Wavelength

Reason for Being in the World, Chapter 7

In the summer of my fifteenth year, our parents moved us for the third time in five years, this time, again, to New York City’s distant southern underbelly, the Rockaway Peninsula, into a trio of twelve-story apartment buildings, a new, subsidized middle income, cooperative apartment development right at the beach facing the Atlantic Ocean. The children of the initial owners got busy looking for first friends. The first friend I made was Michael, and we were very good friends for nearly a dozen years.

I remember very soon after we made each other’s acquaintance sitting on some benches facing the beach, near the swimming pool, when Michael, a blond pimply boy of my height and build, confided in me that he was gay. He wouldn’t have said gay in 1967 – probably homosexual – but he offered the revelation, and I received it, as a special confidence. I learned then that Mike was a foster child. The last name I knew him by was not his real last name, and he had been moved among multiple foster homes for much of his still short life, sometimes with his sister, with whom he had a difficult relationship, sometimes not. His current foster parents, he told me, were not emotionally supportive. A real-life Holden Caulfield, Michael perceived the world’s hypocrisies “deep down things.”

The abusive dysfunctions of his birth parents and his shuffling through foster care had already jaded Michael, and in his acutely sensitive, vulnerable searching, he survived through sardonic wit and a converse care for any he found still more wounded than himself. He confided in me, he conveyed to me, because he sensed in me a kindred, sensitive soul. He believed, very quickly, that he could trust me to understand and feel care toward him. I felt complimented and honored. Those particular words would not have passed through my mind, but I felt from Michael’s intuitive trust affirmed in my own self, seen for who I thought myself to be. That was important to me at the time — that I somehow had been perceived by someone for who I was without my having to tell him.

Over my first decades, the need to be recognized in this way and the urge to break out of a fearful inwardness led to two distinct strains in the friendships I developed, beyond the more normal ones. The first, the extraordinary wish to be intuitively known limited my friendships in life. The fearfulness produced a continuing unconscious draw toward older, aggressive, even reckless boys who would lead me out of myself, also extraordinary in that the first had tried to burn me alive.

In my own introverted and sensitive state, I had developed a desire, more than any grounded belief, that any profound relationships for me in life would arise from this natural recognition between me and another person of who each of us was. We would see into each other. This desire emerged both as a natural expression of my dreamy, contemplative withdrawal and a developing romanticism I would bring to erotic relationships.

Michael was the first person who fulfilled my wish to be intuitively known. Though I never matched his need to expose himself and share, I knew that I could reveal anything to him and not be judged, that I would be understood. He would know my pain and my need because he felt the same kind of pain and need. He knew the same of me.

It was quickly understood between us that I was not gay myself. I think Michael intuited that too. Our friendship included the occasional teasing joke, but my unnamed heterosexuality had already clearly revealed itself to me as early as the first and second grades, amid long, distracted reveries over the prettiest little-girl faces in the classroom. At the same time, my sister, eleven years my senior, enjoyed a host of especially vivacious and alluring teenage girlfriends for a little boy to be thrilled by, and they often visited our home. They thought I was awfully cute and darling and sometimes held me on their laps to be charmed. In return, I was charged by the most vivid day and night dreams within which I flitted promiscuously among the flower and fruit of beauteous young womanhood I now understood to garland the world. A belated thank you to them all.

Despite our different orientations, Michael and I were frank with each other about our sexual desires and pursuits. Once, in our early twenties, when I was now living in my first, small Manhattan studio apartment, on the Upper East Side, and while I was in the midst of a very passionate affair with an older woman, Michael and I made an arrangement. I was off to Connecticut with my love for a long hoped for weekend at a country inn. I agreed, then, to lend my apartment to Michael, who brought with him his, by then, well developed coterie of sexual playmates. Thus, while I was away consummating romantic four-poster dreams in the New York exurbs, Michael and his gang of twinks were consummating endless orgasms fornicating and fellating, by the looks of it, in every corner of my rectangle with bathroom. They even left behind some of the lovely dress-up décor with which they had temporarily re-imagined, for inspiration, my barebones young hetero digs.

Michael needed to borrow my apartment because he hadn’t one of his own. He wasn’t too long for that family in Rockaway, and at different times afterwards lived in a Manhattan residence for troubled youth and, once older, in a single room at the Manhattan YMHA, where I often visited him.

