YOU’RE SURE TO FALL IN LOVE by Bruce K Beck ©2017
Chapter One
Easy Living
(Written by Ralph Ranger and Leo Robin for the film Easy Living, 1937, popularized by Billie Holiday)
At twenty-six, I was emotionally invested in maintenance. My relationship, scarcely dry behind the ears, may have been only a few months old, but it felt like a solid new core to be cherished, to be reinforced, to be protected at all cost. I found life terrifying and thrilling in roughly equal measure, and in rough proportion to the amount of gin or Scotch that I had downed. I felt young, beautiful, talented, and special on one level. And I also felt old, ugly, stupid, and worthless on another. So perhaps I was not unlike millions of other gay boys entering into the remarkable year of 1976 CE. But I had found a man who loved me, and who had an apartment in New York City, and who had a real life with a career and friends and furniture. He was also the most talented man I could ever meet. And so I was not prepared to do anything to put all of that at risk. Well, not prepared, true, but that doesn’t mean that I was incapable of risk. In fact, I was just as good at stupid mistakes as the next child.
“What would you say to a summer on the Cape?” Bobby asked me that winter.
“Hmm. I don’t really know much about it.” Cape Cod, indeed. So what the hell did I know about Cape Cod, other than Patti Page and her tired lobster stew with an ocean view on the Ed Sullivan Show? Well, two tiny touches, actually. The first was an event from more than twenty years before, around the time I was born (even before Patti Page shilled for the Cape) that had nothing to do with me. That strip of sand had provided a haven for my favorite aunt and uncle. The ramp-up to the Korean War reactivated the draft and put their future in jeopardy because of my uncle’s reserve status post-WWII. These two life-long Republicans fled their lives in New Jersey and hid out on the Cape. So they said. For six months? A year? Family stories like this are often vague. Not exactly Pilgrims, but?
I used to imagine my uncle receiving a phone call from his mother. “Charlie, it’s your mother. You have a letter here. Do you want me to open it?” Did my favorite uncle get a draft notice, and if so, when his mother phoned, long distance, to read it to him, did he thank her politely (for he was always courtly with his mother in the years that I knew them) then hang up and say, “Fuck it! I won’t go!” There is no one living to ask for these details, so I guess I have to let it go.
Recent events had made that story resonate with me because I had been busy with my own draft dodging, though of the less adventurous sort: college deferments and favorable lottery numbers. Nothing so glamorous as a disappearing act. But living with terror as an underlying emotion was a condition I understood. Perhaps I had always understood that kind of fear. To gay boys it is as natural as mother’s milk.
And my other brush with Cape Cod, more concrete, is that without having actually visited it, I had seen it once. One morning a few years before, in my student days, flying home from London by way of New York, I looked out the window of the plane through an atmosphere of crystalline clarity down upon Cape Cod. Bam! There it was below us, a big sandy arm complete with flexed biceps, just as pretty as you please. No Google Map will ever be as handsome, nor as accurate. And never, in all my flights and all my destinations, have I felt a keener sense of place. So, despite my ignorance, I had a positive reaction to the concept of spending time there.
“Jan Cooper called and asked me to write some special material for his summer season in Provincetown. He bought an old guest house with a nightclub downstairs. He does the evening show and has other performers in for a few weeks at a time to play the late show. And then he said, ‘Why don’t you come for the summer and conduct for me, and your sweetie can work as a waiter. I have a room for the two of you. You have to share the john, but it’s right across the hall.’ Well, the money’s not great, but with both of us working it should be okay. And the Cape is so pretty. It might be fun. So what do you think, Sunshine?”
Jan Cooper! I had met him, once, backstage after a performance in New York. I had loved the show, had found him very funny and very skilled at his impressions. But it never occurred to me that I might spend a summer working for a famous drag queen, and in the foremost gay Mecca of the Twentieth Century. I’m not saying I was trepidatious, just that it seemed so unlikely.
“Sure. Let’s do it!” I said.
That was the easy part. Committing to an adventure is easy for twenty-somethings. But Bobby was twenty years older, with an established career. Then came all the questions and arrangements and details, the transportation, all of it. I wondered, “Can you really get away from New York for three months without screwing up something important?”
