinks he’s conning them. They think they’re conning him. It’s a funny world.”

“You’d come with me,” she said, “but somebody else already picked up the option. You want to go and you don’t know Freddie, it’s ten dollars. Can you make it?”

“There’s pot and juice and more women than you can shake a stick at. If you feel like coming on, it’s at 347 Saint Marks Place. East Side. You know it?”

“Fall by, baby. I like you, I think. Fall by and I’ll save some of it for you. Won’t that be nice?”

He agreed that it would be nice. He got up and left, wondering why he should bother wasting ten dollars on a party that would probably be filled to overflowing with advertising men. Then he decided that, actually, he really did want to go. He didn’t know why.

It was silly. If he wanted a woman he could find a woman without looking very far. Women were easy to find when you had the key. When you knew where to look and what to look for, women were very easy to find.

And getting high wasn’t what was drawing him there. He had been high before. He could get high again. He could do this for considerably less than ten dollars.

Why run all the way over to Saint Marks Place, paying ten dollars for the privilege of enjoying the company of a batch of people whom he would not like in the least.

He figured out the answer. The answer was embodied in one word she had said, one single word in a long stream of words. Orgy. She had said the party would be an orgy and he had never been to an orgy and it suddenly seemed very important to him to go to an orgy. He did not know why. Unless, perhaps, it was because he would be plumbing the depths of a new desperation, sinking into the middle of a new sort of sickness.

But that was hard to answer, impossible to answer, unpleasant to even think about. He decided not to think about it and followed his feet back to 21 Gay Street, to his apartment, so that he could pick up a ten-dollar bill and buy his way into an orgy.

Joyce Kendall didn’t quite know what to make of it. The two girls, Jean and Terri, were very friendly. The conversation was as pleasant as the meal had been delicious. She talked about Schwernersville and about Clifton and about her job. They talked about New York and about their own work.

She began to get the feeling that something was going on which she didn’t understand. The looks exchanged between the two of them—nothing she could pin down, but something from which she felt somehow excluded. The way one or the other of them would say something which would seem to have two meanings, the one she understood and the one shared by the two girls.

Oh, nonsense. She decided that she was making a big production out of nothing. Of course she was left out of part of the mood. After all, they had known each other for ages and here she was meeting them for the first time. You could hardly expect a relationship to blossom in which she instantly was party to all their backlog of experience. That was ridiculous.

Terri stood up. “I have to run,” she announced. “There’s an artist waiting to paint me. He’s lousy but he’s also loaded. One of those jokers who paints creamy nudes for the creeps to buy in the outdoor art show. Terrible stuff, painted by a terrible guy and sold to terrible people. But it’s money and I have to go earn some. I’ll see you, people. Nice meeting you, Joyce. Be good. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

But, Joyce thought, again there seemed to be a hidden meaning in the conversation. She couldn’t pin it down, of course, but an ordinary parting rejoinder had suddenly taken on the garb of something more than that.

“Joyce? Come on in and have a seat. I’ll put a stack of records on the player.”

She sat on the couch and Jean sat in the chair. There was an expression on Jean’s face now that was a new one, an unfamiliar one. Again—and it was becoming standard procedure now—it was one she couldn’t pin down, couldn’t define, couldn’t place, couldn’t categorize.

They sat in silence. The music was unfamiliar, too-modern classical music, harsh, strident, discordant. She did not like it at all.

It would have been better if Joyce was either unattractive or obviously gay. One way or the other the fencing would be done with, the games would be dispensed with, the party would be either on or off and no two ways about it.

Now she was sitting in her apartment with a beautiful girl who was not, unfortunately, a lesbian. Which gave her two alternatives. She could forget sexual interest in the girl, or she could come right out and tell the girl what was coming off. Either way would be, at least, honorable. Either way she would be avoiding the type of mess that had happened with Carole. Either way, win or lose, she would be able to look at herself in the mirror.

The sensible thing, of course, would be to forget the girl, to let her be a friend but to keep sex out of the picture. The sensible thing, she knew, was not going to work in this particular instance. Joyce Kendall was just too goddamned attractive. Any girl with a face like hers and hair like hers and breasts like hers and a behind like hers was just . . . too . . . God!

Jean sighed. She wanted to come right and tell the girl, to blurt out I’m a lesbian and I want to lay you. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She liked Joyce, liked her as well as desired her, and she didn’t want to hurt or shock the girl. She wanted to lead up to it slowly.

Jean nodded. “I don’t mean to pry,” she said. “But did you ever . . . do anything with a man? You know what I mean.”

The answer made her hopeful. If Joyce had been sleeping around and then had stopped, there was probably a reason for it. And the probable reason was that she hadn’t been satisfied. Something must have been missing. The girl was probably a lesbian, a lesbian who didn’t yet know the truth about herself. Jean’s mouth went dry with anticipation. She would be the one to teach the girl everything, to show her the meaning of love, real love, not the sort of mess that men and women went through but the true and beautiful love that only two women could share.

It would be the first time for Joyce. She would be a willing pupil and Jean would be a more than willing teacher.

Joyce was puzzled. “Of course I enjoyed it,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I enjoy it?”

“No,” Jean said slowly, carefully. “Some women just don’t enjoy sex with a man.”

