Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (12 page)

So I was more available than I might have been to Howard’s next bright idea: we would open a business. Chelsea was slimly prospected as a residential neighborhood. We calculated that there was no movie theater, no bookstore, and no copy shop. With Howard the engine, and me the caboose, we opened Chelsea Copy, in a narrow little storefront next to the hotel entrance. Howard dealt with Stanley Bard, because the hotel owned the space. He raised money from Joe LeSueur, an investment Joe would come to regret. And he found Hector, a “humpy”—we called him—Latino guy, our one employee. My contribution was asking Frank Moore to paint our sign, which he did in beautiful burnt orange, red, and black paint on wood. I also looped back to Columbia,
where I started writing a much-too-serious-for-my-own-good dissertation on the influence of the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes—chaplain to King James I—on T. S. Eliot. Howard, highly convincing, promised that I could sit upstairs, typing away, while he and Hector cleverly made the nascent business soar.

The business never did soar. One of its odder patterns was that whenever Howard went away for stints of filming and I was left, with my patent incompetence, to handle the shop, the receipts from the register at the end of the workday spiked. No one ever figured out my magic touch, and only later did I put the pieces together to realize that Howard probably had been skimming cash from the register for drugs. Nearly two years had passed since he opened up to me about the habit he’d picked up in my absence—but it was characterized more as a vanquished demon, a lesson learned, a dirty secret never to be told to grandchildren. The pivot in that muffled time was the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, in September 1982. Howard, depressed, spending hours on the couch, listlessly watching TV, was intent on our going to the service of atonement together. He chose a synagogue on Gramercy Park. We both donned white yarmulkes, picked from a cardboard box in the entrance foyer, and I confessed my dark sins, too. Howard went further, fasting, not using any machinery, and not answering the telephone for twenty-four hours. When he did check his messages, he found one that he’d been anticipating for months—from a BBC producer in London, offering him an editing room and funding to finish his film.

Howard was magically, or spiritually, convinced the phone call was providential. He took it as a sign from the great executive producer in the sky that he was meant to (a) finish the film, and (b)
clean up his act. Just a few days later, he opened up to me about the true cause of his recent, endless lying-about on the couch. He had always casually claimed that he was stoned—if I asked, which I rarely did. I went along with these explanations. Now he was telling me that he had been nodding, as a result of his now fairly regular use of heroin, the rasp in his voice being just one of many clues, while I had simply thought to myself: “Too many cigarettes.” Galvanized by the prospect of going to London and becoming a big success, he had just enrolled himself into “primal scream therapy,” a form of therapy that John Lennon had supposedly undergone, hence its attraction. Sessions were not simply to be taken up with screaming, he told me, but also with reliving childhood traumas, expressing roiling suppressed anger, and painful truth telling. As a first step in the healing, his therapist had insisted that he inform me of his ongoing addiction and of the months of cover-up.

For a second time in three months a chasm opened in front of me. This time I was looking in the opposite direction, through the rusty bike spokes and leafy balcony to the McBurney Y across the street. The loss of space and place, when he told me, the vertigo, the fear that the whole jigsaw puzzle of my life, our lives, included pieces of doom, returned with force. I was so angry that I screamed, too, without the need of primal scream therapy. I felt duped and betrayed by his expertise at covering his tracks, and said words that were close to fire. I was also experiencing one of those role reversals Sister Mary Michael had prophesied. Living with me in domestic commitment was supposed to have been the cure-all, in Howard’s mind, but instead had brought on renewed addiction. Did this also mean that our commitment was coming unstrung, too? Now I was the one feeling panic. Soon his therapist wanted me to meet with her. She was young—our age—not
like my nun-therapist. I was happy to vent my righteous fury. But she surprised me by opening a line of inquiry on how I could possibly not have known. How could I have been so checked out?