“Well, the auditions for Ford’s Theatre are coming up in early May, so the casting will be done, and the production meetings, too. I’d have to do some work in the afternoons while we’re away, to make sure I’m ready. Rehearsals start September 12. We’ll be home just after Labor Day, so it looks good.”
“As long as it works for you, let’s go for it.”
This was just one more in a series of wonderful surprises that all started with my meeting Bobby James in Chicago the November before. The whirlwind courtship, my move to New York—it all happened so fast. And yet the routine of daily life in New York had settled in so easily, as if we had been doing it for years. The intimacy, the openness and honesty—it had all flowed simply, with no forced issues. Life was easy. Earning a living, as always, was not. Three months on Cape Cod followed by a month back home in New York, then three months in DC. At this rate I could defer grownup decisions for a very pleasant span. Yes, more honeymoon and less real life. Yes!
I probably shouldn’t admit it—in the interest of sounding like a credible witness—but I also have this thing about water. A fortune teller had told me a few years before that I must always live near water, that I draw my strength from it. Like Scarlett O’Hara and the red earth of Tara, I guess. When the psychic told me this, I thought back to my favorite times from childhood, at Boy Scout camp on a huge lake, or at the coast on family vacations. The pronouncement came just as I was about to head off to study in Venice, which was of course a transformative experience. And then after college there was a tiny basement apartment in Chicago a few doors from Lake Michigan, followed by my new home in Manhattan a half-block from the East River. I was certainly all-in with water, and an entire summer on Cape Cod Bay sounded like a happy addition to my roster of favorite water memories.
Meeting Bobby James—a block from Lake Michigan—was the event that set my life on its present course. He was a handsome little man, perfectly proportioned, with a wicked smile, a cute butt, and a very nice package. His black hair was at least 50% white by the year we met, and he kept it short and boyish. Bobby smelled of lemon with a hint of musk, and it was a warm, inviting scent that made me eager to get close to him. He was very physical, and he loved touching my skin. I loved being touched, and so our mutual explorations were joyous.
In late 1975, Bobby had a gig in Chicago, for the month of November. We met the first Saturday night at an after-hours club. He came home with me and never returned to the apartment the owner of the club had given him, except to change clothes. Right away we both sensed that there was something important happening. And by the end of November, there was no question that I would finish up my life in Chicago and start a new one with Bobby in New York. And it seemed that we were working toward—dare I say it?—an unconditional love.
Chicago can be a great place to live. The arts are strong, and the food is exceptional and varied. I liked it very much, and one of my chief pleasures, other than the opera season at Lyric, one of the world’s great opera companies, was WFMT radio. It brought me not only fine music (from Mozart to Judy Collins to Lead Belly) but Studs Terkel interviews and stories, and commentary from Claudia Cassidy, the legendary Chicago Tribune arts critic. And I miss all of that to this day. But my life was incomplete.
As an example of what I decided to give up when I met Bobby, let me tell you about one Saturday night earlier in the year. I met a guy in a dance bar, I guess, and went home with him. He was quiet, slim, sexy, and interested in me. His apartment was unusual in a ‘70s high-tech sort of way. It was outfitted with sensors that turned on lights when one walked into a room (and presumably turned them off again when one exited). And the ceiling over his bed was mirrored. Truly. It has never occurred to me to mirror the ceiling over my bed, in any apartment, but this one time I found it charming and gave in to the impulse to enjoy it.
By late-night-drunken-sex standards, it was exceptionally good. I got so into it that I rimmed the guy. Which I do not ordinarily do. We finished, we slept. The next morning, we had a little Sunday morning coffee and a bite of toast and jam—hell, maybe he cooked an egg for me, but I’m not sure—and then we got into his car and he drove me to the garage where they were charging the battery on my old VW. We exchanged names and telephone numbers. I never phoned him. He never phoned me. I never saw him again. It was a wonderful encounter. It was, also, not enough.
Enter Bobby James with an offer of a permanent relationship. I jumped at it with both hands. Bobby and New York in one trim package. I never looked back. And then, there we were preparing to start a new summer adventure in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And I was enchanted.