Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (15 page)

I associate that season, too, with the Wilson film, an archive of a collapsed venture, as the Olympics withdrew their funding from the production. Howard’s film, which aired on public television the next year, 1986, was full of images of towers of scenery falling, or
Sciopero
strikes by Italian stagehands interrupting billows of operatic music, culminating with a scene of Bob curled on his mattress in his loft on Vestry Street, going to sleep, as if it were all a dream, coiling to dream up his next phantasm, like an urbane, downtown
Prospero. I also associate the film with my sensing much acting-out on Howard’s part, much wild nightlife, in the bars of those cities on his endless itinerary, of which I was now free to be judgmental because I was frozen in my tracks. Touchingly, the last frame of the film was a dedication to me, seeming entirely right and natural, too. And so we moved on, talking all the time about the house that we would share in old age in Los Angeles.

By June of 1985, a little over seven years since we’d met, we were resettled. (Were we having an itch?) Again, Howard was the real estate mastermind, devising a screwy solution that didn’t reflect a fresh start so much as a gnarly compromise. He had a friend from Exeter, Sarah Lindemann. Sarah was perky, and sharp, with brown hair brushed back, and very on edge in those years, as she had just divorced her husband. Howard and Sarah reconnected at an Exeter fundraiser around the time of the film festival, and Howard recognized in her a brainy talent for clarity, and a slight emotional desperation that could be channeled. He asked whether she wanted to help distribute the Burroughs film. She did. Sarah had an inexpensive walk-up apartment on East Eighty-fourth Street, near Second Avenue, above a gay piano bar, Brandy’s. Her parents owned a swanker apartment on Gracie Square. After the death of her father, a former head of CBS Sports, her mother couldn’t face living in the apartment, and the elegant space, with doorman, was going to waste. Howard suggested, as we were trying to find another arrangement, my moving into Sarah’s humble, affordable apartment, while he and Sarah would move into grander Gracie Square. Then we would be living a short walk away from each other, but still have our own spaces, and be paying much
less in rent, especially him. I accepted, not because I felt happy about the new shoebox-sized flat, but to shake off some dust.

If Howard had been wooing Sarah for just this moment, he couldn’t have done better. Yet in some flirtatious way they clicked, as brother and sister, boss and secretary, and just plain him and her. When Sarah was in Miami with her father one weekend, during the
Burroughs
distribution phase, Howard had come by their hotel, all aglow about a red convertible he’d rented, and took Sarah and her sister on a slow crawl through the Spring Break crowd, top down, blaring Jessye Norman singing “Amazing Grace,” to check out the kids’ responses. He also convinced Sarah’s dad, in that brief interlude, to get him good seats at a Bruce Springsteen concert in Madison Square Garden, which we took advantage of together. While cutting the Wilson film in England, he arranged a first-class standby on Pan Am for Sarah, to assist for a couple weeks. They took a road trip to Bath, and the highlight was Howard knocking on Sarah’s hotel room door in the middle of the night to convince her to drive with him to a gay bar in a neighboring industrial city. His pitch went something like, “Won’t it be fun? We’ll pretend we’re a honeymooning couple who have just stumbled into this bar, and see what the reaction is.” Off they went, he in Brooks Brothers, she in Ralph Lauren, and indeed the charade was fun.

Not included in Howard’s rosy sales pitch to me for our new arrangement was Sean’s camping out in Gracie Square. I’m not sure that he was written into the contract at the beginning. He was more the kid who came to dinner and never left. I felt a burn when I found out—a little zing, like a staple to the heart. By then I was seeing someone, Andrew, whom I’d begun dating while still in the Chelsea Hotel, come to think of it, who was sleeping in the shoebox some nights, too. So I chose to glaze over rather than erupt at this double-dealing, Howard’s crafty shadow side at work. After years of amending our contract of love, we were in such a free zone that the only clause left was no clause. And Howard’s complex arrangement at Gracie Square soon backfired, anyway. Often away in London, he revealed to Sean, on one return—unable to stop himself, bragging really—that he had had wild sex with an authentic Brit skinhead kicker. This bragging got him in trouble with Sean, who, well, made a scene, not glazing over, as I was wont to do. Adding to such lovers’ quarrels (I’m thinking now of Howard and Sean, not Howard and Brad) at that time, were the big guns of AIDS. Jealousy was not a life-and-death matter, but sleeping around could be, and was certainly a trump card in romantic strife. Sean, as I understood, now refused to sleep with Howard and removed himself to the couch. Howard had come to feel that Sean outstayed his welcome, but didn’t bank on the closeness that had grown up between Sean and Sarah during his absences. Nature abhorring a vacuum, the two of them had bonded, and Sarah refused to throw Sean out. Howard started dialing for a real-estate solution, and he and Sarah took a break from each other.

