at U Mass when, on a whim, he’d switched buses. He arrived in San Francisco carrying only his dad’s WWII duffel bag stuffed with clothes, and settled into the National Hotel, an ancient and decrepit red brick SRO on Market Street. He found a job selling porn at a store in North Beach on Broadway near the Condor: a club notorious for its gigantic sign depicting a bikini-clad Carol Doda, queen of the topless dancers, with flashing red lightbulb nipples. Then, he took up poetry.
“Really?” I found this shocking. Who wrote poetry?
“I was into Jim Carroll and Patti Smith, so I bought some yellow legal pads and just started churning it out.” Michael’s eyebrows indicated he was being sardonic and modest. “It was about losing faith in church and state, the city’s squalid underbelly, the horrors of human perfidy, Beatnik-y stuff like that.” I wondered what perfidy meant but was loathe to interrupt his flow by asking. “I didn’t know what do with my poems, so I’d stand outside bars at last call to read them. I was not a smash hit so I gave it up and started hanging out at the Mabuhay where I saw your friend Jennifer.”
I managed to interject the first bit of my own bio: atheistical leftwing half-Jewish family, bookworm, and aspiring writer of comical essays—but before I got any further Michael yawned and rolled onto his side. “Well, g’night.” His breathing quickly grew slow and regular. He was sleeping. For a long while I lay perfectly still, so smitten I could barely breathe. Eventually, I molded my body against his and drifted off. The next morning, I rose gingerly so as not to disturb the sleeping beauty beside me and tiptoed to the kitchen to fix English muffins. When I came back, Michael was stretching himself awake. He cast a bleary glance at my alarm clock. “I should go.” As Michael threw on his clothes, I scribbled my number for him on slip of paper. He thrust it into his jeans pocket and gave me a little wave. “Later.” As he clomped down the front stairs, I wondered if he’d call.
Michael did call. And call and call and call. At first, he did most of the talking, lecturing me on European cinema, existentialism, Stephen Sondheim, radical labor history, German expressionism, glam rock, and similar arcana. Eventually I began talking back and we got into a series of unresolvable debates. Was Franz Marc a great painter? Was US entry into WWII justified? Were the Monkees really better than the Archies? After a few of our epic gabfests my six roommates jointly demanded I quit monopolizing our shared telephone, so I started hanging out at Michael’s place.
Everything about the National fascinated me, from the 300-pound mannish leather dyke at the front desk to the communal bathrooms (ick!), to the mysterious residents—down-and-outers, new-to-towners, and suspicious characters who looked like they might be “on the lam.” Michael’s room was miniscule, so eventually we’d sally forth into the city to drink at dive bars, eat greasy Chinese food, shop at thrift stores, dance at clubs, crash parties, see bands, or just roam the streets from dusk till dawn, both of us always talking, talking, talking.
Often as not, our conversation devolved into airy persiflage.
Example #1: Say that anti-gay demagogue Anita Bryant let loose in the press with another “homosexuals will destroy civilization” tirade. Me: “She might be right. Bonds of male loyalty—team spirit, party affiliation, and nationalism—feed on sublimated homosexual longing. Desublimate it and men will unbond, plunging society into a war of each against all.” Michael: “Which would actually be quite refreshing. Western Civilization is becoming intolerably repetitive. We’ve had so many wars they’re not even naming them any more, just giving them numbers. World War One, World War Two . . . It’s like they’re not even trying.”
Example #2: Say we hear someone playing new wave pretty boy Adam Ant’s cover of the Doors’ song, “Hello I Love You.” Me: “Adam Ant has made Jim Morrison redundant.” Michael: “No, the Doors are unique, though they should only be listened to while driving ninety miles an hour on the L.A. freeway in a big American car after midnight.” Me: “You can imagine Adam Ant kissing himself in the mirror, but not Jim Morrison. Why? Adam Ant is aware of his own narcissism, Morrison wasn’t.” Michael: “That ‘know thyself’ business is overrated. Boys wrapped in a cocoon of self-delusion are much sexier.”
Within a month of our meeting, Michael and I were best buddies. We never slept together again after that first night (to my great disappointment). I was not, apparently, Michael’s type. What his type was I didn’t know, as he kept his love life shrouded in mystery. With Michael’s coaching I managed to date a couple guys but couldn’t get serious about either of them because I found men who weren’t Michael deadly boring. I thought that since we were obviously soulmates we should be lovers too, but whenever I brought it up (probably twice a week at least), Michael laughingly poo-poohed the idea. By my reckoning, that didn’t really matter. We were a pair of merry malcontents, a dynamic duo, a conspiracy of two, and I was certain we’d never, ever part.
Then, one pale, gray February afternoon a year-and-a-half after we’d met, Michael phoned with some news. “I’m moving to New York.”
“What?”
“My plane leaves tomorrow.”
Vertigo. Dizziness. Terror. “But why?”
“I’m bored.”
Chapter 5: New York, New York
A FEW LONELY MONTHS AFTER MICHAEL departed, I dropped out of school, quit my messenger job, and said goodbye to friends and family so I could join him in Manhattan. Arriving in the June of 1981, I settled into town with plenty of gusto, but no savoir-faire. Utterly lacking in experience, skills, or stick-to-itiveness, I got—then lost or quit—a series of menial jobs in record time: mail room clerk, bicycle messenger, bathhouse attendant. You couldn’t sink any lower. As for living quarters, Michael and I shared a studio on West 14th Street, a gang and graffiti-ridden boulevard of broken dreams. Our building was in some sort of renovation limbo and not strictly supposed to be inhabited so there was no heat, but it did have a loft bed, which I thought terribly chic.
Most every evening Michael and I popped pills—black beauties, Christmas trees, white crosses—then hit the bars for booze and chatter. New Yorkers have always been a garrulous lot, and even in the lowest dives people held forth on art, politics, and their homespun philosophies, along with the perennial gay topics of which famous people were secretly gay and where all the hot boys were. When, thanks to the pills, we started feeling tingly and superhuman we’d head off to Danceteria where we’d dance to the likes of Soft Cell, O.M.D., Heaven 17, Altered Images, Taco, Fad Gadget, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Scritti Polliti, Pigbag, and Yaz.
Michael, always looking for social significance, ascribed world-historical importance to our nightlife. “Nightclubbing is recreation, and recreation allows us to re-create ourselves and society,” he proclaimed. “It’s easy to tune out the disadvantaged when they’re chanting slogans and waving protest signs. But at nightclubs, everyone’s guard is down and they’ll listen to strangers who’ve led lives different from their own and learn to see them as human. You can change people’s opinions faster with stories than debates. For example, Gilded Age plutocrats only socialized with their own kind so they didn’t see the working class as human. Then, in the Roaring Twenties with Café Society, it became hip to socialize with writers, gangsters, flappers, artists, actors, and musicians. The rich learned to see their social inferiors as fun, interesting characters and consequently developed sympathy for them. That breakdown in snobbery helped make the New Deal possible when the depression hit. And after interracial socializing became popular with Beats and on the jazz scene in the 1950s, it became de rigueur for whites to support civil rights. Now that straight people socialize with gays at discos and new wave clubs it won’t be long before supporting gay rights becomes so hip only total bumpkins will dare be homophobes.”
