Being footloose and fancy free that summer I spent a lot of time in Provincetown on Cape Cod, and a lot of time being infatuated with Billy Davis (AKA Billy-D). I had had my eye on him since the first parties at Doctor Gale’s, but he had an older lover with whom he was in the construction business. They had taken on the renovation of the exterior of the good doctor’s house, and destroyed that classic beauty in the process. They removed all of the detail and trim, the expansive wraparound covered porch, as well as the portico over the circular driveway, which had been designed to provide protected passageway for passengers, when alighting from their carriages. Next they covered the entire three story building with stained Texture 1-11 plywood siding. Disgraceful!
Subsequently Billy-D and whatever-his-name-was had split, leaving Billy-D free that summer as well, and I insinuated myself into his life as much as possible. Mainly making myself always available, so that he could hookup with me when he didn’t have anything better to do, needed a ride, a place to crash, or he was horny. I never complained, I was grateful for every minute of his company and his body that I could get. We made quite a few trips to P-Town together, and he always joked about my car—a beautiful new Ford Torino Squire station wagon in forest green. He said it looked as though I was married with three kids, which was especially funny when he would be selling pot from that “family” car while parked in the lot at the Provincetown police station.
On one sojourn in P-Town a few of us bought some “Summer Blond” (Clairol, I think), and spent an afternoon stoned and drunk, doing each other’s hair. At the time I had a golden bronze tan, so the light highlights really looked as though the sun did it … until the apparent, hitherto unnoticed, red highlights in my hair took on a new brilliance, creating a rather unnatural orange color (these the days before green and purple hair). I started using a Henna rinse, and that took care of it for a while. Until one day a customer, a hairdresser, told Bob Frances that my roots were showing, suggesting I should stop by her salon. Something had to be done!
Billy-D’s best friend, Bobby Conti, was a hairdresser, and he said he could bring my hair back to its natural color, using a lot of drabber to kill the red tones. The result was an unnatural looking dark charcoal brown, with a maroon haze. The next day I called in sick. At the time hairdressers were not licensed to work on men, so they couldn‘t help me, and despite calling almost every barber in the book there was no one who did dyeing of men’s hair (things have changed since the ‘60s). Finally I found a barber willing to give it a try, with the telephone assistance of a friend who was a hairdresser.
He had to completely strip my hair, and was supposed to bring it down to pure white, but when he got it to bright, translucent carrot orange he was afraid to go any further. Then he dyed it my natural color, but before long the orange was becoming prominent again, so it was back to a Henna rinse once or twice a week. It was about this time that I started growing a moustache, and before it completely filled in I was using an eyebrow pencil to give it a little extra presence. One day I was installing draperies in the teachers’ lounge of an old school, working all afternoon above the old steam radiators which, it being a cold day, were cranked up. When I wiped the sweat off of my brow it was brown, as it was on my upper lip as well. All of my colors were running!
One Friday night Billy-D and I went to a drive-in movie with a few other friends, and these girls kept hanging around the car looking for some action; six good-looking guys, as many horny girls. We kept them at bay but, coincidentally enough, the following Friday we ran into them again at a different drive-in. Again they kept stalking us, but when they saw two of the guys in the back making out, they completely freaked out. Then they started going from one car to another and soon two cars full of guys jockeyed to positions near us. The hell with the movie, we left before they recruited any more trouble, and when we did the three cars followed.
We drove to the East Side of Providence, and then to Prospect Terrace overlooking the city ... a major ’gay’ hangout. We knew we’d find friends there. We stopped at the terrace and the three cars passed us, and then we went in pursuit. The girls stopped at a stop sign and didn’t move, and when we pulled up behind the last car, the guys were trapped. They kept screaming and honking for the girls to move, as we all piled out of the car with whatever weapon like item we could find—tire iron, ice scraper, aerosol can, etc. Joined by a few ‘queens’ from the park, we went on the attack. When the girls realized what was happening they took off, as did the other two cars. Although they might have later bragged about how they had harassed some ‘queers’ that night, we were certain they’d never tell anyone that a bunch of ‘faggots’ had chased them out of town.
One night I was in Boston with Bobby Conti—Billy-D wasn’t around, so Bobby and I got stuck with each other by default. To be candid, I didn’t particularly like him. The bars were dull so at about midnight we went to The Fenway. Not the famous ballpark, the adjacent parkland; an extensive rambling natural woodland, with waterways and gardens in the middle of the urban sprawl. This was the location of the Victory Gardens, started in 1942 as a response to FDR’s wartime request for Americans to grow more vegetables. The gardens flourish today, the only original victory gardens still in existence and an official Boston Historic Landmark.
