“Never fall in love with an actor,” Jake said to me the first day I met him and I had followed him back to the East Village apartment where he was crashing that week. We had started talking while waiting for our names to be called to audition for a touring production of a Broadway revival, and in a hallway of self-involved actors he seemed to be the one most capable of drawing a lot of attention. It was late September, one of those stifling hot Manhattan days at the end of a summer, and Jake was a big fellow dressed in shorts and a sleeveless blue shirt, ragged at the seams of the armholes and accenting his large muscles and the trail of sweat left in their wake. He had a tough, monkey-shaped head with large ears and a bald scalp, softened by a big smile and blue eyes, his round jaw covered with a day-old black stubble. But it was his voice that drew everyone’s immediate attention: rough, hoarse, guttural, and raspy, like his vocal chords had been seared simultaneously with ice cubes and hot coals. It was no surprise for me to find this kind of man in the potential line-up of actors that afternoon. The touring musical was about singing and dancing con men.

Jake was complaining to another fellow about a lost ATM card when I took my seat beside him to wait my turn, and when the other actor diverted his attention toward a script he had in his lap, Jake, without missing a beat, turned to me and continued his story. The lost card had not been lost at all but canceled and had something to do with Jake’s ex-girlfriend, or ex-wife, or both of them, and the late alimony and child-support payments he had reimbursed his parents in New Jersey for paying to the ex-wife or ex-girlfriend, and though I wasn’t capable of putting all the facts of the story together into a coherent narrative, I offered him my empathy, thankful to be caught up in his drama and able to deflect my own nervousness over auditioning.

Neither of us were cast that day, but when I left the building Jake was waiting on the street, smoking a cigarette. “How’d it go?” he asked me, and I mumbled something or another about it being a valuable learning experience for me, since I had not auditioned much. I had only gotten my union card a few weeks before through a summer stock apprentice program when a gratis “walk-on” for my parents’ financial investment in the theater company had turned into an actual replacement role when another actor became ill. I had hastily moved to Manhattan and was working at an answering service in midtown as I made my rounds of auditions. Jake, I would learn, had several professional credits, the most recent as an understudy for an off-Broadway play where he had performed a role on-stage nineteen times before the production closed. Now, he was working at a copy shop where he had called in sick that morning in order to make the audition. As he lit up another cigarette, he asked me if I wanted to get something to eat, and since I didn’t need to return to work that afternoon—my shift was over—I agreed. We were headed downtown when Jake impulsively decided he needed to make one final desperate side trip to his bank to get some money.

His account was frozen, or at least that was what I surmised by his ranting as he exited the bank flustered and reaching for another cigarette. I suggested that we find a diner where I could treat him to a meal but he recommended a cheaper alternative of “cooking up something back at my place.” And so we walked the fortysomething blocks downtown and stopped at a bodega near where he was staying and bought ham, bread, and chips. “Nothing but the basics,” he said, smiling and tossing in a beer for each of us. I wasn’t at all skeptical or skittish of spending more time with Jake, even though he clearly outsized me if our growing friendship proved to be an unlucky encounter. He had thrown out enough lines about ex-girlfriends and his kids to make me believe that he wasn’t interested in me sexually and as for being conned out of more money, the groceries and the beer were about all my finances could handle unless I accessed the credit card my mother had pressed into my hand the day I left home—something I refused to let happen unless faced with an emergency.

The meal was simple and delicious. Jake’s crash pad was a studio with a hot plate for a stove and bookcases made from plastic milk crates. While I was looking through the collection of plays and cast albums Jake’s friend had assembled, Jake smoked and talked about acting. He was describing a gibberish technique a particular famous director was known to make actors use during warm-ups at rehearsals, when he suddenly changed the subject and asked me, “You wouldn’t mind if I kissed you? I think you’ve got great lips.”

I laughed in response, not over Jake’s suddenly sincere and fluttery delivery or his speculation that I might be straight and be offended by a kiss from another man, but because I had never been handed that line before. (I’d been told I had nice ears and model-ready hands, but never great lips.) Then I nodded and we both looked at each other, until Jake stood up and lifted me into a kiss.

