Luis Polanco
Waterfront Views
I sat holed up at my desk, waiting until I could leave unseen. It was near seven o’clock, and I had done nothing all day except chat and make plans with men, even while my editor hounded me about a review of a photography exhibit coming due. That night I was on my way to meet Henry.
Henry was visiting from Nebraska. He lived in a town surrounded by prairies, where the nearest city was a three-hour drive. He was on vacation, and while he was here, he wanted to explore museums, go shopping, maybe catch a movie, and tour the city’s gay life. In his messages, he was disarmingly sincere. He said he had never done this before, gone on a date within hours of first talking to someone. But in New York, he felt freer.
I was starving when I arrived. I hadn’t eaten all day because I really wanted to get fucked. I didn’t see Henry in the crowd, so I took a seat at the bar. On stage were two dancer’s poles and a screen showing Fassbinder’s Querelle—the theme of the night, apparently. Amid the fog, Brad Davis wannabes stood around in white tanks and captain’s hats, and a bearded queen pranced in heels far too high for her skill. In the groups of men, I recognized amateur porn stars and trolls I knew from online. I watched the movie until Henry tapped me on the shoulder. In person, he was taller than I assumed from his profile. His clean face accentuated a strong jawline, his eyes crystal blue. At first, he wasn’t going to drink, but I pressured him into a shot since I was already on my second tequila soda. Come on, I said, just to catch up with me. Talking with him was easy, and I cajoled him into two more shots, placing my hand on the ball of his shoulder and giving him a playful squeeze. He was eager to share his impressions of the city. So many people, so many signs, way too much to see, he said. It so overwhelmed him that he didn’t even know where to stop for food. He had ended up buying a hot dog. He would have to work out twice as hard when he returned, he said, running his hands down his abdomen. He preferred to swim, loved the rush of movement. I didn’t tell him that I swam poorly, didn’t like water up my nose, was afraid of the deep end of a pool, or what I associated with it, feeling out of control.
What did I do for work? Henry asked. I hated saying I was a writer, so I said I did editorial work. He assumed that meant I was an editor, although I was more like an editor’s assistant. He didn’t ask which magazine I worked for, thankfully. When- ever anyone asked, I said it was like Artforum but smaller and much less reputable. Was I working on anything? Henry then asked. I had a review due soon,
I told him. On a retrospective of the photographer Alvin Baltrop at the Bronx Museum. His photos often drew comparisons to those of Wojnarowicz or Peter Hujar, and all three shared a subject: the West Side piers. The history of the piers was common knowledge to many gay men in the city, old and young. Even Henry had some inkling. Picture, I told him, a place that was derelict and abandoned, and then add a bunch of gay men lying around, enjoying the summer, each other. Didn’t that sound like utopia? he asked me.
I should have left the bar then, but I was determined. I didn’t know how to respond to Henry or his romance of that time. I could have said something about the culture industry, the danger of old New York nostalgia, how it was used as a marketing ploy to repackage established artists or exhibit ones whose work curators thought they rescued from the dustbins of history, from the brink of obscurity, blah blah blah, but I would have bored myself, too.
Instead, I told Henry how his question reminded me of a dinner party I went to in honor of a performance troupe. After being provided with champagne, all the guests were guided to an empty space in the gallery where we were asked to close our eyes. Imagine utopia, the troupe leader said. What would we do? Where would we be? What did we see? Act out your desire, he instructed us. I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t imagine anything, I told Henry. I had sat uncomfortably still while around me I heard the shuffle of motion. When I opened my eyes, I saw guests acting out different activities. Some hiked, some played the piano, some swung the paddle of a kayak, I said, miming each action. One person, an artist I knew, imitated sucking cock. The anecdote amused Henry, but I didn’t tell him the end. A member of the troupe had locked eyes with me and shook his head, as if to say I lacked imagination.
