“One day that building will collapse,” Harry told me as we stood in front of the condominium on 79th Street and Columbus Avenue. It had been just completed that autumn of 1982.  “Carbuncle Construction,” Harry called it. He was right. The condo with its shiny glass was a true eyesore nestled next to a row of brownstones. Across the street, The American Museum of Natural History seemed to sneer at the new intruder with burnished windows that glowed with gold antique hues.

“How are you so sure?” I asked Harry that day, who had a sly smile as if he looked forward to the destruction.

“My roommate is sleeping with the architect, who told him they miscalculated all the engineering designs.”

This was supposed to shock me. He achieved his desired effect.

“Can’t he tell someone?” I asked, my voice rising in panic. “Call The New York Times? Notify the mayor?”

“Are you kidding me? That architect would never work again. Come on, Lady Jane, let’s go to Hallucination Hall.”

Harry was referring to The Hayden Planetarium. The Hayden was known as this name because during their late-night shows that featured psychedelic rock music. Ninety-nine percent of the audience was high on acid.  Their special “Dark Side of The Moon” production, with music by Pink Floyd, was always scheduled after 10 PM to discourage young kids.

As soon as we sat in our seats, Harry opened his mouth. There was the white tab dissolving on his very pink tongue. I was scared of LSD and lied to him when I said I had to write an essay the next morning about Eugene O’Neil for my American Theater class at Barnard College.

The lights dimmed, and I had a vision of everyone in the audience drifting upwards toward the domed sky, to the illuminated universe. Digital animations spun and sparkled and soared through simulated space. Planets throbbed back and forth in front of me like the swinging faces of a dozen clocks. I’m sure there were other songs by Pink Floyd, but the really trippy “Us and Them” must have played at least ten times.

When I glanced at Harry, whose face was bathed in green and purple lights, his fixed, drugged grin scared me. Where was he? Certainly not sitting next to me at the Hayden Planetarium. I nuzzled my head against his shoulder. No response. He was flying in a different galaxy.

Harry was still high when we left the show and suddenly realized that he too had an English paper to write, his being the very complex Tristram Shandy. “Although maybe it’s better to be stoned to really understand that novel,” he said as we entered a local diner.

Whenever Harry was high or drunk, he had to eat eggs over easy with rye toast and butter, bacon so crisp that it could “cut through metal” and three cups of black coffee. On the Upper West Side in the 1980s, there were Greek diners everywhere, usually named Olympia or Mykonos, with waiters with pasty white skin and black greased black hair who seemed to never sleep. I loved these diners as much as Harry, who said the closest thing to a diner in his hometown in Kansas was a Denny’s run by high school juniors.

“What did you see when you were tripping?” I asked Harry.

“My missing black bomber jacket. Instead of the planets, it was floating up there in the stars.”

Harry still hadn’t recovered from the loss of his favorite leather jacket. He and his family had a disaster when they drove their family van from Kansas to Morningside Heights. They parked on Amsterdam Avenue and 120^th street and forgot to lock the doors. After checking out Harry’s dormitory, they returned to find their van gone.

“Twenty minutes, that’s all,” Harry said, snapping his fingers.

All of Harry’s suitcases were stolen, along with his records and typewriter. That’s how I met Harry. I was walking to my dorm when I saw a tall blonde boy with his middle-aged parents staring at a vacant spot on the street. His mother, a chubby woman wearing a bright red puffy jacket, was sitting there on the pavement, openly sobbing.

“What happened?” I asked. “Was she attacked?”

I was a sophomore then, and I knew that this was not the neighborhood to leave an unparked car, much less a van with a license plate from Kansas.

“I guess someone needed some stuff,” Harry said. “Anyway, it’s a good excuse to buy new clothes.”

I introduced myself to Harry and his parents, and his mother brightened when she saw her son talking to me. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, finally standing up. “We need to find the police station.”

I accompanied Harry and his family to the nearest precinct, where we spent two hours waiting to speak to an officer. That’s where Harry and I bonded. He told me he was the first in his family to attend college. His parents didn’t even know that Columbia University was part of The Ivy League. They didn’t want their son to travel to the big, bad city. And after what happened to their car, their suspicions could be justified. But this is where Harry belonged. As long as he could remember, he watched every film set in New York City. The grittier, the better. “The Taking of Pelham 123” was probably his favorite.

Harry was glad to be rid of his Kansas clothes, but he did desperately miss his leather bomber jacket that his younger sister had bought him as a farewell present. According to Harry, the jacket made him look like Joe Strummer of The Clash. Even with a black leather jacket, there was no way Harry could look like Joe Strummer. He had curly golden hair, freckles, and bright green eyes. He looked like a Kansas farmer’s son.

