The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

At the parties Bill and Dave gave they frequently lit their little string of rooms with candles. The shadows seemed brown and gold, rather than black. In the bedroom that you passed through to get to the living room, the wall you walked by was covered with many small wooden frames filled with photos of their idols and icons, people like Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich and Thomas Mann and Eugene O'Neill and John Barrymore and the Lunts and Noel Coward and George Gershwin. Sarah Bernhardt wasn't there, but Eleonora Duse was. Of course, I knew hardly any of these people. I had to have them identified and explained to me. Ethel Merman wasn't there -- they weren't fans of commercial Broadway theater -- but Lupe Velez was. The Mexican Spitfire. The actress that picked up Gary Cooper after Clara Bow dropped him and, after committing suicide, was buried wearing a wedding dress. She was supposedly pregnant at the time. Is all this possible? Probably not, but Bill and Dave admired her "work," as they called it. I wonder if she called it that.

Then, after this cave of flickering shadows over the dim faces of the glamorous great of the theater and movies, there was a warm, noisy room full of good-looking people who all liked you, who were glad you were there, who laughed a lot, cussed a lot, and said wild things people never said in Michigan.

One of the neighbors was a fat boy from Texas who'd know Bill and Dave at school. He had taken an upstairs apartment on the top floor -- the same one Belle-Mere and Levoy had for a while. I used to go see him by going up to the roof and crossing over and going down the stairs. The front doors and roof doors were always open and people roamed freely about. The fat boy's name was Nick. He worked as an assistant to Helen Menken. I think he worked for her free. She had once been married to Humphrey Bogart, which counted a lot for him and for us. What he did for Helen I have no idea, but his Texas family was rich and could afford to keep him going while he found a place for himself in New York.

Nick gave parties, too, with much the same crowd of Texans that Bill and Dave invited. I used to go there sometimes after a performance. In those days, the kind of mascara we used was hard to get off. Some always stuck at the base of your lashes. Nick always accused me of not trying to get it all off, so I could arrive at his parties looking all wan and smudgy-eyed. I wasn't there trying to pick somebody up, so I don't know what he was worried about. I certainly felt wan, and I was there largely to see if there was something to eat.

Nick was a great cook, and when he awoke in the night and felt anxious, he would get up and cook an elaborate meal. Even if it was ready to go on the table at five in the morning, he would sit down and eat it. Often he would call in the night and ask me over. I was always game to eat, even in the dead of night. I did ask him to please not call me until it was ready to serve. Then I would put a raincoat on over my pajamas and climb the stairs to the roof, beaming my flashlight ahead of me, and descend to big, fat Nick, already at the table. He was like something out of Dickens: napkin tied around my neck, a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, ready to tear into whatever cordon bleu delight he'd concocted. We never made small talk--not at five in the morning. We just downed it; then I returned up over the roof to get a few hours' more sleep before going to the opera.

Often I took my friend April with me to parties at Bill and Dave's. April was a dancer who had been in stock at the New Jersey theater with me. She was something like a spirited squirrel. Her name was April Orjune. She had a sister, May. She told me that her parents had absolutely no sense of humor at all but had chosen both their names without realizing that they were covering a quarter of the months in the calendar: April, May, or June. Introducing those girls at parties was always a problem. People always said things like "What's your brother's name? August?" But April and May didn't rile easily. They said things like "No, Dick," putting a lot of emphasis on the word. That was usually May, who was older and bigger and heavier and more lethal all around. She would say, "No, Dick head" to the inquirer if it was a man, the "head" slightly under her breath.

I learned so much from the Orjune sisters. They were real Greenwich Village girls. The kind that must have sprung up in the early days when Edna St. Vincent Millay lived there. They took no shit. You didn't see that a lot in Michigan, either.

We were at the White Horse Tavern one night and May was seated by some man who proceeded to get drunker and drunker as he spilled out the story of his life. She sat there patiently until he said, "I don't know why I'm telling you all this, you don't even know my name." May said, "No, but it ought to be Schmuck." We left.

The Orjune sisters lived over Slongo's Garage on Hudson Street and had a large apartment for which they paid seventy dollars a month. It was filled with tables covered with letters they were planning to answer, circulars they were planning to read, and bills they were planning to pay. And they had closets, hampers, and boxes full of clothes they were planning to iron. When I had nothing better to do, I would drop in and iron. I once ironed for eight straight hours. The closets were jammed with blouses, shirts, trousers, pajamas, and skirts. I'm sure that was the only time in their occupancy over Slongo's that the ironing was ever fully done. I love to iron. All part of that female side of me, I guess.

I don't remember Illy ever going to any of these parties with me. He would have thought they were boring and the people weren't sexy enough. Like many homosexuals, he preferred all-male parties, which I never liked all that much. Also, I don't think he wanted to parade me around in public. It would have cramped his style.

I did go to some all-male parties. I remember one party in what they call a "garden apartment" in New York--actually, a basement with a little light filtering in from the windows in the front at sidewalk level. It was after the theater and it was mostly boys from the opera. Vincent Warren was there. We were about the same age; maybe Vincent was a little bit older -- a beautiful guy from Florida. I always envied him because he could do the splits very easily. I heard he was Frank O'Hara's lover later. The great thing about being a poet's lover is that you get eulogized a lot, but I don't think Vincent cared that much about being eulogized.

I supposed Vincent thought I was very inexperienced and uptight, a typical midwestern twit. He said, "What you need is to be really fucked hard by somebody like Steve." That was one of our tough-guy bodybuilders in the company. Illy was talking to somebody right beside me. I turned to him and said, "Do you think that's what I need, Illy? Do you think I need to be fucked hard by Steve?" Illy in his most Scandinavian manner stared at me as though I had gone completely out of my mind. To his credit he didn't say, "Why are you asking me?" He just turned away. But we left together and he did fuck me hard that night. Marking his territory, even if he wasn't going to say anything about it.

I don't know quite what I thought about things in those days. I guess I wanted someone to say they wanted to stay with me the rest of their life and make plans to buy a house in the suburbs and all the rest of that stuff. Nobody did then, but many guys do nowadays. But deeper down I think I knew that I didn't want that. What I wanted was to love somebody so much that where we lived and what we did really didn't matter. I was too young to wonder about what the next steps were.

Sounds good? Now read some excerpts:

• The Sex Squad: The sexy, tempestuous life of a young ballet dancer.
• "How I Became a Dancer": Dance calls Harry and his mother all the way to New York City.
• "Sixteenth Street": Harry's disgusting first apartment in New York, and the whole disgusting neighborhood.
• "In the Dressing Room": Enter the world of high art and low advances.

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