Henry said that he wanted to come with me to the Baltrop exhibit the next day. Let’s see where the night takes us, I said. I was still hoping that he would invite me back to his hotel. A friend had recommended it to him, but he said it looked like a front for a prostitution ring. Glamorous and pale women walked in and out of the lobby, he recalled, and the rooms were tiny. I had seen the hotel in question before while walking around the East Village, but thought nothing of it. Our conversation soon turned to Henry’s future. He was going to become a doctor. He had finished most of his medical training and was currently completing his residency. By the time it was done, he would have 250,000 dollars of debt, which was nearly double mine. He told me how much he would earn when he finished and how long it would take him to pay it off. He said he was always adding up expenses in his head. And for what? When would the balance hit zero? Would it ever? When these thoughts cornered him at his worst, he felt as if he were treading water in a race that would leave him breathless. It was so trite, he said, to describe my life in these terms, but they seemed to be the only words I possessed. And sometimes he asked himself: What would happen if I refused? If I never paid? He confessed that he often felt the wish to flee, to dissolve into a shadow in a photograph. In fantasies, he would ignore the payment reminders, ignore the court appeals, ignore the fines, ignore the law, he would ignore all the people who said that it was only fair to pay back what he was given. His hands were gesturing in the air so animatedly as he spoke that he spilled his glass of water, dousing out the candles on the table. He was drunk by then—I had ordered more shots—and I couldn’t listen to much of his blabbering sob story. Perhaps the reason I was so put off by him was less the subject than his manner of stating it, the melodrama of performing the debt-ridden Madame Bovary just before she eats her arsenic. So, when Henry went on and on, I began to tune him out. I just wanted to get laid. I tried rubbing his knees with my hands, inching up his thighs, but he kept saying how his future was foreclosed.
In the bar, go-go performances had begun. The boys all had names that made them sound like they were surfers or boy-next-door types. Some twink in a jockstrap, white Nikes, and tube socks cleared the stage. In his routine, he raised his arms above his head and sniffed his pits. At each one, he stuck his tongue out like a child afraid of broccoli or boiled carrots. He then turned around, bent down, and spread his cheeks wide, signaling my cue to leave. It was obvious I was getting nowhere with Henry, so I told him I had to use the restroom and left without saying goodbye.
I smoked cigarettes on the walk from the subway to the museum. I figured that the best way to look at art was to be totally hungover, throat so dry it hurt to talk, and stomach near-empty. The tension in my forehead left me barely able to describe what I saw.
For a Saturday afternoon, the museum was sparsely attended. Besides the staff and two other couples of middle-aged men, I saw a short woman, dressed in all black, with white frizzy hair.
Close to the exhibit entrance was a monitor that played a video, which, as I approached, started from the beginning. A critic introduced himself and said he would like to first quote his colleague. As we act on the land with increasingly drastic measures, the camera has made a gift of the disappeared, he recited. Alvin Baltrop’s photography captured New York when the city and its inhabitants were in the midst of their own vanishing act, the critic said. In the 1970s, the city was reaching the apex of a fiscal crisis that many saw as its own undoing. New York, which in the decade prior had offered affordable health clinics and mass transportation, free museums and free public colleges, accruing massive debts along the way, was running out of money, the critic added. In 1975, after tremendous cuts to public spending in the city’s budget, President Ford denied a bailout, a decision made infamous by a New York Daily News headline. Ford To City: Drop Dead. This was the New York that Baltrop witnessed, the critic announced, a city falling apart in the throes of austerity.
My phone buzzed. Were we still on for tonight? Peter asked. I had forgotten that earlier in the week I had set up a date with him, a financial consultant who was pushy in choosing a day and time. He was more in line with the men I usually went out with—older, glasses, somewhat weird looking, and generous. Sure, I replied.
As I looked back to the video of the critic, he was discussing the setting of Baltrop’s photographs. Following the collapse of the West Side highway, the critic said, the piers along the Hudson River, abandoned when shipping companies moved their business elsewhere, became a harbor for libidinal exchange. Despite their state of disintegration, the piers afforded an unlikely liberty to those who sought out reprieve from the eyes of a straight and narrow world. With his camera in hand, the critic concluded, Baltrop ventured out to the waterfront and recorded this landscape.
