For a moment I thought I’d been caught red-handed. Storytellers have a way of improving their stories over the years, and I am certainly no exception.
“Did I remember it correctly?” I asked nervously.
“Actually,” he replied, “it’s better than you remembered.”
This is how Brinkley put it in his book: “As fine a humor writer as Armistead Maupin turned out to be, the transcript of the White House tape recording of this meeting reads even funnier than does his remembrance of Nixon’s small talk.” As proof of this, Brinkley offers this word-for-word comment from the president after he made that remark about the little butterflies: “It’s quite a sight. They told me when I was there in ’56 that a Vietnamese mother tells her daughter that she is to carry herself like a swan. And I don’t mind saying, just among our . . . and I’m no expert on this thing, but the Vietnamese women are actually not all that attractive. But I have never seen clothing that does more in, shall we say, a spectacular way than it does for the Vietnamese. But you all know that!”
I SAW NIXON one last time when I returned to Washington the following year for his inauguration. I spent most of that time loitering in bunting-hung ballrooms with other blazered young men, but the event that lingers in memory was the night I sat in the Presidential Box for the Inaugural Youth Concert. There was a blue velvet rope between me and the First Family, but they were all just a yard away: Pat and Dick, Julie and David Eisenhower, Tricia and her new husband, Edward Cox, and old Mamie Eisenhower herself, the former first lady, now a fragile seventy-five. Toward the end of the evening a self-confessed Republican rock band performed an atonal update of “If You Don’t Want My Peaches, Don’t Shake My Tree.” I could tell that Mamie was jarred by all those pounding decibels, but she kept on smiling gamely as she plugged her gloved fingers into her ears.
When the audience began to clap along, Nixon tried to be a good sport and join in the fun with “the kids.” I could see him clapping from where I sat, and it was a pitiful sight. Somehow he missed the beat every time.
For at least a year after I moved to San Francisco I proudly displayed a framed photo of Nixon and me shaking hands in the Oval Office. I figured it would start conversation, and indeed it did when I brought guys home from the bars on Polk Street. Almost to a man, they reacted with looks of revulsion and mild panic, as if they had just realized they had been picked up by Jeffrey Dahmer.
After Nixon’s resignation I took the picture down and never displayed it again.
ON MY FIRST night in San Francisco I slept at the Press Club, a fusty old residence on Post Street with frayed chenille bedspreads and clanging pipes. I was staying there as a guest of the AP bureau chief until I could find a permanent place to live. The club was for journalists, as the name implies, but in 1971 women in the profession were still refused full membership because men swam naked in its pool. That sounds promising, I know, but the place was not even remotely gay. For that, I had to walk a block uphill to Sutter Street to a club called the Rendezvous. How I knew that, I couldn’t say for sure; I may have stumbled across a stray copy of the Bay Area Reporter, a gay handout whose initials conveniently spelled out the word bar.
It took commitment to visit this place. You couldn’t just look both ways and slip in off the street to check out the crowd. Once past the door you were faced with a dauntingly steep staircase that offered no clue as to what awaited you at the top. There would be no easy escape. It would be like that scene in Advise & Consent when all those shadowy faces at the bar turn to cruise the anxious newcomer. I was on the verge of bolting when, somewhere above me, the voice of Barbra Streisand reminded me that we’re just all children, needing other children, and yet letting our grown-up pride hide all the need inside. So I took a deep breath and began to climb.
It was worse than I thought. They were slow dancing with each other, all those men on the dance floor, slow dancing to Streisand under twirling colored lights, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. There was a DJ on one side spinning records in a glass booth that looked like a radio station. The call letters on his mic were KYKY. I didn’t get it. I thought it was a real station, in fact.
