The End of Being Known: A Memoir

Anonymous Life

Anonymous Life / 101 T he summer I turned eighteen, I lived with a dancer on Mercer Street who didn’t know if she wanted to be with men, women, or anyone at all. I had gone through a period of wanting to be with everyone, but at the loft I began the stage of only wanting men. While there had been bisexuality once, I knew it was a multiple that would never add up. Having both sexes was like looking at an eclipse, and in its afterwards, only men were standing in the change—city-bound or sun-drenched at the gay resort. Every solar eclipse seems to refresh an idea you had about the world, and my idea was men and the bodies of men. The loft where I lived was near First Street and First Avenue, and I used to wander into the Club Baths two or three nights a week to meet male strangers for sex. I liked sex but not social ambition very much, so I didn’t go out of my way to meet many people in daylight. Not meeting people paralleled driving a cab all night and that specific kind of loneliness that comes from being in a car. The undertow of any metropolis is its sweeping loneliness, and New York City lays itself at one’s feet with such speed and idiosyncrasy and determination that people feel even lonelier in it. Whenever the odd fare piled into the backseat and lit up a joint, I smoked it with them to ride out the lost feeling. Getting high was popular, like sex, and because AIDS hadn’t changed anything yet, sex was still as improvisational as jazz. And like the clubs for jazz, there were clubs for sex too. It was the best time in history to be a gay man, and the Club Baths was the best bathhouse in New York at the time—reimagined some years later as Lucky Chang’s famous drag restaurant. Today every table at Lucky Chang’s has the ghost of a blow job hovering over it, and the walk-in freezer in the basement still has the pipe in the wall that used to shoot blankets of steam into a tiled room until dawn. The Club also boasted an atrium with a fountain in the middle that lazily arched out its stream of water like spit from the mouth of Puck, and along with an automated snack bar that sold Drake’s Cakes, there was a machine that sputtered out coffee through a metal tube, which made it taste like ashes and hot water. But nobody came to the baths for the ambiance. Or the food and drink. People came for the other men in various degrees of disarray or disassociation . And while my aim eventually settled on them—the strangers—I also marveled at the bathhouse staff: guardians of a collective desire whose job descriptions were succinct, the way they are in dreams. One of the jobs at the baths was taking money or refusing money—refusing money from people who were 102 Anonymous Life 103 too drunk or crazy; refusing me because I was too drunk or crazy, a lot. All the jobs at the baths circled around sex but weren’t sex. People liked to fantasize that everyone, including the staff, was having sex, but it wasn’t true. Sex was for the paying customer and bloomed from the interior—inside the bathhouse rooms, which were flimsy, closet-sized suites, each with a cot up against the wall with a rumpled sheet thrown over it. Rooms are private, And here we were being private in public, so the sex got poured out of the rooms. We let sex out into the steam of the steam room or the dry heat of the sauna. In the steam room, the heat was blasting out in dream time. The steam was transforming against your skin into a beaded cloak of sexual moisture. You followed someone into a room, without talking—without talking because whatever conversations happened always sounded ridiculous. It was a quiet thing, the bathhouse. It was a museum for sex. And like a museum, you walked around the hallways in a kind of trance. You were on the great desire tour. Your temperature changed with your taste. You had many choices. You fell in love twice in the time it took between...