L-R: Robert, me, Donald, Christine, Christine’s mother, name of guest/photographer/empty chair holder—alas—unknown
The seventies were a maelstrom for me, and it was no coincidence that I was in my twenties then. Many people suffer such a period in their youth—some thrive, some survive, some don’t recover. While my memory is still a good catalog of seventies events, pictures, and feelings, I could not assign many to a specific year with certainty, even though I spent most of the decade living in one place, Manhattan.
1970-1978 included many job and address changes—including a three month stint in France. I can’t squeeze my six jobs (and counting) into the seven plus years in any sensible order, even with the help of friends from the era, nor can we agree on the exact when and who of the housing, although we shared many of those seven (and counting) different apartments.
These mysteries are not due to substance abuse, since our tipple consisted of the beer or wine we could afford, and nothing else. Our nights dancing to disco and drinking in the women’s bars ended at The Pink Teacup, where an affordable Southern fried breakfast induced sleep, or at the commercial bakery on Seventh Avenue, where the nice bakers gave us free fresh-baked rolls to soak it all up. We were young, we were innocent.
So much of what happened during each of those years was impossible to pin down, until now. I received some confirmation of the exact details of my 1972 life this fall, when Robert, the fellow facing the camera in the photo above, contacted me. Robert and I are much closer to our seventies than we could imagine being in 1972, that’s for sure, but his description of the event in the photo clarified the year for me. Research into Southern Californian earthquakes helped with 1971.
Proof of my attendance at the Thanksgiving dinner that Robert and Christine (closest to the camera) hosted that year—their first as a married couple—confirmed that I was working at The New Yorker magazine in 1972. Christine and I became great pals as we toiled in the magazine’s business section, located on a different floor from the literary grandees. Using an electric typewriter, I typed (no correction fluid allowed) for a baby-faced advertising space salesman with whom I shared a small office in the building on West 44th Street. Two desks, two chairs, two black rotary telephones, one typewriter, a file cabinet. I called him Bob until he told me I had to call him Mr. Barns (not his real surname). I was barely 21, he might have been 30, so you can bet I called him Mister Barns with meaning. The space salesmen—all Ivy League chaps—headed for the Harvard Club across W. 44th Street for liquid lunches, following the example of the magazine’s leader, Mr. Fleischmann. I too escaped as often as I could to Christine’s office, one shared with several other artists. She sat behind a wooden drawing table where I’d perch and we’d chat and laugh—oh, how we laughed.
Fixing where I worked in 1972 allowed other memories to snap into focus. That year, I shared a light-flooded walkup on Barrow Street in the West Village. We carried our bicycles, laundry, and groceries up and down the six well-worn flights. I often rode my bicycle to W. 44th Street, and from there up to Central Park, to the evening softball games of a New York summer.
As nice as all of that may sound, life was complicated and unhappy—remember the maelstrom? I was juggling being out of the closet with some friends and very much inside it with other friends, my family, and at work. I’d seen the head of personnel at The New Yorker—a small spinster who lived with her elderly siblings—watching me walk in a weekend gay pride march from her Christopher Street apartment. I’d looked right up into the open window of her apartment and seen her looking at me. That week, she called me to her office and said, “I saw you. I know what you are.” In the seventies, she had the upper hand. I could only offer, “I saw you, too,” in return. Was there a hint of defiance without a downright challenge? A tiny threat of something? However she took it, nothing more was said to me, and nothing happened, but I knew where I was.
She didn’t know what I was, or who. For instance, my roommate in the Barrow Street apartment was a young woman with whom I shared a fraught romantic relationship. I still shared a similar relationship with a young man who’d moved to Southern California to attend law school, although we’d essentially broken up the previous year—the year I’d also dropped out of college. Obviously, my relationship with my parents was complicated and unhappy, too.
Enter my parents—so why wasn’t I enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with them in 1972? Because they still lived in L.A., having run away from New York in 1970. Like wannabe starlets from Peoria, they’d followed the fiction of sun-filled happiness. Early in 1971, I flew to L.A. to visit them. It was my very first flight, the tickets for which I’d purchased at the TWA store front on Fifth Avenue. During that long visit I spent a little time with the law student and a lot of time trying to decide what to do with myself: back to the law student? back to college? back to the situation on Barrow Street? Frankly, the thumpa thumpa of the gay bars in the Village beckoned.
