The little building squatted upon the forlorn far West Village triangle like an unhappy afterthought. One of three aged, two-story buildings, it seemed to hug the narrowest end of an imperfectly rectangular city block, holding on for dear life. Of course, by then, it had seen grander days.
In the earlier part of the 20th Century, an elevated subway crossing Manhattan at 14th Street had arrived at a conclusion right here, upon a giant turntable where railway cars were twirled around and then propelled back uptown again on their shuttling by. The raised steel structure that girdled the cobblestone plaza had competed with horse-drawn carts and carriages, with early autos, and pedestrians for which of them could make the most noise, stench, and mess below. Sited only two short blocks from the Hudson River, where Atlantic liners of the prestigious White and Cunard lines docked, and where ferry services from Hackensack and Tarrytown had their terminus, the triangle had once been a large marketplace, a bustling center of life and commerce. Even after the Elevated was torn down and the cruise liners moved to more northerly docks, and the ferries no longer disembarked passengers nearby, the triangle remained a nexus of business: a fresh produce market by day, surrounded on three sides by permanent meat market structures.
By night, the cobblestone triangle was another kind of focal point. During the Twenties, speakeasies and dives, beer- gardens, and ethnic eateries had jostled knock-kneed next to Federal era townhouses with their sober facades, graceful railings and wrought iron-grilled windows. On that edge of the Little West Thirteenth Street, night spots had prospered for years, before attaining a slow decline. But as the ninth decade of the century opened, the last of them – El Alcazar – a Spanish restaurant with adobe outer camouflage and Arabic style signage, was barred shut, the last to go.
At around the same time, the fresh produce market relocated up to Hunts Point in the Bronx. True, a few blocks further west, around the old Gansevoort Street customs house where Melville had scrivened out proseless penultimate decades, warehouses continued to be used, and the four block long meat market repulsed the rare astray pedestrian with its never totally washed sidewalks, where gobbets of fat and flesh reeked in the gutter. By then the rough cobblestone piazza itself had fallen into desuetude. People still lived in the area, mostly on side streets, in rent controlled warrens within the previous century’s tenements, but there weren’t many tenants during the Sixties and Seventies: the area was out of the way, abandoned, too far from the center of anything commercial, cultural or cool.
A few attempts at reviving the triangle and maybe even having it renamed had abortively begun, and a male model of some note along with his girlfriend had taken over a building across the street from the old row of bars and the El Alcazar, two of a handful of pioneers intent on reviving the area. Few followed them to that particular city-edge, and even that thrust at gentrification failed when the model was awakened one night by a burglar, fought him off, and was killed with a twelve inch screwdriver. Even though the burglar also expired of his wounds, that was all people needed to hear: Once more the triangle seemed to sigh, then once again go silent.
So I was surprised when I heard that Michael Fesco had taken over the little corner property there and was planning to open a bar. Once a Broadway musical gipsy dancer turned entrepreneur, Fesco had already done fairly well commercially. The Gay Seventies’ ultimate private club, Flamingo, next to which all other discos Studio 54, Paradise Garage, 12 West were always compared and always found to fall short, had been Fesco’s venue, until it (or he) somehow fell afoul of the NYPD and was closed.
As the Eighties began, he’d already opened another club in Chelsea, around the corner from the roller-skating disco which was hanging on nicely, especially with its Sunday afternoon parties, featuring one cute-ish, wild, hetero bartender who took his break by dancing along the full length of the twenty eight foot long arc of concrete bar top. (He’d soon leave New York for a spot at a TV series called Moonlighting and stardom).
Now Fesco had this new place, which was to be a “casual, neighborhood bar, with an upstairs darkroom, where local guys could come in, have a few beers, talk, and get off,” all a few blocks from home. Or so said Racey Peters, the manager of the bar. Racey came from the South as was apparent just looking at him. He was tall, deliberate moving and circumspect in his speech, with unwashed dank black hair that fell off his head like plastic sheeting. Racey possessed the hard, flat body of someone born to grate himself down on a chain gang, and a face that some might find handsome, but which others called generic Mississippi White Cracker, with an added perpetual bad-attitude scowl. To experience Racey at his most amused was to ascertain a lip curled a quarter inch with half of a single exposed canine tooth.
I’d met him maybe a year before in the Glory Hole, up West Street, where after satisfying myself in the usual manner, I’d peeked in curiously to a double booth on my way out where Racey happened to be carrying on with another rough looking guy, and had paid for my prying by being pulled into the booth, and into a scene of passion with more than the usual percentage of raunch. After about fifteen minutes of being stripped and manhandled by the pair, I managed to get away albeit with most of my orifices invaded by a melange of mouths and limbs – more or less intact.
