The events of this chapter took place between April 1964 and who knows when.
The Metropolitan - Overture
Bev and Scotty had two teenage boys and lived in a South Boston row-house. “Southie,” where years later Boston school board president Louise Day Hicks would lead the drive to keep the school segregated and keep the city safe from busing students from one district to another in order to achieve a degree of racial integration. She was queen of that anti-busing movement. As far as I am aware, the neatest thing that ever happened to her was when some one beaned her with an apple during a Saint Patrick's Day parade. “An Apple for the Teacher!” was how one newspaper headlined the story event. Needless to say, everybody I knew hated Louise Day Hicks, and I have heard that she never relented.
The Bev-and-Scotty household was not a home. Scotty was a drunk. Bev drank, too. But Bev had no secret life, while Scotty’s was one big secret. They fought loud screaming fights. I’d wake up some nights and find Scotty fondling me. What a sneaky guy. While I shared a bed with one of my cousins, one of his sons! I wondered even then how often he fondled his boys.
I hung out with David, another cousin (Helen’s kid), who I’d hooked up with during “He’s A Rebel” (Chapter ). Dave would take me into town. We’d hang around the gay spots, which it turns out were introduced to Dave by none other than wicked ol’ Scotty. We weren’t quite 21 but it was fairly easy to get into Sporters, a casual bar at the base of Beacon Hill’s north slope. Scotty’d go there, too. He’d slip me $20.00 every now and then, and not ask anything in return. It was unspoken that nobody knew who he was fondling in his oldest son’s bed, or where he would wind up some Saturday nights after telling Bev he was going to play cards with the boys from the plant.
Sharaf's Cafeteria, a local chain, was another favorite hang-out for the younger gay crowd. The place was open til midnight and centrally located at Charles Street and Chestnut, at the foot of Beacon Hill (just around the corner from where the TV bar Cheers is supposed to be) one block north of Beacon. Most importantly, this unit of the Sharaf’s chain was on the gentrified side of central Boston. The Public Gardens and Boston Common separated this part of town from the bustling shopping district (Washington Street) and the grit of of inner-city Boylston Street which when it converged with Washington Street marked the center of Boston’s notorious “Combat Zone”—just this side of Chinatown. Yes, Boston has a Chinatown. Tufts medical school is right on the cusp of that seemingly out-of-place place. Sharaf's became a symbol of my growth as a human being.
The Punch Bowl was a more traditional gay bar. It was in the Combat Zone. Much more later, friends and neighbors.
It was while hanging out at Sharaf’s that I met Mr. James Elliot Roosevelt Newton. Jim Newton took an immediate liking to me. He had a bevy of boys around him all the time. Why? Because although he was quit chubby and not-at-all handsome, he had a way with stories and an honest maternal instinct. He was completely non-threatening. And he loved to hold court. He entertained all of us novice and not-quite-so-novice gay young men. He lived in a town house at 18 Chestnut Street, half an uphill block from Sharraff’s, and he drove a white 1964 Lincoln Continental convertible hard-top. The car may have been a lure for some of the boys. To me it was only a car. I trusted Jim Newton. Even his affectations were natural.
By late spring, life at Bev and Scotty’s turned impossible. Scotty was going “out” more. Drinking more. They fought just as furiously as ever, but more often than no when there was nothing to fight about. I was freaking out, too. My jaunts downtown with David pulled me closer into contact with a future. I would have to become responsible and independent. Yet here I was, not long out of the funny farm. Naieve. Young. No job. No sense. And still attending group therapy sessions in Weymouth—Karen was also in that group, but we didn’t see each other except as part of the circle of maladjusted kids who shared one thing in common: limbo.
Blood In The Vestibule
One Sunday evening, early, Bev and Scotty got into a hellatious fight. Every thing had been so quiet and homelike until BOOM, drunk and crazy they went at each other at top volume. Tears rained from Beverly’s eyes. Then I snapped. I stopped the tirade, which was my aim to - not for the sake of attracting attention to myself - just to shut them up I grabbed a knife and cut into my wrist. Blood flew around the kitchen like in a splatter movie or a real good staging of Streamers. In the instant it took Beverly to say “Oh my God,” my guardians fell stone sober.