Tacky doesn’t scare me anymore, but it did back then. I didn’t stay long at the Rendezvous, and I don’t recall a single face from my first-ever visit to a gay bar. I wasn’t recoiling from pickup sex; I was already beginning to get the knack of that. On my way to San Francisco, after that surreal audience with Nixon, I got stranded in a snowstorm in Laramie, where I had picked up the desk clerk at the Wyo Motel. I had chatted him up so long that he finally invited me behind the desk to watch a TV movie, a remake of Death Takes a Holiday with Yvette Mimieux and Bert Convy, which I had endured in its entirety before working up the nerve to invite him to my room. He told me he would meet me there. When he finally showed up at my door, fat snowflakes caught in his flaxen hair, he was holding a six-pack of beer I’d never seen before. This would welcome me to the West, he said, since it was made with Rocky Mountain springwater. I didn’t like the tinny taste of it, but even Coors, a brew I would later boycott for its antigay policies, paired well enough with a plump, pink penis on a snowy Wyoming night. And I did feel welcomed to the West.
So it wasn’t the prospect of sex that had rattled me at the Rendezvous but a sudden vision of institutionalized queerness. Was this how I wanted to do it, after all—with the twirling dancehall lights and the slow dancing and an overall air of lurid tattiness? Nowadays I would relish the chance to be in such a place, a room wiped clean of techno music and video screens that didn’t look like some chrome-trimmed sports bar in the Indianapolis airport. For that matter, I would love to be able to slow dance with my husband without feeling the least bit silly.
But I’ve never been quite in sync with the times.
THE AP BUREAU was located on Market Street, in the Fox Plaza building, a looming concrete tombstone that marked the grave of the grand old Fox movie theater. The work of a wire service, I soon learned, was a never-ending treadmill of words—not unlike the Internet—since the news was never “put to bed” the way it was with newspapers. There was always the other wire service, the UPI, running neck and neck with you. Even worse, you were rarely offered a byline to inspire you to do your best work. I was told by more than one person that the AP doesn’t make stars, and that seemed true enough, with the exception of the blandly named Bob Thomas, who worked at the bureau in Los Angeles and covered movies.
For my first assignment I was told to follow a four-mile peace march through Golden Gate Park to the Great Highway. I’m sure this had everything to do with that detour I made through the Oval Office a fortnight earlier but no one at the bureau was ungracious enough to rub it in, or even mention the warmonger Nixon. That march gave me my first taste of San Francisco Values, not to mention jubilant public nudity, so I collected wacky details and shared them with my coworkers back at the bureau. I liked most of those people, and they seemed to like me. One experienced and chipper young woman who sometimes ran the desk at night was especially helpful. She would whisper to me what the sport was (“That’s basketball”) when I had to take scores over the phone, thereby sparing me the humiliation of having to ask the gruff-sounding guy on the other end of the line.
Others were not so kind. When I reported to work one evening, a disgruntled veteran of the bureau, clearly resigned to never becoming chief, poked his finger in my face and said: “Listen, bud, I’ve got my eye on you. People tell me you’re lazy and you talk too much and you waste too much time polishing your stories. That shit doesn’t cut it around here, so just watch your step. Understand?”
I did understand, depressingly enough. I had spent far too much time working on a feature piece about the king of the Gypsies in the East Bay. But that story was fascinating and full of rich details, and never before told, so I wanted to make it sparkle. And if I was a little talkative sometimes it was only to allay the grim gulag atmosphere of that room. But I wasn’t lazy, dammit. Who were the
“people” who were saying that? And why had they left it up to this asshole to tell me?
I was sure I was about to be fired, so I fell into a crippling depression for the rest of the night. On the way home, in the sickly green twilight of a Muni bus, I resolved to think of nothing else for the rest of the ride. It’s an old trick of mine: banish every thought from your head except the one that’s tormenting you and you’ll soon grow weary of it. It’s a sort of meditation on misery. You’ll be forced to stop torturing yourself. It worked that night, and it was still working the next morning when it occurred to me that I wasn’t important enough to be fired. I could keep this job forever, doing grunt work ad nauseam, like this bitterly unhappy man who had just tried to break my spirit. I could do that, but I would not.
