Excerpt from The Spectators by Jennifer duBois, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue
Semi
1969

For years, this is how we remembered the man who would be Mattie M: walking through Greenwich Village, hands shoved into pockets, leaving a contrail of energy in his wake. He was Matthew Miller then—Counselor M. Miller, Esq. to the courts; Mattias Milgrom to his parents. Matthew to a very, very few. They say he had the charisma of a Kennedy, and not without reason—though he didn't have the face of one, and doesn't now; he only appears mild and unshockable and impossible to rouse to fury, if you didn't know better. He had an inelegant, raccoonish walk he later unlearned for the cameras. But he also radiated a subtle electricity—something slight and untraceable that kinectified the air around him—and it was easy to mistake this, then, for the particular dynamism of compassion. Because compassion took work, he always said, and anyone who told you otherwise wasn't really trying to be good at it.

This quality, whatever it was, is entirely undetectable on television; it may never have existed at all.

If men can change until they disappear, then it shouldn't surprise us that worlds can, too. And yet no matter what anyone says, there is no ceiling to our capacity for surprise. Two hundred years ago Greenwich Village was a mass grave, and before that it was a marsh. Today Christopher Street is a single diseased artery running from the Bronx drag queens all the way to the hospice under the West Side Highway. Thirty years ago you could still get arrested there for window shopping too close to another man. Fifty years ago Matthew Miller was born in a cold-water flat in Crotona Park, and twenty years ago he lived in a walk-up apartment on West Fourth Street that looked out onto a brick wall. And now he makes something like $3 million a year, according to Variety, and nobody knows where he lives.

If anyone in the Village says they remember Matthew Miller, the question to ask is: which one?

* * *

We began going to the Stonewall sometime after All-Street closed. We all liked the dance floor; beyond that, opinions were mixed. Say what you will about the Genovese family, they were nothing if not democratic: when it came to the laundering of money, anyone's dollars would do. Night after night, they served us watery, mislabeled drinks; night after night, we paid and did not complain.

Our nights there streaked together, then as now: they were innumerate, each a whirling aleph of potential. Those evenings now are a kaleidoscopic disco ball, with lights that blink out if we look at any one too closely. Stand back a step and the spinning resumes, pixelating us to present.

We stand in the park on Christopher Street, on one or many nights. The street kids hover nearby, trying to bum cigarettes: they are a pack, with inscrutable loyalties that seem to dissolve and re-form the way schools of fish change direction. Across the street, street queens in stolen dresses are striking poses for the man behind the peephole. In the park, Brookie drapes himself over the statue of General Sheridan and begins taking liberties with his waistcoat.

"Well, well, well," he says. "Not as buttoned-up as you look, are you?"

Brookie turns to us and stage-whispers: "It's like iron down there, girls."

Stephen notes that the statue is bronze, and we head across the street.

Inside, we blink against the darkness and begin counting the almost-strangers: we know faces but not names. A porcine lawyer and a scare queen dancing to the Supremes in a low, viscid light. A man in an outer jacket staring at the hat in his hands, half-pretending to have wandered in by accident. All around is the smell of weak, formaldehyde-tasting liquor; and piss—especially, though not exclusively, near the bathroom; and Ambush perfume, hovering above a smell of sweat that is, it must be said, undeniably masculine.

Excerpted from The Spectators by Jennifer duBois. Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer duBois. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.