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I have no idea what Arthur had to go through just to get me a guest pass, or an athletic pass, to the NYAC. (Like my final draft classification, or reclassification, I'm not sure what my stupid pass to the New York Athletic Club was called.)
"Are you crazy, Billy?" Elaine asked me. "Are you trying to get yourself killed? That place is notoriously anti-everything. It's anti-Semitic, it's anti-black."
"It is?" I asked her. "How do you know?"
"It's anti-women--I fucking know that!" Elaine had said. "It's an Irish Catholic boys' club, Billy--just the Catholic part ought to have you running for the hills."
"I think you would like Arthur," I told Elaine. "He's a good guy--he really is."
"I suppose he's married," Elaine said with a sigh.
Come to think of it, I had seen a wedding ring on Arthur's left hand. I never fooled around with married men--with married women, sometimes, but not with married men. I was bisexual, but I was long over being conflicted. I couldn't stand how conflicted married men were--that is, when they were also interested in gay guys. And according to Larry, all married men were disappointing lovers.
"Why?" I'd asked him.
"They're freaks about gentleness--they must have learned to be gentle from their pushy wives. Those men have no idea how boring 'gentle' is," Larry told me.
"I don't think 'gentle' is always boring," I said.
"Please pardon me, dear Bill," Larry had said, with that characteristically condescending wave of his hand. "I'd forgotten you were steadfastly a top."
I really liked Larry, more and more, as a friend. I had even grown to like how he teased me. We'd both been reading the memoir of a noted actor--"a noted bi," Larry called him.
The actor claimed that, all his life, he had "fancied" older women and younger men. "As you might imagine," the noted actor wrote, "when I was younger, there were many older women who were available. Now that I'm older--well, of course, there are many more available younger men."
"I don't see my life as that neat," I said to Larry. "I don't imagine being bi will ever seem exactly well rounded."
"Dear Bill," Larry said--in that way he had, as if he were writing me an important letter. "The man is an actor--he isn't bi, he's gay. No wonder--now that he's older--there are many more younger men around! Those older women were the only women he felt safe with!"
"That's not my profile, Larry," I told him.
"But you're still a young man!" Larry had cried. "Just wait, dear Bill--just wait."
IT BECAME, OF COURSE, a source of both comedy and concern--with the women I saw and the gay men I knew--that I regularly attended wrestling practice at the NYAC. My gay friends refused to believe that I had next to no homoerotic interest in the wrestlers I met at the club, but my crushes on that kind of wrong person had been a phase for me, perhaps a part of the coming-out process. (Well, okay--a slowly passing, not-altogether-gone phase.) Straight men didn't often attract me, at least not very much; that they could sense this, as Arthur did, had made it increasingly possible for me to have straight men for friends.
Yet Larry insisted that my wrestling practices were a kind of high-energy, risky cruising; Donna, my dear but easily offended transsexual friend, dismissed what she called my "duck-under fixation" as the cultivation of a death wish. (Soon after this pronouncement, Donna disappeared from New York--to be followed by reports that she'd been sighted in Toronto.)
As for the wrestlers at the New York Athletic Club, they were a mixed lot--in every respect, not only in how they treated me. My women friends, Elaine among them, believed that it was only a matter of time before I would be beaten to a pulp, but I was not once threatened (or deliberately hurt) at the NYAC.
The older guys generally ignored me; once someone cheerfully said, when we were introduced, "Oh, you're the gay guy--right?" But he shook my hand and patted me on t
he back; later, he always smiled and said something friendly when we saw each other. We weren't in the same weight-class. If he was avoiding contact with me--on the mat, I mean--I wouldn't have known.
There was the occasional mass evacuation of the sauna, when I made an after-practice appearance there. I spoke to Arthur about it. "Maybe I should steer clear of the sauna--do you think?"
"That's your call, Billy--that's their problem, not yours," Arthur said. (I was "Billy" to all the wrestlers.)
I decided, despite Arthur's assurances, to stay out of the sauna. Practices were at seven in the evening; I became almost comfortable going to them. I was not called--at least not to my face--"the gay guy," except for that one time. I was commonly referred to as "the writer"; most of the wrestlers hadn't read my sexually explicit novels--those pleas for tolerance of sexual differences, as Richard Abbott would continue to describe my books--but Arthur had read them. Like many men, he'd told me that his wife was my biggest fan.
I was always hearing that from men about the women in their lives--their wives, their girlfriends, their sisters, even their mothers, were my biggest fans. Women read fiction more than men do, I would guess.
I'd met Arthur's wife. She was very nice; she truly read a lot of fiction, and I liked much of what she liked--as a reader, I mean. Her name was Ellen--one of those perky blondes with a pageboy cut and an absurdly small, thin-lipped mouth. She had the kind of stand-up boobs that belied an otherwise unisex look--boy, was she ever not my kind of girl! But she was genuinely sweet to me, and Arthur--bless his heart--was very married. There would be no introducing him to Elaine.
In fact, beyond having a beer in the NYAC tap room with Arthur, I did no socializing with the wrestlers I'd met at the club. The wrestling room was then on the fourth floor--at the opposite end of the hall from the boxing room. One of my frequent workout partners in the wrestling room--Jim Somebody (I forget his last name)--was also a boxer. All the wrestlers knew I'd had no competitive wrestling experience--that I was there for the self-defense aspect of the sport, period. In support of my self-defense, Jim took me down the hall to the boxing room; he tried to show me how to defend myself from being hit.
It was interesting: I never really learned how to throw a decent punch, but Jim taught me how to cover up--how not to get hit so hard. Occasionally, one of Jim's punches would land a little harder than he'd intended; he always said he was sorry.
In the wrestling room, too, I took some occasional (albeit accidental) punishment--a split lip, a bloody nose, a jammed finger or thumb. Because I was concentrating so hard on various ways to set up (and conceal) my duck-under, I was banging heads a lot; you more or less have to bang heads if you like being in the collar-tie. Arthur inadvertently head-butted me, and I took a few stitches in the area of my right eyebrow.