Robert Wilson was away even more than Howard, and, since they were still working on the film, offered him a place to stay, as long as he would vacate whenever Bob was in town. So Howard, the only one not exhausted by all these decampments—such a hopscotch board, I grow exhausted just describing it—moved into Bob’s fantastically minimal loft on the top floor of an industrial building on Vestry and West streets, furnished solely with spare examples of rare chairs Bob either collected or made—African birthing chairs, electrocution-style chairs made of metal tubing, a stage throne. Mostly the wide loft was dominated by a series of high windows
that modulated perceptibly with the variations of outside light, reflecting from below the metallic hues of the Hudson River and, from above, the sky, registering time and season. Its main room was a weather clock, like living inside a sundial, rather than observing one from the outside. Here Howard took up residence, filling in his study of Wilson more entirely, and still rent-free.

I landed in an apartment that only I really liked. And I truly adored it. Andrew, whom I’d reverse-romanticized as being “normal,” having grown up in New Jersey, a nine-to-five manager at a corporate kitchen, had a hustler friend named, perfectly, Mike Raven, who was leaving his apartment above an Italian
salumeria
on Eighth Avenue and West Twenty-ninth Street, in outer Chelsea. The ceilings were low, the appliances cheap, the wall-to-wall beige carpet worn, but I was happy to be settled back in my own mess, an experience I’d missed since Perry Street. I liked the seedy ambience, including doorbells ringing at funny hours my first few weeks there, by disappointed fellows looking for Mike Raven. (Raven died of AIDS soon after, a checkmark that we started putting after the names of more and more friends.) Picking up on this history, Howard, on his first visit, condescendingly cracked, “I feel like I should leave money on the table when I walk out.” I, contrarily, was infatuated by all of it, including the flashing sign with a map of Italy just outside my window.

Our agent, Luis, was partly right about our separation being partly work-related. For both of us, this elbow period in our lives—an elbow in the decade of the eighties as well, a little crook before the dark truth was revealed—was filled with manic work that seemed exciting and preoccupying, though now the details compress together in memory like accordion folds into a much smaller space. I segued from porn reviews to book reviews for
The Nation
,
through an editor, Duncan Stalker, who died of AIDS—another check—but not before he went to a new magazine,
Manhattan, inc
., reporting on the pulse of conspicuous moneymaking, frantic moneymaking, in Manhattan, featuring Donald Trump and other such recently minted types. He hired me to write a review of Martin Amis’s novel
Money—
on theme—that led to my first magazine profile, of club personality Dianne Brill, who also designed a line of clothes. Those 750 words led, with some fast maneuvering, to the editor in chief, Jane Amsterdam, observing that I wrote profiles as if I’d been writing them all my life. Perhaps, because what I’d been trying to achieve with more pretense in my arty stories was a minimal setting-down of whatever you could tell or see of people from the outside, without recourse to their thoughts—the point of view of movies and TV. Perhaps, too, my time in the threshing fields of fashion had acclimated me to the shiny world of money and power and extremely drawn character types. The vision Andy Warhol had of the American fame machine was now coinciding with mainstream media,
Interview
equaling
People
, adding a heady rationalization for me to pursue journalism.

What felt like two minutes later I entered the offices of Tina Brown, the new editor in chief of
Vanity Fair
, a magazine title and concept that
got
the serious joke that was being told right then with such great interest. Here was my version, the magazine version, of the Hollywood Sirens that Howard was hearing. Thirty-three years old when we met—a year younger than I—Tina was tingle-inducing, with her Princess Di short bob and her British lilt, and her embodiment, in her magazine, of an unabashed fascination with power and buzz in all its Reagan-era manifestations. All of which was made even more irresistible, and weird, by her big budget for
writers, and by the power on display in her office, where I recall a clockwork of bouquets sent over by happy subjects of profiles, or would-be subjects of profiles, that were carried in by an assistant for a quick glance and then out they went, until the next appeared, minutes later. I had written my second little profile, about Patti LaBelle, and Tina had the outrageous idea that I write a cover story about actor Anthony Delon, the son of French movie star Alain Delon. Having zero idea how to do such a thing, off I went to Los Angeles, and hung out with him, while staying in a hotel with sheets with a very high thread count. When I returned, Tina took me into a little room to show me my article, with Anthony’s picture as the cover of
Vanity Fair
. Not knowing that she had two or three alternative covers ready to go, perhaps goosing other writers as well, I went off thinking my mess was the cover story. It never did run.

