the students in his discussion group ask him for explanations of the same terms, he raises his eyes to heaven and declares, “Don’t ask me. You’ll have to ask Professor Moebius. I have no idea what it means.”
A chairman’s job is not (always) a happy one. But, as my friend John Del Gaizo (who is subletting my apartment back in the city) keeps reminding me, what they pay you for is the unpleasant parts of your job: failing kids and telling good-hearted disasters that they have to go home.
At this point, though, I must tell you about a pleasant young fellow of 36 whom I’ve known for most of a year and who has been living with me, here and in the city, for the past two months. His name is Dennis Rickett. For six years he’s been homeless and living on the New York streets. His stomping grounds for the past couple of years have been 72nd Street, where he had a blanket full of books he sold from during the day.
One winter’s day, when I was down from Amherst for a few days, I went past, when he was squatting at the corner of his book display—a very dirty guy in an even dirtier jump suit, fiddling with a fairly large radio.
A maroon paperback of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It lay on the ground, and I picked it up. It was priced at two dollars. I decided I wanted to read it, and went digging under my winter coat at my pocket.
But I’d left my wallet at home.
I laughed and told the guy what had happened. Under his woolen cap, pulled low over a few year’s growth of gray-shot hair, he smiled over a mouth full of almost no teeth at all within his scraggly, once-red beard and waved a big gray-black hand at me with bitten nails: “Take it. You can bring me the money the next time you come by …
So I did.
(“Hey, you really brought it back,” he said, with a faintly bemused smile on the slightly warmer Wednesday morning, two days later. “I didn’t think you would.”)
Which is how I first began talking with Dennis. He was a quiet, good natured, very simple guy. His old man had been an alcoholic truck driver, occasionally in jail, but very close with Dennis. They’d worked together, all through Dennis’s adolescence and early twenties. Dennis loved him a lot. One night Dennis was out at a bar. His father, drunk and on foot, went looking for him—was hit by a truck and killed. Dennis’s family—none too bright Irish/German working class, from Brooklyn—kept ribbing Dennis about his father’s death being Dennis’s fault. Dennis started to drink heavily, while carrying on an affair with (in his words) “a fat, nymphomaniac girlfriend,” which ended, after two years, with girlfriend gone, Dennis and his family permanently estranged, and Dennis (then age thirty) living on the streets.
With his shopping cart full of books and belongings, he’d been at his present location for about a year—going across Central Park at night to sleep in the doorway of a Madison Avenue art dealer’s, then coming back in the morning (stopping in the park’s public restroom—when it was open—for minimal washing, to masturbate, and take a dump) to the West Side to sell his books, look out for cars, do little side-walk sweeping up jobs for the store owners around.
For the first three months I knew him, it was the most passing of acquaintances. Then, I began going down to look for him in his doorway and to hang out with him for the odd hour. Sometimes, standing around on the street, we’d have a coffee. Sometimes we’d have a beer. In the course of that time, Dennis got rid of the shopping cart, and began to travel with a backpack—which he wore almost constantly and which must have weighed a good fifty, if not sixty-five, pounds. Oddly, it was Dennis who first brought up the possibility of sex—with a passing quip between beers, back in mid January:
“I got it pretty good out here,” he told me one day. “All I really need is a lover.” Which he presented as kind of a joke, since he was dirty enough—no, the word I want is filthy—enough to preclude most people’s sexual interest in him.
A couple of days later, when we were again talking on a rather blustery winter’s day, he shoved his hands deep into his jumpsuit pockets, grinned at me, then looked wistfully off down the street. “You know, I ain’t been to bed with a women in six years. You hear women talk about guys who just want to keep them for their bodies, an’ they don’t like it. Well, I wouldn’t mind it if some guy wanted to keep me just for my body. Me, I think it’d be kinda pretty cool.”
Both comments stay with me because I didn’t respond to either one—at least right away. But a day later, when I went down, I asked Dennis if he was serious what he’d said yesterday. He said,
“Maybe, I don’t know,” which is what Dennis says to a lot of things—today, I know that that’s generally his code for “yes”; but at the time I didn’t.
We talked about our mutual sexual preferences—what we did and didn’t like to do in bed with other men. We both agreed they sounded pretty complementary. I said that if he was serious, maybe we should try spending a little time together. Yes, I found him attractive, underneath (and, hell, just a bit because of) the dirt. Dennis’s response was, “Yeah, maybe we should. We seem to get along pretty good.”
I was back and forth from Amherst a couple more times before I put a proposition to him:
“Look,” I told him one morning. “I’m going to get a motel room for a couple of days. We can go there, spend some time, and see how things work out.”
“You wanna do that?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Okay.”
And the next time I came down, as soon as I got off the bus, I went to the Skyline Motel on 10th Avenue and 49th Street, rented a room for the weekend, and came back to seventy second street that afternoon with the pair of rectangular plastic “keys” (perforations at one end, like single ended dominos), and showed them to him. “I’ve got a room. You want to keep yours? And you can come down there, whenever you like.”
“Naw,” he said. “You keep it, for me. I don’t wanna go there by myself. I wanna go there together.” Generally a pretty indecisive guy, sometimes he’s quite straightforward.
So we agreed I would pick him up at nine o’clock that night. One of Dennis’s jobs was watching out for people’s illegally parked cars. An owner of a bedding store on the block gave Dennis ten bucks a day to watch his car; if the police came down the block, giving out tickets, Dennis would go into the shop and get him, and the man would drive his car off before the police made it to his spot. “And he don’t leave the store, sometimes,” Dennis explained to me, “till eight-thirty or nine sometimes.”
At nine that night, with a Pakistani cab driver supremely indifferent to my muddled instructions about picking up a friend on 72nd and continuing down to 49th, I took a taxi down to the all but deserted commercial street.
No Dennis.
So I got out and let the cab go, wondering if he’d chickened out. I ambled over to stand in his doorway, thinking I’d give him half an hour to show up. Every five minutes or so, I’d glance up and down the street.
After about ten minutes, I glimpsed a figure wearing a backpack, carrying a bed roll, and hurrying from the east. Through his scraggly beard, Dennis grinned at me. “Oh, man!” he said, hurrying up to me. “I’m glad you’re here. I kept thinking I was gonna miss you!”
“I was going to wait,” I told him. “It’s okay.”
“Fifteen minutes to nine,” he said, putting