Now, six months later, there in that Greek diner, he was still grieving for that jacket.  I reminded him he could probably find one for resale at Screaming Mimi’s down in The East Village.

“But it won’t be the same,” Harry said, and then ordered a round of eggs and bacon.

“I like a hungry man,” the middle-aged waitress with the thick black eye-liner said, winking at him.

“Me too,” Harry answered. Waitresses were always flirting with him. I was jealous and also jealous that no matter what he ate, he never gained a pound.

“I don’t know why Greek diner eggs taste different,” he said. “I think there’s some of that NYC smog that mixes in with them in the kitchen.”

“How do eggs in Kansas taste?”

“Like margarine. Everything in Kansas tastes like margarine. Even the people smell like margarine.”

He really hated his home state. In high school, Harry was constantly bullied because he read books like Wuthering Heights and once was stuffed into a gym locker and left there for five hours until the school janitor saved him.

“Onward we must flee, Lady Jane,” he said after he finished his third cup of coffee. His eyes no longer had that stoned glazed candy look. “The Smith-Corona beckons uptown.”

Although my real name is Janet, Harry always called me Lady Jane because he said I had a regal profile. “You mean I have a big nose,” I told him.

“No, regal,” he corrected.

I, in turn, called him Prince Hal. We were English majors, after all.

I always believed that some people have magnets, drawing you towards them and that’s what it felt like with Harry. We both loved Chock Full of Nuts coffee, Werner Herzog films, (we were both taking German, and really tried not to read the English subtitles), bright red Converse high-top sneakers, raisin bagels, punk rock bands that played at CBGB, and the Lacoste shirts of David Byrne of The Talking Heads.

In 1980, Columbia University was still all men. Some, not all professors, allowed Barnard women to take classes. I petitioned for a class about Ulysses that included Harry. The professor hated me. He would ignore my raised hand and never grade any of the Barnard student papers, but have is teaching assistants read them.

Harry called him Goebbels and one day when my hand was wildly waving to make a point about Molly Bloom, the professor called on Harry (who seemed to be asleep) instead.  Harry lifted his head and said, “You really are terrified of women, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me, Mister…” The professor looked down at his class list for Harry’s last name.

“It’s Osmond,” Harry lied. His last name was Harrigan. Harold Harrigan. “I should have been a circus star,” he always said.  To my growing embarrassment, Harry stood up and pointed to me.

“Why do you continue to ignore my academic colleague? Does she threaten you? How the hell can any of us men, talk about Molly Bloom? Joyce can barely comprehend her. Don’t you think a woman has something to say?”

My face was burning.  Everyone in the class was staring at me.  The last thing I wanted was to be the pitiful female college student who needed a man.  When I stumbled out of the classroom, Harry left too and followed me.

“What did I do wrong?” he asked, his hands raised as if arrested.

“I can defend myself,” I told him. “I don’t need a man to save me.”

“Thanks,” Harry said, his own face now flushing. “That’s really nice of you.  I was only helping a friend.  I could get a D on my paper because Goebbels is pissed at me. Last time I defend you.”

“I don’t need defending!” I yelled, and then ran down the hall, nearly falling down the stairs that lead to the exit.

That was our first argument.  I returned to my dorm room, screamed at my roommate who was playing Elton John too loudly, slammed the door, and started punching my pillow so hard that I was sure it would burst.  Why was I so angry with Harry? Did the reason have to do with that he said he was defending his “friend”?  I wanted to be more than just Harry’s friend. There were other boys that I was attracted to but no one “got me” the way he did.

Harry was now hanging out with a pretentious crowd who met every night at The Marlin Bar on Broadway. A bar so filled with smoke that you could barely see the person sitting next to you. His friends all hung at downtown clubs and knew Warhol. They bought their clothes at cool vintage clothing stores and had second homes in places I never heard of like Martinique or Belize. I don’t know why Harry liked them. They certainly didn’t like me. Whenever I joined them, I felt a coolness in the room, as if someone had just opened a window. In a way, it was very much like being back in that Columbia classroom.

After that argument, I stayed away from Harry. I would occasionally pass him on campus and he would look at me, stop, but I would continue walking. I couldn’t sleep at night and was skipping meals in order to study, especially Ulysses. Professor Goebbels was finally taking notice of me. My last paper received an A-. An A would have been impossible.

