Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (2 page)

__________

A
ROUND THE TIME I MET HOWARD I NEVER WROTE
anything without help. I would sit on the floor in my studio apartment on a top floor on Perry Street in the West Village in Manhattan in 1978 with a pale-blue lap-size Olivetti typewriter, then reach for a cigarette and take deep drags until my throat burned. When I started to feel sick and dizzy, a few words would come, a thought-balloon. I was helped by cigarettes. Tareytons. Tareyton Lights. I smoked fancy cigarettes, too: joints. I kept a small, plastic Jiffy bag full of pungent flecks of grass. But they were for the rest of the time, not writing time, which was daylight and harsh nicotine, and a bottle of Astor Place vodka in the mostly empty, rust-stained refrigerator. When I was roiled enough from the Tareytons that I no longer could think straight, I felt I was no longer “myself,” and could write. When I got sufficiently high from the joints that I could not formulate any more words, I felt I was not “myself” enough to go for a walk in the neighborhood. When I drank in bars at night, a
ding
of joy went off, signaling that I was no longer “myself” and could meet someone.

That night, I definitely was not “myself.” It was May 1978. It was a night when steam exploded from manhole covers into pointillistic, grainy air on streets that were lit a dingy amber from sketchy streetlamps, made all the more intense by the ever-present faint smell of acrid dog shit. That is: a pretty standard summer’s night for the neighborhood, the West Village, at that time, near that place. The place: the Ninth Circle, half sawdust pool hall (downstairs), half gay bar with a jukebox and tables in the rear (upstairs) on West Tenth Street near Sixth Avenue, a block from New York’s oldest extant gay bar at the time, Julius. I had been coming to the Ninth Circle since 1971, when I was an undergrad at Columbia, way uptown. Then it was an almost “preppy” bar (though we didn’t use that word yet), collegiate, young. “Chicken hawks,” who liked young guys, went there. (I couldn’t imagine why, as I had a fetish, in college, for thirty-year-olds with jobs. A nine-to-five job, to me, was the most exotic of aphrodisiacs, better than poppers.)

On that ordinary evening, a poster of Mark Spitz was glued to a far wall of the bar. I know because, for a long while, I stared deeply into it. I remember his skin, so dark and deeply tanned—he was wearing a pair of American-flag swim trunks, with red and blue stripes, and pointy white stars at the crotch. His several gold medals hung heavily about his neck, forming a magic talisman that I imagined was casting a spell on me, glittering like a disco ball. I pondered whether Spitz was an icon in a gay bar because he was a buff, desirable athlete—a “jock”—or because he was overly wishfully rumored to be secretly gay.

Some friends had been with me earlier. The poet Tim Dlugos was definitely among them. Tim wore big glasses with transparent frames and usually a striped tie and jacket, chinos with creases, shiny loafers, very collegiate, though I was now twenty-six and he twenty-seven.
(I thought of him as a twenty-seven-year-old “chicken hawk.”) Was Dennis Cooper there yet or was that later? Richard Elovich was. Richard worked as what we liked to call an “amanuensis”—for the sheer Victorian rollout of the word—to more famous artists such as Jasper Johns and Allen Ginsberg. He was a friend of Howard’s and would have a part to play in the coming hour or so. Already probably obvious: it was an arty, literary bar, or lots of us had arty, literary pretensions. Actually I had been introduced, at this very bar, five years earlier, by the poet John Ashbery—who during the seventies often sported his own dark Mark Spitz mustache—to my first boyfriend, J. J. Mitchell, Frank O’Hara’s last boyfriend in life. Lightning could seemingly strike twice, or thrice, or innumerable times at this very same spot.

An invisible finger had just pressed down on the switch in my brain that I believed turned off “myself.” I could tell because, rather than looking around hopefully for Tim or Richard, I felt relieved that they and anyone else with a name or specific identity I knew was blurred. Not to sound too much like a disco lyric, but it was just me and the music. I won’t pretend to remember the name of the song that was playing, but I can remember the pastel greens, yellows, pinks, and purples of the rocket ship of a jukebox flashing, and I know its ambient notes were being registered on some neural receptor so that I felt them pleasantly numbing the top of my head, and there was Howard. I didn’t know his name yet, of course. He was just part of the nameless and undefined, more aural, waves of rhythm that the bar was becoming as I was sliding, and then, a sudden stop. I was seeing this light like a warm, soft aura around this guy just
as
I was seeing him.

