Although Bill could not know it yet, eventually Tim would hang himself on a tree in Battery Park. Maybe no one had known he’d felt so distraught and so it happened. Almost everyone was blown away by it, by the total surprise of it. Tim had moved to New York a little after Bill and his fiancé had moved there.
Tim was slight, blonde, pretty. He was overly sensitive and heady. Apart from being a dancer, he was somewhat intellectual, or he had used his time in school actually studying.
Bill would discover, after hanging around with dancers and even some actors, that for the most part they were pretty stupid. After all, someone else always controlled them, always told them how to move or what to say. But they had a good amount of common sense and a great deal of hubris. Actors were the most narcissistic and least interested in being anywhere or doing anything in which they were not the center of attention. They were always on stage.
Over the course of time Bill would attend many cast parties. At those parties one could tell almost instantaneously who was who.
The dancers pigged out. They had starved themselves coming up to a concert series to be completely trim and flat-stomached on stage. So whenever a concert series ended, when they all got together to celebrate at the cast party, there was always a big buffet from which they stuffed their faces.
They also danced to loud rock music. They danced freestyle and uninhibited, unleashing any personal creativity and unleashing their feelings through their physical selves. That was how dancers let loose.
Bill, who studied literature, who wrote, who knew writers and poets, intellectualized his thoughts. He, like most writers, was linear and cerebral. That’s why having to become a cook had never been in his frame of reference. He would never have thought it, never have chosen it, never have wanted it for an occupation let alone a career.
One of the UDC teachers and choreographers was married to a writer named Richard. Richard, like Rell, was an acid head. Rell was Jack‘s lover on the sly, Jack being one of the dancers in UDC. Jack cast himself as being hetero. Unlike Tim, he was in the closet. For several years no one knew that Jack and Rell were lovers. No one knew that Jack was gay, including Tim, who was not in the closet and who hung out with them all the time. Tim and Jack were opposites. Jack was the masculine gay, Tim the effeminate one.
At the cast parties, Bill and Richard would end up talking. Richard would be tripping. He and Bill would get high, right there with everyone else. One of the things about the cast parties was that joints were passed around continually.
Bill and Richard got drunk as well as high, and Bill, very often, popped speed. Bill loved his black beauties. He and Richard both used Doc as their suppliers.
Richard wrote stories in his head and told them aloud to Bill at the parties. Bill could see them in Technicolor because Richard was always tripping and everything in his head was in Technicolor. Bill, on the other hand, never spoke his stories.
After he’d been busted and become a cook, Bill was different from all the other people at the parties. He didn’t know it yet and couldn’t sense it yet, but surely he was different and onto a different path. All the others were college people. They were artists! He, alone, was not.