The gallery room was large and lit by white bulbs that reflected in the glass of the framed photographs. I started looking at photos of Baltrop’s time in the navy. Those early photographs showed shirtless men sunning themselves on deck, or else they were in uniform goofing around. As I continued to view snapshots of the piers, I took notes on my phone: Black and white pictures. Sun-bleached siding and ripples in the murky river. Pitch-dark windows. Figures flirting with the light.
After the next few photographs, I gave up and resigned myself to just looking. A hunger softly gnawed at my ribs as I passed from scene to scene. The photographs were all so tiny. They couldn’t have been larger than four by six.
In some of the faraway shots, the exteriors of the shipping depots and ware- houses occupied most of the composition. Yet if I looked closely, I saw men the size of fleas or ticks. The viewer had to come close—so that nose or lips nearly brushed the glass, and the heat of one’s breath was in danger of fogging it. Some men were lying down before the loading docks, asleep and tanning themselves. Otherwise, I found them in the grid of warehouse windows, alone or in twos. Sometimes, the only sign of their presence was a gleaming backside.
As the critic mentioned, some of these structures were dilapidated beyond repair. I stood before one photo in which much of the warehouse had collapsed. The siding had fallen through and left only the steel frames. Meanwhile, in the center of the image were two men no greater than pinpricks. Neither paid atten- tion to the wreckage framing them. They were naked below the waist, with one bent at a ninety-degree angle, resting his arms on piles of lumber, as the other took him from behind. The perspective of the shot confused me because the din- gy water of the Hudson filled the foreground, and I couldn’t tell whether Baltrop had swum out to get the shot. As I looked at that photo, I was caught off guard by how little I had eaten that day. The quiet of the gallery sounded in my ears as if I were in a fishbowl. Hunger and nausea overcame me, and standing unsteadily, I had the impression of being stranded at sea.
I sat down on a bench in the middle of the gallery. My insides spasmed, and I thought I might vomit. At the bench beside mine sat the woman from the lobby. Was I feeling ill? She said I looked pale. She searched her purse and pulled out a granola bar. When she was younger, she often fainted, she recalled, and it took her a while before she finally brought food wherever she went. We sat without speaking for a few minutes, my chewing small bits of granola filling up our silence, before I asked: What did she think of the exhibit?
The pictures were a reminder of her youth. She came to New York because she didn’t want to live in America, she said. To sway her against moving, her family had told her about rape on the subway after dark, but she rode it anyway. It was the city where she fell in love. She always thought it must have been the most fabulous thing to be raised here. It was much different then.
As she spoke, I crumbled off the smallest bits of the granola bar. Despite how I felt, the likelihood of sex still seemed high.
She moved to the city from Florida, where she had been surrounded by water. Which she loved, she said. Her father was a swimmer, so he took her and her sisters to the beach every weekend. She studied dance, wanted to be in the theater, and initially came for an audition. It was exciting, the idea of being a Rockette, she said. But it didn’t happen, and she ended up as a figure model at art schools. The students and instructors liked her because she was very thin. She could hold very still, not moving for hours on end. She got good at ignoring discomfort. That’s why artists and painters liked her. The best scenario was to form a relationship with a single artist because the pay was better, but in any case, she didn’t work very hard, she remembered. Living in the Village was cheap and didn’t require a full-time job.
Her first husband was a longshoreman, the woman said, and he used to work in the warehouses on the piers. She could still remember how he described the ache in his body from loading and unloading cargo ships, the sweat and grime that accumulated on his skin. But the city shut down when longshoremen went on strike. Was it a coincidence, she asked, that all those jobs were cut when shipping containers were introduced? But that was just part of what happened to the city. She wasn’t sure she had the words for the rest.
There was something about this woman that drew me in. I loved women with deep and raspy voices, wearied voices. Maybe it was because these photos spoke to her in a way they didn’t for me. For her, they awakened memories of a city that was no longer here, whereas for me, they offered clues—however opaque—about the one I was in now.