One night, about three months since our fight, when I returned home, Harry was in my kitchen with my roommate Gretchen. In his hands were two tickets. “Get your coat now,” he said, walking to the door.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“The Talking Heads show. Front row seats. Forest Hills Stadium.”

He gave me the tickets and I immediately hugged him. He knew I had tried to see the band when I was in high school at CGBG but the bouncer said I was too young and wouldn’t let me in.

“Thank you,” I said. “And you can call me Lady Jane again. I miss being royal.”

“Me too,” Harry said. “I tried to teach my cat to say Prince Hal, but he only spit out a furball.”

That concert was magical. Both Harry and I sang along to every lyric. David Byrne looked over at us. It was as if we were really royal.

On the subway back we both sang “Psycho Killer” at the top of our lungs and a few people moved away. We decided to have a beer at The West End and I was glad Harry didn’t insist on his hangout at The Marlin. The bartender who seemed to know Harry gave us free tequila shots along with our beers. I didn’t realize I was drunk until I slipped off my stool and landed hard on the floor. Harry laughed as he picked me up.

“Hey, lightweight,” he said.

“I have a huge crush on David Byrne,” I told him. “Actually, right now I’m so drunk I think you look like him.”

I leaned over and kissed Harry on the mouth. His lips felt cool and dry.  

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling as if I wanted to fall off the stool again. “Too much booze.”

Harry didn’t say anything for a moment. He picked up a bar coaster and examined the Budweiser logo. “That’s okay,” he said. “If I saw someone who looked like David Byrne, I would want to kiss him too.”

“Really? I asked, feeling very confused. This wasn’t exactly the response I had hoped for with my kiss.

Harry glanced anxiously into his beer as if the amber liquid would give him courage

“Darling, I’m gay,” he told me.

I should have known. I wasn’t a country hick. I knew several gay boys when I was in high school. But I wasn’t in love with them. I was in love with Harry.

He nodded his head to the bartender who was serving very bright pink cocktails to two women at the end of the bar. “Actually, I ’m sleeping with Mitch,” Harry told me.

As if he heard his name, the bartender, who was about six feet two with a shaved head and an earring, was now staring at us.

“He must be thirty-five,” I blurted.

“Actually, Mitch is just thirty. He studied opera. You would really like him Lady…”

But I had already fled toward the restroom. Once inside,  I locked the toilet stall cubicle, unrolled a thick wad of toilet paper, and started sobbing. How could I be so stupid? The jigsaw pieces fell into place. Why he never looked twice at me when he wandered into my room and saw me in my bra and underwear. All those nights at the cinema when I snuggled close to him and he never placed his arm around me.

“Are you okay?” a woman’s voice asked outside the stall.

“I’m not sure,” I told her. I heard her wash her hands and then the sound of the door opening. I would have to deal with this alone. In the bathroom mirror, my eyes were swollen and red. I splashed cold water on my face over and over. When I finally came out, Harry was waiting for me right outside the door. He gently took hold of my arm.

“Hey, you’re not mad at me, are you?” he asked, his voice suddenly soft and unsure.

 “Not mad. But sad. I thought…” I stumbled with my words as my throat ached.  I resisted the urge to touch his face. “Goddamn it, Harry.  I’m in love with you and I don’t know what to do.”

He nodded. “Me too. My feelings have always been mixed up about men and women. You know I adore you. But then I met Mitch. Look at me.” He took me by the shoulders and turned me around. Our faces were only a few inches apart. Harry’s eyes glowed with a light I had never seen before. “With Mitch, I knew for sure. Can still be friends?”

Suddenly I embraced him. He smelled like Harry – coffee, beer, cigarettes, a scent I would try to reproduce in my kitchen when I missed him. “Of course, we’re friends. I would die without you.”

“Well, no need to be so dramatic. No one is expiring here. Let me take you home, Lady Jane.”

He walked me home that night, his arm around my shoulder. He was humming Pink Floyd now, and although I really wanted to cry, I allowed myself to smile when he started making that funny coin-clicking noises that accompanied the beginning of the song “Money” from The Dark Side of The Moon. He suddenly stopped at a corner oat 118^th street and Amsterdam.

“That’s the spot,” Harry said, pointing to a corner of the street. A motorcycle was parked where his parents’ van had once been. “If you had not walked by, we would have never met.”

“Thank God for car thieves,” I told Harry. He lifted my hand and kissed it. “Thank you for saving me. If you weren’t there, my parents probably would have whisked me away back to Kanas.”