Survival wasn’t on my list, but early on the morning of February 9th, 1971, the San Fernando 6.6 magnitude earthquake shocked the L.A. area. My bed careened across the room with me in it. The woman in the apartment upstairs screamed. I climbed over the bed for the hallway. My father stood in their bedroom doorway, the cat ran helter-skelter. I jumped under a door frame and my mother joined me. During the grinding and roaring of the quake—a sound like two jumbo jets crashing into one another—the doors in the apartment slammed shut, only to open and slam shut again, and again. The place rolled like a ship. The floor in the living room gathered itself up into a speed bump. I felt no fear, just a grim certainty that we were not going to survive.
Remarkably, the cheesy-looking apartment building did not fall down on our heads, but parts of elevated highways, nursing homes, and hospitals in L.A. did collapse—people were injured, people died. The strong aftershocks were much more frightening, although the locals seemed unfazed. We felt them in the apartment, in the House of Pie (echoes of Mildred Pierce), in the Torrance public library.
After my hasty return to New York—the law student and I having parted by mutual agreement—the heavy vibration of the 7th Avenue subway under my feet sent adrenalin flooding through me. I returned to Barrow Street, and was still living there when the Watergate scandal broke in June of 1972, and in 1973 when Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in three sets of tennis: all that time the relationship got more complicated, not less. I may have been living there the evening Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974. A group of us ordered pizza and drank beer while watching his speech on the little black and white TV—or we may have watched it in the new place I shared with my friend Nicole (we’re still sharing unresolved recollections about this).
Over the middle portion of the seventies, I moved to different jobs, different apartments, and to different relationships, including the one that took me to France for three months. I won’t say that I fared much better with any of them—maelstrom mode still applied—but I enjoyed much of the French trip. I also enjoyed working at The Legal Aid Society on Park Row and the friends made there—we had fun, a lot of fun. The day before Nixon’s resignation, fellow Legal Aider and current friend Mary Ann and I joined the morning crowd jamming Park Row to gaze up at the World Trade Center, still under construction. There, high up between the towers, Phillipe Petit crossed a high wire strung between them. For forty-five minutes, he crossed, danced, and saluted the construction workers inside and the crowd nearly a quarter mile below.
Later in the seventies, I committed to night classes at Hunter College for several semesters and began to formulate a life plan for myself—slowly and in pieces, the maelstrom began to calm.
My parents returned to New York too, acknowledging that they were not cut out to be Angelenos, but turmoil awaited them, unfortunately. I left both my apartment on W. 69th Street and New York City altogether in August 1978. Taking up a work-student life at the University of Massachusetts/Boston, I stayed until I graduated with a B.S. and M.S. in biology, good career potential in hand, and most importantly, the relationship with Suzy that has nurtured and sustained me for life. The end of the seventies brought fair winds and following seas.
In spending time writing this, and rifling through the past, I concluded that it really doesn’t matter where I worked, or where I lived, or what was happening when. What mattered then as now are the beautiful moments, sights and sounds, the love, the laughs, the friends, and the family. Some of them are gone—swallowed up by the AIDS epidemic that followed the seventies, or lost to old age, lost to a different calamity, or just lost to me. I am grateful to still have a few friends who shared the seventies with me, but there’s another epilogue to this particular seventies story, a sad one. Robert, Christine and I had lost touch. Blame it on my endless shuffling of locations, jobs, and relationships. Yes, blame it on the relationships. It was a full time job being young and (mostly) out in New York in the seventies, and then I left for good. It is a loss that I deeply regret, most especially since Christine passed away two years ago, leaving Robert to mourn. I mourn for both of them deeply and for those lost years I could have enjoyed knowing her.
Robert found me through this blog and sent me the link to the support site Christine joined during her illness. I read her always wise and unsentimental, often humorous, and powerfully moving comments. One of the understated and very Christine comments was that she’d noticed that many people seemed fond of her. I wish she’d known how fond I was of her and how much she’d given me all those years ago. I wish I’d told her.