A few years before that, though, during the 1968 presidential election, Michael and I had decided to travel by subway into Manhattan from Rockaway to attend a Nixon campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. We wanted to witness. Amid the surging crowds on the many Garden ramps and stairways, we became separated from each, so I ended up approaching on my own, at the end of one ramp, the doors to the arena’s upper reaches. As I neared, I was quickly caught under both arms by two clean-cut and suited security personnel, who, having decided I was not a likely Nixon supporter, turned me forcefully away and hustled me down the ramp. I had rights, my sixteen-year-old personage offered in protest. The serious men were mute before my rights. I decided not to take it to the Supreme Court.

At sixteen, I didn’t look like what I would look like only a year later, a long-haired, bearded acid-head freak. In further contrast, just a year earlier, at the time Michael and I met, I was, politically speaking, a conventional product of post-World War Two cultural mythologizing. Because I was such a fearful child, the many combat films I watched and Civil War histories I read, the Western films and the plentiful idealized American representations that filled the television airwaves had all shaped my naturally idealistic self into a proudly patriotic teen. As foreign as it was from any family experience, I imagined becoming a United States marine.

Why? asked my older brother Jeff, worldlier and wiser and more ironically skeptical than I, beyond just his five years greater age.

They’re the first to go, I said proudly.

Jeff’s derisive, cackling laugh, which I shall miss all the rest of my days, resounded through the air and in my ears.

Because they’re the first to go? — he repeated and laughed some more. Little brothers are so much fun.

The idealism never left me, or the patriotism, despite the deeper learning in American and world history to come that grounded it in the real world and no form of utopian vision. It doesn’t occur to many of the people who reflexively invoke Samual Johnson’s famous pronouncement that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” that it is more insightfully a commentary on scoundrels than on patriotism. Oscar Wilde understood this when he said, “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” We need to be clear about where the wrong lies. Still any virtue can be vitiated by abuse. Even piety and the Lord’s kingdom. The natural directions of my self-development, however, did lead me soon enough to recognize that my proper identity was not that of any kind of soldier.

It is a common development among people who undergo significant transformations, as I for the first time then did, to do so reactively, in an overcompensating reversal. I saw this among the extremes of my politically awakened peers and elders of the countercultural left, who, beyond criticizing the American war in Vietnam for multiple good reasons, felt ideologically compelled to champion Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong. Like their own forebears of the Old Left, who opposed fascism by idealizing Soviet communism, the perception of one fault blinded them to the stain of another.

I did, in fact, by 23, once my hippie days were over, myself react in a quiet aversion to the foolish excesses of the counterculture. For one thing, I dramatically changed my appearance and lost, for a time, all interest in avantgarde cultural representations. A consequence of this lost interest was that I missed by avoidance the whole punk and glam rock, heavy metal, and New York downtown alternative music scenes of the late 70s and early 80s. These were the years of my business career, when I was learning instead, classical music, jazz, and the American song book. Later, I had a lot of catching up to do with some good music, but there were lessons for me in both the aversion and the later recovery of what I had missed. That music and those scenes became subjects for me of cultural and human study rather than any direct or even vicarious encounter with my own life experience. I no longer felt the particular rage and rebellion of punk rock, for instance, or, later, grunge, but the success of the music’s energy offered further insight for me into the recurrent human experience of youthful rebellion and disaffected alienation. I enjoyed the music, could enter while listening, from memory, its world, but it was no longer my world. I didn’t wish to inhabit the climate that produced that music, and my learned and studied experience of countercultures and avantgarde artistic movements became that while they periodically provide necessary and valuable social critique and correction, they never offer a replacement world, in total, any more coherent, successful, or righteous than the worlds they judge and reject. The personal alignment to one or the other demonstrates mostly a far from negligible aesthetic orientation to being in the world, generally imbued with much moral judgment from an assumed superior standpoint unsupported by experience.

In any event, one wants to ground one’s way of being in social and self-understanding and not in any reactive overcompensation or emotional aversion to a former state of being or identity.

1970 “Hard Hat Riots”: Unidentified photographer.

But back in 1968 and the years soon after, before all that, the United States, like much of the Western world, was rocked and roiled by just such cultural rejections and realignments of identity. Among the mistaken stereotypes of New York City in those days, like California now, was of its “far left” liberalism. But like the vast conservative, exurban and rural interior stretches of California today, New York City was then broadly arrayed with working class neighborhoods – Irish, Italian, Polish, more – that were fiercely resistant to the countercultural wave. New York’s liberal Mayor John Lindsey was roundly despised by half the city, as Bill de Blasio recently was through his two terms. Neighborhood stores boldly displayed “America: Love it or Leave it” signs that made a grungy, longhaired teen in Mexican vest like me rightly wary to enter. The Rockaway Peninsula, all on its own, contained the full range of economic and ethnic stratification, from professionally affluent, even gated and exclusive communities to middle- and working-class neighborhoods and a social overload of housing projects for the poor occupied by African Americans among the surrounding Irish, Jews, Italians, and Poles, sometimes poor themselves.