In the seventies, New York was living in an emergency, she said. And what was done? The bankers were given free rein. The message was clear, she went on, say goodbye to all that. It upset her too much, thinking about it now, she said. She actually wanted to leave the city.
I sat with the woman until she exited the gallery. When I had collected my- self, the granola bar half-eaten at the bottom of my bag, I stood up to finish the exhibit. I saw that Baltrop also photographed from up close and inside the pier buildings. In some cases, among the ruins, he took pictures of men through fallen beams and support columns, as if seen through a thicket of branches, so that the camera caught only the act of fellatio. As I learned from accompanying wall text, Baltrop sometimes hung from the ceiling of the warehouses to capture the most opportune moment. One photograph was shot from above the rafters, and the hangar was empty except for a young man lingering in a ray of light. His skin pricked with anticipation. Along the loose floorboards, I imagined, he watched his step for debris, used condoms, needles, and forgotten belongings. Perhaps, staring into the dark, listening to the distant sounds of pleasure muddle with the water lapping below, he felt as though time had come to a halt.
As I made my way through the exhibit, I stood in awe of one photograph depicting a crime scene. Police officers ganged around a waterlogged body, gawking at its nudeness. I wondered if he was a suicide, or if he had fallen through rotted wood. The wall text, however, explained that the piers were also the site for nighttime drop-offs by the mafia. The remains of rival parties or borrowers who defaulted on loans sank to the bottom of the river.
Afterward, I walked out of the museum and took a train downtown. The visit left me dazed. I wasn’t even sure what I might write. Baltrop’s photographs raised more questions than anything. How could I begin to address the problem within them? Were the photos, like so many critics mentioned, evidence of community fostered amid a crisis? And what about all that was out of frame? People in debt? Or, rather, a city? Was one man’s utopia another’s ruin?
The second I sat down, I ordered a martini. Peter had made a reservation at a Parisian-styled bistro. We sat at a corner table where we had a view of the rest of the restaurant. It was dark except for the tea candles at each table, and the effect was such that the other diners looked as if they were telling ghost stories. Peter called the ambiance cozy, as we were so close that our legs brushed up against each other’s. Despite the temperature in the restaurant, he kept his sport coat on over his long-sleeve polo, the knit of which stretched where his belly met his trousers.
To start, Peter ordered tuna tartare and a chicken liver mousse, and for the main, he ordered steak frites. I didn’t want to eat but he insisted, so I ordered a Niçoise salad.
Where was I from? He asked. I grew up in Chicago, I said. No, where was I really from, he wanted to know. Was I Chinese? Filipino? Well, my family came from Puerto Rico, I said. Oh wow, he wouldn’t have guessed. He often traveled to the island for the beaches, the food, and the men, winking at me as he said so. It was a shame what was happening there, he said. But he knew some people who were trying to improve things. He called them the generals, although everyone else called them la junta, Peter laughed. They were restructuring the island’s debt. Given Puerto Rico’s financial problems, he found it ironic that the generals—his elites, he jokingly called them—looked down on him for living in New York. Why would he choose to live in this hellhole? They asked him. In their minds, people came to the city to sell their souls and ended up as busboys, he told me. I was tipsy enough to just smile and nod.
As he ate the tartare and mousse, Peter said many things I didn’t know how to interpret. Like, Susan Sontag was not for the suburbs. And, despite his father being a stockbroker, he was finally coming to identify with his roots in the working class—his great-grandmother was a chambermaid. And then: in a crisis, there were winners and losers.
Peter was fifty-eight, and when he came to the city in the nineties, he remembered thinking it was the center of the world. He talked a lot with his hands, pointing with his fingers and chopping the air with the side of his palm. Having been in the city for almost three decades, he was struck by the moments when he could see the old New York peeking through. He used to live in Williamsburg, where he bought a condo with his ex-husband, the mention of whom brought wrinkles to his nose and brow. They were some of the earliest buyers in the neighborhood, and they were even profiled in the Times for having one of the city’s first gay marriages. He recalled the oppression and discrimination that, as a gay man, he experienced among the locals, his black and Puerto Rican neighbors. He was the evil gentrifier, he said, but he felt like a pioneer. As he spoke, I raised my martini to my mouth. The sweat of the glass trickled down the stem. I watched him as he went on, as he looked out into the distance somewhere in the restaurant, the candlelight glare on his lenses hiding his eyes. He was digressing, he said, but he remembered how much he enjoyed coming across those neglected Italian and Polish clubs, where men gathered and smoked, in the cracks of fresh development.
