JULIAN MOYA: ROY COHN from ANGELS IN AMERICA

The trip to Brooklyn didn’t turn out the way I expected this morning. I went back to Brooklyn looking for the life I had left when I went to college. My father, the Judge Albert Cohn of the New York State Supreme Court always wanted me to go away and find a life outside of Brooklyn. It meant a lot to him to have his only child to go out of Brooklyn and continue what he called his judge’s legacy. However, I always miss what I had left. Life for me has been a struggle since I became an aide for Senator Joseph McCarthy. I’m an American patriot and my job those days was to prove to the country that the State Department was full of communist infiltrators, but the Senator and I had become what the Communists and Liberals call "discredited." The Senator influence in the country’s politics had decline but my influence is still strong. I didn’t fade away as he did. I always wanted to walk the streets that I walked when I was a child one more time to reassure myself that the struggle had been worth it. I yearn when I’m alone to feel again the joy I felt when I walked by the big houses of Rugby Road on my way home after school. Walking those streets one more time, I wanted to feel Brooklyn the way it felt to me then. Like a magical kingdom. Like the Jews in the promise land after wandering in the desert for forty years. Time seems to stretch endlessly on those days; ten minutes felt more as an hour and summer felt like the whole year. Nevertheless, this time, it hadn’t worked out that way to me. The magic feeling that felt as a boy looking at those houses from the sidewalk was no longer there. It seems that my clock had stared working right again. A minute was a minute and an hour was sixty minutes as it was everywhere else. Tick, tick, tick... tick. I couldn’t stretch time again or at least not today.

After my conversation with the old man, I didn’t feel I could continue walking those streets anymore. He had taken away in minutes the feeling of anticipation I had in the subway while it went over the Manhattan Bridge on its way to Brooklyn. I walked from the Nostrand Avenue Towers to the subway station, through the stores that only sold trinkets and the fast food joints. While waiting for the subway to arrive, looking at the strange faces on the station and listening to the train’s brakes, metal against metal, on the other side of the station, I came to the conclusion that what I wanted this morning when I came to Brooklyn wasn’t here anymore. As the train pulled in, I looked for an empty car. I wanted to be by myself or at least not amongst people whom I didn’t know. When I felt the train pulling away from the station, I felt relieved because this was probably the last time that I would be here in my life. I closed my eyes. The movie "Roy Cohn the Fag" came on. I saw in the movie my life and I like the way that it was. My life could have been different. I could have work in the rag district maybe I would have my own clothing factory. I would probably be living somewhere in Long Island, maybe Great Neck, by now. I would get up every morning at four o’clock, commute for an hour into the city. At night, I would go back home and sit in front of the television set with my fat wife and watch Hollywood Squares until we went to bed. I wonder if she ever while washing the dishes when I wasn’t home ever asked herself why I never touch her. Did she ever suspect that I went to gay bars when I didn’t come home at the usual time? If had chosen another life I had to be a Homo too, of course. It’s something ingrained in myself. I had no choice in that matter. I know it would had been a hard life for me if I had chosen that life for me, just as hard as this train bench that I’m sitting on.

I chose another life instead, the life that I’m living now. As I had said before, I like it the way it is. I’m proud of it. The fact that I’m a lawyer who everybody respects gives me the power to rule over his or her lives. If I had chosen to live that life of a garment worker, I would have never achieved what I have now. Power is what I got now. Power to control other person lives. Sitting on this train with my eyes close on my way to Manhattan, my kingdom on top of the hill, I can see what I had accomplished in my life. Power has incredible things that come with it. The one I like the most is that you become an instant celebrity. Everybody wants to be you or at least wants to be a part of you and you only become more powerful. I feel how powerful I’m when I’m on my way to Studio 54. As the limousine makes the right turn from Eight Avenue onto 54 Street, I can see the faces of the people who couldn’t get inside of the building. They just want to be me as they press their faces on the car’s window to see who is inside. And then the doorman opens the door and I step outside of the car. The camera’s flashes blind me and I love it, that it’s power. Inside the building the music is pumping and people are dancing. Lisa Minnelli sees me and comes a kiss me on the check. Andy Warhol waves to me from his tables and is saying something but I can hear anything thing over the music. The cute boys on the dancing floor point their fingers at me in admiration. I love the life that I pick for me even tough some people want to destroy me but I’ll will surveyed like the Gloria Gaynor song. Let me see if I can remenber it.

Go on now, go walk out the door

Just turn around now

(Cause) you’re not welcome anymore

Weren’t you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?

Did I crumble?

Did you think I’d lay down and die?