Part 3: Gerald M. Sherman, Contact Me If You Read This
Happy Birthday Wherever You Are
You can read the first parts of this story here.
The next September after my inadvertent Seconal overdose, I’d saved enough to enroll again at Brandeis. I moved in with some other students in a flat in a house in Waltham.
I continued sporadically hanging around with Gerry until I moved in with George Miller some time later. George was another mostly nice man from Minnesota, who’d been around the scene in the South End of Boston for several years before I got there, and who I ended up marrying about four years later.
After a while, it got to be too hard to leave George in the mornings. and take the train from the South End to Brandeis for my classes, especially since one or another of the other people who rented rooms at George’s place would be likely to hand me a joint soon after I got up and went out to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. And so that was how I dropped out of Brandeis for a second time, this time on my own volition.
I don’t know exactly when Gerry started openly living a gay lifestyle.
Clues began accumulating. One time, before I met George, when I was living in the Lower East Side of New York and working at Value Line Investment Survey for the summer between semesters at Brandeis, Gerry called and told me I just had to come with him to see something amazing he’d discovered in Montreal. So I hitchhiked up to Boston one Friday evening to meet him, and we drove the rest of the way to Quebec together. Then when we got to Montreal close to midnight, he took me to a drag show!
I was bored and tired and tired and puzzled why he thought a drag show was so great it was worth driving to Montreal. I don’t remember much about it, except for a Bette Davis impersonator who didn’t look much like Bette Davis. To my unsympathetic eyes, the cross-dressing men in the show all were clearly masculine, no matter how much makeup, wigs, prosthetic boobs, and other stratagems were used to try to make them look female.
After the show, Gerry booked us into a room at a nice hotel with his father’s credit card, and we smoked a joint together sitting on the edge of the double bed. I started feeling relaxed and even began wondering whether this would be the beginning of a change in the status of our relationship again, when he abruptly got up, put on his jacket, and left me alone in the room. The way he dodged out the door made me realize not for the first time how much Gerry relished being a tease. When he came back in the morning he unapologetically told me he’d had sex with a man he picked up, and then after a pause, he added—less convincingly it seemed to me—and a woman.
More and bigger clues dropped when I came to visit him when he was the one of us who was living in New York City. I had come from San Francisco where I lived with George, to visit my youngest sister, Joe-anne, where she was living with her husband, a naval officer in training on Staten Island. Joe-anne and I took the ferry to the Lower East Side, and we paid a surprise visit to Gerry at the Chelsea Hotel.
When we knocked on his door, there was a delay while he checked us out through a peephole. Then there was another longer delay while there seemed to be a muffled conversation. After he nervously but politely opened the door, he led us into the living room. While we sat on the couch, he did most of the talking and occasionally looked toward the bathroom door. At one point he ducked into the bathroom, where he stayed a long time, and came out looking uncharacteristically flustered.
He told us some of the things he’d been up to, acting more campy and bitchy than I’d ever seen him before. He joked that his father was asking him to please get a job so he would be able to retire. He made cruel jokes about other things that were not funny. He joked about an overweight unpopular boy and girl, who he’d known at Brandeis who aborted the baby they’d conceived together, and, he said, they came to see him afterwards and showed him the dead fetus they kept in a glass jar. And then he joked about how ugly he thought the tiny dead baby was because of the unattractiveness of the parents.
He went on to tell us one night he’d tried prostituting himself at Coney Island, just for the experience. And then he told us he auditioned for a part in Andy Warhol’s pornographic Chelsea Girls movie, which was partly shot at the Chelsea, but he hadn’t been called back. Finally, he bragged he did get to act in one or two porn films. My sister and I didn’t know what to say.
After Joe-anne and I left, she said, “I think he had a guy hiding in the bathroom. That’s why he was acting so weird.” You think?
Gerry finally did his big reveal only a few days later, when he drove me to the airport so I could catch my plane back to California. As we walked towards the gate, I started to notice that men would suddenly step away from a wall or a doorway and show themselves to him when we walked by. I’d never noticed that phenomenon before, but later I realized sex sellers and sex buyers and cruisers hang out at airports and (as we saw another time) at bus stations, and I’d never noticed any of them before because they were not on my radar and neither was I on theirs.
When the plane was delayed, we stopped for coffee at a round lunch counter, and I was annoyed when Gerry seated himself awkwardly on a red vinyl stool about eight seats away from me. I guess now that he was positioning himself so he could see my face because he then dramatically announced to me and everyone else at the lunch counter, “I’m gay.”
He looked bewildered when he saw I was not surprised.
You can read our final conversation in part 4, here.
