Stonewall (5 page)

But her happy summers at camp came to an end when her parents decided the money would be put to better use by enrolling Karla in private school. Her parents put a high value on the education they themselves had never had. After an older boy on the block got stabbed in the back at Walt Whitman Junior High School (where Karla was due to go), Abraham and Rhoda immediately enrolled her instead, as an eighth-grader, in the all-girl “Bromley Institute.”
^*
Bromley was as close to an upper-class finishing school as Brooklyn had to offer, and there were only twenty-eight students in Karla's class. Always quick to adjust, she took to the school from the start—and not simply because she now found herself in an all-female atmosphere.

^*
Wherever names have been changed, quotation marks are used at first reference in order to indicate a pseudonym.

RAY

R
ay was only three when it happened, but he remembers what was playing on the television set in the background
(Have Gun, Will Travel)
, what his mother was wearing (a strapless turquoise dress) and
the brand of rat poison (JR). She mixed the poison into two glasses of milk, drank one herself, then put the other down in front of him and told him to swallow it. He tried to, but the taste was so bad he stopped after a few sips. His mother got angry; she poured sugar into the glass and again ordered him to drink. When he gagged, she impatiently took the glass out of his hand and drank it down herself. Then she went into the bathroom, came out a few minutes later with her makeup on, started to cry—and then suddenly ran out of the apartment to the neighbors'.

The next thing Ray remembers is the hospital: orderlies rushing to pump his stomach, his mother vomiting uncontrollably. She lingered for two days and then—aged twenty-two—died. When Ray saw her laid out at the funeral parlor, he figured she was sleeping, and Grandma Viejita told him that that was right. Later, at the cemetery, Viejita tried to throw herself into the open grave and had to be restrained.

For years afterward, she denied that her daughter had killed herself—until Ray finally confronted her with a truth he had long since accepted: “She killed herself and I know that!” Ray screamed at his grandmother. “I remember the look on her face when she was doing it! I remember everything.…” By then, ten-year-old Ray even had a theory as to why she had tried to take him with her: “Moms knew I would have to suffer a long life, and I would be completely different than anybody else.”

Viejita took Ray and Sonia, his two-month-old sister, from their apartment in Spanish Harlem to live with her in Jersey City. Ray's natural father, José Rivera, had disappeared years ago; his mother's second husband, a drug dealer who had fathered Sonia, showed no interest in the children. José reappeared only once, when Ray was four. Viejita called him into the room one day, pointed to a stranger sitting there, and said, “This is your father.” When José tried to kiss him, Ray yelled, “I don't have a father!” kicked him in the shins, and ran out of the apartment. José never came by again.

Nor did he ever send child support. Viejita (an affectionate term for “Old Lady”) had to bring them up on her own. Born in Venezuela, she had raised her own daughter alone in New York—her Mexican husband having deserted her when she got pregnant. Now in her mid-forties and employed as a pieceworker at the Pickwick Mills factory, Viejita was lucky if she could bring home fifty dollars a week. Yet she did her determined best to keep the refrigerator full and clothes
on the children's backs—that is, until Sonia's father reappeared one day and took her off to live with a couple he knew who, like himself, were Puerto Rican.

Viejita was never the same. Sonia had reminded her of her own daughter, and that made the loss doubly devastating. After years of trying, she finally tracked down Sonia and her adopted family in Brooklyn. But when Viejita and Ray went there for dinner, the evening proved a disaster; annoyed that Sonia kept calling her adopted mother Mommy, Ray finally blurted out, “That's not your mother! You're my sister and you don't even know that! Your moms is dead!” Sonia's “mommy” politely ushered Viejita and Ray out the door. It was years before they were invited back again, and Viejita threatened Ray with death if he so much as mentioned the past. Ray managed to hold his tongue, and the day went off well. Thereafter, Viejita was occasionally allowed to visit, and she periodically sent Sonia gifts and money; but Ray never saw his sister again.

