I was on the roof of my building, a dilapidated five-story walk-up on East Twenty-fifth Street. Under my feet the tarpaper tentatively bore my weight, as if the sticky black covering were joined to the roof by insinuation. It was November. The air was cool, not cold. No breeze blew. No moon shone, but the Manhattan sky glow provided enough light for what was to come. I was about to rappel down the side of the building dressed in ill-fitting women’s clothing. Using a bed sheet.

 

~~~

 

In the end, New York was unkind to me. At the time of the roof episode, I still clung (figuratively) to a gradually eroding belief that something—something wonderful!—would be visited upon me from out of the blue. After graduating with a degree in Theater Performance from an undistinguished state college in Rhode Island, I moved to New York. Being an actor was my dream. I wanted to act in serious plays, in meaningful roles. I wanted to make an impact. I wanted to be famous. And I thought I had talent. Some professors and fellow students confirmed my beliefs. The department had awarded me the oddly named “Special Talent” Scholarship, so there was that, too.

       Like everyone else in my cohort, I moved to New York and slept on the grainy floors and aromatic couches of friends and acquaintances. Rite of passage. In my first New York City acting class the biggest revelation was realizing that everyone had talent. It was a big pond. With big fish. Emboldened by big ambitions. In the early 1980s, before diversity became a threshold value worshipped by Actors’ Equity, talent was not the only price of entry. Mostly, producers, directors and audiences expected to see attractive, lithe, blond, blue-eyed idols of the fading mid-century Madison Avenue aesthetic of beauty prancing before them. Getting “typed out”—that is, eliminated from consideration for looking the wrong way—was routine, triggering no moral outrage. It was the worst of times to be average height, swarthy, and “ethnic” (unless the call was for Gang Member Number Three).

       After enduring a sustained interval of couch surfing, I found myself on the receiving end of astonishing good fortune. A friend from college knew some musical theater acquaintances who needed someone to sublet a room in their very large, very elegant apartment building at Fifty-fifth Street and Broadway—La Premier. It was swanky; nicer than my parents’ apartment back home. It had doormen. An opulent lobby. A thirty-second-floor rooftop deck overlooking Times Square. And a balcony facing the most heralded of all boulevards: Broadway. Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade from this too-good-to-be-true vantage point was, without question, a sign of great things to come. I fantasized sitting on that balcony while reading my notices. Since it was a fantasy, they were very good.

       But good fortune is never without trade-offs. While the apartment had three bedrooms, it housed five people so as to be affordable to those whose work was episodic (that is, feast or famine). My prospective roommates explained I would sublet from a guy who was out on an eight-month national tour of A Chorus Line. They told me the guy whose rent I would be paying shared the largest bedroom—two twin beds on opposite walls, with an en suite bathroom—with another aspiring musical theater actor and tap dancing instructor, whom they would introduce me to at a later time.

       The second bedroom was occupied by two guys, a committed couple in the days before same-sex marriage. They possessed resources to do many of the glamorous things that young people in Manhattan rom-coms do. I never knew their occupations.

       A young dancer resided, solo, in the third bedroom. She was dancing in the chorus of 42nd Street, a huge hit at the time. I’ll admit it: I was taken with her. But even if I had been able to communicate my interest, in my mind (and very likely in hers, too) she was out of my league.

       I learned quickly that my bedroom-mate was . . . social, enjoying a variety of sexual conquests, his main pastime when he was not teaching actors to tap dance. The AIDS years had barely dawned, and I saw his promiscuity as more dashing than dangerous (even if we did not share the same sexual predilections). He was not a bad guy, but his love of the drink fueled unpredictability.

       Lying in bed, anticipating the tentative opening of the door, the widening trapezoid of light silhouetting stealthy shadow-bodies, the giggles, the whispered anticipation, and finally, the grunts and groans.

       Then early one morning I was awakened by the sounds of my roommate and his latest overnight guest that would have earned an X rating. Later, watching them put the last of my milk in their morning coffees was the final indignity. My slamming of the front door as I stomped out was passive-aggressive, I admit. We stopped speaking. I sounded the alarm (again) to friends that I was in need of a place to live.

       Deus ex machina being a thing not only in Greek plays, an acquaintance from college, aware of my plight, came to my rescue. She’d found a bigger place on the Upper West Side. She was going to sublet her studio apartment on East Twenty-fifth Street. Since her name was on the lease, and she wanted it to stay there, she needed a sub-tenant she could trust. It would be an illegal sublet. While the word “illegal” gave me some pause, everyone knew illegal sublets were as common in Manhattan as nonworking subway doors. I would have to exercise caution in my comings and goings, she went on to say. I would have to behave as if I did not reside there. Was I still interested?

       What little I owned fit nicely into a cheap orange duffle bag. I said goodbye to La Premier and the cast of apartment 4D. To them, I’d been little more than a bit-player making a brief, uninspired appearance in their glamorous Broadway Musical Theater lives. They wished me well (all but one of them) with polite but anemic good-byes.

 