In addition to being famous in their own right, the gardens are infamous in the ‘gay’ community as a place to cruise, connect, and carry-on … with the option of bringing the evenings “catch” home, or frolicking in amongst the cattails and bulrushes at the edge of the many lakes and ponds. This night though there was no one to be found, except for a group of ten rowdy teenagers, a few sporting rather large sticks … the leader of the pack had the biggest. They told us someone had been knifed, that was why the place was empty. They said we had better get going, and after we gave them each a cigarette, we started walking along one of the paths.
About halfway through the field the leader started shouting, “HALT! HALT!” We ignored him and kept walking. He and two henchmen came running after us. “Why didn’t you stop, I told you to halt!” he screams as he shakes his stick in my face. That was it, I was done. I got right up in his face like a drill sergeant with a recruit, “Listen you little punk!” I snarled, “If you shake that fucking stick in my face on more time, I’m gonna’ break it over your fucking head!” “Hey man, hey, hey, don’t get mad.” He cowers, “We’re not looking for trouble!” Oh really?!
Of the young fellows that John was bringing around, ultimately one became his boyfriend, and when Hal was having problems with his living situation, John asked if he could stay with me temporarily. Despite enjoying my freedom and having the house to myself, I agreed on the condition that the operative word was temporary. One weekend I had a friend (AKA trick) visiting from Boston, and for some reason John wasn’t around, so Hal joined my guest and me in whatever mind altering substance we had available. To make a long story short, in the midst of this altered state, Hal and I fell in love (read: lust), and wanted to get rid of the guest. Fortunately, after the bars closed Lionel and his lover, Fred, came over for a visit, and when leaving they asked my guest if he would like to come home with them and “be breakfast!” That became one of my favorite pick-up lines.
That was the beginning of Hal’s and my relationship, such as it was. He wasn’t a bad looking fellow, but not very bright, and a bit of a goofball with a rather loud, off-putting, snorting donkey laugh. Nonetheless, recently out of the military he had a smokin’ body, and was rather well equipped where it mattered … not that it did matter, because as a lover he was pathetically inept. He was also a social recluse (except for the men‘s rooms at the bus and train station), and never wanted to go anywhere not even to a restaurant. Our meal routine was very limited and regimented, repeating exactly the same seven day menu each week. Homemade pizza Saturday night, meatball sandwiches Sunday, Burger King take-out Monday, then chicken pot pies, and so on.
After the fall out with John vis-à-vis Hal, David and Wayne had placed themselves firmly in John’s camp, and the situation at #190 became untenable. A lot of things like music volume and other noise, frequently overflowing the toilet, issues with trash, blocking my driveway, the list went on. My memory has no interest in recollecting anymore of the details and/or tensions involved, so to make a long story short they finally moved out, leaving the upstairs apartment a shambles, including writing on all of the walls in crayon … mostly obscene things about me.
Once I had refurbished the place Moe and Mark moved in. Moe was a friend of Hal (as far as I ever knew his only friend), and Mark was Moe’s partner (although we used the term “lover” in those days). That worked out well, giving us a pleasant association with them for a while, but it was difficult to actually do things as two couples, because Hal never wanted to leave the house. One weekend we got him to go to Maine, where we spent two nights in Ogunquit, but Hal would not leave the motel room, except to go to the pool when it was unoccupied. For meals we had to get take-out and bring it back to Hal. Very strange, but I was living with it.
One Saturday we went to visit Hal’s father and stepmother in Massachusetts, and the father asked us to join him and Hal’s younger half-brother on a fishing trip. The father hitched his small cabin cruiser to the back of his car, and off we went to the coast somewhere near Plymouth. We launched the boat and fished. They caught everything, I caught one two foot sand shark that was cut off the hook and thrown back. As the day began to fade I suggested that it might be time to head for home, only to find out that we were staying overnight. No blankets, no change of clothes, no toothbrush, no food, no water, nothing. The dad beached the boat on the salt flats of a deserted peninsula, and he and the boy dug for clams while Hal and I went searching for a store.
There was a little cottage community on the opposite side of the peninsula, accessible only by boat, dune buggy, or on foot, and there was a little store that didn’t have much of anything but empty shelves. We bought a loaf or two of stale bread, whatever drinks were available, and hiked back to the boat. The father built a fire, threw the day’s catch and the sandy clams into a pot, and cooked up a gritty stew. I ate bread. Hal and I slept on the boat, the other two on the beach, and the next day it was more fishing.
We found a shoal where the cod were biting, they couldn’t reel them in fast enough, I got nothing. Then a school of mackerel, the fish were practically jumping into the boat, still nothing for me. Finally, above a sandy bottom where they were catching flounder by the bucketful, I got a bite. It was the same sand shark from the day before. Seriously! No word of a lie. It had the jagged knife wound from where we had cut him off the hook the day before. This time his biting days were over.
