City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (33 page)

Chris Cox and I invited Isherwood and Bachardy to my place for dinner the very next night after we met them that first time at Virgil’s. I spent the whole hungover day buying the twelve kinds of fish necessary for Julia Child’s recipe of marmite Dieppoise with its complex ivory sauce. It was a triumph and we all screamed with laughter till dawn. Now that I no longer drink, I wonder if I’m capable of such fierce, joyful abandon, such total immersion in the high tides of laughter and forgetting.

* * *

Chris Cox became almost pathologically jealous of me. I felt that he was actually envious of my slowly burgeoning and belated “career” (which precisely because it was just beginning, we could still imagine might truly blossom someday). It was easier, however, for him to say he was sexually and romantically jealous and possessive. I would leave his apartment and then walk into mine to hear the phone ringing. “Why did it take you twenty minutes to get home instead of fifteen? What were you doing? Did you duck into a doorway with some tall, dark, and handsome stranger? Come on, you can tell me. That’s what happened, right?” I could hear him inhaling on his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of his nose like some condensed form of rage. “Huh? Is that what happened? Don’t think I’m naïve. I know what a little slut you are. Just can’t pass up a chance of getting fucked, can you?”

When I’d arrive at his loft, he’d embrace me tightly and I’d be flattered and moved until I realized he was sticking a hand down the back of my pants to see if my asshole was wet from just getting fucked. He’d push me away and say, “How many times you been fucked today, huh?” He’d be genuinely angry.

If it had been a sex game once a fortnight, I would have thought it was a turn-on, but as a constant presence in our lives, as if we were in a three-way marriage with his jealousy, it was an intolerable invasion of my sense of freedom. I’d been hopelessly in love with three men and I’d spent all my time suppressing my feelings of jealousy as uncivilized and in any event a fruitless expense of spirit. Now Chris was letting jealousy consume him completely, nor did he question his right to be jealous.

At first, after my years of being rejected by Keith McDermott, I was starved for even this pathological form of devotion. My shrink said that I had such low self-esteem that only a nutcase could send a strong enough signal to get through to me. But soon I resented
Chris’s jealous interrogations and shakedowns, especially since I’d always been an apostle of promiscuity.

My new editor was Bill Whitehead at Dutton, a funny, handsome man who would die of AIDS at age forty-four in 1987. He developed a new paperback line and brought Chris to work for him as his assistant. Chris was perfect for the job—his meticulousness, his charm, his energy and devotion to Bill and his authors, his savviness about all the names in New York (that’s what New Yorkiness is, primarily: the recognition of a thousand names and faces).

I had a difficult acquaintance, the Southern Gothic writer Coleman Dowell, whom Chris befriended. When gay men say in their personals, “No drama queens, please,” they are trying to avoid someone like Coleman. He was from a poor family in Kentucky but lied and said he was rich and that his family owned Heaven Hill bourbon. What he didn’t want to admit was that his psychiatrist lover, Bert, was supporting him. Cole wrote elaborately postmodernist novels with Chinese-box narrators, but they were all about spiteful people in positions of power double-dealing one another—or they were rural-Kentucky stories about a farmer cursed with a huge penis, a dick too big for any woman to handle (finally a teenage boy was able to take it all). Ludicrous as these stories were, no one quite saw them in all their pornographic absurdity since they were rendered with such dodgy modernist devices and in an opaque Faulknerian style.

I had first met Cole because the
New York Times Book Review
had asked me to review his
Island People
, probably his best book although it is so consumed with paranoia and spleen about real people (notably Carl Van Vechten, who’d had the ill luck to be Cole’s mentor) that it is hard to read to the end. It lacks that key, embarrassing literary quality no one knows how to discuss: charm. I was baffled by such a complicated book, so uneven that it could be called a corduroy road to perdition, but even so I gave it a positive
review, while expressing reservations about such highfalutin expressions as “she was an ennuyante of stature.”