A month or so later, I’d come across Racey and his band on-stage, at one of those fly-by-night Punk Rock lounges that seemed to mushroom overnight throughout the city in those days, this one hosted by gigunda drag-impresario Dean Johnston. Along with his instrumental trio who more or less played, Racey grabbed at his substantial boner, while screeching and howling out his “current hit song,” “Fuck You – And Your Mother Too!” Following this performance, I’d been astounded to be accosted by him at the bar in a surprisingly familiar manner as he verbally played me up to the guy I was trying to bag, as a quote, “hot little fucker,” which indeed did help me bed the guy later that night.
But I’d never have gotten into Fesco’s new neighborhood bar if only Racey Peters was involved. No, instead it was Bob Lowe who’d been talked into working there two nights a week, and Bob was at that time the person closest to me. I never got a clear understanding of exactly how he ended up there. True, Bob had been head bartender at the Cock Ring, a little place at the foot of Christopher Street at the Hudson River’s edge that had taken the gay community by storm in the late Seventies. On weekends, crowds would be lined up, vying to get into the bar and it’s boudoir sized dance floor. And it was through this contact that Bob – and I too, had entered the after-midnight, after hours bar and club scene which had helped me write my novel, The Lure, so authentically.
But Bob’s only connection with Fesco had been as a “living statue” on a plinth wearing a black leather outfit during one of Flamingo’s notorious Black Parties. Of course, his two years’ earnings at the Cock Ring paid all of Bob’s first year and part of the second at the New York School of Law, when he matriculated there. Now he was in his second year, living nearby, in a small flat on Horatio Street, in a building the local police (who knew its denizens well) called “Love American Style,” after the current tv program. And although he never gave details, I guessed that Fesco, who was no fool, thought Bob would bring the trade into his place too.
Meanwhile, Bob, said, until it hit, he could study his law books whenever the place was empty, and still make a few dollars. That studying ended up being a great deal: the new bar was empty most of the time. Bob had begun working there mid-September, while I was still living out at Fire Island Pines. It would be another month before I actually got a look at the place, even though it was only six or seven small West Village blocks from where I lived. By then, I’d received lengthy phone calls from Bob from the bar, telling me about Racey’s antics, as well as Michael’s own attempts to get the place going, which included stripping all the upstairs walls of plaster, leaving bare brick, not really that necessary in a room that’s supposed to be pitch dark.
In fact the first time I stepped foot in it, I overheard the place referred to as “Fesco’s Folly.” That occasion was a party for someone or other, a kind of Sunday afternoon pre-beer bust. The piece de resistance of that fairly ho-hum affair was a pair of Racey’s denims, draped over one of the bathroom pissoirs in such a way that using it you had to urinate on them. He explained to someone who asked when he would know the denims were “ready” by saying, “I guess, when they dry out and can stand up on their own.” He of course planned to wear them during his band’s next gig.
Although he gave no sign of recognizing me, Racey followed me upstairs to the newly wall-stripped “back room” when I wandered up there to see if there was any “action?” There wasn’t. At least not until Racey arrived, with his squid-sucker like mouth and his octopus-like arms, at which point it was all I could do to keep my pants on and in one piece, before making my escape. The combo of Racey and Fesco somehow suggested to me that this new place would – like most of Fesco’s places – become a hit. But it didn’t and somehow that was all right with Bob, and even with Racey, for the next two months that it lingered on after opening.
For Racey, of course it was a hangout for him to have sex with pretty much whomever he wanted. While for Bob it was a way to get paid while studying law with the unusual distraction of a customer or two. That’s the way it was explained to me and that’s the way I took it. Soon enough Fesco would get wise and staunch the money flow, but until then why rock the boat?
So I guess I was surprised when I began getting phone calls from Bob, from the bar, at around the same time every night, just before midnight. He’d been there since ten pm. I knew, and would remain until one or two in the morning. But all of a sudden, he was phoning me, often for a second or third time that day very much wanting to talk, but saying very little. He needed to talk to someone, I began to feel. He wouldn’t let me go to sleep until we’d spoken. Outside the bar, whenever he and I were together and I mentioned this new habit of his, he explained it by saying, “Well, no one comes in. So I get lonely there.” Or even “The bar gives me the creeps.”
It was one of the oddnesses of our already odd relationship that we sometimes had sexual affairs with others which we might mention to each other in passing, but which were usually unimportant, and which didn’t in any way bother us or alter our commitment to each other. It was partly a function of the era we lived in. It was also how we’d begun our relationship and so how we’d decided to stay “together.”
Sometime in the beginning of his first year of law school, Bob had begun seeing a designer/decorator named Reggie. I meanwhile had begun dating with two guys: one blonde Randy, one dark haired Neal. As a result of these extracurricular activities, Bob and I seldom checked each other’s schedules very closely. Even so, I’d gone so far as to begin to worry about Bob. Partly because whenever we did see each other, he wasn’t looking his usual absolutely beautiful self, but instead a little – haggard? a mite gray? I couldn’t put my finger on it. He knew I didn’t like going to the new bar because Racey would invariably try to get my pants off me, and I wasn’t that interested in Racey – definitely not in front of Bob.