We stood there for several minutes, staring at the motorcycle but in our minds replacing it with his family van. I wondered if he remembered his mother sobbing. A broken streetlight made the same kind of shattered shadows as the lasers at the show at the Hayden Planetarium. Harry was right. Thank God for car thieves.

The best way to mend a broken heart is to find a new lover, I once read, and within a month I had a new boyfriend who was in the business school and thought Emma Austen was a luxury brand name. I didn’t care. His name was Jake and he knew how to kiss and he knew other very nice things too.

Harry and I remained friends, although we were in different crowds. Now openly out, Harry spent time with a group of young men who were not as pretentious as his crowd at The Marlin. To my surprise, he became sober. Mitch, the bartender, told him he drank too much. Harry had bleached his hair blonde and wore ripped jeans and torn t-shirts now. A true punk rocker. He told me he was not going back to Kansas for Christmas.

“This Dorothy doesn’t believe there is no place like home.” He had told his younger brother he was gay, and now his parents wanted to send him to a Christian conversion camp.

“What that?” I asked.

“It’s a horror show. We had a boy in our class sent to one in West Virginia, and the first night he came home he set himself in fire and jumped off the roof of his house.”

“Don’t go. I’ll hide you,” I told him, placing my and on his arm.

“No worries, Lillian Hellman. No way in hell will I ever end up there.”

Harry sometimes called me Lillian Hellman because I started writing plays. Harry was a fierce critic but I knew he was honest.

“No one talks like that in a dole queue in London,” he once told me about a one-act play. “Have you even been in a dole queue, Lady Jane?”

Jake went to Boston for a job and I decided to spend one semester abroad in London. I soon forgot Jake since there were so many English actors to fall in love with. I wrote long letters to Harry about how the people could smoke cigarettes in The Tube and that a play I saw titled Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was the most exciting new theater I had ever seen. Harry never wrote back but I wasn’t mad. He would tell me about his life when I returned to New York.

I had hoped to see Harry when I returned, but when I telephoned, he told me he couldn’t see me. “Something’s up,” he said. “Maybe next week.”

He sounded very tired. On my way to Chock Full of Nuts, I ran into my old roommate, “Have you heard about Harry?” Gretchen asked me.

“No, why?”

“He has that gay kind of cancer.”

In London, I had heard about AIDS, but had not paid that much attention since I was so in love with London. Harry still wasn’t returning my phone calls. He no longer lived in this dorm and when I went to the registrar the woman behind the desk told me Harry Harrington had withdrawn from the semester. The only place I could go was The West End. To my relief, Mitch was still there. He nodded his head to me in recognition and said I should join him outside for a break. He lit a cigarette the moment we were on Broadway.

“He’s on his way to Buenos Aires,” Mitch said, waving his cigarette wildly in the air. His voice was high and flustered.  “I’ve been dumped. Harry has a new boyfriend. Supposedly there’s a new kind of treatment in Argentina.”

“Is he really sick?”

“You can ask him yourself.”

Mitch’s shoulders were shaking and I knew that Harry had broken his heart.

“Where is Harry now?” I asked.

“The Greystone Hotel. On 95^th and Broadway,” he answered. “Don’t tell him I told you. I need to get back to work.

Mitch slammed the door when he returned to the bar. Harry had broken more than one heart.

I couldn’t believe Harry was living in the SRO hotel. We both knew the place. Whenever a Columbia student was expelled, he usually rented a room which we called The Graveyard Hotel. I took a taxi and examined the buzzers for Harry’s name. Although his name was listed, when I pressed the button, there was no response. A woman in a trench coat took a key out and opened the door. “My brother is inside there and is too sick to let me in,” I lied. She shrugged her shoulders as I followed her to the dark stairway.

The apartment was on the fourth floor. I was winded climbing up the stairs, and I wondered how Harry, being ill, could manage it. To my surprise, the door was unlocked. I knocked to be polite and then entered the room. Harry was sitting up in bed, watching a soap opera with the volume tuned too loudly. Harry was always skinny, but this was beyond skinny. His face was all bones and sockets. The boy I knew was now a man. The disease had made most of his hair fall out.  His face was white. It was as if all the freckles had been wiped away.

“Salutations, Prince Hal,” I said. He could barely move his head. I took the remote at the foot of his bed and turned off the television.

“I wasn’t expecting visitor,” he said. His voice sounded strained, as if something was caught in his throat.

“Well, then you shouldn’t keep your door open.”

“I was too tired to stand up and close it.”

