In One Person

"I was trying to spare you meeting this guy, Bill," was all Alice said. We were living in Santa Monica; she was always the driver, so she was sparing me the driving, too. I just stayed in the apartment and wrote. I could walk to Ocean Avenue and see the homeless people--I could run on the beach.

What was it Herm Hoyt had said to me about the duck-under? "You hit it and run--you know how to run, don'tcha?" the old coach had said.

I started to run in Santa Monica, in '69. I would soon be twenty-seven; I was already writing my second novel. It had been eight years since Miss Frost and Herm Hoyt had showed me how to hit a duck-under; I was probably a little rusty. The running suddenly seemed like a good idea.

Alice drove me to the meeting. There were four or five studio execs gathered around an egg-shaped table in a glassy building in Beverly Hills, with near-blinding sunlight pouring through the windows, but only Mr. Sharpie spoke.

"This is William Abbott, the novelist," Mr. Sharpie said, introducing me; it was probably my extreme self-consciousness, but I thought the novelist word made all the execs uneasy. To my surprise, Mr. Sharpie was a slob. The Sharpie word wasn't a compliment to how the guy dressed; it referred to the brand of waterproof pen he twirled in his hand. I hate those permanent markers. You can't really write with them--they bleed through the page; they make a mess. They're only good for making short remarks in the wide margins of screenplays--you know, manageable words like "This is shit!" or "Fuck this!"

As for where the "Mr. Pastel" nickname came from--well, I couldn't see it. The guy was an unshaven slob dressed all in black. He was one of those execs who was trying to look like an artist of some indeterminate kind; he wore a sweat-stained black jogging suit over a black T-shirt, with black running shoes. Mr. Pastel looked very fit; since I'd just started running, I could see at a glance he ran harder than I did. Golf wasn't his game--it would have been insufficient exercise for him.

"Perhaps Mr. Abbott will tell us his thoughts," Mr. Sharpie said, twirling his waterproof pen.

"I'll tell you when I might take seriously the idea of service to my country," I began. "When local, state, and federal legislation, which currently criminalizes homosexual acts between consenting adults, is repealed; when the country's archaic anti-sodomy laws are overturned; when psychiatrists stop diagnosing me and my friends as clinically abnormal, medically incompetent freaks in need of 'rehabilitation'; when the media stops representing us as sissy, pansy, fairy, child-molesting perverts! I would actually like to have children one day," I said, pausing to look at Alice, but she had lowered her head and sat at the table with one hand on her forehead, shielding her eyes. She was wearing jeans and a man's blue-denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up--her customary uniform. In the sunlight, her hairy arms sparkled.

"In short," I continued, "I might take seriously the idea of service to my country when my country begins to demonstrate that it gives a shit about me!" (I had rehearsed this speech while running on the beach--from the Santa Monica Pier to where Chautauqua Boulevard ends at the Pacific Coast Highway, and back again--but I'd not realized that the hairy mother of my future children and the studio exec who thought my first-person narrator should be faking his homosexual tendencies were in cahoots.)

"You know what I love?" this same studio exec said then. "I love that voice-over about childhood. How's it go, Alice?" the craven shit asked her. That's when I knew they were fucking each other; it was the way he'd asked the question. And if the "voice-over" existed, someone was already writing the script.

Alice knew she'd been caught. With her hand on her forehead--still shielding her eyes--she recited, with resignation, " 'Most places we leave in childhood grow less, not more, fancy.' "

"Yeah--that's it!" the exec cried. "I love that so much, I think it should begin and end our movie. It bears repeating, doesn't it?" he asked me, but he wasn't waiting for an answer. "It's the tone of voice we want--isn't it, Alice?" he asked.

"You know how much I love that line, Bill," Alice said, still shielding her eyes. Maybe Mr. Pastel's underwear was light-colored, I thought--or perhaps his sheets.

I couldn't just get up and leave. I didn't know how to get back to Santa Monica from Beverly Hills; Alice was the driver in our little would-be family.

"Look at it this way, dear Bill," Larry said, when I came back to New York in the fall of '69. "If you'd had children with that conniving ape, your kids would have been born with hairy armpits. Women who want babies will say and do anything!"

But I think I'd wanted children, with someone--okay, maybe with anyone--as sincerely as Alice had. Over time, I would give up the idea of having children, but it's harder to stop wanting to have children.

"Do you think I would have been a good mother, William?" Miss Frost had asked me once.

"You? I think you would be a fantastic mother!" I said to her.

"I said 'would have been,' William--not 'would be.' I'm not ever going to be a mother now," Miss Frost told me.

"I think you would have been a terrific mom," I told her.

At the time, I didn't understand why Miss Frost had made such a big deal of the "would have been" or "would be" business, but I get it now. She'd given up the idea of ever having children, but she couldn't stop the wanting part.

WHAT REALLY PISSED ME off about Alice and the fucking movie business is that I was living in Los Angeles when the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village--in June of '69. I missed the Stonewall riots! Yes, I know it was street hustlers and drag queens who first fought back, but the resultant protest rally in Sheridan Square--the night after the raid--was the start of something. I wasn't happy that I was stuck in Santa Monica, still running on the beach and relying on Larry to tell me what had happened back in New York. Larry had certainly not been to the Stonewall with me--not ever--and I doubt he was among the patrons on that June night when some gays resisted the now-famous raid. But to hear Larry talk, you would think he was the first gay man to cruise Greenwich Avenue and Christopher Street, and that he was among the regulars at the Stonewall--even that he'd been carted off to jail with the kicking, punching drag queens, when (as I later learned) Larry had been with his patrons-of-poetry people in the Hamptons, or with that young poetaster of a Wall Street guy Larry was fucking on Fire Island. (His name was Russell.)

And it wasn't until I came back to New York that my dearest friend, Elaine, admitted to me that

Alice had hit on her the one time Elaine had visited us in Santa Monica.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked Elaine.

"Billy, Billy," Elaine began, as her mother used to preface her admonitions to me, "did you not know that your most insecure lovers will always try to discredit your friends?"

Of course I did know that, or I should have. I'd already learned it from Larry--not to mention Tom Atkins.

And it was right around that time when I heard again from poor Tom. A dog (a Labrador retriever) had been added to the photograph on the Atkins family Christmas card of 1969; at the time, Tom's children struck me as too young to be going to school, but the breakup with Alice had caused me to pay less attention to children. Enclosed with the Christmas card was what I first mistook for one of those third-person Christmas letters; I almost didn't read it, but then I did.

It was Tom Atkins trying hard to write a book review of my first novel--a most generous (albeit awkward) review, as it turned out. As I would later learn, all of poor Tom's reviews of my novels would conclude with the same outrageous sentence. "It's better than Madame Bovary, Bill--I know you don't believe me, but it really is!" Coming from Atkins, of course I knew that anything would be better than Madame Bovary.

LAWRENCE UPTON'S SIXTIETH BIRTHDAY party was on a bitter-cold Saturday night in New York, in February of 1978. I was no longer Larry's lover--not even his occasional fuck buddy--but we were close friends. My third novel was about to be published--around the time of my birthday, in March of that same year--and Larry had read the galleys. He'd pronounced it my best book; that Larry's praise had been unqualified spooked me somewhat, because Larry wasn't known for withholding his reservations.