For two months, I joined Howard at many of these sessions—him center stage, me off to the side, getting some “Earth to Brad” treatment, listening to these gritty confessions. The cure meant having to hear him yell at me, even without raising his voice. “Why are you angry at Brad?” the therapist would ask. “He demands I respect his need to work,” he would growl, “but he won’t respect mine because he’s an egocentric, spoiled only child who can’t give the respect he demands.” Okay. I did discover some of those aspects of Howard’s hidden self that he had suggested we share with each other—his anger at my selfish work habits, for instance—though of course we never would have without this intervention. Much had to do with money. Howard had the misconception that his parents were wealthy and that his Dad would bail him out whenever necessary. I flashed back on their many intense phone conversations, often revolving around the credit card his family backed. Every so often his Dad would take the card back because of an infringement. This topic led into the tangled wires of Howard’s not taking responsibility, the copy shop as play money, or play career, with no consequences, and the doctor asking a lot about fears of success.

Touchingly, at this time, Howard went out and bought a small Sam Flax black hardback sketchbook in the style that I had used for years for self-examining—the very notebook that he had cracked to discover my promiscuous betrayals—and began writing down his thoughts and dreams. I found it sweet to see him somehow being me, as if I were an older brother, a role I never imagined. “I still don’t feel I’m much closer to the mystery of why I take heroin,”
he wrote in that notebook that fall. “I know I still feel the impulse. Partially it’s connected to habit. If it rains, I think of doing dope and sitting in all day. Or Sundays, when I get that scared/depressed feeling inside. I have noticed a good release valve for the scared/depressed feeling I get almost every day at some point. It is a way of almost thinking about it. Trying to figure out why I’m depressed or scared, and then it instantly vanishes, and is replaced by a good feeling, which might be the absence of pain, or might be a tricky way of preventing myself from finding out what is the real cause.” Room 515 became our claustrophobic laboratory of mutual introspection.

Not cured, but certainly not willing to jeopardize his big break for the intangible benefits of more weeks of self-examining, in late fall Howard flew to London, where he remained, with one Christmas return to Miami and New York City to see his family and me, and then finally back at the end of January 1983, timed to be there for my birthday. As a gift for one of those holidays he brought me from a London shop a nineteenth-century Russian icon painted on curved wood of “Christ Pantocrator,” a woeful Christ with steadfast gaze, holding a globe of the cosmos in his hand. Canon West was snobbish about its provincial “late style,” but I fell in love with its concentric calm. My own Sam Flax diary turned into dialogues, with “C.P.” (Christ Pantocrator) taking the part of my higher self. Like me, Howard that New Year’s Eve wrote resolutions in his journal, number one being, “no more schmekle, none” (his code for heroin), plus: “Understanding of Brad and consider his feelings and our life together when making any career decisions.” And he resolved to listen to Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony on his Walkman.

But his life in London was pretty much a repeat, in its spiraling and whirling, fueled by anxiety, of his time in New York without me, and most of his times on his own. Howard didn’t like to be alone. Left to his own devices, he was much more galvanized, much more socially fun, but also much more given to playing Russian roulette with his shadow side. By day he worked at the BBC studios in postproduction on his film. He had a circle of friends, the writer Peter Ackroyd, who cast himself as Howard’s “guardian,” like a male Melinda, art critic Richard Shone, and the filmmaker Derek Jarman. He discovered that he had a fantasy of being a “sugar daddy”—unfortunately never acted out with me for reasons of age and finances—but realized in London. One of his new friends was a pale boy named Miles, whom he liked to take out to dinner, and to a piano bar where Brazilian transvestites entertained. Then they would arrive home, and he would fuck Howard, and they would stay up drinking scotches until five in the morning, the beginning of the workday. He went to the same club with other “rent boy” types. Howard was telling me some of these tidbits by phone, our monogamy now mutually shot.