Viejita seemed to blame him for the separation. She told him he was a “troublemaker,” that she had only wanted Sonia, not him. When he left a spot of dirt after cleaning the apartment, or when he failed to iron her blouse just so, she would beat him. Ray didn't doubt that Viejita loved him in her own way, but he turned increasingly to Sarah, an upstairs neighbor who had known his mother and was herself childless. Sarah would buy him little things that his grandmother couldn't afford, and she would listen to him talk about his unhappiness.

In 1958, when Ray was seven, Viejita fell ill and sent him off to St. Agnes, a Catholic home for boys. She felt well again within six months, but delayed bringing Ray back home until the nuns strongly recommended that she do so. But she didn't seem to want him around anymore and started to board him out on weekdays. She at first sent him to people she knew in the neighborhood and then, for a long stretch when he was nine, to Elisa, a Colombian friend whom Viejita had sponsored as an immigrant. Elisa and her husband lived in a nice house in Sea Cliff, Long Island—they were the only Hispanic family in the town—and they sent him to the local Catholic school. Elisa was good to Ray most of the time—as long as he meticulously completed the many chores she gave him—but when she got in “one of her moods,” she would beat him for the slightest infraction, or for no reason at all, and not just with a belt but with a two-by-four plank. She also beat him on the day she invited him, aged ten, into her bed and he refused to go.

On weekends, holidays and during the summers, Ray would return to Viejita, who had moved to Manhattan's Lower East Side. She was never too happy about his return. The neighbors had begun to tease her about Ray's effeminacy, predicting he would soon be a full-fledged
maricón
. What they didn't know was that he had already, at age seven, had sex with his fourteen-year-old cousin—and by age ten was having sex regularly with a married man down the block.

Returning from the man's apartment one evening with hickeys on his neck, Ray couldn't understand why Viejita was staring at him so fixedly. At first he thought it must be his eyebrows again. He had taken to trying on Viejita's clothes when she wasn't home, sashaying around the house in padded bras and panties. Then one day he had gotten the idea to shave his eyebrows, but he had botched the job and had to paint them over with Viejita's eyebrow pencil. That night, completely forgetting, he had washed his face thoroughly and gone into the living room to say good night to his grandmother. “Where are your eyebrows?” Viejita had asked evenly. Faced with disaster, Ray had mumbled something about having lost them down the sink and had said he would go look for them. Viejita had held him fast, but to his surprise had not beaten him. She had quietly gotten out her eyebrow pencil and had repainted Ray's face.

But this time, seeing the hickeys on his neck, she was not so benign. Where did he get them? she demanded. Thinking fast but not exactly well, Ray said he got them from Millie, the girl down the hall. “She tried to attack me downstairs!” Sure, sure, said Viejita, try telling me another—and she hauled off and whacked him. “Next thing I know,” she screamed, “you'll be hanging out with the rest of the
maricónes
on Forty-second Street!” It was not the first time Ray had heard Forty-second Street mentioned. When he, Viejita, and a group of neighbors from the block had passed the Times Square area on their way to Coney Island for the day, he had heard them make snide comments about the “fags” who hung out there. He had stored the information away, not yet fully understanding it, not quite ready to have a firsthand look.

But then more trouble developed at school. Ray had started wearing face makeup in the fourth grade, but for a couple of years nobody had seemed to notice, or care. (Nobody, that is, except for his fifthgrade teacher, a married man with eight children who had taken to driving Ray home from school and then one day had seduced him in the backseat.) Perhaps Ray's athletic abilities in track and gymnastics had given him some protective covering, for if he was effeminate, he
was also wiry and tough, widely known as someone you didn't mess with.

But in the sixth grade somebody did. He was skipping rope one day with the girls, and wearing what was then called “full face” makeup (eyeliner and mascara), when a classmate named Glen called him a faggot. Ray whirled on him—“You don't call
me
no faggot!”—and although Glen was two heads taller, beat him up right then and there in the playground. Called into the principal's office, Ray explained what Glen had said. “Now do I look like a faggot, Mr. Sloan?” Ray demanded—which took some bravado, since he was dressed in skintight pants and was still wearing makeup. Mr. Sloan, for whatever reasons of his own, agreed that Ray did not. He suspended Ray for a week—and Glen for a month.