I resigned a month later. My delicately worded letter to the bureau chief explained that I wanted to look for something “more creative.” The chief said he was disappointed to see me go and warned that it would be hard to get work as a feature writer at the local newspapers. He proved to be dead right about that.
Flash forward to a new millennium and a book signing in a large California city. An older man has been in the line for my autograph for at least an hour, so I tell him I’m sorry about the wait. He brushes it off with a wave of his hand.
“Do you remember me?” he asks.
I don’t remember him, so I say what I usually say when someone puts me on the spot like this: “Help me out here, would you?”
He tells me his name and says that we worked together at the AP.
I recognize him instantly as my tormentor on that demoralizing night. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I say, wondering if he remembers how he treated me. He doesn’t seem to remember a thing, so I don’t bring it up. He thinks we were good buddies. I sign his book Thanks for the memories, keeping the last laugh to myself.
MY FIRST APARTMENT in the city was a furnished front room in a yellow Victorian house on Sacramento Street. It had flocked wallpaper in a vibrant shade of whorehouse red, like most of the fern bars in town; I loved that about it. I would be living alone, so, for company, I bought a mynah bird at a pet shop on Fillmore Street. He had impressed me when he said HOW ARE YA? in the shop, but unfortunately that proved to be his only impersonation beyond an ear-piercing whistle that suggested someone had left a tea kettle on too often in his presence.
The apartment was a block from Lafayette Park, so I soon discovered how busy the bushes were at night. It was a Pacific Heights sweater-and-slacks crowd, which struck me at the time as sort of hot, and I could invite guys back to my place after checking out the goods. Most of my fellow bushmen, however, wanted to get off right there on the spot, despite (or maybe because of ) the threat of the police. Squad cars would make the loop at the crest of the park, flashing their high beams to flush us out of the brush like so many quail at a Dick Cheney shooting camp. As soon as we saw those beams, we would scatter and go bounding down the steep open lawn to Gough Street, yelping like pups. Or at least I did, on more than one occasion. The one time I went to another guy’s place—where I had naturally presumed he lived alone—his lover came home and saw us and pulled a full Jacqueline Susann on me, shouting SLUT as I grabbed my clothes and stumbled down the hall. I was laughing when I got to the elevator. I was a slut. And beginning to enjoy it immensely.
I had several subsequent hookups with one of the guys I met in the park. It never got serious, but I really took to his friend, Nancy McDoniel, a young actress from Missouri who played Nurse Ratched in a Little Fox Theatre production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Though she brought an icy hauteur to that role, she was kind and warm and elegant offstage, and we were good friends in the seventies until she moved to New York for acting work. Our friendship informed the one I would eventually create for Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton—a naive gay man feigning sophistication with a slightly more naive young straight woman. Nancy, like Mary Ann, also had a “good-time Charlene” roommate, a United Airlines stewardess, as we called them back then, who kept bottles of Jade East and Old Spice in her bathroom cabinet for the convenience of the men who would sleep over. Nancy and I would giggle about “the friendly skies” of that bed down the hall.
So it was that guy I picked up in the park, Nancy’s friend, whose name I have long since forgotten, who answered a question I put to him nervously one night.
“What does it mean when your pee turns the color of bourbon?”
It meant I had hepatitis, of course. My liver had been kicked to shit, and I had been dragging around listlessly for days, and every time I came home the damned mynah bird would yell HOW ARE YA? HOW ARE YA? HOW ARE YA? and it wouldn’t make a bit of difference if I covered his cage with a towel, since he would only turn into a screaming tea kettle in retaliation. The doctor who treated me told me I needed bed rest. That meant, in the end, giving up my apartment and returning the mynah bird to the pet shop and flying back to North Carolina for a mother’s care. It meant that my golden California Dream had come to a screeching stop.
Back in Raleigh, I would lie in bed all day, staring up at the stained-glass window I had designed as a teenager starved for a little color. My mother was very sweet, thrilled to be taking care of me, as I knew she would be. Only once or twice did she approach the subject of how I had acquired the hepatitis. “There are lots of ways to get it apparently.” She was laying a breakfast tray on my bed, French toast with eggy crenellated edges, the way I like it. Her tone was both breezy and forced. “I hear you can even get it from a toilet seat,” she added. She could talk herself into anything.