~~~

    

It was a glorious day in June when I moved out. Walking from the Twenty-third Street subway stop over to East Twenty-fifth, I felt reborn. Even the hammer swings of sidewalk chaos did not dent my mood. Laurie, my soon-to-be surrogate landlord, was there to hand off the keys and take me on a tour of the 450-square-foot expanse of the apartment. She again cautioned me about coming and going and with a small grin added, “just act like you are visiting.” I was reasonably sure I could play that role. What flavor of visitor I wondered? The lover? The cousin from out of town? The delivery guy from the bodega? All of the above?

       The first time I saw George, the super, it was easy to connect Laurie’s description of him to the real person, mostly because of the gray, one-piece coverall garment with his name sewn onto the breast pocket. George resembled a cross between the actors Rod Steiger and David Huddleston. Agreeable was not the first descriptor that came to mind.

       Soon though, normal living—if  “normal” involved checking the peephole at the sound of footsteps in the hall, never answering the door or the downstairs buzzer unless I was certain someone was visiting, and always approaching the building with stealth—resumed. I became practiced, even nuanced, in my portrayal of The Visitor.

       Returning was harder than leaving. I would go into character as soon as I made the turn heading east onto Twenty-fifth Street from Second Avenue. I’d adopt a halting step and searching gaze, then remove, and, with some animation, check my pocket Day Timer—the struggling actor’s main utility in the pre-smart phone era. I would gaze upward, brow furrowed. Finally, I would ensure George was not lurking. This was best accomplished by looking out of the corners of my eyes, so I often wore sunglasses regardless of the weather or time of day. 

       Despite expending more than a little emotional energy on these performances, I managed to go about my business, settling into a rhythm of more auditions (and an equal number of rejections). More acting classes. More toiling at sometimes eclectic, sometimes mind-numbing survival jobs. As life droned on and the realization that the New York theater did not seem starved for my talent, I began to fashion my identity less around that of aspiring actor and more of a Kerouac-like, experience-seeking vagabond … with the expected anxiety that tended to come with that role. 

       I began to grudgingly acknowledge other residents of the building. Gail was one. I suspected she was slightly older than me. She possessed a petite frame and a look best described as “cute.” She had short, reddish hair and a spray of freckles tossed across her cheek bones. After seeing each another on the stairs several times, she must have surmised I was a resident. I never spoke, but would, on occasion, nod in recognition. I imagined she thought (because of my reticence) I was unfriendly. Or socially awkward. I hoped it was the latter.

       One day she spoke. Her voice surprised me. Higher-pitched than I imagined. A caricature voice. Reminiscent of the funny-never-gets-the-guy-sidekick-to-the-ingenue in classic movie musicals. Without the 1930s patter.

       “You live in 5B, right?”

       “Uh, yeah.”

       “I’m Gail. 4C.” 

       “Hi, yeah.” After a few seconds of silence I may have mumbled my name and said something about going to work.