But that marked the end of Ray's formal education. In 1962, at age eleven, tired of Viejita's beatings and the neighborhood mockery, he left home for good. He headed straight for Forty-second Street.

JIM

J
im's family life shifted so often before he was five years old that he ended up feeling he had no family at all. And he would later let stand some of the rumors that surrounded him about being the son of the chairman of the board of Pepsi-Cola (thus conveniently making Joan Crawford his stepmother), or about his father having been a circus performer. “Circus” is in fact an apt invention and metaphor for the emotional acrobatics that surrounded Jim's childhood.

His mother, Connie, ran away from a convent school in New Jersey when she was fifteen to live with thirty-five-year-old James Fouratt, Jim's father. Connie and James never married: she refused to wed outside the Catholic Church, and he refused to wed in it. She left him after giving birth within a three-year period in the mid-forties to three boys (one of whom died in infancy); ever after, she deflected all questions about that period of her life.

When Connie, not yet eighteen, decided to leave James Fouratt and start over, she went to the state of Washington to live with her own mother, Florence. Descended from an upper-class French family, Florence, too, had early realized that her first marriage was a mistake, had divorced Connie's father (a butcher whom she accused of being
a drunk) and had quickly remarried. When Connie went to live with Florence, she left young Jim in New Jersey with James, telling the boy that she would be sending for him shortly.

But she and Florence soon concluded that leaving Jim with his father had been a mistake, that James might not later be willing to give the boy up. Deciding to take no chances, they concocted a kidnaping. Florence and her husband simply appeared one day when Jim was on his way home from school, and told him to get in the car. Since he knew his grandmother, he obliged; but later, safely resettled in Washington, he cried bitterly over the new puppy he had been forced to leave behind. It was only some thirty years later, in the seventies, that Jim reconnected with his father—briefly, since the hoped-for knight in shining armor turned out to be a bookie and an alcoholic, an ill, bigoted old man who lectured Jim about his “sick” values.

Connie's new life in Washington started well. Still young, and very attractive, she entered a state beauty contest—and won. Then it was discovered that she had two sons and had been “divorced” (to conceal Connie's nonmarriage, Florence had somehow arranged bogus divorce papers). Stripped of her crown, Connie nonetheless had a millionaire suitor to fall back on. That is, a conditional suitor: He wanted to marry her but refused to raise her children. Florence urged Connie to accept the proposal and offered to adopt the two boys herself—a solution that would not have sat well with Jim, who had developed considerable antipathy for his grandmother.

Just as Connie was agonizing over her options, her own father, whose second wife had recently died and left him with a daughter younger than Jim—is it any wonder that the confusions of Fouratt family history fed the need for plausible invention?—invited her to live with him in Rhode Island. Connie decided that was her way out, and, leaving the younger boy with her mother, she took Jim, now aged five, and understandably bewildered at yet another shift in the family configuration, to her father's house in East Providence.

He lived in a neighborhood that was basically working-class Irish-Portuguese-Italian, and strongly Catholic. (Connie herself, though a believer, only became devout later in life.) Within two years of moving in with her father, Connie married Bill Malone, a short-order cook, the son of an Irish cop and a telephone operator. In adulthood, Jim would come to think of his immediate family as having been dysfunctional—his mother doting on him more than on her husband.

But Connie and Bill tried to do well by him, pinching pennies to send him to a good (and as it turned out, liberal) parochial school. Clever, bright, eager to learn, Jim took to his new school immediately and, encouraged by some of his more freethinking teachers, was soon reading the progressive Catholic publication
America
, as well as materials put out by Dorothy Day's radical Catholic Worker movement. Precociously articulate, Jim could stand on his feet and talk rings around his contemporaries., and he also had highly developed social skills that quickly thrust him into leadership positions. Yet, puzzlingly, he was behind his peers in spelling and writing and had trouble committing anything to paper. Only years later, in his twenties, did he finally discover that he was dyslexic.