In One Person

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.
    W HAT 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