I was still a skinny thing, a dark blond and willowy boy at heart, twenty-two to Jake’s larger forty-three year-old physique, and even though I had only had a handful of sexual encounters with men by then I knew I wanted more than the deep, smoky kiss Jake offered me. Jake was exactly the kind of man I was attracted to—older, interesting, and well-built—and I had spent the entire time sitting in the apartment with an erection I had been trying to will away. As we kissed, my hands traveled beneath his shirt and rested at the cool, sweaty small of his back until Jake broke away from me and tugged the polo shirt I was wearing over my head.

I ejaculated the moment we were both undressed and lying together on the narrow mattress of the bed. I was as inexperienced in the ways and sexual attentions of other men as I was in reciting lines from a play on stage, and Jake accepted my early orgasm with the sort of pride of a rookie ballplayer hitting a home run on the first pitch. He wiped up the come I had spewed on his chest, reached beneath the bed frame and pulled out a shoe box which held an assortment of dildos and lubricants. “This should get me warmed up till your ready,” he said, growling out a laugh and lifting one of the larger sized toys in his fist. But it was soon apparent to both of us that even though I had ejaculated, I had not lost my erection, and his response was a surprised and gravely, “My, you are a young one.” I was so young and innocent-appearing, in fact, that he called me “baby” that day, a term of endearment as he held me in his arms, “Baby, that was so good. We’re gonna do it again.” The way he said it sounded both sincere and rehearsed, and though we did follow through with doing it a few more times that day (and night), that moment was when he followed with the advice of not falling in love with an actor. “You’ll never feel appreciated,” he said. “You’ll never feel loved enough. No. Don’t ever fall in love with an actor.”

I never believed I had enough self-confidence to become a working actor, which was why after a few weeks of unsuccessful auditions it seemed more natural for me to find an off-stage job. In the next few months I worked on various off-off Broadway productions and showcases as an assistant stage manager, a lighting operator, a prop person, and an usher. I hadn’t given up my dream of being an actor, though; I took classes, volunteered for readings, practiced scenes with other actors, memorized monologues and songs to use for future auditions, though my primary focus soon shifted to earning an income in order to be able to continue living in the city. Jake had made it clear that I shouldn’t hope for any romantic attachment from him, though he was the one who kept our paths crossing my first year in Manhattan. He would call me for dinner, call me about an audition, call me to borrow a few bucks until a check cleared, or call me to crash at my apartment until a house-sitting arrangement or a sublet or a roommate possibility would open up. And every time I saw him I would be drawn into one of his heavy-nicotine dramas—a conflict with one of his son’s teachers, an ex-girlfriend who had filed a restraining order against him out of jealousy, his mother’s worry that he would end-up drug-addicted and homeless on the street. And each time he would draw us together, kissing and stroking and fucking until we were both sweaty and sore and ready to do it again.

Even though he would not let me love him, Jake was beneficial in helping me become more sexually comfortable with other men. Not that I developed a preference for anonymous and detached sexual encounters—no, that was never my case and not the kind of man I wanted to be—I was much more of a romantic, shying away from the romping grounds of other gay men of my generation, avoiding the dark, bushy Rambles, the abandoned west side piers, the bathhouses and sex clubs downtown. In fact, Jake’s conduct was responsible for leading me in the opposite direction, helping me recognize that every man I met was a potential narrative—someone full of history and specifics and dramas. Mark was a tall drink of water from a small-town in Texas who worked as an accountant, though I met him when I auditioned for a role in a chamber musical he had composed. I didn’t get the part—I was as bad of a singer as I was an actor, though I did get to sample Mark’s musical equipment: a soft, whispery voice in bed and a fat, jazzy cock he was eager to slide inside me. Ian was an overweight blond, bespeckled landscape painter who made more money as a commercial photographer of food products. He had moved to the city from Dublin with his younger and very competitive brother and they shared a loft near the railroad tracks in upper Chelsea, though I was only invited into Ian’s bed when the brother was not around. Peter was a stock broker who smoked a lot of pot and wanted to be a film director. “Whadya think about this idea?” he would ask me before I would drift off to sleep when I spent the weekends at his apartment. Peter was a dreamer who had never directed anything, not even traffic. Instead, he was developing screenplays based on alternative histories: what if the Germans had invaded America, what if Russia had used atomic bombs against the Chinese, what if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated.