1970 “Hard Hat Riots”: NYPD Intelligence Records, Photograph Files, NYC Municipal Archives.

In 1970, the city’s “Hard Hat Riots,” a reaction to the counterculture and the anti-war movement, signaled a political realignment to match the “southern shift” to the Republican Party of southern whites that began, in presidential politics, with Nixon in 1968, then to be fully realized in 1972. By 1980, the Reagan Democrat had emerged, which would include my own parents, who had been lifelong liberals. (By the early 90s, Mac and Helen, already in their late 70s and 80s, had reverted to their more natural liberal sympathies. I listened with pride as Mom recounted to me her irate reaction to the anti-immigrant sentiments of her fellow elderly Jewish retirees around the pool in Woodland Hills: “Have you forgotten where you came from?”)

Not just politics, but identities were shifting, identities that people, in consideration of their meaning, grounded rather automatically in economic class, social milieu, ethnic and racial heritage, place and peer influence. Modern sociological study merging with political demographic analysis, ubiquitous in American news media, have together solidified these grounds of social identity and normatively enforced their vision of personhood, almost like the speed of light or the chemical element’s valence. One doesn’t argue with those facts of the physical world; one adjusts to and works in accordance with them. While political idealogues act as historical visionaries of what might be, political operatives function as vote-harvesting calculators of what is.

In 1968, I lived in the world the teenage child and grandchild of poor, mostly uneducated Eastern European immigrants. Nowhere in my known family history glimmered the golden-hued remembrance of the educated, financially successful, socially ascendant German, French, Austrian, or Hungarian Jewish communities that once had thrived and were ultimately destroyed by the Holocaust. My lineage delivered me into the world a blown cloud of the Russian Pale’s peasant dirt. There is no one else in my known family before me with my educational achievement — no intellectuals, no artists. In every lower middle class New York neighborhood where we resided, my family occupied the near lowest economic rung, working class rather than noticeably poor because of our mother’s skill in managing her uneducated sewing machine operator husband’s meager income and navigating civic and Jewish-based support systems until she entered the workforce as a parttime department store salesperson and later took a state civil service exam.

Coming of age in the New York City of that era included navigating its different ethnic and economic enclaves, with the religious and cultural heritages they represented and their enforcement into the consciousness of any next generation. One accepted or rejected for oneself the identity-shaping forces dependent on the pressures of family and community life and one’s ability and strength to think and grow for oneself. One responded to difference in other communities accordingly, and this included the affinities that guided friendly association, even among the hippies in high school hallways and freaks on the street, no matter how one looked or the music rocking from high-amped speakers.

Whatever other among these influences acted upon me, and they did, my development as an individual was directed overwhelmingly by my intellectual capacities and learning, my creativity, and the emotionality that bridged those two. All of my friendships, intimate relationships, and directional choices in life, among countervailing personal dysfunctions, ultimately flowed from those elements. Whatever free floating community, beyond family, to which I belonged along the way constituted itself from those elements and the values I developed from the intellectual and spiritual journey I recount here.

In 1998, thirty years on from Richard Nixon’s security detail strongarming me away from his rally in Madison Square Garden (where I would later cheer the Rolling Stones and George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in states of elevated consciousness), I am found a Columbia University trained professor of English and writer. I dress, often, more formally than many male English professors my age, who wear jeans and old sport coats, perched on the edge of their classroom desks and hailed by their first names as if friends with their students rather than mentors, though mentors can be friends too. I am increasingly perceived by some colleagues and administrators as white, an identifying label I have never applied to myself, rather than — unless pejoratively — Jewish, which is already becoming, for some, ideologically subsumed in the category of “whiteness”; clearly male; and because of an uneasily determined ideological orientation, as elitist and hierarchical, gatekeeping guardian of a patriarchal and oppressive literary and cultural canon. While my writing and sometimes my articulation present me as an intellectual, people who meet me after reading me are sometimes struck by a surprisingly recognizable New York urban swagger and, of course, accent not quite Oxfordian. Happily, there is an honored New York legacy of working class, New York-accented intellectuals and artists.