       After several more encounters, emboldened by the trust engendered by nothing more durable than repetition and the subsequent familiarity, I confessed my illegal resident status. Her reaction was dismissive and laden with ennui. She lightly touched my arm and giggled. I began to think Gail might have been interested in me in a way that transcended neighborliness. Like I said, she was cute, but my passion remained unstirred. I’m not sure why. And, besides, as it so happened I was already committed to an unrequited love affair with a coworker at one of my many survival jobs. (I much preferred to be interested in someone who had no interest in me over giving it a shot with someone who, for reasons unknown, seemed interested in me, (thus validating Groucho’s maxim regarding club memberships and those who seek them.))

       In the early fall, on one of those rare nights when Manhattan is so agreeable you simply can’t ignore it—FOMO before it was a thing—I headed down the stairs. Gail abruptly appeared from her apartment. She adopted a wide stance appearing confident against the pocked plaster industrial gray walls.

       “Where you headed?” she said with chirpy directness.

       “To the movies,” I stammered.

       “What are you going to see,” she said.

       “The Big Chill.”

       “Oooooh, I love scary movies.”

       That innocent declaration confirmed Gail and I would never be. It’s shallow, I know, but pop culture literacy was important to me. Movies, music and books (in that order) were the touchstones of my life during that time. So I politely explained that it was not a scary movie; rather, a movie about a group of 1960s college activists, drawn back together after ten years for the funeral of one of their friends who had committed suicide.

       She made a face like she’d just sucked a lemon. “That’s dumb.”

       I nodded and told her that I—and my imaginary friends with whom I would be seeing the film—did not share her assessment. I wished her a pleasant evening and, having arrived on the cracked and littered sidewalk in front of the building, walked briskly toward Second Avenue.

       Our relationship (if that’s what it could be called) regressed after the tone of our subsequent encounters played out with icy formality. My machinations to avoid George now grew to avoiding Gail as well. Every trip into or out of the building was a test. There were times when I considered calling it quits, but a two-hundred-thirty-eight-dollar-a-month rent wedded me to inertia.

       I still found no work as an actor. I was contacted by an advertising agency one evening asking me to be at a call in Midtown the next morning at eight for some print work. I passed.

For all practical purposes, I had ceased to be an aspiring actor. No classes. No auditions. No motivation. It seemed my talent may not have been as special as it was to those who doled out scholarships at my old school.

       So I accelerated living my life in a kind of drifting, fantasizing existence, fueled by long walks, smoking weed, and concocting elaborate narratives about serendipitously getting cast in a sleeper hit play, finding the perfect female soulmate, or securing a rent-controlled apartment with my name on the lease—sometimes all three at once.

       At about this time my father died. He and I were not close. As an act of contrition I began making more trips back home to see my mother. In mid-November while on one such trip, I got a call from a friend who was keeping an eye on “my” apartment, taking in the mail and such. He told me he had tried to get in, but one of the keys did not work. While odd, this did not alarm me. I had several locks on that door, including one known as a Police Lock, a large iron rod that sat in a metal cup embedded in the floor of the apartment; it leaned against the door, a formidable buttress from inside the apartment. I reasoned it must have been a failure of the spare key. Regardless, it was enough of an excuse to precipitate my return to Manhattan.

       I arrived at the apartment close to eleven p.m. Typically at that hour I did not have to do my visitor routine, so my emotional temperature hovered around normal. When I reached the fifth floor, something was not quite right. Something imperceptible—more sensed than seen.

       I put the key into the lock and, as foretold, it did not work. I forced the key and attempted to turn it. Nothing. The door seemed jammed. I pushed and it gave slightly. I put my shoulder against it and pushed harder. It swung open accompanied by a loud metallic clanging, confirming the impotence of the so-called impregnable Police Lock.

       Upon entering, the first thing I noticed was the oppressive heat. But that was not unusual. Once the heat was turned on in the building, my apartment served as a case study for the natural law that heat rises. The four-inch-wide steam pipe that periscoped the height of the building, and whose terminus was in my ceiling, reached its boiling zenith six feet from my futon. To approach within a few inches risked  mild to moderate radiation burns. (As such, my windows remained open all winter.)

