Tales of Teddy and Afternoon in the Balcony

A fortyish, striking-looking woman across the aisle began chatting with him as if she were his Auntie Mame, and Teddy almost pictured himself going off in her Bentley once they arrived in New York... to her pied’a terre?... to the St. Regis?... to Long Island? But no – red-faced at even thinking about why he was coming to this city – Teddy bade the beautiful, slightly sad stranger good-bye as they stepped out in the cavernous Pennsylvania Station and were engulfed.

He gave the taxi driver the number of Harvey’s pad on Sullivan Street and leaned back. Teddy was no novice to Manhattan, having been there several times with chums from his expensive college in Ohio. Their venue had included ten-room Fifth Avenue apartments, meeting for drinks under the clock at the Biltmore (the legal hard-drinking age in New York in those days was eighteen), and chauffeured forays into Midtown under cover of night to see the latest Edward Albee play, or films like "Last Year at Marienbad," or to catch some jazz.

Teddy loved the glossy, towering ziggurats of this world... their fragrant, elegantly appointed lobbies and dusky nocturnal wallscapes of softly glinting windows high above the hoi-polloi... veiling the secret lives of myriad, unknown, no doubt fascinating, inhabitants. Now hurtling down raucous Seventh Avenue, through the sun-dappled brick-and-stone maze of Chelsea, and veering suddenly into the dank, shadowy Sullivan Street was a new adventure.

Arriving at exactly the time Harvey had specified, Teddy found him there on the front stoop, fresh from work in his striped Oxford shirt, bow tie, skintight Levis, and sneakers. "From his belt up, a runner’s gotta look business-like," Harvey mugged... "and from his ass down, he’s gotta rock an’ roll!"

Leaping up the sagging staircase and negotiating a dingy, zig-zag hallway smelling of pee, Harvey proudly ushered his guest into his refuge from home. It was undergoing a frenzied, disorganized spate of redecoration, knee-deep in as many beer cans as paint cans. Its sole amenity was a street view shielded by a beach-towel curtain. Furnishings were few... red light bulb, scuzzy old refrigerator, battered stereo, and spunk-stained king-size mattress.

Dropping the sackful of paint brushes he had brought, Teddy’s host engulfed him with the tenacity of a boa constrictor, and the beguiled one ceased to care about their surroundings. Before things got too sloppy, Harvey abruptly backed off and announced -- surprise! -- they weren’t going to stay there after all. Harvey’s parents had, that very morning, taken off from LaGuardia for a week in Miami, so arm-in-arm the two compadres descended into what was Teddy’s first rocketing subway ride, out to the Malitz family apartment.

Emerging in the twilight on Queens Boulevard and turning down a side street, Teddy was all the more captivated by the vastness and variety of New York. Here was yet another facet to absorb... endless blocks of undulating Georgian and Tudor facades, their pleasant curved bays and diamond-paned casements warming the blue-black-gray. Legions of lollipop trees, ringed with spiky little iron fences, guarded the sidewalks and entrances as staunchly as the occasional uniformed doormen. Why, Queens was almost swanky!

The vestibule was claustrophobic and smelled like knishes, but once up the elevator, inside the shag-carpeted, luxurious if overstuffed flat filled with huge fat lamps, there was plenty of room for two hot new lovers to unwind,

First Harvey mixed potent drinks from his father’s bar, then flicked on the hi-fi console to blast forth his fondest new acquisition, the movie soundtrack of "West Side Story." Finally, engorged in atmosphere, the two leaped out of their clothes and lunged into a fierce bout of acrobatic sex in Mr. and Mrs. Malitz’s elephantine master bed.