“What’ll we do with him?” “Take me back to Medfield.”
And they did. They left me at the main road and I walked to the Clark Building. But I could only be permitted to stay one week. The doctor on duty had questions ready. “Who can we release him to? He’s old enough to be released to his own recognizance, but we can’t release him to the streets (like we’ll be able to do ten years from now). Know anybody who’ll be responsible for him til he figures things out?”
“James Elliot Roosevelt Newton.”
A meeting was arranged between hospital staff, Jim, and Bev and Scotty. It was agreed that Jim was the right person to take on the challenge. Bandaged and bruised - yet almost sublimely unawares, in my usual state of incredulous shock - I moved into Jim’s Chestnut Street home.
Instead of taking the subway-and-bus down to Weymouth for group therapy, Jim would drop me off and pick me up. But after two sessions this arrangement screeched to a halt.
The door bell rang. Late. We’d been home a couple of hours at least. The door bell rang. Again. And again. It was Karen. Karen from Mefield. She wanted to live with me at Jim’s. Already living there were Jim, Butchy, Marty, Joe, and someone called Phaedra (maybe that was another Joe's nickname; there was also a Joella). There had only been a little bit of been hand-holding because physical contact between patients was not permitted. Only a dance or two. And ga-ga eyes at meals. At group the only thing revealed was the misery shared by everyone there—it wasn’t an intimate thing, Karen! Jim wouldn’t let her in, and he let her know it: “Get away from here! Go away!” And neither would I: “Please, Karen, go home. We’re tired. I’ll talk to you later. I can’t let you in. Please go home!”
Eventually she’d go home. But not right away. She caused a huge scene—as huge a scene as I’d recently caused at Aunt Bev’s. She clung to the vestibule, ringing the bell and screaming and carrying on. She slashed her wrists. (Now where’d she get an idea like that?) Jim got on the phone. An ambulance game and took Karen away.
The Metropolitan - Main Theme
Sometime hereabouts. After Medfield, before Jim Newton. When? Sometime during the Bev-and-Scotty days. It was the middle of spring, April. My internal compass was springing to life, floating above it’s magnetic needle, wavering and ready to dead-reckon. If only a clue would come to the surface; if only a shy little hint would awaken, and nudge it toward it’s a-waiting direction. The clue, the hint, the promise. All had been planted at Medfield, by a hawk-eyed and manly-tough matron whose charge was to look after newly admitted women and girls, most of whom were wary, like does of the forest when they’re lost at the edge of the trees. “Provincetown.” Not “go west young man, go west” but “Provincetown, that’s where you belong.”
Springtime in New England is only the far side of winter. Cold. But I followed the compass and headed for Cape Cod. MTA to Dorchester. Bus to Weymouth. I’d seen the highway signs while riding this route to and from those hollow group therapy sessions. I wonder if there’s been any change in the guy who turned every subject to Jesus Christ, whenever it became his turn to speak. Any question. Any answer. Always led him to praise Jesus Christ, and praise him from only one posture: his right hand would open up and fly to the top of his head, to rub it and pat it until somebody—never the doctor in charge of the group—would firmly announce that time was running short, and that so-and-so hadn’t said anything yet in this session. Luckily there was always at least one person who had not had one thing to say for some time. Better to goad those poor souls into talking than suffer the sadness of the man who could only praise Jesus from the tip of his tongue to the top of his head.
It was a mile from the bus stop to the main road to Cape Cod. I was happy as I walked along. I was stupid. I was nuts. But somehow I knew I was free in a way that was right for people to be. Happy. Crazy. Stupid. Free.
P-town is a very picturesque village out at the hook of Cape Cod. A fishing village. A tourist magnet. A very small village in winter whose sidewalks really do overflow every year between Memorial Day and Labor Day’s last gasp of summer. This I would learn a couple of years later, at about the same time that I’d learn why Provincetown was “where I belonged.” But for now I was just on my way to where that just might be—if for no reason other than to have an adventurous time without leaving the state, as earlier travels had somehow demanded me to put everything down on the line.
