Not So Good a Gay Man Page 5

  Almost hidden in a corner was a small stack of Astounding Science Fiction. I flipped open the cover and just gaped. There it was—“Untitled Story” by Frank M. Robinson.

  What the hell …

  Then I remembered that one of the last stories I had written before returning to the navy was the result of a conference between Bill Hamling, then editor of Amazing Stories, and myself. Amazing always changed the title the author had given a story, so I had let it go as simply “Untitled Story.”

  I found out later from Fred Pohl, my agent, that the editor of Astounding had a twelve-thousand-word hole in the magazine and that “Untitled Story” would just fit. At three cents a word (Amazing paid one), Bill Hamling was pissed but I was delighted, though somewhat confused. Astounding had the reputation of being the thinking man’s science fiction magazine; Amazing was for kids.

  What puzzled me more was that my story was rated second in the issue by the readers. (Just goes to show you why so many adults read the Harry Potter books and love them. The stories appeal to both kids and adults—a good trick for any author to pull off.)

  While I was in the service, the family had moved to Beverly Shores, Indiana, relatively close to the steel town of Gary, but I decided to stay in Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, and study journalism at Northwestern University.

  I got in without any trouble—I had written and sold short stories and been the news editor of Beloit College’s weekly paper, the Round Table. The Medill School of Journalism was rated one of the tops in the country, right after the University of Missouri and Columbia. At Medill I learned how to set type by hand from a tray of tiny metal letters—I failed to realize the importance of that—and how to take photographs with a Speed Graphic and develop the prints myself. (In a few years, the Speed Graphic would become a museum piece.)

  There were, however, two advantages. The course on reporting would be important for its mantra of who-what-how-when-and-where. I knew that learning how to interview people for news stories and articles would be invaluable. Most important of all, Northwestern was close to home.

  Making money by writing stories for one or two cents a word for science fiction magazines began to lose its glamour.

  What was worse was that I had begun to buy into the popular attitude toward homosexuality. It was dirty, it was sinful, it was a crime.

  My self-esteem was rapidly sinking, and there was nobody in whom I could confide, nobody who could offer real-life advice. I was on my own, and if I didn’t do something I would go off a bridge, as Tyler Clementi was to do generations later.

  I had to bite the bullet and do what I knew had to be done. I didn’t succeed, but in the process I managed to fuck up the lives of two other people.

  V

  THE NORTHERN CAMPUS of Northwestern was in Evanston and stretched along the shores of Lake Michigan. A cramped but beautiful campus and one that I fell in love with. Unfortunately, it would take two years to get a master’s degree in journalism—my undergraduate work at Beloit was of little help (they were not impressed by my major in physics nor my minor in anthropology).

  It was also expensive, and my government aid wouldn’t cover it. My brother Mark—probably making up for all the times he’d hit me on the arm or belittled my prowess when it came to throwing a baseball—offered to send me $100 a month. If I were frugal, I could just make it.

  My first job was to find a place to live, and the first stop was the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. They weren’t interested in anybody from a hick school in Wisconsin, or maybe I had the fraternal grip wrong. At the door it felt like I was shaking hands with a freshly caught trout.

  I finally ended up on the top floor of a three-story rooming house run by a more-than-friendly middle-aged woman. How friendly I found out when I went to the basement to take a shower. The shower stall was made of wooden slats with a lot of space—maybe two inches—between them. I had just soaped down when my landlady came bustling into the basement with a load of laundry. The first time was maybe coincidence. The second time I realized she was checking me out through the slats. After the third shower she knew everything there was to know about me. From then on I turned my back to the slats and mooned her when I heard her coming down the stairs.

  One of the few advantages was that the local campus hangout, the Hut, was just a few blocks away. Everybody who was anybody dropped in there—meaning many of the students in drama and journalism, as well as the usual townies trying to make friends and influence people, especially the girls.

  It was a great hangout. One of the girls I briefly knew was a child prodigy in theater, fifteen years old when she entered Northwestern (she left after two years). A number of the Hut regulars razzed her because of her age and doubted she could act her way out of a paper bag.

  Karen Black grew up and won critical praise playing opposite Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. She won an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and a Golden Globe for the same film. (She also appeared in Nashville and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, both Altman films. I liked Dean the best because it promised so little and delivered so much.)

  One time my brother’s check was late and I was flat broke. I didn’t want to borrow any money, but a Canadian student, Bob Vallance, a Hut regular I’d met, glanced at the starved expression on my face one morning and said, “Hey, Frank, how about I spot you to a breakfast or two?”

  Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and a small bowl of peaches. The waiter forgot the peaches for the second breakfast, so I took the bowl back to the pass-through from kitchen to dining room and did my best imitation of “Please, sir, may I have some more?”

  Jerry Orbach, the temporary short-order cook, stuck his hand in a #2 can of peaches, pulled up a handful, and plopped them in the bowl. I never got to know him well but attended a few college plays he was in and went backstage once to compliment him on how he carried his spear or whatever. He was a very good actor, but part of my visit was just to thank him for the peaches.

