The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered (6 page)

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approaches realism of this sort. Benderson has gone to great lengths in his exploration of the motivations and lack of motivation that befuddle the carnival of denizens in his story. In his recent memoir,
The Romanian
, Benderson admits he spent a lot time with “midtown Manhattan hustlers, ex-cons, and junkies sponging up their speech and vampirizing their emotions to write about.” These days, he frequently leaves the USA to escape an ever-encroaching gay mentality that he feels eagerly and publicly assimilates itself into a pathetic version of family values, part of the same exclusionary mentality that helped change Times Square into its current scrubbed-up Disneyfied incarnation.

There is one extended focus on sound in the novel: a reverberant passage that lingers in the mind. When Casio is in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he hears a familiar ringing in his ears that initiates a chain of memories. The sound first entered Casio’s mind years before in prison. While checking for contraband, the guards repeatedly hit metal pipes with rubber mallets. A change in the ringing indicated where things were hidden. As a result of the search, Casio ends up taking the rap for another prisoner. For days in solitary, he hears the ringing internally and imagines it as birds or insects buzzing around him. From then on the ringing is a recurring trigger that sets off a chain of foul memories, a collation of his worst times that threatens to draw him back into darkness.

The hard edges in this novel lie not in its structure, but in the mental boundaries of the main characters. They are all hemmed in by difficult living situations and the necessity of escaping painful aspects of every day life.

Benderson’s mode of writing is enhanced by the frequent use of a device: he inserts italicized sections that are the verbalized thoughts of the character into the narrator’s depictions. These thoughts are internal monologues in the voice of that character, given as if they are occurring in real time. For a few seconds, the reader feels he is inside the head of that character. The strength of these sections carries a heightened sense of reality back into the narrator’s non-italicized flow.

Regardless of Benderson’s success in making a novel that looks from the inside out, the reader is always an outsider looking inside the world of the novel. And in that sense, each reader is a tourist, now even more so, because the novel refers to a Times Square that no longer exists. Though it was written as a fiction,
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has become partly a historical document of a world that has vanished or at least has been dispersed into small pockets of activity elsewhere. In this sense, it is kin to Samuel Delany’s frankly stunning documentation of pre-sterilized Times Square, entitled,
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
.

Nearly all of the characters are ruthless as the pain of living presses in on them. They need it to survive the daily onslaught of poverty or drug withdrawal, as well as betrayal from the other desperate ones around them. Yet, Benderson has compassion for each character, he rounds them out with surprising warmth and elicits our sympathy as we delve deeper into their troubled situations. They all have loyalties to others and help each other at times, but these tendencies are easily overridden by the fierce urges of day to day survival. Even the police are portrayed with complexity. Detective Pangero shows compassion for Angelita, the drag performer, by leaving him untouched and unconscious when he arrests Casio, Angelita’s junkie boyfriend and crime partner. Abuela, Casio’s grandmother, who navigates through a sea of religious visions and tries to save her family, is the most compassionate of all, but dies alone with no one to take care of her.

Intelligence alone never saves people from dire circumstances. Apollo readily absorbs information from everything around him and recycles it to make himself appear more attractive to a variety of men who return for his services, but only temporarily. Baby Pop has a knack for math and creates elaborate internal scenarios adapted from the popular novels he reads. But both are unable to imagine a usable framework for changing their situations.

Angelita does willfully overcome addiction to get his operation and moves out of the neighborhood. During the course of the novel, she is the only true survivor.

No matter how much Benderson seeks to reveal to us the otherness of this world, it isn’t difficult to understand Apollo’s need to share his pain in unusual ways with his johns and the other junkies. He blames the stomping he gives his only friend on the withdrawal from drugs. He’s trapped in vicious circles that must be attended to at the sacrifice of others. In this novel, redemption comes only momentarily, if it comes at all: and then, more as a hint of whimsy than a destined eventual outcome.

Apollo’s unnamed friend is an almost middle-aged educated man trying to stay alive in a pre-AIDS cocktail world. He takes strong prescription drugs to prolong his life, but it is a losing battle. Their jerky relationship continues because Apollo trusts him more than his other contacts. Apollo can only admit he needs help when he’s desperate. Full acknowledgement of his helplessness would destroy him. His friend helps him because he has nothing to lose. He is already lost and he thinks for a time that some involvement in Apollo’s world has more meaning than the literary life he’s left behind on full shelves that line the walls of his apartment.

