They hadn’t known this because he hadn’t known it. It had taken a random man on Amtrak to reveal to him his own inclinations.
In fact, it would be months before he would even kiss a man. First, he had to sort out the terrifying steps of settling into city life. He found a dingy studio in the West Village almost by accident: he was helping an old woman who had fallen over on Seventh Avenue, so laden was she with a grocery bag of potatoes and medications, and when he was on her doorstep on Charles Street, she revealed herself as the landlady of the residence and offered him a unit, which was one floor underground and which dispensed roaches like a pinball machine. Yet it was a godsend: New York at that time was a war zone, leering men cascading by his window every night, their voices riding up the sides of buildings and into the thick night air. He would perch on his rickety couch like a Catholic kneeling at confession, gazing upward through his windows and observing people from below, their wingtip shoes and chains and the moonlit feathers of their hair. He felt his lust as if it were a stash of money in his pocket, something valuable but daunting to transact. If he gave it away and got something in return, he wasn’t sure how valuable that something might be to him.
He busied himself during the day looking for a job, which he found in a deli. The irony of making sandwiches, given his brother’s line of work, was not lost on him. He loved it, though. As demanding as his customers could be, he had a fondness for them, their quirks building his impression of the city face by face and gripe by gripe. They were a varied bunch: grandmothers and addicts, effete painters wearing berets, rabbis clutching worn copies of the Talmud. His bosses were a husband-and-wife team from Malta, and they both seemed grateful for him because he came across like their son. He would take himself out for a drink—just one—at a bar adjacent to the gay ones, steeling himself to venture Out but stopping short. One time, he wavered outside Stonewall after a strong martini, but after getting an arch glance from a gray-haired older gentleman, he retreated to a bar where women’s hips rubbed against his back.
In the meantime, he auditioned. He knew how completely na?ve he was in thinking that he would land a gig, but he thought that acknowledging his na?veté would put him one step ahead of most people and lead to success. (Nothing envisioned a future more inaccurately than na?veté.) As if it were a talisman, he treasured the fable of Betty Buckley, who had stumbled off a bus from Texas in 1969, walked by an open call for 1776, and booked the role of Martha Jefferson immediately; she had been a famous Broadway star ever since. Every time he saw an audition in the paper and showed up, his hair parted and his black clothes laundered with his last batch of laundry quarters, he assumed that his perfect pitch and his handsomely ruddy face would pave his path to the stage.
The auditions were always in some ill-lit and downright dingy room with uncomfortable plastic chairs and a gaggle of peak-eyed people who all seemed to be hiding a murder from one another. They were all, undoubtedly, attractive—the women with eyes like ceramics and their limbs thin and lovely; the men—well, the men as tall and noticeable as he was. They looked him up and down unabashedly, and once, one approached him and let a finger trail along the back of his neck, startling him so much that he simply froze.
He’d be pushed into another ill-lit yet larger room, with a long tableful of people wearing black sweaters, or turtlenecks. He expected a gregarious bunch of free spirits, charming cultural purveyors of the Big Apple. Instead he found group after group of casting agents, directors, and choreographers who resembled college professors—stoic, unsmiling. He pared his audition songs down to two—“On the Street Where You Live” from My Fair Lady and “We’ve Got It” from Seesaw. He soon learned that the former was a total no-no, its melody aped by scrawny queens all over the city. At least the latter made people pay more attention to him—when they paid attention to him. He would get through four of his sixteen measures before one of the people behind the table, as if asking for a bill at a restaurant, would flick a dismissive hand in the air. The first time that it happened—indeed, the first few times that it happened—he was confused, standing dumbly in place. The creative teams were used to this. They laughed and said, “Oh, honey, don’t call us. We’ll call you.”
Still, he clung to that Betty Buckley story as if it had been passed around solely for his benefit, a message by carrier pigeon that had found its way magically from Manhattan to Youngstown. He knew that perseverance was the name of the game; he knew to expect rejection after rejection. In the meantime, he continued working at the deli, happy to be doing something that he genuinely enjoyed, despite the meager setting.
Soon, in the evenings, when he went out, he’d find himself ordering more than one drink. One summer evening, he got cruised so aggressively by a handsome guy in a straight bar that he followed him to a gay bar. He wasn’t even sure which bar it was because they proceeded to get royally drunk. Ken confessed that he was a performer, too, and he promised to share his wisdom on auditioning in exchange for more and more drinks. Later that night, in the doorway of Ken’s apartment, Frederick found himself close to being sick. Surrendering, he stumbled into Ken’s dark apartment and blindly groped his way toward the toilet, into which he ejected their countless Long Island Iced Teas. Ken unleashed a torrent of anger so strong and focused that it made Frederick sick all over again. He kept yelling, “‘Frederick’? ‘Frederick’? Classy name for a fucking disgusting guy who can’t hold his liquor!” Then he practically pushed Frederick into the street, from where, at 6:00 A.M., Frederick managed to make it home—not before tripping and falling painfully on his steps. It was when he was hoisting himself up, his knees bleeding through his pants and his forehead scraped, that he heard Ken’s voice ringing again and again in his head: “‘Frederick’? ‘Frederick’?” He decided to change it immediately.
*