       The second thing I noticed was that the place had been trashed. The only thing that hadn’t moved (or been taken) was the small black-and-white television that sat atop the obligatory cinder-block-and-pine-plank shelves. A friend had bequeathed it to me several months earlier. He called it R2-D2. It was old. It had a rotary dial channel selector, and a jagged stub of antenna, which served little purpose beyond inflicting pain. There it sat, untouched, mocking me. I could hear it saying, “You are so poor, I was not even attractive enough to steal.” 

       Wading into the mess, I took note of what had been stolen, something made immeasurably easier in that I essentially own so few items that one might consider even remotely valuable:

 

       1) A cassette-tape player that passed for, in the parlance of the day, a smallish boom box.

       2) A case of two dozen or so prerecorded and self-mixed cassette tapes.

       3) A backup pair of George-avoiding shades.

 

       The economic loss was far less than the psychic trauma. 

       I began organizing with focused ferocity: Must. Restore. Order. After an hour or so of aerobic cleanup I realized my clothes were sodden with perspiration. I stripped out of my clothes and stood in my tighty-whiteys, surveying the room. Then in a queasy flash it came to me: Can I even be in here tonight? Will the door lock? Believing the locks had been rendered useless, on impulse (again) I stepped into the hall and closed the door behind me to assess its efficacy. It was a moment that I have relived over the years to the point of exhaustion. I still ask myself: What were you thinking? Why did you do that? It eerily echoed the time my father, after hitting a pot hole and tearing the muffler from the family car, ran back—with no obvious deliberation—and picked up the severed and still-superheated appendage. His palms were bandaged for days. Like father like son.

       The door was now unquestionably, securely locked. I allowed myself to cry for a moment.

       My options were limited. I could go to the phone booth at the corner (in those days they were not booths, per se, but grimy glass-and-metal carrels), but I could not envision begging for change dressed as I was. Certainly not without consequences. I needed help. But who would help at this hour? In this place? With me wearing nothing but tighty-whiteys? It came to me surprisingly fast. Gail. I could see her gunmetal gray door one flight down from where I stood on the landing. For a brief moment I attempted to will her from her apartment. She did not appear. 

       I made my way to her door and knocked, not softly, but short of frantic pounding. I heard scuffling, footsteps, locks being unlocked. She cracked the door slightly, her head and one shoulder emerging at an angle. She was wearing a pink nightgown. One strap, I noticed, had slipped from her shoulder. Her expression registered uncensored horror. In her small, squeaky voice she emitted a panicked hiss.

       “I can’t talk right now,” she said, rather curtly I though. “My mother is staying with me.” Not the response I was expecting. I stood with my hands in the fig-leaf position.

       “Please Gail, I need your help, I was robbed. Can you get me some clothes, or a blanket?”

       I looked down at myself, in case she hadn’t noticed and needed a nudge. She did not reply. The door closed and I heard the locks snap back into place. I should have invited her to see The Big Chill. She was probably calling the police on the near-naked man at her door—or worse, George. As I prepared to go to Plan B and take my chances on Second Avenue, I heard footsteps behind her door, locks snapping open once again.

       This time Gail came into the hall. She’d changed into gym shorts and a too-large gray sweatshirt, and was carrying some articles of clothing.

       “I knew you were gay. What happened, did one of your little tricks rip you off?” she said with more hostility than I felt the situation called for.

       For a brief moment I considered agreeing with her. It would’ve been easier than explaining what really happened.

       “No, No. I’m not gay! I was robbed!” And then I explained to her what had happened—the mess, the heat, the locked door.

       She looked at me as if she were witnessing a mushroom cloud blooming on the horizon.

       “Here,” she said, thrusting the clothes into my hands.

      I examined a pair of olive-drab pants affecting to be army fatigues. I assumed they must have belonged to an ex-boyfriend—until I tried to put them on. I horsed myself into them but I couldn’t get them buttoned. The cuffs found their equilibrium somewhere north of my ankles. Then, a white cotton shirt. At first, I thought, This is not so bad I can pull this off. Until I realized the shirt was, well, elaborate. It had ruffles and stitching and buttons in places like no shirt I’d ever worn. (Some years later, a famous comic in a famous sitcom would coin the term: puffy shirt. Spot on.) After getting maybe two of the buttons buttoned, my hands hanging, ape-like, from the sleeves, I knew I would have a better chance in the outside world sporting only my Jockeys.