Benderson contrasts the abuse by the cops that Apollo receives for his drug use with his friend’s unpleasant dependence on legal medication. Apollo gives in to the numbing effect dope; and his friend desperately clings to life by taking sanctioned poison.

After Apollo’s valiant effort to kick and work a real job as a doorman for Tina, the pressures drive him back to dope. It’s nearly impossible to stay clean when he’s surrounded by the same environment that fed his habit in the first place. His comeback high gives him a surge of confidence as he puts the make on two blonde out-of-towners. They succumb easily to his macho display and take him back in their hotel room. He takes every advantage of them by strutting, rutting, and degrading them as bitches. He stuns them for hours with super human endurance and his dope stick: the blood engorged penis that stays erect for hours at the end of a high. He completely humiliates them after the sexual frenzy by demanding sixty dollars, which they do reluctantly pay him.

This act is Apollo’s pathetic revenge on the girly tourist gays who are seeping into the neighborhood, hanging out in new trendy clubs in greater numbers. Few of them are looking for a hustler. In fact, they fear him or ignore him. He has become the alien who no longer belongs, a clown to be laughed at by the passersby. Eventually, his inability to deal with this change inflates the wishful fantasies in his mind, pushing out the last remnants of rationality.

Benderson shows us that everyone is a user and is used as well. To be used is not always to be abused. At times, it benefits the used more than the user. Sometimes, both parties benefit, sometimes neither. There is the temptation to wonder who benefited more in the making of this novel, Benderson or those who were used as the basis of its characters.

No matter how we might pretend otherwise, even a cushy life can be viewed as day to day survival through the use of others and their use of us. The question is not whether this is so, but how is this so. Ironically, as entertainment-seeking tourists approaching Benderson’s passionately drawn world of lowlifes, freaks, and criminals, our rapt stares may transform this novel’s exquisite portrait into an elegant and filthy mirror, inside which any one of us will catch a few glimpses of his own reflection.

Addendum:

It was in late March of 2007, shortly after finishing this review that I went to a celebration for the Romanian writer Ruda Popa at the Russian restaurant Samovar in Manhattan. The friend I was to meet there didn’t make it. Upstairs in the salon, I took a seat at the white U-shape made of long tables pushed together. I could not avoid noticing the garish makeup of the 60-or-so-year-old woman who sat next to me. Adroit with a worn down pencil, she calculated her way through several puzzles in a small Sudoku book. Her cloying perfume mingled mercilessly in my head with the mind-altering shot glasses of vodka I downed as they were offered to me on silver trays. As soon as the guest of honor finished talking, she sighed and pushed her chair back away from the table. I recognized Bruce Benderson sitting on the other side of her. I had heard him read years before during one of the many readings hosted by C. Bard Cole in the East Village. This time I introduced myself and we spent the next several hours together talking about all manner of things including his desire not to be labeled gay and the sad fact that his new novel,
Pacific Agony
would probably not be published in English. Benderson’s caustic yet cavalier wit did not disappoint.

Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1993

Jameson Currier

Christopher Coe’s critically acclaimed first novel,
I Look Divine
, published by Ticknor & Fields in 1987, was the witty and luminous portrait of a rich, gifted, über narcissistic gay man who believed he was exceptional from the moment of his birth. Jet-setting across the affluent and au courant landscapes of Rome, Madrid, Mexico, and Manhattan,
I Look Divine
re-counted the tragedy of Nicholas, the divinely sophisticated “affected creature” of the title, and his swift downfall when he realizes that aging has erased both his youth and beauty. As narrated by his older brother in a cleverly succinct manner, Nicholas’s life was marvelous and stylish right up to its end.