I assumed that this failure of the Delon piece, which I took to be
my
failure, the other option being
his
utter failure in her sluicelike eyes, meant shambling back to writing porn reviews. But this failure only seemed to bump me up. Next Tina decided that I, and no one else in the world, should be sent to write a cover profile of the actress Kathleen Turner, whom I’d never heard of, as I’d been spending much of that year finishing and defending my dissertation. I was an adjunct professor in American literature at Columbia and was teaching a survey course that ran right into the hour of our interview, so I talked fast about Hawthorne, left early, and arrived to find the actress tucked into a booth at the Algonquin Hotel, as seductive as the character she’d played in
Body Heat
, which I’d watched in preparation for the interview. She seemed as rarefied as an expensive racehorse. In the limo on the way back to her townhouse in the Village, she stretched out one leg like a living movie poster. When we went into a TV repair
store on Sixth Avenue—why I can’t remember—people recognized her not from her look but from her smoky voice. As I left that afternoon she invited me to return sometime for one of her dinner parties. “I have some women I’d like you to meet,” she promised. I was more impressed that she had Mapplethorpe silver-gelatin prints lining her hallway. That cover story did run, but I heard that she was displeased, and I never did get to meet her friends.

Howard was on his own trajectory, arcing toward his own version of adrenaline made visible. He sketched out a few film scripts, hoping to interest PBS
American Playhouse
in producing a feature film. Burroughs’s
Junky
was one possibility; a Stephen King story another; and a film version of James Purdy’s Southern Gothic novel,
Eustace Chisholm and the Works
. I was scrunched in my apartment, finally turning all my modeling memories into a novel. I had such a hard time with my short-story attention-span that I tied myself to my desk chair to keep at it, else I’d find myself wandering the apartment, or the neighborhood, before I’d start up short and remember that I had been in the middle of a paragraph. Howard settled on combining four Damon Runyon stories with daffy characters with names like “Feet” and “The Brain,” made-to-order Howard-ish darkly funny types, shook them together, and poured them into New Year’s Eve 1928, just before the party went dark in the stock market crash of October 1929—pretty much a “bingo” match for where we were at ourselves, unknowingly, a half-year short of Black Friday 1987. He teamed up for this
Bloodhounds of Broadway
project with an old friend from Exeter, Colman deKay, a TV and screenplay writer. Howard had his own attention deficit issues when it came to writing. Colman was his version of tying himself to a chair—a professional and disciplined guy, who kept the bright laser focused.

Our lives had been simpler and more straightforward when we were starting out, living together a few steps from the Bowery. Our emotional and social life now was far more convoluted. Howard threw a thirty-fifth birthday party for me in the loft, to which he insisted that I bring Andrew. An old Ninth Circle friend, now scene photographer, Patrick McMullan took a picture of me lighting my cigarette from one of the candles on the cake. But Andrew left early because the unsaid bond between Howard and me spoke for itself, challenging anything else in its path. I slept with Howard that night, and I believe that he felt some sort of pyrrhic victory. Andrew soon broke off with me on the grounds that I didn’t own a couch, and he couldn’t be serious about someone who didn’t own a couch. He belonged to that new ilk of “guppie.” Howard’s complication was that he was now passing for straight, playing Hollywood as it lay, or so he insisted. Sean was still around, slouching, with allure, but he was an actor, and so he was dedicated to being straight, too. I could never be sure. Howard also had an affair going on with an extremely beautiful French actress. I would find Polaroids of her covered only in a white sheet, lying in bed, scattered about the loft, as if blown in from some French
nouvelle vague
film. I knew from modeling the weird sensation of one step forward two steps back on the gay issue—adapting to a closeted or bisexual life after having been openly gay. Now the culprit was supposedly Hollywood, but of course the unlabeled shadow of AIDS had to be factored in. We were being “straight” or “normal,” Hollywood or Madison Avenue, madly trying to pedal ourselves away from the stigma of a disease, and its accompanying gay world and bumpy life.

But that unwitting charade—not entirely a charade but a sort of coincidence concocted from subtle hints, and shifts, and whistles in the dark—did not work. The disease began to catch up with us. And then I saw it. Well, I didn’t see it. I heard it first. I was walking on a drizzly fall day, crossing Sixth Avenue and then Greenwich, passing by the Jefferson Library, with its gingerbread tower. I was thinking about the Women’s House of Detention, which was before my time but I believe had been situated in that triangular lot—now becoming a garden for the library. Women’s catcalls had supposedly been screeched down from the windows on hot summer days. Right then I heard a howl. I looked across the street, or by now I was narrowing in on Christopher Street, and across
that
street was a tall, thin guy in his thirties or so, with wiry spectacles, his skin as gray as the day. He had howled, and now he was bawling, and the tears were running down his cheeks like rain, more rain, and in his left hand he held tightly a pharmacy prescription, and I knew that he had just received his diagnosis and that now he was on his way.

Photograph by PatrickMcMullen.com