And To Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street
by Richard Grayson
Laura says Labor Day is the most bittersweet of holidays. As a kid growing up in Canarsie, I dreaded the end of summer while also knowing that the blank sheets of notebook papers in my loose-leaf binders were all potential A’s or 100’s. By October, when the nights would grow chilly and my papers would come back covered in red corrections — how did I ever become a writer anyway? — the endless days of July and August seemed the remote past, along with the hopes I had for the new school year. Classes were boring, the days were getting shorter and grayer, and life generally sucked moose.
Stephen and I met in Advanced Drama class our senior year at Canarsie High School. In eleventh grade I’d almost failed English the first semester: I never bothered to read Huckleberry Finn because Miss Shapin introduced it by reverentially reading aloud from the book’s opening and humming “NNnnn” when she came to the racial slur. In those stupid days I had founded and presided over an organization I’d named SPONGE, the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything. When we had to write a book report on an autobiography, mine was on My Shadow Ran Fast by a white ex-convict I’d seen interviewed on the Mike Douglas show. “You should have selected a more admirable person,” wrote Miss Shapin — I told everyone that her name described her physique — and gave me an F. But I just passed that term with a 65.
Laura, the baby and I are back from our three-week rental on Fire Island, where I got barely any work done, and Nick, my almost-seventeen-year-old son, has returned from spending the summer in San Jose with his mom. It’s Saturday afternoon, cloudy and cool and lazy, when Nick comes into my office with his boyfriend Kevin.
I did much better my second semester of junior year, when English was speech and drama. I was good at debate and liked the plays we read: the robots in “R.U.R.” and the Jewish veteran suffering psychosomatic paralysis in “Home of the Brave.” I had a crush on young, blonde Miss Squicciarini, who gave me an A on the essay I wrote on the latter play, explaining why the film version changed the hero into a black man. My final grade was good enough to get me into Advanced Drama the next year, one of the few twelfth-graders in the class who hadn’t taken Drama with Mr. Haring all junior year.
“Hey, Dad, how’d you like a chance to relive your past?”
I didn’t know anyone that first day in Advanced Drama, and I sat alone at a two-person desk, feeling like a creepy loser. Mr. Haring had Stephen come down from the back row to sit next to me. Before that first class was over, Stephen whispered to me, nodding his head toward Mr. Haring writing on the blackboard the title of the Stanislavsky paperback we had to buy: “He hates me.”
“No thanks” is my instinctive reply, but a parent has to squelch his or her instincts. I raise my eyebrows instead, a gesture my characters also favor.
“I’m talking about your CBGB-and-Club-82-going, Ramones-and-Blondie-listening, hanging-with-Legs-McNeil days,” Nick says. I wonder if the baby will grow up as verbal as her half-brother.
Mr. Haring made us do three scenes with a partner each semester. For the first one, Stephen and I did Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with me as Nick and him as George. He rolled his eyes at our first rehearsal at his apartment when I suggested he imitate Richard Burton in the movie.
As Nick finishes the start of what promises to be a long spiel, Kevin looks toward the ceiling. Half-Puerto Rican and half-Chinese, he’s two years older than Nick and has been a college student (at NYU) for at least a week now. Nick’s still in high school, a senior at Stuyvesant, where they met in the Gay-Straight Alliance. Kevin’s the more sensible of the two, and I say that only because I know Nick a lot longer and better.
Kevin, the son of two professors at Brooklyn Law School, lays out the facts. He turned eighteen last May and can get into tonight’s 10 p.m. show in the basement of Northsix, one of those clubs that have made Williamsburg the hipster capital of the known universe in the last few years. Nick won’t be legal for another thirteen months, so seeing the quadruple bill of punk bands tonight will be impossible unless he’s accompanied by a parent or guardian.
I am Nick’s parent. Therefore, if I go to Northsix to hear Seein Red, Kriegstanz, Bury the Living, and Kill Your Idols — well then, Nick can hear them too.
