Wolfie and I arrived at the Trailways — or was it Greyhound??? — bus terminal and found an apartment almost instantly — we had no money — we were both waiting for our service paychecks to catch up with us, so I called a sci-fi writer friend, Mary Kornbluth, and she said she had an extra room if we didn’t mind 250 cats all around us, so we went there and bedded down for the night. This cat was our first visitor, and I snapped the shot and it survived the years, and here it is.
The next day we walked down Broadway, looking for work. Both of us were limited in wardrobe — everything we had on we’d acquired the day before, at Gettysburg, which is kinda near where we’d worked our last three weeks of service, Valley Forge Hospital, in the TB wards.
Dangerous, but it beats guard duty with a .12 gauge with orders to shoot any prisoner who attempts an escape. I never knew whether the weapon was loaded, but I got out of there fast when I got the offer of spending the last few weeks at Valley Forge in spite of the danger of TB, and it’s fortunate I did go there, or I’d never have met Wolfie.
We spend the day just walking about, checking out the stores, being amazed at all the changes that had been made in civilian life since we’d entered the service a few years earlier.
It was majorly different, palpably so.
For one thing, when we walked two girls arm in arm, nobody stared. This was very different from before. Judy Henske and I had walked around Greenwich Village before I went into male drag again to start college — all my paperwork was as a boy, of course, and I couldn’t just show up and say I’d been fooling people all those years.
That’s asking for trouble with a capital “T”.
Mary was sweet and understanding and helpful and fun to be around. We walked over to sci-fi writer Evelyn E. Smith’s apartment, not far from Mary Kornbluth’s, and she invited us in for tea. We stared at the titles of the thousands of books Evelyn had hoarded — I mean, “researched” — for many years.
Evelyn E. Smith was the author of the famous “Miss Melville” Detective Series that got made into so many B Grade films in the 1950s and into the early 1960s. None can be found today, enjoying the same fate as Max Oseran’s and my 1960 production of “Vampire Rose”. Can’t find a copy anywhere, or any record of its existence, mostly because it got buried beneath a recent film release of the same name.
Can’t copyright a name.
Copyright doesn’t cover short names, sentences or paragraphs. It has to be a significant amount of text before copyright applies, but walking around New York City in the late spring looking for work, who cared about copyright issues?
Little did we know what was in store for us.
What an adventure! Of course, as we walked, guys would do the usual — sidle up at a street corner while you’re waiting for the light to change, and grind his hip against yours. I used a slight elbow chop to the midsection on one creep who wouldn’t take “fuck off” for an answer.
We were so obviously together, I wonder how in the hell anyone could mistake us for casual friends, but it happened several times more before we got to the relative safety of a restaurant — “Wolfie’s Deli” at 41 West 57th Street in New York City’s Broadway District, between 5th & 6th Avenues.
Of course, Sixth Avenue was easy to remember, easy to figure out, so naturally the New York Public Authorities renamed the street “Avenue of the Americas”. Nobody ever said politicians are smart. Clever, yes — smart, no, and I can prove it. They spend their lives in politics. See???
After a great lunch of pastrami on rye — we were both at our military weight and our best health ever, so we shared, although we each ordered our own “egg cream”, a mixture of a special kind of chocolate syrup, called FOX’S U-BET. Nothing else works. By the way, an egg cream contains neither eggs nor cream.
I know what you’re going to say — there were plenty of recipes calling for both back in the 19th century, but you’re reaching for it pretty far if you think that’s going to throw me off my dissertation.
Now, what was it I was going to say???
Oh, yes, so Wolfie and I stumbled out of Wolfie’s Deli with totally stuffed tummies, and wandered semi-intelligently across Madison Avenue, ending up inside the first of many Michael’s Art Supply stores, and wow, BOTH of us were hired on the spot!
Wolfie had been an art major and knew a lot about the supplies, especially architecture stuff, which is what they mostly sold at that time in 1964.
I knew enough to do a fairly decent charcoal, and said I could also paint, sculpt and weld.
“You can weld???” the assistant manager all-but-yelped in an unnaturally high-pitched squeaky voice. “What are you, Rosie the Riveter or something???”
I laughed and said my dad had taught me. It was a lie, but had I told him the truth, that I’d been living as a boy and I’d had shop at high school, he’d have blown his top. This guy was so straight and narrow, he was still wearing an Arrow white shirt with no button-down collar.
Button down collars were a must in 1964, and Van Heusen was the shirt to buy, if you were a man. I was mighty glad to get out of those drab rags for the time being, but I wasn’t allowed to be a girl for very long. I’ll tell you all about it in Chapter 3.
See You At The Top!!!
LeslieAnn