Who are we — what we may correctly or incorrectly perceives ourselves to be, aligned with interests, beliefs, and affinities we choose? What others correctly or incorrectly perceive us to be, implicated in structures that “privilege” us, even if we do not construct them or recognize and consciously choose them? The cross-plotted life choices, purchasing habits, and voting booth behavior of sociologist and pollster? Some combination of them all? Do we own ourselves, or are we social widgets effected along an assembly line of material predestination and causality?

In 1994, not yet tenured, I drove up to San Francisco from Los Angeles with a colleague and fell in love along the way. I was driving to visit my old high school buddy, my last hippie, Alan, then living in Cotati, a small Sonoma County town. Colleague, another New York expat, aimed to spend the long weekend visiting a lesbian friend in San Francisco. The emotional earthquake of the CD-scored, teasing and bantering intellectual joust of the drive, though we had already been flirting, shook us both. She was, I learned, seeing someone else, another colleague. Once I dropped her and arrived in Cotati, the serene Alan worked to steady my jangled nerves. During unplanned weekend reconnections, colleague conscientiously fought against her feelings.

At the end of the weekend, when I picked her up in San Francisco, I arrived early, in order to meet lesbian friend. It was a pleasant visit among socially and politically sympathetic individuals. At one point, lesbian friend informed us of some current news, a female celebrity who had come out. Lesbian friend was excited. If not literally, then verbally and attitudinally she did a fist pump. We appreciated the solidarity she felt.

On the drive back to Los Angeles, amid talk of our developing entanglement and colleague’s unconvincing insistence that nothing could happen between us, we talked about our visit with lesbian friend.

It was an interesting reaction. Why? I don’t know – the level of enthusiasm, I think. Because it seemed – Of course, she’s glad –. With the greater numbers, making it public, you feel less isolated. Right. There’ll be greater acceptance. But it’s not – It’s not like it’s a movement. Well, in a way it is. Yeah, for acceptance, rights. But it’s what you were starting to say. What? It’s not like – The rest of us aren’t going to become lesbian. Speak for yourself.

We giggled and gazed at each other.

What are we going to do? I said.

She stared at me.

The last time I saw Michael, I had been working already for a few months on the ground floor of the air courier business, in which I would quickly ascend to international executive heights, transform myself, then pass on my chance at wealth. The natural course of our still developing lives, with no mutual friends between us, had been gradually drifting us away from each other, as will often happen. He and I shared dinner together in Manhattan’s Midtown East, where I was working, before I had to leave for a scheduled conclave of the young all-male workers of my first employer in the business. I don’t recall anything else about our dinner except that Michael and I were regretful that we were having such trouble connecting lately.

The informal meeting of the staff, chaired by the operations manager, Jerry, took place in the serous business setting indoors, then at sidewalk patio tables outdoors, of the now defunct La Maganette, a gold and glassy, characteristic East Side establishment at 50^th Street and Third Avenue. We drank a lot. I drank then, different from now, not for flavor notes but rather force field effect, the way in earlier years I had consumed pot and coke and acid. We returned to the company’s Third Avenue offices afterwards — walking distiller’s vats each — and invaded the horseshoe operations room and the sober efforts of the night staff. Jerry put the Stones on the office sound system, and we began to take customer calls, contact agents, and route shipments all across the U.S., with carefree alcoholic brio, to the rhythm of “Miss You.”

Well, I've been haunted in my sleep
You've been starrin' in my dreams
Lord, I miss you

Jerry, to the beat of the base, launched, from a handy bag, M&M Peanuts all across the room into the gaping mouths of his fellows as we worked, joyful and inebriated by youth, liquor, and becoming. Like all joy in life, however, artificial and natural, it came to an end, as I sank to the floor and whirled my head into the wastepaper basket I grabbed beneath the desk to receive my vomit.

That was early 1978, the last time I saw Michael, as our planets drifted out of mutual orbit and spun away into space and darkness to the other. I don’t know, but given his enthusiastic sexual life, the chances are good he’s been dead from AIDS for over 35 years now. I hope not.

I do know this. On park benches real and imagined all over the world, sit sensitive young people uncertain of who they are and afraid, troubled by the challenges of who they believe themselves to be and lost. Every one of them needs someone to see them, to care about them without judgment, as individual human beings and not as categories — not as political props in resistance or movement posters in uprising.

They need more than just someone. The world can be colder than the dark side of the moon.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com