Among his other caustic comments on our acting, Mr. Haring asked, “What made you decide to make the choice to play them as pansies?”
You’d think a boy would be far more embarrassed to be seen in public on a Saturday night with his father than he would be upset about missing what sounds like a middling show. Even I know the basement venue has to be inferior to what’s going on upstairs. I don’t know what’s wrong with these kids today.
I didn’t get it. Everyone knew Mr. Haring was homosexual. I had no problem with that but I couldn’t understand why he’d use a word like “pansies” if he was like that himself. “It’s the same reason he hates me,” Stephen told me while we were walking up Rockaway Parkway after school.
“Do they really check ID?” I ask. My son already has a decent black goatee. Noticing his caduceus of chest hair this morning, Laura felt she had to remind Nick to wear a T-shirt when he comes to the breakfast table for his Cocoa Puffs. With commendable logic, Nick told his stepmother that he’d give her request more weight if she hadn’t made it while baring her own left breast to feed Lucy.
Nick actually looks older than the angelically smooth-faced Kevin, whose dyed red bangs make him look twelve to my presbyobic eyes. But even if he can’t remember the last Democratic mayor, Kevin doesn’t need his dad — who, by the way, who wouldn’t score half as high as moi on the hipster-o-meter — to accompany him to Northsix tonight .
I went on to do my other scenes with girls, playing the seductive Jean to Karen Kramer’s Miss Julie, wearing my tightest T-shirt to be Stanley Kowalski opposite Nina Camerlengo’s Blanche du Bois, getting into bed (four desks moved together) with my wife Rosemary Benevenuto in The Fourposter, but Stephen and I remained tight through our time at Brooklyn College, even though we traveled in different circles.
“Yeah, they’re very strict,” Nick says. “You know, alcohol and all, they’re afraid of trouble.”
“Okay,” I say. “I don’t have to change, do I?”
“Nah, you’ll fit right in.”
“Yeah, right,” I say.
I became political, grew my hair long, had a girlfriend who thought she was the next Joan Baez. Stephen majored in Speech and Theatre, started pronouncing his name “Steff-in,” got campier every time I’d have coffee with him every couple of weeks at Sugar Bowl.
Still, he made me crack up more than he did in high school — even when his remarks were at the expense of my own pretentiousness. And he had his own demons. One time we were walking to Baskin-Robbins on Flatbush Avenue and he suddenly said we needed to cross the street. Only when I pressed him later did he tell me he saw his father coming in the other direction.
Stephen’s parents, unlike mine, were no longer together. “You don’t know what it’s like to hear all that shit and see your mother with two black eyes in the morning,” he told me.
“Sweet,” says Nick. Then, to Kevin: “Let’s go to Grand Street and get him a pair of earplugs.”
“Hey, I don’t need them,” I tell him. “You think I’m not man enough to hear loud punk music? I was listening to that shit long before you were born.”
“Um, Mr. G,” Kevin says, “we’ve got earplugs for us already.” He smiles beatifically. “We don’t want to go deaf like you baby boomers after years of going to arena concerts and listening to your old, what do you call them, records.”
“Think of them as ear condoms, Dad,” Nick says. He and Kevin make eye contact. “You know the two of us always play it safe like the public service announcements tell us to.” They’ve got on devilish smiles.
I nod, tell them to get out of my office, I can still save part of the day and get some writing done. Nick’s been out since he was thirteen.
I saw Stephen less and less as I got more involved with politics — campus stuff and the McGovern campaign — and going out with Yolanda and fighting with her took more and more of my time.
Then, one September night senior year — it was Rosh Hashanah, so things were quiet in the city — Yolanda and I ran into Stephen and a friend at Azuma on West Eighth Street.
The West Village was the place where Yolanda and I felt most comfortable together, so we went there for a lot of our dates. It wasn’t that cool for us to be seen together in Canarsie back then.