“I’m not sure he would have divorced Jackie for Goldie Hawn,” I would say when he theorized about Kennedy’s second term in office, for instance.

“Well, he wouldn’t have dated Jane Fonda,” he would answer. “What about Streisand? Or Liza Minnelli?”

Our sex life was not nearly as inventive or creative, which might have been one of the reasons Peter did not make it beyond a ten-week affair. A few days after our break-up in fact, I met a waiter-slash-dancer at a jazz class I was taking in a dingy room that overlooked the gaudy lights of Times Square. Dennis reminded me a lot of myself: a boyish-looking fellow from the South with an interest in movies, music, and the theater. He was the first guy I slept with whom I suspected might be HIV-positive. We dated a few times but when I went over to his apartment, he wouldn’t take his T-shirt off during sex because he didn’t want me to see the rash that covered his chest. Marshall, however, told me up front that he was positive. He was a copy editor at a newspaper who was working on a novel when I met him at a benefit in the Village. He had a long, lean physique, a dark full beard, and a voice as deep and majestic as an old English actor. He had a passion for yoga and alternative therapies, but he was also a bad-boy character full of alibis. Lying next to him in my bed I would listen to him describe how he had fooled his lover into believing that the nights he spent with me were really impromptu out-of-town business trips as a fact-checker for a breaking story. This was when I realized I might never find a man who could love me as much as I could love him and I arrived at this conclusion: If he cheats on his lover, he will cheat on anyone, including me. By then I had matured from a boy who was awkward with sex into a man who wanted to know what it was like to be completely and blissfully in love.

My newfound logic did not prevent heart ache or heartbreak, particularly where Jake was concerned. Each time I saw him I was more in love with him than the time before, and the more comfortable he grew talking of his other sexual partners—male or female—the more it stirred my quiet jealousy.

Eventually I took a full-time permanent job working for an entertainment publicity firm where I sat at a desk from nine to five answering the phones, stuffing press releases into envelopes, and fielding requests for interviews or photographs of our clients. I dated a number of actors during this period, none of whom progressed beyond casual affairs, and got together enough with Jake to give him a set of keys to my apartment after my roommate moved out and I could afford the place on my own. Jake didn’t move in, of course; no, that would be going against everything he stood for and he was aware that he would have been taking advantage of my growing fondness for him. In fact, we were both saved the torture of my feelings when he got a job with a touring production and was out of town for almost two years, only flying into the city for an audition or a commercial spot before departing to catch up again with the tour. One night, however, I arrived at my apartment to find him cooking in my kitchen. With him was a thin, olive-skinned young woman named Nina whom I knew to be one of his ex-girlfriends, an actress he had met at a class, I believe, though I could not remember any specifics about why she had become his ex. They invited me to share dinner with them—pasta with vegetables and a cream sauce, salad, and a bottle of wine. It was an uncomfortable dinner—I felt like an outsider in my own home, even though Jake chattered away about the various accidents and mishaps on the stage of his touring show and I tried to down as much wine as possible. While we were cleaning up, Jake lit a joint and, thinking it might make me more relaxed, I took a hit when it was offered to me. Soon Jake and Nina were stoned and dancing to the oldies-but-goodies on my album of the soundtrack of American Graffiti. I knew where it was all going even before it arrived there because Jake kept looking at me and asking, “You cool with this, aren’t you, buddy?” Jake and Nina were twirling and sweating and smiling and clutching each other. They both tried to involve me in their dancing and groping and when Jake or Nina or both of them had maneuvered the three of us to the bedroom, I stood by the bed watching them kiss one another until Nina leaned over and kissed me on the neck.

She might as well as have socked me in my stomach. It wasn’t that I was a misogynist or repelled by women, but I thought I had consciously given up romantic and sexual entanglements with girls when I had left the South for New York because I had recognized my sexual attraction was elsewhere. I kept up a politeness and a gentlemanly composure as long as I could, deflecting their further advances until I became a voyeur instead of a participant. When they were both undressed, lying on my bed, Jake ready to penetrate a willing Nina, I left the room, unable to watch anymore.

