Sleeping With Women Chapter One I was twenty-three, lost and loose inGreenwich Village, 1969. I kept afloat as a worker at a downscale auctiongallery in the East Village. At the end of each day, my $20 salary was paid byZiggy Zazlow, the jolly auctioneer who peeled twenty bucks from a fat roll ofbills he kept stuffed in his right pant leg pocket, which stuck out on his hiplike a goiter. Antiques were a big cash business and I never once saw anybodywrite a check. My days at the gallery began with cleaning up the poop of Splat,the vicious watchdog and feral stray, named for the sound of his farts, and whosank his teeth into my ankle each day as I walked past his food bowl, oncesending me to the emergency room at St. Vincent''s. Most mornings at thegallery I spent faking antiques from cheap Chinese import, softening the glazewith steel wool and motor oil. I also gently distressed furniture by draggingthumbtacks in a leather belt across the wood.
On Saturday mornings the auctionswere held at the gallery, but occasionally we held lawn auctions. Ziggy woulddrive us to a house on Long Island, where we tagged all the belongings of theowners who had died, or were moving to Florida, difficult to discern which,probably for them, too. It was sad to be foraging through the closets of otherpeople''s lives, going over their personal possessions, shoes, picture frames,the mattresses they slept on, assigning them a lot number. I wondered if oneday my own life would be tagged and priced and sold off to strangers. Or worse,not. I never felt like I had reached a dead end working at the auction gallery. I figured I was just passingthrough, treading water, waiting for my number to be called in the bakery oflife to get a slice of fresh, hot opportunity. Only you really had to listenhard for that number in New York, a very noisy place with a lot of peopleclamoring for things.
Anyway, I liked working at the shabby gallery with thetin ceiling. I enjoyed the whole carnie of it, the big Saturday auctions heldin the main room with its assortment of oddball antique dealers, cloisonnécollectors, and netsuke mavens who came every week to bid and buy. I especiallyenjoyed Ziggy Zazlow, with his silver-tongued spiel about antiques that perhapswere not. At the Saturday auctions, I helped carry "restored" furniture up anddown the center aisle so people sitting in the folding chairs could get acloser look. If I helped carry the merchandise out to a van or car when theauction was over, I was happy to get a five-buck tip so I could get take-outshrimp and lobster sauce for dinner.< I wound up living thisway after attending New York University film school, which left me expertlyprepared to do nothing. Albeit an impractical education, it was a wonderful wayto go to college, sitting in a dark theater every day, stoned, watching filmsthat were explicated by a young instructor, Martin Scorsese, with whom Istudied, and who had a secret student girlfriend I ended up sleeping with, muchto his outrage--I had no idea they were involved. When he found out I had sleptwith her, he screamed at me as we met face-to-face waiting for an elevator onthe eighth floor of the Education Building.
I tried to assure him that I wasinnocent, that it was a one-off, and that the liaison lasted exactly as long asProcol Harum''s "A Salty Dog," which played on her stereo, clocking in at 4minutes and 33 seconds. Luckily for me, those four and a half minutes didn''tseem to affect Scorsese''s judgment as a teacher, because he still gave me an Aon my final exam. Yes, I slept with women.It was part of my homosexual cure with Dr. Wayne Myers, a talented Freudianpsychiatrist whom I''d met at Payne Whitney, the time-worn but respectedpsychiatric clinic on Manhattan''s Upper East Side. I was willingly incarceratedthere at age fifteen after a serious attempt at self-annihilation involvingwindowpanes. I was a gay Jewish kid who lived in a thicket of self-hatred abovehis grandma''s bra and girdle shop in Borough Park, Brooklyn, a shtetl twenty-five minutes by train and a chasm of erudition from Manhattan. Dr.
Myers, who was mypsychiatrist at Payne Whitney, was touched by my deep despair and offered tohelp. Homosexuality was a psychiatric disorder, classified in 1952 in theAmerican Psychiatric Association''s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manualof Mental Disorders , as a "sociopathic personality disturbance." However,even Freud didn''t believe that homosexuality was sociopathic, or that it couldbe cured, or should be cured. In his 1935 "Letter to an American Mother," hewrote to a woman who asked him to cure her son: "Homosexuality is assuredly noadvantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; itcannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of thesexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Manyhighly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have beenhomosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo,Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). By asking me if I can help, you mean, Isuppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality takeits place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it.