Considering all of the care and caution that my father had exercised launching and towing boats, and the long slow trips to the beach with a second car always following the trailer, the way Hal’s father did things was a bit of a shock. Traffic on the I-128 beltway was heavy on the way home, but despite towing the boat on the trailer, this joker was booking it as fast as eighty and ninety when he could. At that speed he hit a bump and the trailer hitch bounced off of its connection.
At least this fool had been smart enough to have a safety chain, but now from the backseat I watched as the trailer followed loosely on the two foot lead, swinging back and forth, and aiming dangerously close to the back of the car as the father tried to ease it down from ninety. By some miracle there was no accident. By some miracle the trailer didn’t come crashing into the back of the car, and the boat sailing through the back window. We got back to their house safely, and I never went there again.
In the interest of becoming a fulltime “hippy” with long hair and a beard, early on in my relationship with Hal I left Bob Frances Decorators and—with Wayne’s help, he was then with DES (unemployment)—I landed a job as a stock clerk for Mossberg Pressed Steel in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, about a forty minute commute. Although seemingly quite a step down, I made more money than I did with Bob Frances, and after a few weeks I had the stock crib so well organized, that it only took me a couple of hours a day to do my work.
To fill the time I was reading two or three books a week, and got away with it because my system was foolproof. I’d keep a tray of inventory cards out on my right, an open book on my desk, and a clipboard with orders on it upright in back of the book. With a bird’s-eye view of anyone approaching, when someone did I’d push the book forward, the clipboard would fall down on top of it, and I was working. As I said, “foolproof” except for the day that I had fallen asleep while reading, and the vice-president, Donald Joyle, walked in. No problem though, my efficiency and accuracy had solved so many problems for him, that he thought I walked on water.
That was a good thing, because one day I wasn’t feeling well, but went to work anyhow; typical of me, even though I had a temperature of 101°. My supervisor (so-called, I really reported to Don Joyle) was an old-timer named Dennis, and a crotchety old fart at that. We usually kept our distance, but that day he came in and started giving me some bullshit. Many of the parts were kept in heavy metal bins about the size of file boxes, and they were dragged around the floor with what we called a “hook“ … a long metal shaft with a “T” handle at one end, a hook at the other. Well, when I’d had my fill of Dennis, I happened to have a hook in my hand, and chased him out of my stock crib shaking it at him. The next day, Friday, my temperature was 103° so I stayed home.
That Monday Don Joyle came to see me, acting a little sheepish, and told me he had heard something that he found completely unbelievable. “Did you really chase Dennis out shaking a hook?” “Yes, I did.” “Were you threatening to hit him with it?” “No.” He puzzles, “I think I understand. You shook the hook because that is what was in your hand at the time. If it was a pencil, you would have shaken the pencil, right?” “Yes, exactly!” And it was the truth. In the meantime, Dennis was freaking out, scared to death of me, and wanted to have me arrested for attempted murder. Seriously! He canvassed the women in assembly, with whom I had the most contact, and anyone else he thought might be a witness … but everyone loved me, especially all the women, and they all laughed in his face.
For lunch I always ate alone at my desk, until one day this butch, ‘straight’ hippy fellow from welding—who rode a “Chopper” and wore a “Thor” helmet with big horns sticking out each side—came in and sat down. “Do you mind if I have lunch with you?“ he asked. Color me surprised. We chatted and from then on we always had lunch together, sometimes going out, and in the process became very good friends. He often talked about his younger brother and the brother’s “partner” … they owned an antique shop. It was pretty clear that they were ‘gay’ but I never made a connection. Christmas rolled around and I invited this friend to stop by on the Eve, which left me in the uncomfortable position of having to finally use gender defining pronouns when talking about Hal. When I “came-out” to him he said he knew all along. I asked why he never said anything, and he said it wasn’t his place to tell me, it was my place to tell him. Well of course, I had never looked at it that way before.
Within a couple of months after Hal had moved in he lost his job, which I later found out was due to not showing up. He’d leave for work every morning, but more often than not he would go cruising the train or bus station, or wherever. He never made any attempt to find another job, and after a year of him not working I was tired of supporting him. Pushing him to get a job brought conflict to our relationship, and when we’d get into an argument I’d usually end up bruised or bleeding. Sounded familiar! He finally got a job, and a few weeks later he said he was leaving. Although I went through the motions of trying to get him to stay, my heart wasn’t in it. True to my old patterns, I found him an apartment, paid for it, painted and furnished it, and never saw nor heard from him again. Today I cannot even remember his last name, neither can John. So much for Hal!
No comments:
Post a Comment