On this April journey, it was all I could do to keep from freezing to death. I wasn’t wearing much of a coat, and as a transplanted quasi-Californian, I never dreamed it was possible to freeze to death in April. By the time I was let off at Wellfleet it was mid-afternoon and absolutely cold. There was no traffic. There’d hardly been any traffic at all since Bourne (the canal that cuts through the Cape, separating it from the rest of Massachusetts but for some reason not separate enough to make Cape Cod an island. There'd be no traffic until just before Memorial Day.
I was not happy now. I was, however, still free. But quite miserable. A more or less “seasoned” hitch-hiker—if you can call an oblivious traveler seasoned—but not a hardened one, I was facing a threat that none of the many miserable times I’d endured on highways behind me—it was the threat of freezing to death. Oh, there were houses and towns and businesses. But the highway to Cape Code does not go right through the hundreds of villages strung out on its limb. In April and along this part of the highway there was not even a gas station open. I don’t know what story I had for the few drivers who stopped for me that day. Who knows, maybe the person who dropped me at Wellfleet knew I was emotionally unbalanced and ready to become unhinged once again. But because I was free, I have no doubt at all that the I was truthful to many people whom I’d just met. But for others I had stories, too. College bound. Homeward bound from college. Seeing the country before settling down. Seeing the country before going to college. Few people would hear that I was just drifting about, aimlessly drifting about, unable to start my own life.
Until this wicked cold day on the Cape, I had never seen the threat of freezing to death, and that’s what was happening now. And never had I looked for shelter by knocking on doors. Nor would I knock on doors now . . . unless there’d been doors around here to knock on. Now it was getting very late. Dark. About 30 degrees. Windy. I came upon a used car lot and started trying door. Not for the purpose of stealing a car—I’d never been tempted that way—only to shelter myself from the wind. The first unlocked door was the last I would try—to a turquoise-and-white Metropolitan. From the company that brought us the Rambler, the Pacer and the Henry J. From the guys that would team up with Studebaker and produce Larks and Avantis and Hawks. Here was the tiniest mass-produced car in the world, a classic today but a nuisance back then—the one-seater cutie by Nash. And that seat is not even as wide as a telephone booth. I folded my body in half, instantly falling asleep. At dawn I unhooked myself from that car, crossed the street and stuck out my thumb in the direction of Boston. I did get to Provincetown (1966) in time to see the Barbarians’ one-handed drummer menacing tourists, especially queer ones. For whoever’d pass close to him perched on a bench in Provincetown square, he’d gleefully lunge at ‘em, and threaten to gut them with a prosthetic hook that any good pirate would be proud to wear. The Barbarians asked that one-hit-wonderful question, “Are you a Boy or Are you a Girl”—“with your long long hair, you look like a girl; you may be a boy, but you look like a girl” -- written in true California surfing-song style. But that would be later. Right now I was on my way back to Southie.
Chestnut Street
Jim Newton’s house was no shabby affair. At Number 18, it was definitely on the “better side” of Beacon Hill the divisions of which came at Myrtle Street on its crest. Once you got aove Louisville Square and below Myrtle Street, Beacon Hill was in decline. I imagine that nowadays there is not one undesirable address on that hill. But in 1964 there were many such numbers, usually apartment cuts. I would guess that full size residences have always been prime real estate on Beacon HIll. The times were right enough for me to have lived in two different, affordable apartments later on. One on Myrtle and then on South Russell, downhill and North. I could support myself on $95.00 a week take-home from my job at UBS Chemical Company across Longfellow bridge in Kendall Square, Cambridge. UBS stood for Union Bay State; the company was a subsidiary of A. E. Staley Manufacturing Company (Sta-Puff Fabric Softener, Sta-Flow Starch, many soy products, etc. UBS was a leading supplier of specialized adhesives. Many made to order for one specific application. My first real job was at UBS. But that would come later.
Jim’s home had once been his father’s, a physician who’d retired to a very bucolic estate along the Charles River in Concord. Where swans-a-swimming could be seen from the elder Newton's back door. Jim lived on some kind of inheritance. A small monthly check to cover gasoline, food, day-to-day expenses. Certainly nothing extravagant. He had a short line of credit at SS Pierce Grocery Company - a small chain of gourmet food stores that had been around since the 1800s. We did not starve, but we weren’t exactly high on the hog. We managed. Nobody worked.