I’d tried to be as easy going and sexually adventurous as I could make myself: curious, enlightened, willing, versatile, though I would be the first to admit that I was my own biggest obstacle. I wasn’t resistant to the theory of a threesome, or even one that included a woman, only resistant to participating in one with Jake whomever the third partner was. I was just as much of a failure here in my honest affections for him as I was as an actor trying to pretend I was someone else. I wanted Jake as my own and on my own terms, something that was impossible both with him and everyone else I’d been interested in romantically in my life so far.

In my bathroom I ran the water for a shower, stepped inside the tub, and then sat down, folding myself up so that the water was beating on my skull and neck and back as if I were a turtle caught in a sudden downpour. I’d like to think that it muffled my crying, that it stopped me from hearing or imagining what was going on in my bed, but my disappointment got the better of me until I was soaked and exhausted. When I finally turned off the water Jake was tapping at the bathroom door, rasping out in a throaty plea, “Jimmy, babe, open up. I didn’t think this would upset you. I didn’t think it would matter, buddy. Open up, I didn’t mean to hurt ya.”

When I finally came out, Nina had left. That night Jake crashed on my sofa bed, while I tossed and turned in the bedroom, trying to find ways to forgive him.

Albee was the most effeminate of all my boyfriends and lovers, pretty as a girl with jet black hair, ivory skin, and long, twiggy eyelashes. His father was a Jewish tailor and his mother a woman he had met and married while stationed in the army in Korea. Raised in the new-age era in the suburbs of San Francisco, Albee came to New York City hoping to make it as a fashion designer. I had toughened up quite a bit romantically by the time we met, or, rather, I had been through enough heartbreak by then not to want to keep chasing it, so it was Albee who did all the wooing and courting. But he was also a modern man, calm and meditative and full of passive-aggressive attributes; early in our relationship, for instance, he would plead for me to stay over at his apartment and then, once we’d finished our fucking, he would sit at his drafting table working on his illustrations oblivious of my presence as I read or surfed channels on the TV. In many ways Albee domesticated me and turned me into a man capable of enjoying the complexities and compromises of a relationship. I began relishing our silent time together as much as I did our more sexual time, learning how to cook a squash casserole in his kitchen, for example, and then, later, when we lived together, spending time writing at the computer. I’d long ago abandoned the public relations job in the same way I had abandoned my quest to be an actor. Instead, I was now fully outside the entertainment area and the theater world, working at the in-house library of a corporate insurance firm in order to keep myself flush in money and able to spend my free time with Albee.

The more in love I became with Albee the less I needed a similar verification from Jake and so he became a good friend I enjoyed hearing from and he was pleased to learn I had someone like Albee in my life. Jake still wasn’t interested in settling down with one person, man or woman, even though he was now in his fifties, and he’d garnered some professional notoriety by playing gangsters and Mafia men in various movies and plays. Albee and I even traveled to New Haven one year to see Jake in a show that he was co-producing about a money-laundering scheme and which, unfortunately, never played anywhere else but that small, uncomfortable and un-airconditioned theater.

Jake was also a support for us when Albee became sick. I didn’t disclose it at first but the New Haven trip and Albee’s thinning appearance made Jake aware of the battle we were facing. Jake knew of specialists through friends or friends-of-friends that he put us in touch with, but the truth of the matter was the doctors weren’t all that sure what anyone was facing, nor did they understand Albee’s collapsing immune system. Albee was thirty-three when he died and I was thirty-five. We had been a couple for more than five years. Two of those we had spent trying to restore his health. He died a happy man in love. I survived as the lonely, guilt-stricken partner.