That same sort of elegant and eloquent stylishness reappears in Coe’s second novel,
Such Times
, published by Harcourt in 1993 and reprinted by Penguin in 1994, but the journey on which the author propels his characters this time is not merely through the process of growing older but of navigating the bleak and haunting realities of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. This time Coe slowly strips his archly observant gay narrator, Timothy Springer, of his wealth, health, and good looks, and, in the process, infuses this novel with a humanity that was often absent from
I Look Divine
;
Such Times
becomes, then, a sort of riches-to-rags tale, a Job-like tumble from the demands an unexpected life-altering circumstance can produce — in this case, an AIDS diagnosis. As in
I Look Divine
, Coe tells this tragic tale of a vain and self-involved man’s breakdown from a grand, clever, witty and distinctly gay point of view.

The narrative structure of
Such Times
finds Timothy and Dominic, friends for twenty-plus years, catching up with one another over
risotto frutti di mare
in a trendy Los Angeles restaurant after viewing Dominic’s taped appearance on a television quiz show. Dominick and Timothy share many traits with the brothers of
I Look Divine
. Dominick, like Nicholas, “has always made up laws for life.” He knows a true daiquiri cocktail requires a few drops of maraschino liqueur, adores his set of Baccarat tumblers, and can recall verbatim Elizabeth Taylor’s Academy Award acceptance speech for
Butterfield 8
. Timothy, overly articulate and “desperate to be glamorous,” shops for a baby spoon for himself at Tiffany’s and desires to be “irresistible to every man who looked like anything.” Together they drink Gavi dei Gavi la Scolca and find it “acceptable.” Everyone in
Such Times
, in fact, seems to be well-bred and well-educated and well-traveled, even our protagonist’s more lugubrious conquests and acquaintances. Throughout the novel there are illusions to reading John O’Hara, Socrates, and Henry Miller, tasting soufflé Rothschild and smoking Montecruz 210 cigars, shopping on the via del Babuino, living on the Ile Saint-Louis, and drinking Muscat Beaumes de Venise or Château d’Yquem.

But it is 1992 and Dominic and Timothy have both been through personal battles with AIDS; Timothy knows of Dominic’s struggles, but Dominic is unaware of Timothy’s illness and of the recent death of Jasper, Timothy’s older and wealthier lover of 18 years, from AIDS. That night is full of reminiscing for Timothy, flashbacks of his friendship with Dominic, his own life in Manhattan, his travels to San Francisco, Rome, Puerto Vallarta, and Sitges, his brief affair in Paris with a musician, but most of these memories are regarded in the context of his long-time love for Jasper. And contained within these recollections are Timothy’s astute elucidation of the polar differences between gay life during the decades of the 1970s and '80s.

At the emotional center of
Such Times
, however, is the issue of sexual monogamy of gay men. Jasper, 41 and 22 years Timothy’s senior, was in another relationship the night in 1974 that he first met Timothy, 19, at the Continental Baths in Manhattan, though it is made clear that Jasper and his official lover, Oliver Ingraham, an older and wealthier man than Jasper, have not had sex in years. During the entire 18 years of Timothy and Jasper’s affair, Jasper never gives up his relationship with Oliver. Timothy, a would-be actor with a trust fund turned portrait photographer, and something of a prudish “coy maiden,” learns fairly early on in his desire to be solely with Jasper that he is not able to satisfy all of Jasper’s sexual appetites. “Can’t I be enough for one night,” Timothy says when he discovers Jasper’s unsatisfied libido when they spot each other by accident one night at the waterfront piers of Manhattan’s west side after celebrating Timothy’s 21
^st
birthday together at Lutèce only hours before — Timothy has shown up at the piers drunk and to be a voyeur of the parade of gay men, but Jasper, a “straight-forwardly handsome, virile” man, is looking for as much sex as he can find — and with partners other than Timothy.

As the years progress and change, however, so does Timothy and Jasper’s relationship, becoming sexless itself, though the love they have crafted and developed for each other has not diminished. The era of AIDS brings to Timothy’s mind, among many things, the nature of sexuality and the ability of gay men, in particular, to find and maintain emotional attachments, or, in his sentiments, love,
monogamous
love. “People make a mistake,” he muses, “love wrongly when they love without demands. Jasper always told me that he loved me in his fashion, that he was true to me, in his fashion. It may be to his credit that he made no promise on which he didn’t deliver.”