No matter. My qualified praise got me invited to dinner at Cole and Bert’s Fifth Avenue apartment on the fifteenth floor looking down on Central Park and across to the Guggenheim Museum. Cole was a tall, nice-looking man wearing a big, fake-looking wig. Bert’s wig was darker and more modest but not on quite right. The main sitting room was large and spacious with mirrors on one end catching the light pouring in through the plate-glass windows. The style was Hollywood Classic with matching upholstered white couches, white rugs, stagily spotlit paintings, a legion of high-backed dining-room chairs flanking a skinny medieval refectory table. It was all a bit theatrical and delightfully comfortable—and so much more luxurious than anything else Chris and I had ever seen that it awed us.

As did the food. Cole was a martyr cook. Since he never left the apartment except to swoop down on homeless black men in Central Park across the street for sex, he had the rest of his time to write, and to construct elaborate dinners that sometimes took three days to prepare. Cole would greet us at the door with dark circles under his eyes and exhaustion pinching his lips. Tammy was our “hostess,” or at least that’s how Cole conceived of his wienie dog. She was old and lame and an intelligent, seemingly normal dachshund, but Cole was enraptured with her and ascribed to her a whole bewildering range of gracious and malefic emotions. He would hurt her physically when she’d been “bad” (or he drunk and crazy), though she slept every night between Bert and Cole and had a wardrobe of diamonds and tiaras and furs that were contributed to a museum after her death. The writer Walter Abish, author of
How German Is It?
, made a terrible gaffe when in a note to Cole about matters literary he wrote, “P.S. Sorry to hear the dog died.” Steam came issuing out of all of Cole’s orifices. He trembled with
rage when he said to me, “I hope his wife, Cecile, dies soon so I can write, ‘P.S. Sorry to hear the woman died.’ When I think how many times Tammy graciously received the Abishes here as their hostess!” Cole once told me that all his pleasant female characters had been based on Tammy. The unpleasant ones were based on Susan Sontag, whom he didn’t know, though he was convinced that she had personally blocked every positive review he’d failed to receive and had engineered every rejection by every publisher. He knew she was plotting against him day and night because he’d written an attack on her in his novel
Mrs. October Was Here
, though he’d been careful to set it in “Tasmania, Ohio.” Of course in real life Susan Sontag, Argus-eyed as she was, had never seen a mention of Coleman Dowell. But Cole needed an enemy, and it helped if he or she was Jewish, as were Sontag, Abish, and Bert, Cole’s lover. Cole was wildly and self-defeatingly anti-Semitic, since he was kept by a sweet, patient Jew and all his literary friends were either Jewish or quite conventionally politically correct—and New York had the second-largest concentration of Jews in the world after Israel (two million versus five million). And of course the whole cultural life of New York in which Cole aspired, everything from music to literature to scholarship, was markedly influenced by Jews. Nor was Cole’s anti-Semitism actually based on anything other than a desire to shock and to be “interesting,” and I suppose it was meant to figure as a declaration of independence from his endlessly indulgent lover.

Most literary writers in the second half of the twentieth century felt wronged, neglected, conspired against, but Cole was one of the few who railed without cease against his Job-like fate. Maybe because his mental literary map starred Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, he imagined that he, too, should be on the cover of
Time
. Maybe because he’d been on television in his twenties as a performer and was used to big audiences and street-recognition
fame, he found sales figures of his books in the hundreds instead of the hundreds of thousands cruel and lamentable. Lament he did, all the time.

When I first met Coleman in 1974, I was still drinking heavily and as a consequence was constantly feeling guilty. I couldn’t remember what I’d said or done or shouted the night before—and this made me a receptive friend for Cole and an open ear for his complaints. Because I was timid, I’d written a mostly enthusiastic review of a book I didn’t like all that much but that I was afraid to condemn. Why hurt an author who was unknown? And what if it turned out to be an important book? A single review in the Sunday
New York Times
could make or break a reputation. I’d already suffered the consequences of bad reviews in it through low sales, pitying looks from friends, low advances on the next book.

Now if I dislike a book I’m asked to review, I send it back to the newspaper or magazine, but back then I was so thrilled to be asked by anyone to review something that I hesitated to reject the golden offering. None of us was natural in the face of power, of absolute literary power; we were all cringing courtiers, I less than most writers.