Jake died a year after Albee. It was an unexpected death. A stroke that took him out in one swift punch. He was fifty-six, or fifty-two, depending on who you were talking with at the funeral. I’d gotten a call from Nina, who had kept up a casual acquaintance with me in the aftermath of our aborted threesome. Nina loved Jake as much as I did, wanted to be Jake’s second wife, wanted to have a child by him, and she had pursued and chased him in ways that I could not do myself without losing some self-respect. Nina wasn’t the only woman in Jake’s bed, of course. At the funeral home on the upper West Side where Jake was interred, a shocked gathering of his friends, family, and former lovers assembled for an impromptu memorial. “He wasn’t always gracious on stage,” an actory-looking blond woman in her mid-twenties said. “But off-stage he was as generous as they come. No one could top him there.” Another woman whom I recognized from a daily soap said she wanted to remember Jake as “a smoky mess, but always ready to party.” “I’d like to remember Jake as a devoted father,” his ex-wife finally said, cutting off all the bedroom innuendo. “No matter what our differences were, he was always there for our sons.” Jake’s sons, Scott and Greg, fourteen and sixteen, sat with their heads tucked down and their fingers balled into fists, squirming and shifting, as restless as their father had been.

I sat there quietly, unable to speak, remembering that Jake was present with me the day in that not-too-distant past when Albee died in our apartment. Frank, a stage manager, got up and said what a terrific drinking buddy Jake had been. Next, an older woman in her late sixties said she’d like to remember Jake as the kind of New Yorker who you were always surprised to find in the city. “Someone to help you move furniture or pick up your dry cleaning for you if you were in the hospital.” Then Tom, a young, handsome dark-haired man, rose up from his chair and said that Jake was always full of suggestions and advice, not just for acting but how to survive in the world. “Always have a back-up,” Tom repeated Jake’s advice, which when he said it, I remembered hearing Jake tell me this as well in one of our long ago post-coital embraces. “A back-up monologue or a back-up scene. A back-up profession. A back-up lover.” This prompted an elderly man to stand up and say that he might have known things about Jake that no one else was aware of. “Enough about all that loving and living crap,” the man said. “Jake was a terrific brick-layer. Simple as that. He worked for me when he was a teenager. First job he ever had. He caught on to it right at the start. Any man who can build a solid, level wall is a decent man in my view. And Jake was a decent man. I saw that right away.”

Jake’s death served to remind me not only of how much I had loved him and the deep impression he had made on my life, but how little I had truly known and understood his life and times with others. “Everybody is always somebody else in this town,” he once said to me. “The cab driver wants to be a star, too. So does the secretary and the cop. And we’re all a bit different to different people. A guy at an audition probably hates my guts thinking I’m going to get the part, but the guy in the audience doesn’t see me like that. He probably hates me because the play stinks or maybe he just thinks I’m a lousy actor or the character is a louse. Whatever he thinks, I’m sure it’s a little bit different from the guy he’s sitting next to.”

It was five years later when I heard a chilling echo of Jake’s guttural, raspy voice. I had published a novel which had had a modest success and a small but growing gay troupe of actors who were performing in a converted warehouse in west Chelsea had commissioned me to write a play for them. The four-character play I had created was all about wannabe actors caught up in the off-stage dramas of their own lives. We had a modest turnout of actors for the auditions—even the strangest of casting calls always gets a crowd in Manhattan. So when a familiar-looking young man walked into the audition room and read lines with a casting director and his voice seared the air, I reached for the photograph and flipped it over to the back and studied the resume. Scott, Jake’s youngest son, was now nineteen and didn’t have a single professional acting credit to his name. And though he was not quite as tall as his dad, nor as thuggish-looking (in part, because his scalp was covered with a mat of thick, black hair), he did possess his father’s self-assurance and cocky attitude. The role he was best suited for had already been filled by one of the members of the acting troupe, but I was able to convince the director to use Scott as an understudy and launch him on a quest for bigger and better roles.

And though it would have made pure novelistic sense for me to bed him that day or during rehearsals or even during the short run of the play, it wasn’t until three years later that I ran across him at a gym in the Village and we finally hooked up with each other in that manner. And now it would be too vulgar of me to compare the attributes of the father and the son: the voice, the arms, the chest, the size of their dicks, one against the other, kissing and telling who was a better lover—or even the better actor. But as Scott and I lay in each other’s embrace in my apartment after we had both come and dried ourselves with a towel I kept nearby, I realized that I had reached the age Jake was when we first met and his son was the age I had been that year, too. “Never fall in love with an actor,” I whispered to Scott that day, then added some advice I had learned the hard way, “And never stop telling him if you do.”

 

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