A case in point: in those days she and my father were riding to the hounds with a fox hunting club out in the country. They wore the traditional scarlet jackets (though I had learned to call them pink, in the British manner), and I loved how they looked when they came home on Sunday afternoon, mud flecked and pink-cheeked, exhilarated by the chase, a couple straight out of Auntie Mame. They had not been chasing a fox, however. My mother, as founder of the Wake Country SPCA, would never have agreed to that. This was a “drag hunt,” so called because they were chasing the bedding of a fox, a rag that was dragged through the woods prior to the hunt. That gave the hounds the scent trail they needed, but no fox was killed in the process.
Only, one day one was. My mother rode into a clearing and found the hounds in a huddle going wild with bloodlust. Bits of red fur were flying everywhere like dandelion pods on the wind. The hounds, it seemed, had flushed out a real fox, so they were delirious. My mother fled the scene on horseback, sobbing. She was inconsolable when the master of the hounds approached and told her that these things happened sometimes in spite of their best intentions. That was not enough for her. She would never hunt again, she said, not if sweet little animals were going to be killed. The master of the hounds hesitated for a moment, then offered to share a secret with her if she promised not to tell the other members of the hunt.
That fox had already been dead, he told her, when the dogs got to him. The hunt organizers had found its corpse on the side of the highway that morning and placed it at the end of the drag to satisfy the appetites of the dogs—and, presumably, some of the humans who longed for a taste of the real thing. This explanation struck me as pure malarkey, but my mother had chosen to buy it. If she felt, as I did, that faked savagery was every bit as life-demeaning as actual savagery, she did not say so. She needed this explanation to endure the unendurable. In that way, it was not unlike the case of hepatitis her son had picked up off a toilet seat in San Francisco.
Three years later, when my mother’s breast was removed, I sent her a stuffed animal that I’d bought in New York City at F.A.O. Schwartz. It was a little red fox, soft and squeezable, and she took it with her to the hospital every time she went back.
MY TWO-MONTH RECOVERY seemed to take forever. At night, down in the Chimney Room, with its used brick fireplace and Confederate flag and oiled chintz café curtains, my childhood lurched back like the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
threatening to drag me under. In my early youth I had wanted to live in this house forever (or maybe next door, in Miss Lillian’s little house, after she died) but that dream was gone now that I’d become one of Tennyson’s lotos-eaters. My brother and sister were already married and living away, so I would sit with my parents in the blue light of television, annotating scenes from The Streets of San Francisco.
“That’s the cable car I take to work!”
“That’s Russian Hill, where I want to live next!”
“Look! Angel Island! I went there last summer!”
And thus I held tight to the paradise that had almost been lost.
ELEVEN
I DID FIND A PLACE ON Russian Hill—that “pentshack” I mentioned earlier—a tiny studio perched on the roof of an old yellow-brick house at the crest of Union Street. The address was 1138½, a satisfying echo of 38½ Tradd Street, my storybook aerie in Charleston. To get to it you had to climb dozens of steps, some through the steep front garden, still more through the side of the house until you reached the roof. The moment I saw the view I knew I was home. There was a sliding glass door that opened on to a painted plywood deck that opened on to the full pageantry of San Francisco Bay and the distant mountains of Marin. At night the beacon on Alcatraz pulsed softly against the wall, so softly that I didn’t notice it for weeks.
The main room was only big enough to contain an armchair and a bed, a problem discussed at length when my parents visited and found me sleeping on a mattress on the floor. My mother suggested that what I needed was one of those captain’s beds with drawers beneath it, so I could at least have a little storage space. So my father measured the room with his conveniently foot-long feet and we drove out to an unpainted furniture store in Mill Valley. There, as any idiot could have predicted, the choice of a bed took on embarrassing dimensions.