Stephen’s friend was John, who actually looked a lot like Stephen: tall, dark curly hair, kind of stocky. Yolanda and I had been bickering all evening and it seemed like she welcomed the presence of other people, like she knew it might avoid yet another cycle of breaking up and trying to get back together, something we were sick of by then.
So we walked across the street with them to Orange Julius and then accompanied Stephen and John to a movie they’d already seen: Pink Flamingos. I’d heard about it, of course, but I assumed Yolanda wouldn’t be interested.
Yet after it was over, walking up Sixth Avenue, with John and Stephen on either side of her, me hugging the sidewalk, she said, “That was the most disgusting film I’ve ever seen. I loved it.”
Usually Yolanda and I would take the IRT to the end of the line, Flatbush Avenue/Brooklyn College, and we’d get the Avenue J bus to take us to Canarsie. But John lived in Williamsburg — the other side of Brooklyn — and that night we took the LL train with them at Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street.
John’s stop came up surprisingly soon after we got out of Manhattan. It was pretty late, and the subway car had just contained the four of us and the conductor. I wasn’t prepared for what I’d see as we screeched to a halt at Lorimer Street. Stephen got up with John to the door and just before it opened, he put his arm around John and kissed him. On the mouth.
The conductor looked disgusted. I had a sick feeling in my stomach. Yolanda was taken aback, too, but she recovered surprisingly quickly and soon she and Stephen were trading inside info on me — making fun of me, I felt. By the end of the line, I was fuming and they were singing an off-tune “Never Gonna Fall in Love” together.
Stephen even told Yolanda about SPONGE, something I’d kept from her. He didn’t even know me when SPONGE existed; I’d told him about it long after the fact.
After we walked past the block where Stephen lived with his mother and little brother — I barely managed to get out a curt “‘night” — I said to Yolanda, “You know, I got kind of nauseous when Stephen kissed John on the train like that. And I feel weird about it.”
When nobody else would speak for the gay organization at the student assembly budget meeting, I’d made an impromptu speech about how important it was that we fund them. (Stephen, of course, would never be a part of that kind of student organization. Later I found out he met John at the Newman Club.) I prided myself on being so liberal I was radical.
“I’m not surprised,” Yolanda told me. “It was a little weird, but I can get used to it. I’m sure some people would get nauseous watching you kiss me, you know?”
We walked a couple of paces.
“Except nobody ever sees that, of course,” she said. “Not even our friends at school.”
“I’ve told you, I don’t like public displays of affection.”
She sighed. It was too late and I was too tired to break up again tonight. She didn’t want to come back to my basement with me, so I just let her go down her block to her apartment building.
As we cross underneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, my son is uncharacteristically ebullient.
“Don’t worry, Dad,” he says. “If you don’t survive the show, I’ll tell Laura you loved her. I’ll even lie and tell Mom the same thing. And until Laura finds a young studly new husband closer to her own age, I’ll help her raise Lucy like she were my own child.”
“Sometimes I think Homer Simpson has the right idea when he says, ‘Why, you little…’ and starts choking Bart,” I say.
“Mr. G!” Kevin says. “Surely you’re joking about the choking.”
“Don’t call me Shirley,” I tell my son’s boyfriend.
Kevin’s mom teaches the Domestic Violence Workshop at Brooklyn Law School.
I did wonder why I was so freaked out by that kiss. After all, I’d known Stephen was gay from the first day I’d met him. I just didn’t think of him as having sex with another guy. Intellectually I was fine with it, but viscerally it shocked my system. But I had other things to think about, like the end of my own relationship.
It took a long time for me to get over Yolanda, longer than it did with the girls who came before her. I didn’t know why. We’d pass each other at school without speaking. I heard she and Stephen sometimes did stuff together and I considered his friendship with her another act of betrayal.
Stephen and I had just one friend in common, really: Veronica Reilly, a girl I’d met in my creative writing classes. She wrote these playful, whimsical stories the professor went crazy over. My stories usually got good comments, but they weren’t entertaining like Veronica’s. I was a little resentful that her little tales were taken more seriously than my earnest productions.
