1995 - 1. Chapter One

Has your life ever imploded? Mine has, a few times. The first was in the winter of 1994/95. Having your life implode is different from exploding. Your life exploding is where all kinds of crazy things happen in a short period, you feel like you’re driving too fast on ice, and you’re barely in control. No, an imploding life is where everything comes to an end at the same time and you have to start it all over again. It’s like driving in the rain and getting a flat tire. You know you can fix it, but there will probably be blood, and you’re going to get very wet before it’s done. At no other time is there so much room for re-interpretation and re-invention. It can be thrilling, and horrifying.

In 1994 I was living in New York City, on a great street in Greenwich Village, in a cute little illegal sublet, with a very nice boyfriend who will remain nameless. Ok, his name was Terry and we were very much in love, in 1993. The problem was not his doing. It’s just that I was bored. Back then, I got bored easily. I was not a good boyfriend. No, that’s not right. I was a great boyfriend, but a terrible lover. For six months or a year, I could be devoted, loyal, and committed. After that, I just couldn’t help myself, I would stray. A lot.

Terry, like most of the gay men I knew at that time had been an actor, even having a master’s degree to prove it. He was the best educated receptionist I’d ever met. He worked at a popular daytime television show answering the phone and as a sort of assistant to the assistant of the star. At this point, he hated it, believing that he deserved to be at least an associate producer, and he probably should have been.

I described myself as a ‘Fitness Professional’, which meant I worked at a gym. I taught aerobics, worked on the gym floor and did some personal training. I worked for at least 2 or 3 different gyms a day and would commute back and forth between them on my rollerblades. You could say I was fit. That part was a plus. But, I was over thirty and knew that I couldn’t keep up this pace for too much longer. And there was a looming question over my head, What next?

One of the definite plusses of being with Terry was that he and I made a very attractive couple. He: black, bald and tall. Me: white, curly blond and tall. I’m truthful enough to admit that part of why I stayed with him, was how we looked together. I’m also shallow enough to admit that it’s true. Plus, there was the apartment.

When we met, I’d lived in Hell’s Kitchen in a really fantastic apartment which was in a really horrible building, in a pretty bad neighborhood. Terry moved in with me there after he discovered that either his apartment was haunted, or his room-mate had been sneaking into his locked bedroom. Either way, he had to get out. That’s when we heard about this sublet in the Village. It was half the size of my current apartment at twice the price, but it was Greenwich Village. A place I’d wanted to live since I’d seen “My Sister Eileen” when I was 12. We had to have it.

What is an illegal sublet, I hear you ask? At this time in New York, renters usually signed two-year leases. Many people would sign a new lease, then move out, renting their apartment to someone else. Usually charging twice the price or more of what they were paying the landlord. The beauty of the arrangement was that legally, the landlord couldn’t do much until the lease expired, then they could evict whomever was living in the apartment without a lease. Of course, once we moved in we were trapped. Neither one of us could afford the place without the other, so we couldn’t move unless we both moved. I’d waited my whole life to live here, so I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, and well, he loved me and didn’t want us to be apart. Did I mention that he didn’t yet know about the straying?

But, let’s back up. When Terry and I first got together, I was living in a 5 floor walk-up apartment in Hell’s Kitchen on 10th Ave. Although the apartment had potential, the neighborhood was pretty grim. Half of the residents were on rent strike. The apartment across the hall from mine was empty, with broken windows and was very popular with pigeons. But I had a lease in my name, 9 foot ceilings, a view of downtown Manhattan, New Jersey, and the Hudson river - if you stuck your head out the window. One thing about living on the 5th floor, you think good and hard about your day before you leave in the morning. If you forget something? You don’t go back for it; you just make due.

When I first moved into my apartment I didn’t notice the prostitutes right away. Late at night they would be on the street corners, looking like they were waiting for a taxi. After a few late nights coming home, I did notice that they were always the same women looking for taxis. The first few times they saw me, they smiled and waited to see if I was going to talk to them, I suppose. Then, after they figured out I was a local, they would just lift their chin to me in greeting. I felt lucky having them around. Even when it was very late, the street deserted, and I could hear my own shoes sounding on the
sidewalk, they were a comforting presence. I especially felt lucky after learning that on the street corners a few blocks south were drug dealers. They didn’t come to my street, and the ladies didn’t seem to go to theirs. Hey, it worked for me, and made me feel a little safer. You take what you can get when you live in a crummy neighborhood.

Terry was a member of a gym I worked at, which had been famously popular with gay men back in the 80’s, but by the 90’s was looking a little sad. It was located above a D’agostino’s grocery and was not so cleverly called ‘fags over D’ag’s’ by many members. I used to watch Terry take aerobics. It was a beautiful thing. As class progressed, his brown, finely muscled legs would begin to shine like he’d been oiled for a photo shoot. His spandex short-shorts and tee-shirt would cling to his back and ass, becoming translucent when wet with sweat. Once the endorphins kicked in, he would begin to throw his head back and whoop with the music. I guess it was pretty obvious I was interested in him by the way I stared, because he later told me it was.