A lot of his nightlife revolved around the big gay dance club Heaven, near Trafalgar Square, and a second club called Bang. The Apollo and Dionysus in his life, or maybe the two Dionysii, were Miles and Adrian. A dancer from Bang, Adrian was the more demanding, asking for ten pounds before going off to work, then knocking at the door at three a.m., asking for a place to stay. Miles at least had what Howard described as “the dick of death” and would leave him spent, while remaining untouchably passive in temperament most of the rest of the time. At dinners with one of them, or one of his friends, or with Derek Jarman, discussing Caravaggio, Howard might swill four gins before the meal, followed by three glasses of white wine at dinner, then three huge scotches back at his leased apartment with Peter and Richard and their friend Brian.
He called me one night as I was going out to a gay disco in New York, the Saint, pretty much the Heaven of New York, asking me to help him to decide whether he should take speed or Quaaludes. “Being clean,” to Howard, meant taking Xanax instead of codeine, or drinking sherry or port instead of vodka, the transitions between poisons smoothed by packs of cigarettes.

After one of his hangings-out with Derek Jarman, Howard, then twenty-eight, revealed that the live-hard-die-young template of the romantic artist was on his mind, or both their minds. “Glad I’m clean, with the New Year, and the film opening,” he recorded in his notebook. “I must make concerted effort to stay this way. Must not slip. I hope I stay clean till my thirtieth birthday. ‘Many great gay artists die young,’ Derek aged 40 said today. Caravaggio, Orton, Marlowe, Fassbinder. I will need time to do anything. I feel my powers coming, and hope this film, which I think is actually very, very good, is not a fluke. I think I’ve learned enough so I could do in 6 months what this took 4 years to do. Of resolutions—am still not writing letters, am still biting nails, not exercising.” Derek was plotting his next film,
Caravaggio
. Howard found all his talk about the painter’s sexuality “boring to listen to,” but loved when he shared a print of
The Calling of Saint Matthew
, which reminded Howard of the poses of street hustlers “out of the Haymarket.”

Having set my birthday as his return deadline, Howard eventually focused on editing like a diamond cutter, giving up cigarettes, running mornings in Hyde Park, fighting a tendency, exacerbated by drugs and alcohol, to linger in bed until two, feeling lonely and depressed. “I must finish the film to be back in NY by Brad’s birthday,” he wrote in his notebook. “I miss him, of course. By the time I get back, we will have been apart for two and a half months, with
2 weeks together in between. I’ve had no thoughts of leaving him, and find my ‘freedom’ a kind of burden. I think he also feels our relationship is strong. If we can survive this absence, I’m sure we will be together for a long time. I hope forever.” Indeed my version of Miles, in New York, was the opposite, a young banker, Ron—a new breed of gay guy who began to appear in the early eighties, the gay yuppie, or “guppie.” I was acting out a fantasy to balance Howard’s “sugar daddy” fantasy by dreaming of being kept by a young gay banker in a suit. But, like Howard, the satisfaction of my hyperventilated wish was undercut by the ache of missing our life together.

When Howard returned, we moved to a different apartment, number 410, in the rear of the hotel, looking out toward all of downtown. That was the last apartment we would actually live in together. I suppose the apartment could well be a bad, or mixed, memory, as the unraveling of our domestic arrangement occurred there—but that moment was still far off. I actually have some of the strongest, warmest feelings about that place, and time, and, even, mysteriously, of our love as having bloomed into another order of being there. Howard and I really came to some authentic caring for each other. I don’t think, from our residence in 410 on, we would ever say or do anything consciously to hurt each other, though accidents did happen. It was as if the further apart we stood, the closer we became. I’ve never seen such a dignified phase spelled out in any psychology textbook, though some subtle poets have said as much. I’m thinking of Rilke on the barely touching lovers’ hands on an Attic stele, in
Duino Elegies
, or Rumi’s reed-flute singing of separation.