Let me back up. We didn’t speak. Howard had been sitting with his film crew at one or two of the cramped wooden tables in the rear.
He’d snuck away for a minute and held a dark green bottle of beer, probably a Heineken, leaning inches to the right, and down on a diagonal from the poster, into the shadows, crammed in: about five-nine, curly dark brown hair, bantam weight, toned body tanned, almost Middle Eastern–looking. He was wearing a T-shirt, faded brown corduroys, and the beat-up blue sneakers with Z’s on the sides that he always wore back then. I felt his dark-brown eyes staring sharply into mine as I was staring into his. Then it stopped. Scuffing and shuffling interfered with sight lines and erased him like a squad of human erasers and I saw only his back, his damp reddish-orange painterly T-shirt, and I think I caught a musky smell, as well.

Quick, pick up the string, keep it going. Here comes Richard Elovich, five, ten minutes later. “You should meet my friend Howard.” Richard always had a sly way of saying everything as if it were a joke that only he and you and some other higher intelligences would get. I never did find out if words had been exchanged, or if this was coincidental, fated. Richard led me back to a table where Howard was sitting with his film crew. I’d never seen a film crew. But there they were, the NYU Film School students. I don’t recall, either, whatever urgent words we exchanged. But soon Howard was writing down his number for me on a chopsticks wrapper from a Japanese restaurant. On one side was the name of the restaurant, “Taste of Tokyo,” with step-by-step instructions and a line drawing showing how to use chopsticks, as Japanese restaurants were still very foreign. He wrote out his name, HOWARD BROOKNER, went back and doubled the letters of “HOWARD,” adding zigzags and squiggles so that it looked like the scarifying titling of a horror movie, leaving the “BROOKNER” normal. And his number. I traded mine. He said that he was going to visit his parents in Miami and would call when he got back.

I had a few quick first impressions of Howard that out-of-focus, tender evening that never changed. He possessed an insouciant charm entirely his own, like an original musician, more Tom Waits than Billy Joel, and could direct the full force of this charm on someone, while maintaining a noncommittal demeanor. He wasn’t tall, and in his medium-ness was most directorial. He was very sexy and very sexual and very intelligent about his sexiness so that its force was subliminal. He was a Mexican jumping bean—popular when I was a kid, you put them in the palm of your hand and they didn’t stop popping. Neither did he, between the gaffer and the sound guy and Richard and the bartender and me. He was not too fazed by being gay. Witnessing the Stonewall riots (just a block over from the Ninth Circle), eight years earlier, Allen Ginsberg told a
Village Voice
reporter, “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.” That was Howard: instead of a wounded look, a conspiratorial twinkle.

The phone did ring one afternoon in the middle of June. Howard was back. His voice was alluring on the other end, playful. He was twenty-four, two years younger than I was (I’d asked his age on that call) and working as an usher at the Met. He was inviting me to a Cuban dance troupe, filler during a slow week at the opera house. He’d scored free tickets. Somehow, remarkably, I hesitated, and made a lame answer along the lines of, “I don’t like folk dancers . . . or Spanish guitar.” I have no idea what I thought I was saying, but obviously I wasn’t given to much self-knowledge. I apparently had strict aesthetic standards that Cuban dancers somehow did not meet. Providentially, for the course of our lives, Howard tried again. His friend Brad was the lead singer in a punk-rock band and they had a gig at a basement club on Eighth Street Saturday night. The offer finally right, I said yes.

At some designated hour, Howard showed up, sweaty from having run down by the river. I forget how we decided that he would come by for dinner first, or that my apartment would be the terminus of his run. But I opened the door and there he was, tanner from Miami, the same electricity subtly activated. He was in shorts, a gray Exeter T-shirt—his prep school—the sneakers with Z’s, holding a paper bag with a fresh T-shirt to change into after the shower he asked to take. I returned to sit on two brown, corduroy pillows stacked next to my window for looking through the fire escape at a tender-blue, or pink, or gray sky. The time was early sunset. I was reading, or pretending to read, a red hardback translation of something by Jacques Derrida. I was a lit major in grad school at Columbia at the time, though not the kind of student to whom Derrida made much sense.