Ina certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs ofheterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majorityof cases it is no more possible." And so, when I wasfifteen years old, we set out to reanimate the blighted germs of myheterosexual tendencies, hoping I would be one of the lucky few to succeed. Theprincipal was that if we figured out why I was homosexual, then I wouldn''t beone anymore. In the unraveling, the thing disappears. I never believed for a moment that Dr. Myersmeant any harm. He was a good man. Why did I continue to cooperate in my cureeven though I knew it was hopeless? Didn''t I know, deep inside me, that I washardwired gay? Of course I did.
That reality crossed my mind a million times,but I fought it back, knowing that if I embraced the truth, it would meanspending the rest of my life on the fringes of society. As the years inanalysis passed, I worried that I would be unhappy either way, as a closetedgay or as a fake straight. Norman Mailer, a writer whom I admired, wrote thatthe most respectable thing a homosexual man could do was not act on hisdesires. So I didn''t. All therapy and no play makes Jack a very unhappy boy. During this period, Dr.Myers''s office was up on East 74th Street in one of those white bathroom tile,doorman buildings that had sprung up all over the Upper East Side. There was asimple waiting room, a blank white space with a few chairs.
His sessions werefifty minutes with ten-minute intervals, so the waiting room was always empty.There was a set of back-to-back soundproofed doors that led to his office. Dr.Myers was in his early forties. He had blond hair, kind blue eyes, and he was acareful listener. He also had the unique talent to have a blank expression thatwas not judgmental, and yet seem interested and concerned. I didn''t look at himvery much, because I was in formal Freudian analysis, and every session I layon my back on a beautiful leather divan, facing away from him to lessen hispresence so I could free-associate without distraction. In front of me was aframed print of the center panel of Bosch''s Garden of Earthly Delights hanging on the wall.
This is the panel that depicts a paradise of lust, withlots of cavorting naked figures, including one with a flower planted in itsanus. I had a problem with thefoot covering on the couch. Why was it there? Are you supposed to keep yourshoes on or take your shoes off? I began to worry about how clean my socks werebefore I went for a session. Sometimes I took my shoes off, but not if I woresneakers. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask him if I was supposed totake my shoes off, his response was, "What are your thoughts on having yourshoes off? There was also an issuewith rituals. Dr. Myers asked if I followed any specific pattern beforetherapy, and indeed, I had a slice of pizza before each session at OriginalRay''s Pizza up the block. I don''t know if he asked me this because he smelledthe pepperoni, but once I''d admitted to having a slice and a Coke beforesessions, he asked me to stop.
The sessions were at random times for a reason,he said, and he didn''t want it to be part of a convention I had developed thatmight inhibit my free associating. I figured, "In for a penny, in for a pound,"and if I was going to be analyzed, I better do it right, so I stopped havingpizza, most of the time anyway. Six years and $100,000into analysis, nothing had changed. At twenty-one, I was a pressure cooker oftestosterone. My head ached from priapism, and at times I felt like my eyeswere bulging out of my head with bottled-up desire. Finally, Dr. Myers gave mean ultimatum: Either I took the plunge with a woman, or there was no sensecontinuing therapy. If I changed my mind about becoming straight, he wouldrecommend me to another psychiatrist, whom, I assumed, would help me make thebest of it while I wallowed in the swamp of homosexuality.
Cheered on by Dr. Myers,I became a serial affairist. It wasn''t hard for me to meet young women; my subrosa indifference was a turn-on. Since I approached the whole sexual thingas more of a tourist than a native, I became a connoisseur of the female bodyin the way a Jew appreciates the Vatican. It was a matter of honor to be atender, satisfying partner, so I performed all the obligatory sexual acts inappropriate order. Petit déjeuner , déjeuner.