Jim was in love with me. I was not reciprocated. I did not dwell on the situation. If he succeeded in charming me into feeling bad about it, I would occasionally sleep with him and let him hug me. We never kissed or had sex. Sex? Not now, please. I might have had sex three times between the time of Chestnut Street 1964 and Emerson College ‘65.
Jim had one of those amusement park photos of me in a tiny frame on his bed side table. Sexuality was certainly a major motivation, but sex itself wasn’t important to me. I was lost. I met boys. Socialized. Walked hand-in-hand with a boy on Columbus Day—right in the heart of macho-Italiano North End—the same boy who said, “Oh, you’re so untouched by everything. So untouched by all of this stuff.” I didn’t respond. I knew it wasn’t true because I’d had plenty of sex at Juvenile Halll, etc. But now I can respond. I’m still untouched by “all of this stuff,” the petty social games, the style parade, the social affectation, the drinking, the conventions. (There are many times when I wish I would partake of all that.) Untouched. And yet I was for many years smothered by it all. Hemmed in by an inability to wear the lifestyle in its place. Lonely. Not “out” enough.
Jim loved me. And I loved him. He was a very good friend. When the dishier queens made fun of him or tried to take advantage, I stood up for him. Jim Newton didn’t have money or prestige, but he shared what little he had with the tattered boys who’d left home and found themselves adrift in Boston.
Marty was from a good family in Arlington. We had sex once, in 1966. At Chestnut Street, Marty and Joe were lovers, but oh how dreamy I thought Marty was. Dark. Handsome. Italian. I wanted to sleep with him but he was “married” until 1966. Today his son leads one of the biggest rock groups from the Boston scene. He is the father of a well known guitarist-singer-writer whose Boston-based band folded after a string of hits in the early 2000s.
Butchy (Lloyd) Curry was from Lowell, Massachusetts. We were like “sisters” I guess, although I didn’t-and-don’t consider myself anyone’s sister. But Butchy definitely was one of my protectors. He had a wonderful laugh and great sense of humor. He loved to camp and carry on, and he loved to egg me on. After considerable cajoling, begging and daring-me-to, he managed, one night, to do me in drag. It wasn’t Halloween or New Year’s Eve, or any other drag-ready time. Just a regular old everyday night. He made me up and dressed me and walked me down Chestnut Street to Charles. He tried to push me into Sharraff’s for coffee but at that I balked. Looking like a cross between Connie Francis and Diana Ross, I ran back up the hill and into Number 18.
Doris and Margaret Go to the Movies
Jim Newton’s favorite actress was 
Doris Packer, a character actor most famous for playing Mrs. Chatsworth Osborne, Sr. in the “Dobie Gillis” television series, who would occasionally pop up on shows and movies hither and yon - always playing the ultra proper society marm. Stout, with out-thrust jaw, Doris, oddly, looked quite a lot like Mr. Newton himself, but not in this photo - it was a living thing and you had to be there to know. This is one of about three photos I've been able to find of Ms. Packer. Like Charlie Ruggles, for whom my cat was named, Doris didn't leave much of a footprint. None of the photos are of good quality; her Wikipedia entry is spare. But on October 10th, 2009, someone did leave flowers for her at Find A Grave. It wasn't I, but I'm glad somebody did.
Oh it just dawned on me. James Eliot Roosevelt Newton also resembled 
Margaret Rutherford, a personality that I have always strongly identified with. Indeed, one of our favorite pastimes, Jim and I, was watching Dame Rutherford as Miss Marple in the wonderful series of Agatha Christie storeies released by MGM during the early 1960s. These silly little films were always shown, first run, at the Exeter Theater in Boston.
A few of the kids were mean to Jim, but all who fussed or poked or dished, disdained, intruded, complained or traded in shoddy gossip about him and his family, or in how he chose to live his life—to the nasty ones, and to the negative all, Jim paid no mind. He wanted to be liked, of course, and he sought the approval of those whom he felt were his equal. But his example was to teat as invisible people who through so little of their own lives that preying on the lives of others was the only thing they could do. Mosquitoes. Jim was friendly, easy going, conversational, fun loving and supportive. He was a gentleman; kind; generous, and caring. It was easy for him to overlook one’s bad qualities in favor of the good. And although he managed to avoid sociopaths, he drew no guard against people who would treat him mean.