Then one night, at midnight, Bob called, as usual from the bar, and this time he sounded quite different. I was brushing my teeth, preparatory to going to bed and was fatigued from an over-occupied day. But I sensed something going on in his voice and didn’t like it. I asked if he wanted me to come there, that night, right away. And he said, “No. It already happened.” While I mulled those enigmatic words over, he added, “But I’d like it if you came tomorrow night, around this same time. Say, quarter to twelve?”
It turned out the following night I was going uptown to dinner at the upper west side apartment of recent acquaintances, the Ferro-Grumleys. Based on what our mutual friend had told me of these events, I knew I’d get out around eleven p.m. Add a subway ride and I’d arrive at the little West 13th Street triangle around eleven-thirty, eleven-forty. So I told Bob I would see him there the next night and exactly when.
That following day turned out to be yet another busy one. I was about to launch a new Seahorse Press book, always a lot of work and worry for me, then I had dinner, at which Robert and Michael had several new people for me to meet, the reed-thin but achingly handsome Colin Streeter, for some reason or other dressed in a gardener’s uniform; novelist Julia Markus; and their especial pal, writer and recently a successful jazz singer, Suzanne McCorkle. The evening was fairly fabulous, people-wise, even food-wise it was merely pasta with ricotta and a salad since the F-G’s were in yet another financial slump – the women had brought dessert and I’d brought wine so I really had to tear myself to get downtown by midnight.
I recall that I was full of high spirits from the evening’s events, slightly buzzed if not high from the wine, and that I didn’t even mind the longish walk to the bar from the 8th Avenue subway line at 14th Street, through a mostly deserted area. Bridge-and-Tunnel Guidos cruising syphilitic hookers and only slightly more upscale trannies were pretty much the cream of this area’s sparse population in those days, although today Armani and Barney have chic emporia there. The cobblestone triangle upon which Fesco’s bar stood provided the only light for blocks around that night, and it was as moribund as I previously recalled it.
When I got there, Bob was at the very front of the bar, nearest the streetside windows, perched on a stool, with a text- book and a notebook open. The place was otherwise empty, although a disco mix by Roy Thode played loudly. I’d figured Bob sat where he did for the light or because it was closest to the street and any possible street life. I would soon discover the true reason. He offered me an aperitif, but I was interested in sobering up before heading home to sleep so I took a tonic water with lots of ice instead. We chatted, I about my day, and the people at the F-G’s dinner party, he about his day at law school. We’d reach a point where we had nothing further to say, and we were about to lapse into silence, when Bob suddenly turned and faced the rear wall of the place.
It was a long rectangle of a building, with the bar on the south side, the east side half wall, half windows, a corner doorway, and the north side again half wall, half windows for almost one entire length – except for the last five feet or so which enclosed what once had been a hat check room. Another door opened to the street right there, but that was locked most of the time. And near that back door and check room a wooden stairway rose straight up to the second floor and the dark room. I knew all that, as I’d been there a half dozen times.
Even so I was surprised when Bob turned to that back wall and stairway, ignoring me as I spoke about someone or other. I turned too and this is what I saw: at five minutes to midnight a mass of ash-gray smoke descended the stairway as though tumbling toward itself. It stopped at the foot of the stairs and formed itself into a figure. I don’t to this day understand how I could tell, but I could definitely tell who the figure was and even how the figure was dressed. It was an African-American man about 40 years old, with a wide almost cat-like face and somewhat squashed-in broad nose. He was dressed in overlarge jacket with a sort of checker board pattern, which looked vaguely yellow green, and he wore darker, almost chocolate colored trousers of some fine material, well pressed. The shoes were newish and two toned: white and oxblood. He wore a light brown pork pie hat, askew on his close cut head, with a single feather sticking out of the band. He was holding what looked like an empty wine bottle. The clothing was Bee-bop Era, no later than 1941.
A second after he had consolidated at the foot of the stairs, he somehow became both the ash colored smoke and a solid figure again as he flowed forward, directly into the doorway of the hat check room. Then he was gone. I looked at Bob, who looked at me rather queasily but didn’t say a word. Neither did I. I got up and walked to the back of the place, looked up the stairs, inspected the steps and floor, and examined the hat check room. Nothing. Not a thing. “What is it?” I asked.
“What did you see?” Bob asked. I told him what you just read.
“You’re pretty observant. Anything else?”
“Yes, he looked stoned, not on liquor but as though he’d been shooting heroin.”
“That’s what Racey said. He comes every night. At five minutes to midnight.”
