I've slept with Fran several times this week. The Park Slope artist and I met at the Gslight Pub on 7th Avenue. She broke up with her boyfriend, who used to knock on the door, while we were making love. She shushed me and continued to a silent orgasm. Any time I exited from her President Street ground-floor apartment, I checked out the sidealk for him. I had no idea what he looked like. Fran wants to nail down my freedom. I don't know why.
Last night at One-Fifth Bert, Cecile, and I discussed romance. Bert is a homosexual portrait painter with a receding hairline and Cecile an older woman with a very avant-grade view of innocence. She loves make-up and dressing like a fag hag. Given my freedom I would love to seduce her or be seduce by her.
"Romance? Isn't that what we all want?"
Cecile wore diamonds on her finger and around her delicate neck. Cecile came from wealth and I wondered whether if having too much money killed any approach to sexual adventure with the unrich like myself.
"Romance is a perfect ideal, but..."
"But what..." Burt asked with his eyes on my crotch.
"I deal more with freedom. Sexual freedom is threatened by romance or love. Carson McCullers wrote in THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE "Most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover, because being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.”
Cecile's eyes widened and she said, "I had been married for twenty-five years. On New Year's Eve my husband finally admitted he was gay. Everyone was shocked. I had known all along. We divorced, so he could be with his lover or lovers and for the first time in my life I was free."
"You didn't have to divorce..." Burt started to say, but Cecile lifted her hand, "Yes, but my husband loves no one more than a bottle of vodka and I could always deal with Hal being queer, but when he's drunk, he's only with drink. This New Year's Eve he drank so much."
"It's too bad he does." Burt looked at me, as if I might be able to cure Cecile's loneliness. "You should go to CBGBs with your young friend."
"How did you spend New Year's Eve? I was alone," she confessed a confidence and his eyes showed the hurt.
I was with friends and strangers at Cisco Disco. I can't remember a thing, but my ass does." Burt was in his fifties, but still very handsome. He loved the back rooms, as did anyone wanting to fuck.
"I got tight."
"Tight?"
"Drunk.
"With everyone and no one. I wanted no one."
"Neither did I, but I had the best time, because I was free."
"One night of freedom is only one night."
"Better one night than none and I love the freedom." Cecile signaled the bartender for another round for us and I lowered my head, thinking about how lonely loneliness was, as the hours of a New Year slipped away without anyone to help pass the time.
I know alone too well.
Later
I entertained Ro and her friend, Sally at Broadway Charlies. I drank hard and missed a rendezvous with Fran. I called and said I couldn't make it to Brooklyn.
"Why can't you meet me?"
"I have errands to run." I hoped she wouldn't ask any questions about why and she didn't. We made plans to meet tomorrow. I warned that I wouldn't wake up before noon. She said, "Why do you treat me like I'm nothing?"
"I don't know."
And that was the truth.
Even later
Racism. White people against anyone of color. African or Asian and let's not forget the extermination of the Native Americans. Slavery of them all is how White people stay ahead. Since 1621.