Two weeks after I handed in a barely-disguised version of my breakup with Yolanda called “Misplaced Trust” in Advanced Fiction Writing, Veronica handed in a story called “The Misplaced Trout,” claiming when she’d first gotten her xerox copy of my piece, she’d misread the title and decided to use the misreading for the title of her own story.
“The Misplaced Trout” was so good that even I couldn’t help admiring it. I wasn’t interested in Veronica and was pretty sure she was a lesbian anyway, but we started hanging out together. She opened my eyes to Donald Barthelme and a lot of other writers. And she told me Stephen was heartbroken over John.
“What happened?” I asked her.
She told me John felt really guilty about what they were doing, decided to go back to dating girls, had gotten engaged to his old girlfriend.
It was Veronica who got Stephen and me to be friends again. I never apologized or anything. We’d sometimes hang out with Veronica and her equally dykey twin sister Constance — Ronnie and Connie, their parents called them — and we’d do stuff alone.
Late one night at the Canarsie bagel bakery as we were waiting to get some hot poppy-seed bagels, Stephen told me that kiss on the LL train was a crucial moment in his relationship with John.
“He couldn’t handle stuff like that,” Stephen said. “He didn’t want to admit what he was. Is. He didn’t want other people to know. One day he’ll be married with kids and I know he’s going to show up at some bar and I’ll tell everyone what a fucking phony and creep he is.”
“You’re right,” I said.
And he was. Except Stephen was too nice to tell anyone about John, and he even went over to say hi to him at the bar. But they could never get back together again, of course.
As we approach Northsix, I say, “There still must be time for you guys to get to an all-ages show someplace.”
Nick just snorts. Kevin says, “Oh come on, Mr. G, it’ll be the bomb.”
“I’ll take your word for it, Mr. C-R,” I tell Kevin. His last name is Chin-Ramos.
Kevin shows his driver’s license to the young black guy checking ID’s in front of the club’s entryway.
Nick shows his photo ID and I show mine. “I’m his father,” I tell the ID-check guy. Nodding, he can see that I’m Richard Arnold Grayson and he’s Nicolas Stephen Grayson.
When Nick was three, Oh, All The Places You’ll Go! was published, and Nick made me read it to him over and over again.
As I pay for the three of us to get into the basement and a girl with heavy black eyeliner stamps our hands, I find myself thinking: “Congratulations, today is your day! You’re off to great places, you’re off and away!”
After graduation, Stephen and I saw each other only occasionally. He was never my closest friend, but when he was hospitalized with severe back problems — they couldn’t diagnose the cause but I suspected it was all the weight-lifting he’d been doing — I went to see him every day. He was in severe pain, made worse by a bad case of hospital constipation, probably caused by the Vicodin they were giving him. I remember when the chaplain came by while I was visiting, Stephen asked, “Can you bless my bedpan, Father?” The priest demurred. I know I’d never be able to act like Stephen. He took things less seriously than I did.
After he was released from the hospital, he was still in a lot of pain. His mother had to order a hospital bed and he walked with a cane. I had a car in those days, and I drove him to different doctors. We went to one on Ocean Parkway who years later would get in the tabloids for murdering his wife and running off to Brazil with his nurse. Stephen, who by the late Seventies was still trying to be an actor, called me excitedly when he’d read the story from the newsstand of the Abbey-Victoria Hotel, where he was the night manager.
“We met those killers!” he told me. “I can’t believe I had a murderer for a doctor.”
“He didn’t help you much anyway,” I said.
Actually, Dr. Robbins, the chiropractor on Remsen Avenue who’d treated my father’s sciatica, helped Stephen the most, although Stephen was wary of chiropractors and didn’t go back after the first two adjustments because they were so painful. Only later would he admit that those treatments actually started his recovery.
I’m surprised the venue is so small. There are only about a dozen people in the audience, most standing, a few on the single of row of seats that look like they came out of an old movie theater. Most everyone puts on their earplugs right away. When the first band — four guys from Holland — come on, I realize it would be painful without them.
