‘MEETING WALTER’ & ‘MINGLING AMONG THE THRONGS’
Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet.
MEETING WALTER
I am in denial of my aging process. I have been blessed with enviable family genes which include my still having all my hair, thick and dark. Expanding on that good fortune, I look younger than the years I’ve accrued. I’m 65. Not that I do this, but I can get away with saying I’m 50 without having anyone doubt me. But 50 isn’t considered “young” by young people. I know men who, at age 40, look older than I. Yes, it’s subjective, but it’s not misplaced ego. I am aware and grateful.
====
Several years ago, while on vacation at a picket fenced-in guest house in Key West, Florida, I met a man named Walter Stern. At the time, I was somewhere in my early 30’s. Walter was 71 years old which, if I remember correctly, was the same age as my mother. He looked quite weathered to me. Tall and thin, sparse grey hair with a ghostly pale white body and deep lines on his face. He thought he looked young for his years. Though I was happy that he believed that to be true, he was wrong. And in my opinion, Walter was not a handsome 71. Arguably dignified, there was nothing physically attractive about him and no signs of his having once been a catch. Obviously, I could be off about his appearance in his younger days.
====
Walter was a German Jew. As a boy during Hitler’s reign, he was wheelchair bound, afflicted with bone cancer. People spit at him. For so many reasons, I can’t stand visualizing that.
His family owned a farm in the Bavarian area of Germany. All their land, buildings and goods were confiscated and sanctioned as “government property” by the Nazis. I don’t know the history of his relatives: who survived and why. Who didn’t and how. Perhaps their not living in a city made it less difficult to hide, or not be hunted like rabid animals.
I can’t remember Walter telling me when he came to the United States. He didn’t speak with a German accent. By the time we met in the 1990’s, he was a retired textile worker, living well in an apartment in Forest Hills, a lovely, Tudor strewn area of Queens, NY. I believe he worked his way up to ownership of the Seventh Avenue company in New York City’s Garment District for which he was employed his entire adult life. His lover of many years had been an African American man, living in Harlem, uptown on the west side of Manhattan. He had passed away some time before Walter and I met.
====
Returning home to New York, the following month I invited Walter to join me for drinks and an early dinner in Soho. I had landed a job at a large, grey walled gallery on West Broadway, across from a high-end clothing store called the Gallery of Wearable Art. They featured a beautiful, living mannequin in their display window — a woman — who posed for hours at a time. I loved watching her stay absolutely still: making small, strategic movements every once in a while. If you stood directly in front of the window for a few moments, she might wink at you. How she stayed motionless and emotionless is a rare skill and must have been something she was schooled to do. Reminiscent of the frozen stance and expressionless face held by British guards outside of Buckingham Palace. Men dressed in their uniform finery, as if they had stepped out of “The Nutcracker” ballet.
====
Walter and I dined at a trendy restaurant a few doors down from the gallery. When the weather was clear and warm, which in this case it was, there were tables placed outside on a serrated black iron platform the width of the building. The floor-to-ceiling windows folded into themselves and seemed to vanish, exposing the cavernous space and opening the front wall for guests to view the theatricality of the street scene. This was during Soho’s hey day, before the elite Manhattan galleries moved north to an undeveloped piece of Chelsea.
One memorable restaurant in that desolate far westside area was Florent, named for it’s French born owner. Years before Chelsea embarked on her evolution, Florent was open 24 hours a day, hidden in plain sight among warehouses as well as gay bars that, at that time, had been strategically placed at the edge of the city’s foreboding fringe. On a cobble stone street across from a bagel factory and beneath a decaying trestle, lived this diner/bistro where truck drivers, club kids (of which I was one), celebrities and drag queens congregated to capacity during the black hours after midnight.
====
On West Broadway in Soho, as we casually dined, Walter and I talked about his business and his late boyfriend. I remember feeling an affection for him that I still cannot categorize. What I mean by that is he didn’t feel like a father figure to me, nor a friend who happened to be twice my age. I was attentive to his story-telling as he relayed the details of his life when he was young, during a period of time that was now chronicled in history books. As genuinely interested as I was, I had no agenda as far as forming some lasting friendship with him.
I have a fascination with what occurred in Germany in the 1930s and 40s. I find it incredible, the depths of hate and cruelty humans can unleash when permission is encouraged in society. Walter was more than an historical witness.
As a Jew, I’ve never had to suffer the ripple or overt affects of anti-semitism. Less than 2.5 percent of Americans are Jewish, yet there is a significant population in New York City: the largest in the world, outside of the country of Israel. Though I was not bar mitzvahed, a ritual considered a right-of-passage for a Jewish teenage boy, I am a Jew by culture on all sides. I’ve become militantly proud of my heritage as I’ve gotten older. When I was in high school, I didn’t think it was “sexy.” That may seem like an odd adjective. To strangers, I sometimes pretended to be Italian. I now see that self denial as self-hatred. And frankly, my last name reveals my background, even after having been Americanized at Ellis Island, when my grandfather emigrated from Russia.
I can’t say I celebrate my culture with any religious fervor, but for me, it is part of my identity. And I owe it not just to my family, but to people like Walter, on whose shoulders I proudly rest, without thinking on the privileges I am able to take for granted. Walter Stern. A Jewish man who survived 20th Century European horrors, to embrace a new life in a world an ocean away. A country in which he would call home.
