The front door to the building was locked. I stood in the cold and peered through the heavy glass at the mailboxes in the entryway. One said 'H. Pickering.' A middle-aged man in a topcoat and knit cap came up the steps and inserted a key in the door. I followed him in and said, 'Excuse me, isn't this Helen Pickering's place?'
Two bushy eyebrows went up. 'Harry Pickering. I'm Harry Pickering. No other Pickerings live here. What do you want?'
I said, 'I'm collecting for the Steve Rubell Defense Fund. Would you care to donate?'
A look of alarm. 'You'd better leave, mister.'
He shoved the door shut behind me and went up the stairs, glancing back once menacingly. I went and stood at the curb. Ten minutes later a woman in a trench coat and a pretty Indian silk scarf trudged up the stone steps with a bag of groceries. I tagged along.
'This Harry Pickering's place?'
'I think so,' she said.
'You should get to know him. One of the sweetest guys you'll ever meet.'
She smiled and entered a first-floor apartment, and I walked to the third. Blount's name was printed on a card on the door of 3-A. I went through the lock with a lobster pick that had been a wedding gift from Brigit's cousins Brad and Bootsy, and went in.
The living room, which looked out on Madison and the park, had off-white walls that were bare except for a big poster of the 1969 gay-pride march that had a lot of raised fists and looked like an ad for Levi Strauss. There was a daybed with a faded floral print coverlet and a couple of scruffy easy chairs. A bent coat hanger had replaced the antenna on a battered old black-and-white TV set. The newer, more expensive stereo amplifier and turntable sat on a board resting on cinder blocks, the speakers on either end. The two hundred or so records lined up on the floor between more cinder blocks were mostly disco, with some baroque ensemble stuff-Corelli, Telemann, Bach. No Judy Garland. The post-Stonewall generation.
The fake walnut bookshelves contained a row of old poli-sci textbooks, some fiction paperbacks
— Catch-22; Man's Fate; One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, other good modern stuff-and a collection of current gay literature: Katz's Gay American History; Out of the Closets and into the Streets; Loving Someone Gay; others. There was a nongay fifteen-year-old assortment of radical opinion: Cleaver, Jackson, Sol Alinsky, various antiwar writers, and a dusty hardback copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth with a bookmark stuck a third of the way into it. He'd tried.
He also probably had some politically aware friends who'd come of age in the sixties, making them close to my age.
The small kitchen was clean and appeared to have been little used. The old Frigidaire contained only an egg carton with two eggs, a bottle of Price Chopper ketchup, a pint of plain yogurt, three bottles of Valu Pack beer, and a plastic bag with enough grass left in it for maybe one joint.
Another gay gourmand for Edmund White to visit
The bedroom, in the rear, was furnished with a mattress on a box spring; the bed was unmade.
On the floor beside the bed lay a copy of the August 27 Advocate, a half-full popper, a telephone, and a phone book. Four first names and numbers had been handwritten on the back cover of the phone book. I copied them down: Huey, Chris, Frank, Mark. Huey again. But no Eddie.
A single bureau was cluttered on top with coins, ball-point pens, old copies of the capital-district gay guide. No personal papers of any kind, not even an unpaid bill. Albany's finest had been there.
The dresser had three drawers. The top one was filled with summer clothing: tank tops, T-shirts, shorts, jeans. The bottom drawers were nearly empty, except for one ratty crew-neck sweater with a dirty collar and a pair of new corduroys with the price tag still stapled on-wrong size, lost the receipt.
The bathroom, a high-ceilinged pit with a dim light bulb about a mile up, had two racks clotted with dirty bath towels and appeared to be missing three items: toothbrush, toothpaste, razor.
When Billy Blount disappeared, he'd had his wits about him and probably knew where he was heading: to a wintery place where the population observed habits of oral hygiene and good grooming. This meant that I would not be searching for Billy Blount among the Ik people, which was a start
I switched off all the lights and was about to depart when Billy's phone rang. I picked up the receiver and said, 'Blount residence.' No one spoke. I was aware, though, of a presence at the other end of the line. I said, 'I'm Donald Strachey and I'm trying to locate Billy Blount for his parents, who want to help him. Who's this?' No response. Then, after a time, there came a sort of choked sound, and the line went dead.
3
I drove over to my place on Morton. I could see my breath in the air in the front room, went to the kitchenette, set the oven at 450, and opened the door. Ten days. Hurlbut the landlord would make steam October fifteenth, the day he left annually for Fort Lauderdale. Then I could grow orchids on the windowsill and fungus on my shoes until the old man reappeared to shut off his rain forest machine on March fifteenth, the first day of Hurlbut's summer.
I set the phone on the kitchen table, propped my feet on the oven door, and phoned three people I knew who'd been involved in the early days of the gay movement in Albany. Each expressed roughly the same opinion about Billy Blount: that he was a decent, likable young man, if slightly pushy and opinionated, who had dropped out of the movement several years earlier because he found the local organizations insufficiently radical in their outlook and tactics. Each man I talked to was skeptical of the official view that Blount had killed a man, but none had any idea where Blount had gone or even who his current friends were. I'd have to find out the hard way.
I flipped on the TV for the six o'clock news. Dick Block, action man for the anchor news team, was squinting into the camera trying to puzzle out the names and places of the day's calamities. Fresh news on the Kleckner murder was not among them. I stripped to my briefs and did sit-ups while Snort Harrigan grappled disgustedly with the sports report.
I remembered the envelope the Blounts had given me for their son. I dug it out of my jacket lining and slid it into the jacket of Thelma Houston's 'I'm Here Again.'
I went into the bathroom, showered, and shaved. I spotted a single white hair in my mustache, probed around and got a grip on it, and yanked it out. I checked my armpits, chest, and groin. No change below the neck yet. That was when you'd know it was for real.
I went to the daybed, set the alarm for eight-thirty, pulled the old Hudson Bay blanket over me, and slept.
'Tell me about the Blounts,' Timmy said. 'I get the impression they aren't exactly Albert and Victoria.'
We were heading down Delaware toward Lark in the Rabbit. Timmy was beside me in a Woolrich shirt over a dark blue turtleneck and faded jeans the color of his eyes. I had Disco 101 on the radio-Friday-night pump priming- and they were playing Stargard's 'Wear It Out.'
'They're more like the duke and duchess of Windsor,' I said, 'by way of Dartmouth, Sweetbriai, and the Fort Orange Club. I think they might have a few vital parts missing. They talk as if their kid might come out of all this with the Nobel Peace Prize.'
'Kissinger got one.'
'Yeah, but the Albany County DA's office wasn't consulted.'
'I heard they were. It was part of a deal worked out with the mayor, the Swedish Academy, and a vending company in McKownville.'
'Ahhh.'
We swung onto Lark.
'Even so, they must be upset with all the publicity. People with old Albany names like Blount prefer their names on downtown street signs, not in the newspapers. The social pages are okay, and then eventually a seemly obituary. But the front page is bad taste, pushy. It's for the Irish and the Jews.'
'This is true. The missus especially is not pleased with the gay angle getting bruited about. She thinks that part of it's all a horrid misunderstanding, anyway. She says her boy has 'tendencies.''
'A phase he's going through.'