When my salad finally came, I was drunk. I nibbled on it to give the illusion of eating, swirled my fork around the plate, pushing egg and potato from one side to the other. I was saving myself for later when he would inevitably invite me over. The signs were there. Every so often, he would rub my back and compliment how delicate and thin I was.
And what did I do today? Peter asked me. I told him that I had gone uptown to see an exhibit of photographs. I described some of them, how the warehouses along the piers were deserted then taken up by queers, runaway teens, drug addicts, and the homeless. He was familiar with the history. I said I was interested in that period of the seventies, and that in some ways it seemed like a turning point. I was nearly finished with my second martini, and I was loose enough to be unreserved. Deindustrialization, white flight, the city’s massive debts, blah blah blah, I said. What it made me think of though, I told Peter, was how budgets were like portraits, in that they could reveal who people were and what they valued. And thinking about what Peter had said about Puerto Rico, I wondered if debts governed not only nations, territories, and cities, but also one’s self and even consciousness, as such. Peter looked at me sternly, his arms crossed on his chest, and I worried whether I was making any sense. I wasn’t, he said. In his words, I was making flimsy connections between personal and public debts. If I was interested, though, he could recommend books for me to read, at which point his elbows came down on the table, and he clasped together his hands.
After we left the restaurant, Peter said he wanted to take me to his condo a few blocks north. He had moved to Chelsea following his divorce. For part of our walk, we took the High Line, where, elevated above the street, the cold caused my teeth to chatter. We walked past tended shrubbery and tall grass glinting like knives. Between the apartment complexes, we saw the sheen of the Hudson River in the dark.
The generation before his, the eighties generation, was the most important for the creation of the New York he valued, he said. He lowered his voice, his words the texture of honey, trying to draw me in to his way of seeing. Having experienced some of the culture of that decade during visits to the city, touring its art galleries, its gay scene, its nightclubs, he didn’t think the city had reached that level of creative energy since. Looking back now, it might seem that there were so many potential trajectories, but it didn’t feel that way at the time. Communism was discredited, he whispered, the bristles of his beard prickling my ear, and to be in a union was to be seen as a loser, someone who had no future. To believe in anything but the way things were was absurd. Saying this, he wrapped his arm around my waist, reeling me in as if I were a fish on a line, hooked by the tease of his hold on my ass.
When we arrived outside Peter’s building, I mistook it for the lobby of a bank. The walls were made of glass, and the interior gleamed. We took the elevator up to his floor, and as we came to his apartment, he told me to close my eyes, as if I were about to receive a gift. He wouldn’t unlock the door until I did as he said. Once we were inside, I saw that he had hardly any belongings, at least out in the open. The decor epitomized minimalism, a philosophy he said he followed for a simpler life. The end of his marriage led him to see a home differently, he explained, as he brought out a bottle of wine. We sat on his sofa, but I was antsy and didn’t want to wait any longer. I pressed my fingers along the inseam of his trousers and came in for a kiss. Then I kneeled and dug my face into his crotch. I was a hungry boy, he said.
His bedroom had waterfront views. The windows went from floor to ceiling, and the Hudson seemed within a stone’s throw. Everything in the room was white, including the wood floor and the bedsheets on which he tossed lube and poppers. A Keith Haring print hung above the bed, and when we began fucking,
I had to change positions and look elsewhere. I was on all fours facing the river, watching as the surface shimmered with moonlight. I don’t know if it was all that I drank or the poppers kicking in, but past my reflection bobbing up and down in the window, I swear I saw a figure in the water, waving for help.