. . .
An acquaintance at Simon asked me to join the house in Fire Island. I didn’t have much social life. I thought it was time to try again to enter the world of gay men. Tom said you could hear the ocean waves crashing in the morning when you awakened.
. . .
This is how you traveled: You packed an old white carpenter’s bag you got from the lumberyard when it closed. You left from Penn Station, changed at Jamaica, got off at Sayville, rode on a bus to the ferry, which crossed the water to the island, the Pines.
You stopped working every weekend, and for one, two, maybe three years, the island was your favorite place, the best place you had ever been, the happiest time.
Then, gradually, things changed. You began to lose your way, knowing you were suddenly in trouble, but just going on, figuring that later you could get it together again if you did not get arrested on the Long Island Railroad for passing a vial of cocaine among you and your friends.
. . .
It was our first summer in Fire Island, late in the season, late at night. We were walking from our house to board the ferry in the harbor of the Pines to go to a big party at the Ice Palace in Cherry Grove. The night was known as the Invasion and had been talked about for weeks. At the party, I was chemically enhanced; we took ecstasy, mescaline, bumps of this and that. I danced, bounced around. The air was filled with sparkles. Men in boots, shorts, and jeweled cross necklaces floated by me. Leather henchmen stalked about in chaps. In a corner, a fierce black queen in a turban, sunglasses, and long rhinestone earrings read everyone to filth.
David Geffen stood by the door, checking out every man who came through it. He had redone Calvin Klein’s house that summer and was everywhere. Madonna and her brother came in on the seaplane for lunch one day.
“Vogue, Vogue, strike a pose.” I tried to. I stood in the mirror before every party. My face was okay, but my body wasn’t marketable. The impressionable gays of New York go through phases when certain things are desirable. I am not cut out for chaps. Nor am I a piercing type. There was the long decade of the muscleman when the great beasts, bulgy-veined and orangeish from their steroids, lumbered down the avenues. There was the period of lean, the summers of sculpted, the days when dating participation required the complete absence of body hair. Black men were for a while the favorite. Then Latinos. At no time, in my memory, have Midwest Protestants been the flavor du jour. A year or so ago, when someone on a dating site asked me to Skype naked, I decided I would do better at Christian Mingle.
At the party at the Ice Palace, I was wearing a pair of five-hundred-dollar sunglasses. I had splurged. I didn’t want anyone to get a look at my eyes, to see how messed up I was.
. . .
For hours and hours, we danced that night in Cherry Grove. When I looked down at my feet, they seemed to be miles away. The night seemed to go on and on. “Do we live here?” I asked someone, barely able to speak.
My housemates were gathered in a pile on a banquette, holding one another and talking. They reminded me of wanderers gathered in a forest around a campfire in a strange, dark forest. The dance floor was the shifting, changing mating place, the ritual. Our comrades were home bases. We went out to seek and then returned to fall back into the arms of our own people. The music played and the hours flashed by and it seemed we had stepped out of time into some safe, warm place where no one was dying or ever alone.
We walked back to the Pines after the Invasion party by the ocean, all together, taking our shoes off, trekking through the shallow waves as, under our feet, the sand and tiny shells sparkled and changed colors. We were so high.
I was happy, but scared too. I was going out too far; I knew this, but it was worth it. I needed these people to feel close to. I was tired of being on my own.
Back at our place, sitting around, laughing with everyone, I just closed my eyes and did another little hit of something when I looked at the flowers on the deck.
“Doesn’t it feel a long way from home?” my friend Leo asked me one morning after everyone else had gone to bed.
. . .
In her last years, when Mammy was living at Monroe Manor, my mother brought her food several times a day, and in the summer took her rosebuds from her bushes wrapped in damp newspapers. I was in Fire Island when I heard that my grandmother had had a massive stroke. She was ninety-six. On the day of the funeral, as we were getting ready to leave, I went to check on Mother and there she was, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had already turned the lights off in her room. She was just sitting on the edge of her bed, still, with her eyes closed.
. . .
“What is the capital of Portugal?” Betty asks over and over all day long.
“Lisbon?”
“What is that place where Mimi goes in the winter?”
“Scottsdale.”