I stay as far away as possible from the band and from Nick and Kevin. Punks don’t need papas close by. There are a few older people around — nobody remotely near my age, of course — and probably most of them look older only because they take care of themselves so badly.
Even with distance and the earplugs, the music’s too loud for me, and anyway, I’ve got shpilkes once the second band up gets past their first song, an angry rant about Bush. So I make my way upstairs, decide not to get anything at the bar, and head outside.
The air is hint-of-autumn brisk as I lean up against the building’s brick wall. I watch the crowds — some of them clearly tourists drawn by what they’ve read about the Williamsburg scene on the Internet or wherever — when suddenly I see a familiar face: Nick’s friend Quinn.
“Hey,” she says. Or maybe it’s he says — Quinn is a trannyboy. Quinn’s been to the house a few times. Quinn takes my hand and pumps it in a hard handshake. She’s got a cigarette in her mouth and I remind myself that I’m not every young person’s parent.
“How’s it going?” I ask.
“Okay,” she says. “Working hard.”
“Sounds good,” I say.
“I’m taking testosterone now,” Quinn says.
“How’s it going?”
“Good, real good. I mean, I don’t like putting something artificial in my body, but it’s not really artificial for me, you know.”
I nod. “Not like that,” I say, pointing to the cigarette. After being someone’s father for so long, I can’t help myself.
“Yeah, I keep saying I’ll quit when I’m twenty-five,” Quinn says. “But you’re right, I should do it now. It would help me save for the surgery.”
I remember at the house she said she’s having only the top done: “I’m sick of Ace bandages.” And: “What do I need a cock for? My masculinity is in my head.”
I look at Quinn and nodone more time. “Well, nice to see you again. You’re looking good.”
He smiles. “Later, man,” he says. “Say hi to Nick for me.”
As Quinn walks down the street, I don’t bother to notice if his gait is masculine or feminine. Seein Red’s music actually sounds better out here. I think about little Lucy at home in her crib. Oh, the places she’ll go.
The only time Stephen and I went to a play together was in September 1976. It was Tom Eyen’s Women Behind Bars, at some off-Broadway theater downtown. Divine played the prison matron and Holly Woodlawn was in it, too. We’d seen them both in John Waters and Andy Warhol movies, of course. I was always going to downtown clubs to hear music and I was still a film junkie, haunting revival houses, but I’d lost my taste for plays.
“That was fun,” I told Stephen after the show that night. “I guess that year with Mr. Haring killed anything I felt for theater. Seeing how shittily he treated you, I’m surprised it didn’t do the same for you.”
“Beneath this faggot exterior,” he said, “I’m a lot tougher than you are.”
By then he was working out constantly again. “I know,” I said, “I’ve seen your biceps.”
But we both knew that wasn’t what he meant.
For me, the show at Northsix seemed to last an eternity. For the boys, who knows? Wending our way through the crowds of the terminally hip that clog Bedford Avenue at midnight, Kevin lets out a huge sigh.
“I can’t believe it’s four years since my first day in high school,” he tells us.
“Ah, yes,” I say. “Those wonderful gay carefree days of youth are now behind you, Kevin. I feel your pain.”
“Um, my first day in school was 9/11, Mr. G. And Stuyvesant was practically next door to the twin towers. We were there like fifteen minutes when the building got evacuated.”
He’s right. Nick was still in middle school in Brooklyn that day. I can’t imagine what Kevin must have experienced being so close to ground zero.
“Sorry,” I say. “I forgot. Senior moment.”
Kevin needs to get back to his dorm at NYU, so I’m surprised when he doesn’t get the subway at Bedford and North Seventh. “I’ll walk further with you guys,” he tells Nick. Mostly we do it in silence, but at one point Kevin asks me if I’m going to use anything I’ve seen tonight in my next work of fiction.
“Sure,” I say, “but I’ll just plagiarize what you write when you go home tonight and update your blog.”