       Then it struck me. I did not have to go anywhere. All I had to do was get into my apartment. The window was open!

       Gail started to close the door and I panicked.

       “Gail, please, you’ve got to help me. I need to get into my apartment. I need you to lower me down from the roof to my window.”

       Amazingly, she did not flee. She stood staring at me, waiting for me to go on. I explained that the fire escape landing for my apartment was not more than ten or twelve feet from the top of the roof. If she could at the very least hold some minor tension on a rope, I could quickly get far enough down to jump to the fire escape without too much danger. Of course, in my mind’s eye I pictured rusting bolts popping from the face of the building as my full weight crashed onto the corroding slats, me hurtling down clinging to the metal skeleton flailing into the night, a la Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove.

       “Where are we going to get a rope?” she said, sober enough that I believed she was convinced.

       Then every cheesy prison-break movie I’d ever seen flashed through my mind.

       “We don’t need a rope. Do you have an extra bed sheet?”

       She said nothing and  disappeared into her apartment. When she returned, she held a sheet adorned with a pink-and-white rose pattern.

       “It’s fitted,” I said.

       She stared, holding it at arm’s length, daring me to take it.

       We went to the end of the hall past my apartment, the door glowering malevolently, although I tried not to look. I had been up on the roof once or twice. It was supposedly off limits but was almost always unlocked. Access required climbing a metal ladder, propping open a hatch-like door and scrambling up onto the roof. I helped Gail up onto the uneven tarpaper surface, embarrassed by my sweaty palm enfolding her small, warm hand. On the roof, we stood for a moment. In other circumstances it could have been romantic.

       I walked to the edge of the roof. There was a three-foot balustrade, ostensibly to keep people in situations such as this from straying off the edge. I still see the image of Gail, bracing herself at the base of the short wall as if about to engage in a tug of war, her slender legs surprisingly muscled (she was remarkably strong), her feet clad in what incongruously looked like ballet slippers. I grabbed the sheet and scrambled atop the balustrade. The drop between the roof’s edge and the fire escape was far less than I had imagined. I probably could have jumped.

       The next thing I remember was hitting the fire escape. It held. I gazed in at my apartment. It was, I’ll admit, tidy. I’d done a good job. I looked up and saw Gail peering over the ledge, her small face lit by the sallow light reflected up from the streetlights. Then she reeled in the sheet and disappeared. I went out into the hall just as Gail was descending the stairs. I started to thank her effusively when she said in a voice too loud for the hour: “You’re crazy, you know that? And I still think you’re gay.” She stomped down the steps, dragging the sheet.

       That was the second-to-last time I ever saw Gail, the last being when I slunk to her door to return her clothing (unlaundered). We conducted the exchange in silence, with no eye contact, punctuated by a meek thank you on my part. For the next six months, mercifully, we did not see each other. How that happened, I do not know. Maybe she had crafted her own elaborate routine to avoid me. Over the years, with some shame, I came to see that as the most likely explanation.

 

~~~

    

A couple of months later a guy I knew from one of my survival jobs asked me if I wanted to move in with him. His roommate was getting married. He had a two-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights, and said he could arrange it with the landlord that my name would be on the lease.

       The day I packed up and moved out, I made no effort to hide from George. Bravado comes easy when there are no consequences. But he never appeared. I half hoped I would see Gail, if for nothing else than to apologize. She also never appeared.

 

~~~

    

Gazing down at the harbor as my cab clattered across the Brooklyn Bridge, I wondered if this new beginning might also reignite my attempts to find work as an actor. There was something exhilarating about the shape of the superstructure superimposed over the skyline. The graceful arcing lines of the bridge were funneling me to something new. Sun glinted off the heavy cables giving them the appearance of a gilded runway. Brooklyn beckoned. I felt hopeful. I saw myself having my own place. My own room. No more clandestine comings and goings. I made a mental note to get off on a good foot with the new super.