Number 410 was a bigger and more user-friendly one-bedroom. I scored the use of the extra room as my office, mostly out of Howard’s guilt because he was away more and more in pursuit of new film opportunities, and making final touches on
Burroughs
, and I was left more and more to oversee the dubious golden goose, the copy shop. I holed up with my Christ Pantocrator and was productive, writing my dissertation, and stories, and porn reviews, and pulp books on rock stars Hall and Oates and Billy Idol, each taking a month to write—these instant bios were meant by the publisher to cash in on the successful acts of the new MTV channel. For the first time I was a workaday writer. Our main room was the vast living room with our bed and all the furniture now covered with white sheets. If I got my office, Howard got his Sony color television. We spent much time lying in bed, watching MTV, or
Andy Warhol’s TV
cable talk show, or Pope John Paul II arriving in Poland, or the
Winds of War
miniseries. The public-access channel was frontier territory. I loved one show where a freaky guy, whom I found vaguely sexy, fancied himself a cult leader (shades of Jim Jones) and kept his rapt camera on, filming his rolling diatribes. I called him once at the crawl number on the bottom of the screen. Often when Howard was lost in TV, I was dialing something called “Apology Line,” where you could listen to anonymous callers’ confessions of their extreme crimes, from stealing to ritual murder, left on an answering machine. Apology Line was conceived as a conceptual art piece. Besides TV watching, jerking off in the back windows, too, was common practice on more than one floor in those rear apartments of the Chelsea Hotel.

Close by, on another floor, was our friend Chris Cox. I’d first met Chris while Howard was in London. Chris ran a hustler ad in the pink pages of the
Advocate
. I assumed that being a hustler was just
another sex fantasy, and showed up without intending to pay anything. In Chris’s case, or perhaps generally at the time, he had the same assumption. He was having fun, taking breaks from editing manuscripts for Ballantine Books, where he was an editor. Chris was southern, wore round wire-rimmed spectacles, and had been a member of an original circle of gay writers, The Violet Quill. He was also Edmund White’s boyfriend at the time, or had been. He complained that Ed, with his infidelities, had no concerns for the niceties of being lovers. I thought the remark strange, shared with me, sitting on his mattress in a room over a thrift shop on Twenty-third Street, having answered his hustler ad. But Chris was a winning combination of macho and loopy, and full of cyclonic energy that could never find a satisfying container. He smoked endlessly. He was a coke fiend, and his other reward to himself for editing a few pages was snorting coke, so that his vibrating only intensified. He was a cook—southern food—and when he moved into the hotel he often prepared collard greens, spiced with Tabasco, and invited us.

Especially when Howard was away, I hung with Chris, the Ethel Mertz to my Lucille Ball. Chris was friendly with the composer Virgil Thomson, who lived on the top floor. I’d first met imposing Virgil in the elevator, where he told me that my name would hold me back from becoming a famous writer. I preferred John Ashbery’s comment that my name was very American, like a character out of the thirties comic strip “Joe Palooka.” Neither assessment was exactly inspiring, though. I grew to like Virgil more when he started inviting Chris and me, Sunday nights, to dinner, and we ate in his kitchen, barely big enough for him to lower the stove door. He prepared mac and cheese, or recipes from
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book
, which he had contributed to in the “Recipes
from Friends” section: Shad-Roe Mousse, Gnocchi Alla Piemontese, and Pork “Alla Pizzaiola” of Calabria. Virgil had famously been a friend of Gertrude Stein’s. Since his hearing wasn’t great, he would deliver monologues on their friendship in Paris in the 1920s. And as he was nearly ninety, he told us, of his healthy sex life, “I get down on my knees every morning and thank God for gerontophiles.” He also gave me advice that the only item I would need to go anywhere was a pair of good shoes. “People always look at the shoes first,” he said. “I didn’t have good suits in Paris but I had fine shoes.” And, of his solution to hearing an unsatisfying concert by a friend: on the way out he would say, “Full of pretty things!” We often had fire scares in the hotel. Virgil would fully dress, put on his good shoes, and lie on top of his made bed until the firemen arrived to escort him downstairs.