“He doesn’t know he’s dead,” I said. “He shot up on bad stuff, ODed, I’m guessing somewhere upstairs, at eleven fifty- five p.m. and every night he comes downstairs, looks around, and goes into the hat check room.”
“Racey thinks he leaves here every night,” Bob said.
“But you don’t?”
“I’m here every night.” Patting his spot, as far away from the apparition as he could get and still stay in the building. “That’s why I stay here. But what if one night he decided to come for a drink?” he fretted.
“He’s already got a bottle,” I said hoping to calm him. It only partly worked.
“What if he does?” Bob repeated.
“He won’t. He doesn’t know he’s dead. He’ll repeat this action every night. But I doubt that he’ll do anything new. They usually don’t,” I added. I remained another hour. No one came in, and at 1:30 a.m. Bob closed up the register. I walked him home which was on my way home.
In his building foyer, Bob said. “I can’t stay there anymore. I’m just too ... you know?”
“Creeped out. I know. Well, don’t stay. Can’t you find a temporary law-clerking job through school?”
“It’ll be real work, instead of studying like this all night,” he argued. “But I can’t stay there.”
“Does Fesco know?” I asked.
“We’re not sure he believes us. You saw? Right?”
“I saw. I’ll tell him if you want.”
“Don’t bother,” Bob said. We kissed good night and he went up to sleep.
To all of our surprise, Fesco abruptly closed the bar the very next week, and paid Bob and Racey for another week after that. After a month or so, Bob began clerking, a job he got via school, for two women lawyers, one of them British who had been married and divorced from the film director Joseph Losey. After he’d graduated with honors, Bob would take her place in the firm and become junior partner, he’d remain working there happily the remainder of his far too short life.
As for Racey, I would see him now and again over the years, usually at some raunchy new bar or club opening, and usually manage to get away before he spotted me. Then I heard he’d returned South where he’d made something of a go out of singing and playing rockabilly.
We never referred to that evening again, Bob and I, the rest of our years together. Except once, only once, when I needed potent ammunition against the specious words of his vile mother. The place was Cabrini Hospital in Manhattan where we’d brought Bob several weeks before with severe pneumocystis pneumonia, and where he’d remained, in and out of intensive care, as first one then another vital part of his body began going completely haywire before shutting down. In the fourth week of this abomination, it became clear to me that he was probably not going to ever get out of this place. I had plenty of time to be with him in the hospital, but usually his mother – we uncordially, mutually, detested each other – was around, refusing to leave his side.
One day as I entered, I heard her bullshitting him that he was getting better and would be back in New England soon, recovering. I’d just that moment spoken to his doctor who’d told me that Bob’s body was going into a piece-by-piece shutdown. He said he’d told Bob the same thing an hour earlier. I was angry at her for lying to him. Instead of filling his mind with nonsense, she should be preparing him to cross over. This was now my unwelcome obligation.
Once Bob and I were alone, I held his hand and told him what his doctor had told me, and what I knew he knew too about his lack of a future. He told me he was afraid, very afraid, and that’s why he let his mother prattle on. I asked him not to run from what was happening, but to attempt to embrace it, difficult as that seemed. But he kept arguing with me.
Finally, I asked him to remember the little bar where he worked on the Little West 13th Street triangle, so many years before, and what we’d seen there, what he’d shown me. Was that what he wanted, I asked Bob, to be so utterly unconscious in life that he didn’t even know he was dead? To be so fearful and blank that he would keep doing the same stupid action over and over again for eternity? I begged him to reconsider. Bob stopped arguing. He went silent and a few minutes later he began coughing, then needed ice in his mouth, then the pillows plumped and there were another dozen distractions, before the she-wolf stalked in again and our private moment was over. But I knew from the way he looked at me in those next few moments that I’d gotten through to him with that memory, and that he’d remembered and been horrified all over again by that nightly visitor and worse, by the possibility of turning into one himself.
So I was relieved, if appalled, when two days later, I discovered that Bob’s consciousness had already left his body. He’d had what they called a “massive cardiac event” and the witch woman had forced the hospital staff attempt to resuscitate him, even though the letters DNR, “Do Not Resuscitate,” were all over him and the room, from outside the doorway to the chart hanging at the foot of the bed, to the tag around his neck. Of course, once she realized too late the ghastliness she had precipitated – if only to go against his and my wishes, since I was his health executor – she fled, sidled back to whatever aperture she’d crawled out of.
But while I was deeply disheartened, having to daily care for a machine-breathing body without any mind inside it – shaving it, washing it, etc. – day after day until I had nightmares about it, still and all, I judged this was a better situation than if it had been the opposite: body ravaged, mind still active. Wasn’t it? Naturally enough, once his body too was gone, I’d wished I’d kept my mouth shut, wished that I still had contact of some sort, any sort with Bob. I even, yes even wished that he could have become my own personal nightly visitor.
