In One Person

Institut
, the students called it. We were Americans, from all over, but our faculty was a mixed bag: some Americans (Larry was by far the best-known among them), one wonderful and eccentric Englishman, and various Austrians from the faculty at the University of Vienna.
    In those days, the Institute for European Studies was on that end of the Wollzeile nearest the Doktor-Karl-Lueger-Platz and the Stubenring. The students complained about how far
das Institut
was from the university; many of our students (the ones with better German) took additional courses at the University of Vienna. Not me; I wasn’t interested in more courses. I’d gone to college in New York because I wanted to be in New York; I was studying abroad in Vienna to be in Vienna. I didn’t care how near to or far from the university I was.
    My German was good enough to get me hired at an excellent restaurant on the Weihburggasse—near the opposite end of the Kärntnerstrasse from the opera. It was called Zufall (“Coincidence”), and I got the job both because I had worked as a waiter in New York and because, shortly after I arrived in Vienna, I learned that the only English-speaking waiter at Zufall had been fired.
    I’d heard the story in that mysterious gay coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse—one of those side streets off the Graben. The Kaffee Käfig, it was called—the “Coffee Cage.” During the day, it appeared to be mostly a student hangout; there were girls there, too—in fact, it was daytime when a girl told me that the waiter at Zufall had been fired. But after dark, the older men showed up at the Kaffee Käfig, and there weren’t any girls around. That was how it was the night I ran into Larry, and he popped the top-or-bottom question.
    That first fall term at the Institute, I was not one of Larry’s students. He was teaching the plays of Sophocles. Larry was a poet, and I wanted to be a novelist—I thought I was done with theater, and I didn’t write poems. But I knew that Larry was a respected writer, and I’d asked him if he would consider offering a writing course—in either the winter or the spring term, in ’64.
    “Oh, God—not a
creative
writing class!” Larry said. “I know—don’t tell me. One day, creative writing will be taught
everywhere
!”
    “I just wanted to be able to show my writing to another writer,” I told him. “I’m not a poet,” I admitted. “I’m a fiction writer. I understand if you’re not interested.” I was walking away—I was trying to look hurt—when he stopped me.
    “Wait, wait—what is your name, young
fiction
writer?” Larry asked. “I do
read
fiction,” he told me.
    I told him my name—I said “Bill,” because Miss Frost owned the
William
name. (I would publish my novels under the name William Abbott, but I let no one else call me William.)
    “Well, Bill—let me think about it,” Larry said. I knew then that he was gay, and everything else he was thinking, but I wouldn’t become his student until January 1964, when he offered a creative writing course at the Institute in the winter term.
    Larry was the already-distinguished poet—
Lawrence
Upton, to his colleagues and students, but his gay friends (and a coterie of lady admirers) called him Larry. By then, I’d been with a few older men—I’d not lived with them, but they’d been my lovers—and I knew who I was when it came to the top-or-bottom business.
    It was not the crudeness of Larry’s top-or-bottom question that shocked me; even his first-time students knew that Lawrence Upton was a famous snob who could also be notoriously crass. It was simply that my teacher, who was such a renowned literary figure, had hit on me —
that
shocked me. But that was never how Larry told the story, and there was no contradicting him.
    According to Larry, he
hadn’t
asked me if I was a top or a bottom. “In the sixties, dear Bill, we did not say ‘top’ and ‘bottom’—we said ‘pitcher’ and ‘catcher,’ though of course you
Vermonters
might have been prescient,” Larry said, “or so far ahead of the rest of us that you were already asking, ‘Plus or minus?’ while we less-progressive types were still stuck with the pitcher-or-catcher question, which soon
would become
the top-or-bottom question. Just not in the sixties, dear Bill. In Vienna, when I picked you up, I
know
I asked you if you were a pitcher or a catcher.”
    Then, turning from me to our friends —
his
friends, for the most part; both