  (Next time I heard of Orbach he had a long-standing role in the Off-Broadway play The Fantasticks and went on to win nominations and Tonys for Guys and Dolls, Promises, Promises, Chicago, 42nd Street, etc. On television, he played the lead for years on Law & Order. The day of his death, Broadway theater marquees were dimmed in his honor.)

  Journalism school was an almost all-white school back then. No Chinese or Latinos that I remember and only one black, a friendly guy named Arthur France. One time I asked him why he wanted to be a reporter.

  He hesitated, then blurted, “Because then people won’t have to look at me.”

  He was going to spend his whole professional life hiding his face behind a byline. I hope Art lived long enough to see Eugene Robinson, Don Lemon, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and dozens of other black anchormen or experts being interviewed on TV today. I hope that on some station Art had been one of them.

  One night Art and his wife invited me to dinner and I went shopping for groceries with his wife. They lived on the very segregated South Side of Chicago, where there were only mom-and-pop stores; no supermarket had located down there. When the elevated trains emptied out, everybody headed for the stores. It was hard not to notice that there were few blacks behind the counters, that few blacks owned the stores where other blacks bought their groceries.

  On the black South Side everybody shopped meal to meal. The iceman had long vanished, and few families owned a fridge. At one meat market, Art’s wife picked out some chops for supper and asked the clerk to turn them over so she could see the bottom. She told me that a lot of the stores dyed their meat so you had to watch out for chops that were green on the bottom.

  In journalism school, I fumbled my way through print shop, did moderately well in reporting, and loved special projects. I had started a novel and spent most of my evenings working on it. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up the bona fides of the instructor who was teaching the course. So far as I could find, he had sold one story to The Saturday Evening Po
st—and that was it. Google didn’t exist back then so there was no way I could easily check him out for books or articles. I suspected there hadn’t been many.

  I hung out at the Hut and met most of the regulars, including Big George (six-four at 225 and a regular in the weight room of the Evanston YMCA). I also worked out at the Y, determined to match the physiques of my brothers, all of whom had exercised with weights. (Stepbrother Bill could do a stomach isolation—it was all I could do to suck it in.) I could bench-press 225—once—but no matter how much I worked them, I never got an abdominal six-pack.

  I was getting further along with my novel, which I had titled The Power, after a few lines in the movie The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (screenplay by Sidney Sheldon).

  You remind me of a man.

  What man?

  The man with the power.

  The publisher subtitled it “a novel of menace,” which much later would be referred to as simply a “thriller.”

  I was very proud of what I had written so far, and the instructor asked to see it. He was not nearly as delighted as I was and called me into his office. Had I ever read Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw? I said I hadn’t, though of course I knew of Shaw.

  He claimed that my lead character’s name—William Tanner—was the same as the name of a character in Shaw’s book. And both books dealt with “supermen.” I don’t think I convinced him, and the manuscript earned an A minus. I checked later, and decided he probably hadn’t read Shaw’s book, either. For Shaw it was “John Tanner,” for me it had been “William Tanner.” As close as “Jim Jones” and “Bob Jones.”

  My personal life by this time was nonexistent. Why the hell was I interested in men, not women? There was nobody to tell me; I had to find out for myself.

  There was one kid who hung out at the Hut who seemed to have few friends. He was somewhat effeminate, and rumors were he was probably a “faggot.” He became the object of an experiment for which I was never to forgive myself.

  One night I asked him up to my apartment and stripped him of all his clothes, including socks and shorts. Without saying a word I then gave him the male equivalent of a gynecologic examination, inspecting every external organ and every orifice, trying desperately to find out exactly what attracted me.

  After twenty minutes, I gave up. I sat there staring at him as he put his clothes back on. As he was leaving, he turned at the door to look at me with hatred. He was crying.

  “I was looking for somebody for a long time,” he said. “I was hoping you might be him.”

  I was badly shaken. I looked for him after that but he never came to the Hut again, nor did I ever see him on campus. Effeminate or not, he was what I had always wanted. Somebody I could talk to and compare notes and maybe even sleep with. I finally realized that whatever I had done to him I had also done to myself.

  VI

  I LIVED AT home during the summer in Beverly Shores, Indiana, a short distance from the steel mills of Gary. I got there too late to get the usual college summer job of reading meters in the main building. The only job open was manual labor as an assistant in Central Mills maintenance. I surprised them and took it.

  I had no idea what I was getting into. Every day one of the five mills would close down and we would go in to fix anything that needed fixing—primarily replacing the huge links on the conveyor belts that carried ingots of steel from one part of the plant to another. The links that were broken or worn, we’d take off the belt and replace with a new one. The links weighed a good twenty-five pounds, and I carried the comealong—a device for hoisting the heavy links—on my shoulders. Once the new link was in place on the belt my job was to “buck” the rivets that were inserted through the link to make it part of the belt while a workman on the other side flattened the rivet with a sledgehammer. If they missed the rivet, the only thing in the way of the sledgehammer would be my head. On Monday, when some of the workers showed up either drunk or with hangovers, I’d hide until somebody sober reported in.