But my cowardice that led to overpraising a confused and irritating novel saddled me with a long and painful friendship. Cole would get very drunk late at night (me, too) and he’d bring up the reservations I’d expressed in my review—what’s wrong with saying “ennuyante of stature”?—and he’d speak with real venom. There was always a trace of anger and resentment against me—and that kept me so intimidated that I was always eager to prove to him my devotion. Chris Cox and I even agreed to be his agents representing his novel
White on Black on White
. Cole was furious with New Directions for not having sufficiently promoted his earlier works and quit James Laughlin, who was truly devoted to Cole’s writing, to search out a new editor. Of course he didn’t understand that
Laughlin, mentally unstable himself, was that rarest of things, a loyal and disinterested literary editor. Nor did Cole know how to go about finding a new publisher. Since Chris was by now working in publishing and I had a few contacts, we sent his book around everywhere, with no success. I thought it would be a natural for publication since it dealt with race and sex, the two great American obsessions. But no one wanted it—again the Chinese-box problem and the lack of charm. Finally another friend enlisted the help of the Countryman Press, a tiny house with a minuscule list. The book garnered far less attention than it would have if New Directions had done it—and far less than it deserved.

Dowell jumped to his death on August 3, 1985. We’d all seen it coming. Cole talked about it endlessly, and when Bert visited me in Paris a few weeks before it happened, I asked him if he was prepared for such a gruesome eventuality. We were all horrified and frightened—it seemed something we could all be tempted to do. We wondered if he had AIDS and was too embarrassed to admit it or afraid of the long, slow, painful death. Or we heard that he’d “dropped a dime” on a black prison lover on parole—planted drugs on him and tipped off the police that a man on parole was “holding,” as revenge for the guy’s infidelity. Or maybe, as he said, he was afraid of aging and losing his “beauty.”

If many of the people I knew in New York in the seventies were twisted or paranoid or even evil, we all agreed one was a saint: Joe Brainard. Joe was a writer and visual artist from Oklahoma who stuttered and spelled erratically and was so timid that he danced in place, looking down, if he thought anyone was paying attention to him. Someone had once complimented him on his chest so he always wore his shirt open to the waist, even in subarctic winter weather.

I had a few dates with him and he’d always bring a notepad to dinner. He was too shy to converse normally so he’d write
something down and pass the pad and wait for a written answer. It was a bit like being someone who couldn’t sign and dining with a deaf person who couldn’t read lips. Sometimes he’d look directly at me with a warm regard, but a moment later he’d be looking up at the ceiling, like a bad actor miming innocence and whistling.

He’d grown up middle-class but poor, and when he got to New York, he’d lived in the East Village and eaten out of garbage cans. Kenward Elmslie, the poet and an heir to the Pulitzer fortune, took him up and they were lifelong lovers. More than once I’ve heard inexperienced people say that the days of being kept are over, that now no one is a Balzacian hero who comes to the capital and finds a protector, but in fact that scenario happens as often as it probably ever did. It’s just that only very rich people can afford to do that and one doesn’t encounter many of them. And today neither the kept boy nor the older man owns up easily to his role.

No one could have been less on the make than Joe. With the stocks he’d been given he earned extremely large sums every quarter, but he converted everything into cash and put the money in a large drawer. He’d fish out a thousand dollars and ask seriously if that would be enough for dinner. He was usually stoned by dinnertime. He always paid.

He lived in a big loft that was just two huge rooms on Greene Street. In the backroom were hundreds of boxes full of materials he might someday assemble into collages. The front room had a sitting area and a mattress on the floor and a radio tuned day and night to a country-and-western station. Joe worked his way through one mammoth Victorian novel after another. At two in the morning he’d finish
Middlemarch
and start
The Way We Live Now
. He seldom said much about them except that they were good or that he’d liked them. Or he’d say, “What about that Dorothea!” and smile his big goofy smile.

In the late sixties and early seventies he’d been a speed freak,
which had enabled him to do hundreds and hundreds of tiny collages. When I knew him, he still did book covers for his friends Ron Padgett and John Ashbery and Kenward Elmslie. He’d also over the years done lots of hilarious variations on the comic-strip character Nancy. Perhaps he was best known for his book
I Remember
, in which he just listed all the things he could remember—the ultimate dandy’s book since the method of a dandy is to level all hierarchies and replace all normal value systems with the arbitrariness of taste and personality.