Terry was part of a large group I knew who never had their own place. They would rent a bedroom, or do a summer sublet, but never bother to get their own place. I guess that’s because they always wanted to be able to go somewhere at a moment’s notice. Where that was, I never knew; Park Avenue with a new sugar daddy, or L. A. for pilot season? Whatever, it never happened. They just tended to bounce around.

I first spent the night with him in his apartment in what is now called The Flatiron District. Then, it was called, ‘near the Flatiron building’. The fancy name came later. It was a glorious ‘L’ shaped studio in a converted loft with huge windows, soaring ceilings, and original 12” wide plank wood floors. The problem was that club kids lived downstairs. At night, you could actually see when they turned on their lights, because they shone through the planks of the floor. The several hours it took them to get ready to go out in the evening were usually from around midnight ‘till two. They wouldn’t get back until around nine or ten the next morning. Every night around midnight the ritual would begin: On would come their lights, shining little strips of light through the floor onto the ceiling far above; on would come the club music, thumping up through the floor; and on would come their bitchy club banter, at full volume. They weren’t the kind of people you could ask to be quiet. So, a month and done with that place.

The next apartment was a much more regular apartment on the Upper West Side. A seemingly nice gentleman with a nice three-bedroom apartment was renting out one of the nice rooms. He had lots of rules: about the refrigerator; label everything. About laundry; must be done weekly. About guests; only one at a time. Oh, and don’t mind the ghost. Things supposedly moved around by themselves, he said, to be found in strange places. So, he was eccentric, but not as bad as club kids. Terry was happy there for a few weeks, until things started to get weird. He had a lock on his bedroom door, which he always kept locked, but sometimes when he’d come home, his laundry basket would appear to have been moved, or the blanket on his bed would look different from how he left it. His shelf in the fridge would also get re-arranged.When Terry asked the very nice room-mate about these things, he claimed, “Well, I surely don’t know anything about it. I told you this apartment has a ghost. It must have been him.”

That’s when we decided he should move in with me into my Hell’s Kitchen walkup. We had some really good times in that apartment. I don’t remember them, but I’m sure there were very good times, it’s the bad times that I remember better. There was the time we ordered Chinese food and the delivery man buzzed the door, I pushed the button to let him in, but he didn’t come up. Eventually, I walked down all 5 flights, to discover a water-fall coming out of the ceiling in the hall between the front door and the stairs, with the delivery man on the other side of the waterfall. I had to jump through, get the food and jump back. The worst part was that the water was a sort of beige color.

My worst memory of that apartment is of having Chicken Pox. Yes, I know I was old to get Chicken Pox, but I did. The itching got so bad one night, I distinctly remember having a fork in my hand and miming myself raking it across my forehead and down my cheeks. I didn’t do it, but the memory and the scars are still there. Terry was very nice to me through that whole ordeal, buying cans of sun-burn numbing spray to spray on my face, and homeopathic anti-itch pills which worked, I think. Do you ever really know with homeopathic medicine whether it works or not?

I was not as upwardly striving as Terry was. He always thought he deserved better than he had. I was happy to stay in our sunny 5 floor walk-up with the prostitutes on the corner. For some reason, he wanted better.

Let’s back up again. Terry was from upstate New York and came from some money. His parents were from the Caribbean and, from what I’d been told, quite expectant that their boy would do very well in the world. I came to learn that Terry not only expected to be a success, he thought it was owed to him, because he’d already paid his dues by going to school for so long and now working long hours at a TV show.

“Hey, Duane, I’ve heard about a great apartment in the village that someone is trying to sublet.” He said one night. “I know you love the area, right off Bleeker. We should try for it, shouldn’t we?”

“Well, of course it wouldn’t hurt to look at it,” I said, “but this place is so cheap, we don’t want to leave it and get in over our heads somewhere else.”
We arranged a time to meet the lease holders and arrived on a hot summer evening to look at the place. The street was charming, just one block off of Bleecker street, the main restaurant and shopping street in the neighborhood. Another big plus was that it was on the first floor. The only stairs were the front stoop of the old brick building, which was lovely. If I was expecting pre-war grandeur when finally seeing the apartment, I was disappointed. It was small. And crowded. And new. The apartment was filled with modern over-sized furniture which had somehow been squeezed through the door to fill practically all the floor space. What little space was left was taken by a giant dog. Some big black Mastiff type of dog whose hair and smell covered everything. The original plaster walls had been either taken down or covered up by cheap drywall, and then left unfinished. The whole impression was of a dirty crowded ugly mess. The couple who lived there were very proud of their apartment, and all the work they’d done to it. I couldn’t get out fast enough.

Stepping out of the apartment was a relief. Stepping out of the building was a revelation. We stepped out onto that stoop in the middle of the block, the street in front of us quiet, but looking down to either end of the block was all the excitement and energy I’d come to this city to be a part of, but had always felt like an outsider looking in. This was an opportunity to move into the heart of the New York of my dreams. We’d have to find a way to do something with the actual apartment though.

“What do you think?” Terry asked, once we were on the street.

We had exchanged enough big-eyed looks in the apartment that we both knew there were challenges here.

“This street is amazing”, I said, “but that place is a wreck. I’m excited and scared of that apartment. I also think this is an opportunity that we may never see again.”

“I think so too, if we can afford it, we should get it before someone else does.” So what did we do? What we didn't do is think too hard. Instead, we jumped.