  The best and most reliable worker was an avowed socialist. The company would have canned him, but he was the best man on the gang. If something went wrong, he was the one they called on to fix it.

  The supervisor took me aside and warned me that Scotty was a socialist and I should be wary of him. Scotty and I, of course, became good friends.

  I joined the steelworkers’ union when two very large union men showed up in the locker room where we boiled our overalls, thick with grease, in kerosene. They suggested I join the union and I readily agreed. (I would have joined even without the muscle showing up. I was a dyed-in-the-wool union man.)

  Working in the mills was hard work. I’d go home and sleep for an hour before I had strength enough to eat supper.

  It was a different sort of danger the few times I worked out in the Gary YMCA gym. I was showering one Saturday getting ready to go home and there were only two of us in the shower room. The other guy, about my age, was semierect and studying me, making sure I knew he was available.

  I ignored him, feeling the sweat pop out on my forehead. I didn’t know him from Adam, and he didn’t know me. Entrapment, I thought. If he were genuinely interested he would have started a conversation as I was getting dressed, or offered me a lift home. I left the Y but not without regrets. What if he had been for real? There were ten years missing out of my life that I desperately wanted to make up for. But this time I was sure the closet had saved me.

  At the end of my last year at Northwestern, my master’s thesis was titled “Pornography and the Law,” and I dropped in on the one man I thought would know the most about it. Hugh Hefner had first proposed a “sophisticated men’s magazine” to his publisher at PDC in Cicero, but there was room for only one genius in the shop and his name wasn’t Hugh Hefner.

  Hefner gave his magazine a new title, pasted it up on his kitchen table, and used a near-nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe as his first centerfold. The rest of the issue he filled with cartoons and fiction. He printed fifty thousand copies of the first issue (so I was told), which he planned as a bimonthly publication.

  The first issue sold out; so did the second. He went to monthly publication, and by the end of a year had a small office on Chicago’s near North Side and enough spare cash to buy himself a Mercedes with gull-wing doors (at least so the rumors went), and his friend and former fellow employee at PDC, Bill Hamling, reportedly turned green with envy. So did everybody else who knew Hefner.

  He didn’t recognize me as his former bartender of a few years back and waved me to a chair. There were maybe a dozen female assistants who came in and out of the office while we talked—most of them wore tight sweaters with “Hef” printed on the front. (This is from memory, so forgive me if I’m wrong.) Hugh Hefner was a slender, handsome man and the women in the office were definite knockouts. Whatever else might be said, Hefner had great taste.

  He was friendly and told me everything I wanted to know. In the back of my head was the idea that if I’d asked him for a job, he would have given me one—he could have hired me for stamp money. But along with being an overage virgin, I was also something of a prude. Work for a magazine that featured naked women? No way.

  One major insight into myself was offered by a psychology major in casual conversation. You were programmed to do certain things in life at certain times, he said. If you failed, you’d spend the rest of your life playing catch-up.

  He didn’t know me that well, but I felt that everything he said applied to me.

  I finished the novel that semester and went running to the post office and sent it off to my agent. Two weeks later I heard back. Lippincott wanted some minor changes, but they offered an advance of $500. I immediately called my mother (collect) and told her the good news, slapping the side of the phone booth (they had them then) as I talked. She was excited but I could detect a trace of doubt in her voice. She’d believe it when she saw it.

  When the books came in, I spread them out on my bed in the Y and looked at th
em with great pride and satisfaction. Ten copies of a book with my name on it. Then came the letdown, and I realized I was just as unhappy as I was before.

  The book was dedicated to my mother, and she got the first copy of the ten. She put it proudly on the coffee table so all her friends would see what her son had done.

  She never read it.

  My friends at Northwestern promptly threw a party for me, and I was the man of the hour. It was the first book I ever sold (a dozen more were to follow), and like a lot of things in life, there’s nothing like the first time. And this turned out to be a home run—paperback, television, magazine, a dozen overseas editions, and a lousy movie.

  I got mildly plotched at the party and so did a pretty, slender Irish girl named Cathy McGill, a fellow journalism student. She felt mildly ashamed and hid under the piano, afraid she would spoil the party. By this time most of those at the party were drunker than she was and I assured her there was nothing left to spoil. Since then we became good friends.

  One time she gave me a book—Now We Are Six, by A. A. Milne, detailing the adventures of Christopher Robin in verse.

  Now I am six and I’m clever as clever,

  So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.

  On the book jacket Cathy had carefully printed “to Eeyore,” Christopher’s grumpy and pessimistic donkey friend. (She had that right.)

  I got my degree in 1953, needed work, and ended up working on a new magazine with Bill Hamling. He had started his professional life as a science fiction fan, become a writer, eventually edited Amazing Stories, then left Ziff-Davis and started his own magazines, Imagination and Imaginative Tales, because he loved the field. They did well and then began to slip in circulation along with the rest of the field. At one time, to keep them going, Hamling found work at Publisher’s Development Corporation in nearby Skokie, where he met Hugh Hefner. They became friends and went to each other’s parties, though later Hefner denied ever becoming really close friends.