MINGLING AMONG THE THRONGS
When Neil walked into the bar on 10th Avenue, though it had been years since I’d seen his face, I recognized him immediately. I estimate that he and I are about the same age. We are what I term as the “last of a certain breed.” Possibly fascinating but not to be envied. We are single, gay men of an “advanced” age, out on the prowl. At least that’s how I presume we are judged by those watching from the sidelines.
In an historically short time, things have progressed for the better, particularly if you are young and don’t struggle with what came before, if even aware of the shoulders on which you stand. And though there is a thriving business in gay bars, places to see and be seen, most are not patronized for the purpose of finding men of my years. Unless they are establishments that invite briefcase carrying Sugar Daddies in loafers and suits, where money is exchanged for companionship and services rendered, in the short or long term.
====
Neil and I are dinosaurs that can be found mingling among the throngs of young men drinking garnish clad cocktails and domestic beer from a tap. Nothing exceptional and not all that rare, at least here in this city of millions. Years of experience can lead to good conversation, as long as we initiate, and the younger man is either cornered and polite, or willing to listen. There are places more accepting of our kind but I don’t find stimulation there, nor persons I might want to date or fuck. It’s not that I’m adverse to meeting a handsome man near to my age, but almost all of those bachelors are trolling for youth. Or they aren’t bachelors at all.
The domino effect that applies, travels back many decades to a time when a personally complicated AIDS-related destruction altered all that would follow for me. Though I moved on long ago, something or things subconscious became road blocks to what might have been healthy pairings (that’s when I probably should have returned to therapy). Finding or choosing the safety of considering myself a father figure or repair man doesn’t open up opportunities for an equal relationship. Wounded masculinity is very attractive to me, since the focus tends to be on the other one. A deflection I have mastered.
====
Though not at another man’s request, after almost 40 years, I put away the photograph of Stephen — the one person from my past where dreamlike memories still affect my mood. If he were alive, he would not be anything like the picture I looked at everyday. It was taken before we met, when he was in his early twenties. As my imagination took flight visualizing what I decided he might currently look like, I no longer wanted to see him as he had been in a photograph shot when he wasn’t yet 25. He would now be close to 70. Around the age his parents were when I met them.
I don’t spend my life comparing others to my memory of him. Though I’d be lying if I said that what happened doesn’t influence my present day behavior. Being unsuccessful in my finding committed love is not blamed upon the similarities to or differences from who came before. I know of a good many people, straight and gay, who survived unhappy endings to bravely pick themselves up and embark on subsequent pairings. As for people who decide to remain in damaged relationships, I guarantee there are those who settle in order not to be alone.
====
I know almost nothing about Neil. I don’t remember why I know his name. I have no idea where he lives or what he does for a living. I don’t even think we’ve ever had a conversation.
My obsessive fascination with Neil lies on my wondering how we both ended up in this state. He may not think about it like that, if he thinks about it at all. He represents something to me that probably has nothing to with who he is as a human being.
Whether I live an additional 25 years or leave Earth tonight, I don’t want to end my days with unaddressed regrets. One of the great privileges of my life is knowing that nothing was left unsaid between my mother and I before she passed away. The only guilt I feel is the convenient distraction of wishing I had been at her side on the day she went to sleep forever.
====
One thing Neil and I arguably share is that we have both aged well. But that’s not necessarily a reflection of anything more significant than misdirected vanity. What I mean by that is, from a distance, you might mistake us for being 20 years younger than we actually are. Come close and you will uncover the truth. In my case you may discover the love handles I strategically keep hidden, or the noticeable sagging beneath my chin that cannot be camouflaged well, or the loss of youth in my facial expression. I have managed to deflect lines on my face usually associated with age. But I chalk that up to genetic fortunes.
Other than dropping dead, there is no escaping getting older. When I see someone who is 60 and has had a facelift, I think of the sentiments my friend Margie once said. I’m paraphrasing. “Yes, she’s had a facelift but she still looks like she’s 60 — with a facelift.” That may seem like a hypocritical comparison coming from a man who still works out with weights religiously. It helps in my fight, but the shape of the body as I get older, unequivocally changes. So much for defying gravity. For Neil and I, I wonder how long we will go on in this delusion of unrealistic denial. I shouldn’t put Neil in the same category as I find myself, since I know almost nothing about him.
When I was 39, I had a year long relationship with a gorgeous man who was married to a woman and had two teenage daughters. We met in the bleachered seats of a concert at Madison Square Garden. He was standing in front of me and kept turning around to stare at me. And though it couldn’t last, most of my friends made up scenarios of what was going on in my private life. Since I didn’t talk about it, no one really knew. I still fight the urge to contact him, as if there could be some seductively desperate future we might share. I haven’t spoken with him in years, yet I still miss what we never had.
What is it that Neil has? A lover no one knows about? A choice he made not to opt for anything serious? Still searching for something he can’t seem to find? I haven’t a clue. And though I write about him, it’s none of my business.
Andrew Sarewitz has published more than 75 short stories (website: www.andrewsarewitz.com. Substack access is @asarewitz) as well as having penned scripts for various media. Mr. Sarewitz is a recipient of the City Artists Corp Grant for Writing. His play, Alias Madame Andrèe (based on the life of WWII resistance fighter, Nancy Wake, the “White Mouse”) garnered First Prize from Stage to Screen New Playwrights in San Jose, CA; produced with a multicultural cast and crew. Member: Dramatists Guild of America.