Howard emerged from the teeny bathroom wrapped in my
cheap white towel stitched with the blue letters “YMCA,” still wet. Now the two of us were pretending to be nonchalant in a very chalant (a word?) situation. The door shut and opened again and he was fully dressed, the same, but with a worn black T-shirt, intended, no doubt, for the punk concert later. By then I’d made my way across the six feet of available space to the refrigerator, where I took out a lump of red hamburger meat wrapped pretentiously in sheets of French newspaper. I worked, too, as an “amanuensis”—for the poet Kenward Elmslie. Born into the Pulitzer family, Kenward lived in a townhouse on Greenwich Avenue, and for lunch he liked to prepare
beefsteak tartare.
He would send me to a nearby French butcher, who wore bloody aprons, and then he would add his own egg yolk and capers.

So I added
my
own yolk and capers. “What are you
doing
?” Howard asked. I told him and he made a negative, mistrustful sound. It wasn’t the sound of an American dubious of all things French. Howard had lived in Paris for a year after college. He went to college at Columbia, too, two years after me, though we’d never met there. In Paris, he knew a very funny, highly theatrical girl, Melinda Patton, who soon would have a part to play in one year of our lives. Back then she was a waitress, and he a dishwasher, at Le Petit Robert, near Place Blanche. I, too, had lived in Paris, gone to the Sorbonne, my first year out of college. We had yet to discuss our overlapping adventures in Paris. Yet the
beefsteak tartare
did not lead, as might be expected, to a natural segue. I usually ate on plastic milk crates, so I set a red one down for Howard, by my bed (meaning my thin mattress on the floor), and a yellow one for me, by the brown pillows. But after looking for a few seconds at the mound of uncooked meat set before him, he balked.

“Umm, do you have a pan? I want to cook mine. Want me to cook yours?”

“Sure,” I answered, almost meekly, swallowing a clump of hurt and surprise.

Howard quickly scoped out my battered little kitchen. Within minutes he was pouring vegetable oil from an opaque plastic bottle into a huge and heavy metal skillet. Steam rose, meat crackled, and soon enough, the tables turned, figuratively, and he returned, putting down his own plate, and a plate for me of cooked ground meat, crispy brown, pungent, with no bun. The jar of Grey Poupon mustard intended for the
tartare
still out, we took turns relishing our now-hamburgers. Somehow we were already finding our way to our independent, occasionally insensitive, copilot rapport.

A joint was shared and we were out on the street. The walk was summery and crepuscular—a violet sky, a first star—as we made our way across the Village to the entrance of the basement club on Eighth Street, a few doors down from Sixth Avenue. A tall Frankenstein’s monster look-alike wearing some article of leather, a vest perhaps, held a clipboard and checked our names. We clattered down and took seats in the first row of folding chairs in a basement hall. The gawky band appeared. Brad was nearly David Bowie. He was tall, blond, bony, and narcissistic, in tight black pants, white shirt open on marble skin. Their music was garage-band rapid patter. Punk in its beginnings included lots of quick suburban high-school echoes, and a nerdy look, built on button-down white shirts and short haircuts, indicating a move away from more voluptuous hippie rock.

Brad was also gay, not just glam rock or crypto bisexual, and so he was adding something incrementally new to the developing
musical style, as I understood it, anyway. “Brad, meet Brad,” Howard joked when he took me over afterwards to meet the rocker, or simulation of a rocker. Howard made some flirty reference about Brad resembling Jim Morrison of the Doors, and Brad, moth to candle, was drawn into the obvious amber flame. Howard loved beauty, and open-ended flirting, and I already saw him, just a few hours in, seducing someone as a kind of magic act. Turning back to me, he joked insecurely, it seemed to me, something about his “creep collection” of friends. “Do you want to go to my place?” he asked suddenly, sort of interrupting himself. “Sure.”