Chris was the third energy source, too, for the Ladies Parties, special events that define most vividly number 410 in my memory. I don’t recall how the frilly notion began, but Howard, Chris, and I concocted a plan to throw parties with a small group of our friends, involving lots of martinis and dressing up like women. Part of the joke was that none of us was much interested in drag, and had never been to the dress-and-wig stores on Fourteenth Street that were a honeycomb for drag queens. We thought of ourselves as poets, writers, filmmakers, or, when we were horny, leather guys or hustlers. We went to the Gaiety, above a Howard Johnson’s at Forty-sixth and Broadway, where boys appeared onstage and runway twice, once clothed, once nude, making dances out of push-ups and squats. You could meet them between shows in a seedy lounge equipped with a giant bowl of Hawaiian punch mixed with astringent Alexis vodka. But the Gaiety was hardly a drag bar. There
was
a club we did start going to, though, La Esquilita, packed with Spanish drag queens. I remember Howard and me tumbling down its narrow staircase one Saturday night to watch a lip-sync contest of Spanish Barbra Streisands and Judy Garlands singing their bilingual hearts out, as admirers stuck dollar bills down their nearly convincing cleavage. We were transfixed by watching one gang member—a red bandana wrapped around his calf—dancing with a stunning, quite-a-bit-taller, post-op transsexual. Perhaps those Spanish drag queens in their sequined gowns did inspire our three Ladies Parties.

The first, and best, took place in the spring of 1983. The most convincing drag queen was Howard. Not because his feminine principle was particularly strong, but his demand for production values was, and he was the most professional at hair, makeup, and dress. For the occasion we decorated the apartment with pink candles, pink carnations, girlie hors d’oeuvres, and, most importantly, jumbo-size martini glasses with a requisite James Bond–style silvery martini shaker. We opened our cracked-mirror, tan-tiled bathroom to our little group of friends who arrived giddily, warily, with their store-bought wigs, makeup kits, and dresses. The group for the first evening, besides the three of us, included: Dennis Cooper, Los Angeles darkly punk writer who had just moved to the East Coast, to our great excitement, after guiding the poetry and art scene of our generation from his
Little Caesar
magazine out west. He had recently burned himself into my brain with his
Tenderness of the Wolves
book of poems, especially the prose piece, “A Herd,” about a John Wayne Gacy–style killer of teenage boys. Along with Dennis were his boyfriend, Rob Dickerson, and the poet Donald Britton. Feeling peeved at being left out, Joe LeSueur and Tim Dlugos were included in the
next party. The plan was that we would all stay in character, and let the alcohol help loosen our tongues and thicken the plot.

Howard was Lili La Leen, a German actress who claimed to have been in all of Fassbinder’s films yet didn’t speak a word of German. He/she protested in a bad Russian accent that the reason none of us had ever seen her in any of those films was that she was such a brilliant chameleon, a true actress. Lili had the best dress, a Mary McFadden—as she often repeated—which Howard found not in the well-worn drag shops where the rest of us shopped, but in an actual secondhand boutique in the actual women’s section. Most extraordinary was Howard/Lili’s precise makeup, eyeliner, sharply combed black wig, gleaming and unmoving double circlet necklace of white pearls, and ever-present thin clove cigarette. I remember that while I had been casually smearing on bright-red lipstick and pancake makeup behind him at the bathroom mirror earlier, he was focused, sober, and almost martial in his tight concentration. But then my messiness fit my floozy character, June Buntt (“The second T is silent”), the wife of the astronaut “Brad Buntt,” who had “been in space for years now.” In my crinkled red-velvet dress, a pink carnation stuck crumpled into my low cleavage, I grew even more wacked with every martini.

Chris Cox was Kay Sera Sera, a redheaded southern broad with big tits pushing up under her Christmas-red top, which she matched with a short green skirt, a red fox boa draped casually over her broad shoulders. She reminded me of some of the football players in my junior high school who would boldly choose to dress up as women at Halloween school events, working their shoulder pads into their outfits. Kay was outgoing, a well-worn belle now on her eighth husband who talked up her former plantation life and Auntie-Mame world travels, but was currently living, she confessed, in a tiny studio apartment in Queens. Dennis Cooper was the most resistant to drag archetypes, in blue-jean coveralls, as the butcher-than-any-of-us-were-in-our-regular-lives-and-gender Mavis Purvis, a lesbian farmer living on a rural commune with her lover, a famous African-American poet. Mavis was never without her African-American baby doll, I believe named Charmin, which (who?) was covered with cigarette burns, cuts, and other scars, assumed to be their badly abused child, though Mavis insisted Charmin was not abused but simply accident prone.