Beyond the usual gossip, the cattiness, and the hiss that escaped from the lips of “dish” queens—beyond all the day-to-day and, dare I say, more or less innocent meanness, there was one awful instance of blatant cruelty that befell our dear Jim. And as cruel as the incident was, Jim forgave and forgot, while looking through his own tears to do so, as unto others he was most definitely inclined to do what unto him he would prefer in exchange.
There weren’t many “parties” at Chestnut Street, unless you count having a lot of kids hanging around and staying up late each Friday and Saturday night. But special social occasions were just that—special. One such event was a joint birthday parties for several of the extended group whose birthdays followed one day upon another and the next. Sharing the spotlight was the celebration of Jim’s having completed the first typed draft of his manuscript, the one about Mrs. Edwin Tanner and friends—the real people upon which Patrick Dennis based his characters on in Auntie Mame. I always wondered if the Mrs. Tanner whose Bleecker Street home I slept in just after getting to New York, was the same Mrs. Tanner of Jim’s book. “It was possible,” Jim would assure me, “but, well, Tanner isn’t that unusual a name.” Me thinks it was his way of saying there is no Mrs. Tanner, and Patrick Dennis didn’t base his fictional characters on real people’s lives. Jim would now and again intimate that, true, his book about the “real” people who became story-book folds was, itself, a storybook filled with made up “real” lives of people that paraded themselves around in other people’s books.
The working title was something like Will the Real Agnes Gooch Please Stand Up. The manuscript was at least a ream and a half (750 pp) of onion skin bond, typed double spaced with firm strokes, on a manual machine and always with a richly-inked ribbon.
It was Joey and Wesley who scattered those created and cared-about pages all over everywhere that night. Some pages they even tore in two and some they tossed into the fire. My reaction was utter shock—that someone could do something so mean and then stand there, laughing, scanning the crowd and wearing faces that asked everyone gathered there, “Wasn’t that a neat thing to do?” or “Wasn’t that a mean thing I did, and aren’t you proud of me for having done it?”
The boys got no response, and left the party, in a huff, while the rest of us picked up sheaflets of pages and spent the rest of the night at Jim’s dining room table, putting the remaining pages in order again.
Pages in order again. Pages of made-up lives, of people who only lived in pages, on paper, quite similar to these, and this. Putting together the pages that tonight we’d gathered, partly, to cheer. The completed first typed draft of James Elliot Roosevelt Newton’s true story behind the characters that Patrick Dennis had supposedly created to parade through his “Auntie Mame.”
A ream and a half. Manuscript typed; proofread and, earlier that night, neatly assembled, awaiting the next part of the process. In this case, before the draft could be packaged and sent to an agent, all that was left to be done was to put on each page the number.
So we all got to read Will The Real Agnes Gooch Please Stand Up in sheaflets, in singles, in burned scraps and torn-apart sheets. Like alphabet soup only instead of letters floating in broth, words, sentences, paragraphs. Word Soup. We laughed a lot. And in order to make the manuscript complete once more, Jim only had to re-cogitate a hundred or so lost or mostly lost pages.
Transition
My physical break from Jim’s life came sometime in 1965, when my life would change completely from what it had been since my travels first started, just a short time ago.
I met an Emerson College student named Ronnie Friedman in front of Sharaf’s, and thereafter socially divided my time between with the college scene and the gay scene. I would become active in the anti-war movement. Soon enough the nascent drug subculture would find the straight part of my little clique, when we were ripe for the taking. But most of all, my life began anew when these new associations gave me a new perspective. I learned that I was intelligent, the consequence of which was the realizatino that I’d never been conscious of having a brain until then. I wasn’t looking for a brain, but I found one just the same. Instead of talking about whatever it was the gay scene was talking about, I mixed with people whose families sent them to college on their way to growing up and living in a world that was real and substantial, not gossamer thin.
I never knew how much life I really had lived during those recent, turbulent years. I learned to see my own self, reflected in the light that only knowledge and love can bring. I was far from out of the woods - it would be many years before that would happen. But soon enough I would experience mysticism, and, without looking for it, the peace of mind that would become some of the soil in which my life would stop-and-go grow.
There will be thousands of words about my life knowing Ronnie.
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