I sat at the edge of the bed. It was a terrible room. Broken window shades and dirty beige walls. Next door I could hear a man yelling at someone. A dog barked in the hallway.  In the corner was a cane. Then I saw that several vials of pills were on a table next to his bed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

Harry, who was wearing a Columbia University sweatshirt, placed the hoodie over his head.

“I was hiding. Why would I want anyone to see me like this?”

“Because people love you.  How bad is it?

“Bad. But Victor told me about this new clinic in Argentina.”

“Victor?”

A faint smile crossed Harry’s face.

“My new boyfriend. Or I should say lover. I know this is a dump, but I’ll be out of here soon. In the pampas. Or Patagonia.”

I couldn’t imagine him traveling, much less being able to leave his bed. He leaned forward when his saw my face crumple.

“Now don’t cry, Lady Jane.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of his sleeve.

“What about your family?”

“They want nothing to do with me.” Harry’s voice grew stronger with indignation. “Their minister said I was an abomination. At least my little sister doesn’t believe him. She was able to sneak me a letter. She said no one is even allowed to say my name.”

That took my breath away. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m fine.  They all call me Harold anyway which I hate.”

The room smelled sourly of unwashed clothes. Who was doing Harry’s laundry now? I walked over to his window and pulled up the blinds.

“Let’s get some fresh air here.”

I could hear Harry sigh.  “I wish you weren’t here. This place reeks of Eleanor Rigby.”

His window faced an airshaft. There would be no fresh breezes. When I turned around, Harry was now trying to get out of bed. His limbs looked as brittle as sticks. I rushed over to help him but with a flat palm, he pushed me away so lightly that his hand could have been a feather.

“Please. I’m fine,” he said, sinking back into his pillow.

“Come live with me,” I told him. “I’ll sleep on the sofa. I can take care you, Harry.”

“Thanks, but I don’t need any Florence Nightingales. I told you I’m leaving for Argentina. This Sunday.”

We watched each other in the fading light of the day. In this squalid room, even the sun looked dirty.  

“Oh, Harry,” was all I could say.

“I’m not scared if that’s what you want to know.” Harry pulled down his sweatshirt and I could see that were wine-colored stains on his neck. “Now I want you to turn around and leave, Lady Jane. We’ll see each other soon. And anytime you hear Pink Floyd, promise you’ll think of me.”

I never saw Harry again. That week I was accepted at graduate school in California and when I returned for winter break, I tried to find my prince. His name was no longer listed in his apartment building. When I asked the few people I knew about Harry, they shrugged and said they hadn’t seen him in months. I decided to visit The West End Bar and found Mitch. He was serving a customer and walked slowly with me with a tea towel draped over his shoulder. He didn’t have to tell me a word. I could see it in his eyes.

“When?” I asked, feeling my body tremble.

“Last month,” Mitch said.

“In Argentina?”

Mitch shook his head. “He was too sick. He went home. His family took care of him. But no one was allowed to contact him. They said he died of influenza. Like this was 1917. When I sent a card, his mother returned it, unopened.”

“Oh God, that’s terrible.”

“Not as terrible as dying that young.”

Someone called Mitch’s name and he walked over to the end of the bar. In a daze, I walked to the door, and into the hot summer sun. The glare from the sidewalk blinded me.  I didn’t start crying until I reached my apartment. Then I ran into my bedroom and unearthed my old record player. I still had my original copy of The Talking Heads’ first album. I played “Psycho Killer” at full volume over and over again, screaming out Harry’s favorite lyric: “I hate people when they’re not polite!” The doorman rang the apartment but I ignored his call. The walls seem to be shaking with noise. Someone knocked on the ceiling. My boyfriend found me on the floor, shouting along to the lyrics with tears running down my face.

Harry, I still hate people when they’re not polite. And you were wrong.  Almost four decades later, that high-rise condominium on Columbus Avenue and 79^th street still stands. Unlike you, the edifice did not crumble.  But you are there whenever I stand beneath the awning. Families leave the lobby with strollers, single men and woman walk their dogs. Life here continues. You would probably never have chosen this apartment building to be your memorial. Maybe I chose to live on the Upper West Side to be near you.

I’m here right now, tilting my head all the way past the very top apartment on the thirty-fourth floor.  If I crane my neck even further, I can see the stars in the sky, like the fabricated illumination we saw that night so many long ago at The Hayden Planetarium. Maybe you’re up there right now, floating in the galaxy, wearing that lost leather bomber jacket and singing Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them.”  You want to know something? I prefer my own new title: “Me and You.” Me and You, Prince Hal. Always.

– Penny Jackson