“You read his blog, Dad?” Nick says with real alarm.
“No,” I say truthfully. “I was just joking. I didn’t know he had a blog.”
Kevin and Nick look at each other.
I don’t know anything. I have no idea why I’ve been a published author since I was twenty-seven while Veronica Reilly, who had so much more talent and energy, practices ophthalmology with her partner in Westchester. The one piece of hers that ever got printed, and only because I intervened, was “The Misplaced Trout.”
In 1979, when my first book came out, Stephen was the one to call me late at night from the hotel newsstand to tell me good news — “Richard, you made Liz Smith’s column!” — and not-so-good news — “There’s a review in The Village Voice. I wouldn’t quite call it a rave.”
By then he’d given up trying to make it as an actor. To my surprise, he applied to and got accepted at Brooklyn Law School. He went part-time, in the evenings, and took the day shift at the Abbey-Victoria newsstand. He reported that most of his classmates were “just kids.”
Somehow I never pictured Stephen as a lawyer. In the early Eighties, we saw each other maybe once a year because we were both so busy. During the AIDS epidemic, I asked him if he was worried, if he was being careful.
“Hey,” he told me over the phone, “I’m going to be the first person to get this thing and survive.” Then he laughed the laugh I remembered from when we were just kids.
I knew he had a steady boyfriend, although only because I started hearing Tony’s name every time we talked or met for dinner. He never met the woman I lived with for six years in Park Slope.
I remembered to call him less and less. I knew that he set up a solo practice on Court Street, but by that time I was too involved in my own mishigass. Things went bad for a while, and I moved to San Francisco in 1985. That’s where I met Nick’s mom. It never occurred to me to invite Stephen out for a visit, although I did send him “and guest” an invitation to the wedding. He never sent back his RSVP.
By the time I was back in New York, a harried divorced dad in a Williamsburg brownstone — very close to where Stephen’s friend John must have lived — I couldn’t find any trace of Stephen. He wasn’t in the phone book, his Court Street office was gone, and I’d lost touch with the few friends we’d had in common, like Veronica Reilly.
One day I got my answer on the Internet, checking out the Social Security death index. He died a few months after Nick was born.
My first wife’s late father’s name was Stephen, too, and that’s how Nick got his middle name.
It was simply one of those coincidences.
I keep meaning to ask Kevin’s parents about setting up some kind of prize or scholarship in Stephen’s honor at Brooklyn Law School. I guess I don’t get around to it because there’s always so much to do: writing deadlines, Laura, the baby, taking my son to punk rock shows. Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t really know Stephen as an attorney and think some other memorial would be more suitable.
I once brought it up with Laura, and she just said, “Well, you’re a writer, aren’t you?”
The Lorimer Street entrance to the L train is closed on weekends and even on weekdays after 9 p.m., so we’ve got to say good night to Kevin at the entrance on Union and Metropolitan. There’s a cop on the corner, and people walking up and down the street. A few stores down there’s an all-night Korean grocery and across the street are two 24-hour laundromats.
So am I going to look or not when they kiss? If I look, I’m not giving them their privacy. But if I don’t look, they might think worse of me. I hate for people to think worse of me.
Stephen once told me that his mother came into his bedroom while he and John were in bed. He didn’t have a lock on the door. Mrs. D’Atri just said, “Hi Stephen, hi John. I just wanted to tell you I’m going to Bohack’s to get some food for dinner.”
“Wow, that was pretty cool of her,” I said to Stephen.
“No, not at all,” Stephen protested. “She didn’t see anything. She wasn’t pretending not to see anything. She really didn’t see what was going on. Richard, people see what they want to see and no more than that.”
I see my son and his boyfriend kiss. Perhaps out of deference to me, perhaps because it’s what they’re doing naturally, the kiss is neither incredibly deep nor incredibly long. But it’s a real kiss nonetheless, with some tongue involved.
I imagine I kiss Laura like that all the time.