Her hands trembling, Jean got up from the chair and sat on the couch next to Joyce. She couldn’t stop staring at the girl. She looked at her breasts, imagining what they would feel like, smell like, taste like—what it would be like to stroke them and cup them and play with them.

Mentally, she pictured Joyce welcoming her advances, submitting to them, glorying in the parade of brand-new sensations. She imagined the way Joyce would moan softly when Jean’s lips closed over a nipple, playing with it, tugging at it, until the long-haired girl would go out of her mind, with passions that were new to her.

“Joyce,” she said softly, “some women don’t enjoy sex with men. Or they think they do, but that’s because they don’t know what they are missing. There’s a lot that women like that are missing. Do you understand?”

It was hard now, very hard. And she knew that she was going to lose, for the moment at least, that she was going to shock and stun the girl no matter how hard she tried to be gentle and slow with her. Joyce would leave and Jean would not have the sweetness of the girl beneath her, the bulging breasts swelling in her hands.

Joyce’s eyes went very wide. They held a vague, faint glimmering of recognition.

That did it, Jean thought. That shot the works. The horror and nausea in the girl’s eyes was unmistakable. There was no way to rationalize it. She was not only uninterested. She was literally sick.

“And you want me to be like you? You want me to be a lesbian and sleep with you?”

The girl was standing now, her hands outstretched to defend herself, to keep this evilness away from her.

“I thought you liked me,” she was saying. “I thought you wanted me to be your friend. I was just trying to be friendly. I just wanted to have somebody to talk to. And all the time you were thinking about what I’d be like in bed. All the time you wanted to get my clothes off and . . . and—”

“Stay away from me! Damn you, stay away from me! I’m not a lesbian. And I don’t want to see what it’s like or to see you or your girl friend or to talk to you or to have anything to do with you or to, or, oh, oh leave me alone!”

Then she was running for the door, tears streaking her pretty face. Jean made no move to stop her, called no words after her, stayed instead where she was and thought about what had happened. What had happened was not good. What had happened was horrible, as a matter of fact.

She had been so sure about the girl for a moment there. But it had all backfired, had all blown up in her face. Now she was alone, frustrated, unable to sit still and unable to cease hating herself.

Joyce locked the door of her apartment, ran to the bedroom and threw herself down on the bed. She had never felt quite so horrible in her life. Even the first shock of the break-up with Joe Cardigan had been nothing compared with this.

She had never met a lesbian before, had never even thought much about homosexuality. She had read a book once, a book by an author named Lesley Evans, a book entitled Strange Are The Ways of Love. The book had been about lesbians and she thought back to the girls in the book and wondered if she could be like them. No, she decided, she couldn’t.

She didn’t understand. All she knew, all she could think of, was that her loneliness before was nothing compared to the loneliness she felt now. Now she was lonely, now she was alone in a very private portion of a very private Hell.

Jean and Terri had been the only friendly people she had met. The only ones. And why were they friendly? Because they were after her. Because they were interested in taking her to bed. That was all they wanted. Joyce Kendall as a person didn’t mean a damned thing to them. Joyce Kendall was only important as somebody to seduce, somebody to kiss and touch and take to bed.

That was all anybody wanted, she thought. People were only interested in themselves, in what they could get. People were mean and rotten and narrow and self-seeking. She would do better keeping to herself in her apartment, working at her job, living her own life.

The loneliness that covered everything like a shroud. The loneliness that, even now, while she was still reeling with the shock and horror of discovery, made her think for a fleeting moment that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to sleep with Jean, to live with the two of them, because that way at least somebody would talk to her, somebody would pay attention to her, somebody would like her and spend time with her and care about her.

She had to find somebody. She had to find somebody or go mad trying. Somebody somewhere would want her. If it was a man, and all the man wanted was to sleep with her, well, even that was better than nothing. She would sleep with a man if she had to. Just so she wouldn’t be so completely alone.

The apartment was a trap. She got up from the bed and went to the door. She went outside and started off down the block, not very much caring where she was going, who she would meet, what they would do. She knew only that, whoever he was, she had to find him.

To say that Pete Galton was surprised when Joyce Kendall threw herself into his arms is to make what might well be the understatement of the century. He was overwhelmed. For a minute he couldn’t remember who in hell she was. Then he remembered. Of course. The cornfed thing who wanted somebody to talk to. Hell of a way for an innocent cornfed thing to act.

“Listen to me,” she was saying. “Just listen to me. I know you don’t like me and I don’t care. I just want to be with you or I’ll go out of my mind. I need somebody. I’m alone all the time and I can’t stand it. I don’t care who you are or what you want or where you take me. I just can’t stand it if I’m alone all by myself for another minute.”

He thought for a few seconds. Then he smiled slowly, remembering where he was going, to the apartment of the artist-of-sorts named Fred Koans.

He wondered what it would be like to see Little Miss Cornball at a first-class orgy.

He decided it might be interesting. Very interesting. It would cost twenty bucks instead of ten, but it just might be worth it.

“Relax,” he told her, stroking her soft hair. “You just relax, baby. You can come with me.”

“You wait right here,” he said. “I got to get some money. I’ll be right back.”