Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (4 page)

I moved through the Mineshaft in a kind of trance, like a zombie, or sleepwalker. Most others were in a trance, too. I saw Kevin, Howard’s grip, there soon after we met and he had the same inability to say a word to me that I had to him. It was as if we were all shot up with some anesthetizing drug before we walked in. “Feeling no pain” was an important motivator. Drugs were in the air everyone breathed. I saw my doctor, who had a mostly gay practice on the Upper East Side, splayed on the pool table in the main room with poppers held to his nose and things being done to him. He was the brains behind giving antibiotics to all of us patients to take
before
going out, as a prophylactic measure against exposure to venereal diseases. Of course, the shortsighted tactic backfired within the petri dish of the Mineshaft as subcommunities became hosts to infections that soon developed resistances to the antibiotics and needed more and more powerful prescriptions. The place obviously had a risky edge. The doorman, a French furniture curator by day, purportedly threw someone down the steps and broke his arm in a rage over a misplaced handkerchief or inappropriate blazer or preppy loafers. I remember
thinking that this was Satanism lite—or “fascinating fascism,” to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase; something had to give.

But the two-storey dream box, full of floor hatches and shoeshine stands, torture devices and pillories out of Puritan Salem, also had an extraordinarily dark lustrous glamor, a cosmopolitan dandyism that must have rivaled the Hellfire Club of eighteenth-century London. Comparisons to the vertiginous latter days of the Roman Empire, or to Weimar Berlin, were always being made. I was infatuated with the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and had written a story, “Jailbait,” as homage to an early film of his. J. J. Mitchell presented Fassbinder with a typescript copy at the bar of the Mineshaft. Susan Sontag and some other women were rumored to have snuck in disguised as men to participate in its democratic voyeurism. I was mesmerized with one regular, a charismatic Jersey-seeming young guy always dressed in slick leather with every color handkerchief lined up in orderly fashion in his rear black leather pants pocket, who marched through the place like a martinet. One night a mutual friend, an art dealer, introduced us. He was Robert Mapplethorpe, and we had a polite conversation. A few days later he sent me a postcard with one of his photographs—a large uncut hose of a cock flaccid across skin inked with a pentagram. The message: if I ever needed a photograph for a project, perhaps we might collaborate. I felt a prissy clutch of embarrassment knowing that the proletarian mailman had seen the startling image of the tattooed skin and penis.

Howard had his own clubs, from the other side of the dotted aesthetic divide. He went to Paradise Garage, a members-only dance club in a converted garage on King Street in the lower West Village. He was very proud of his laminated black-and-white membership card and held on to it for years in the same way that I
held on to a precious, tattered copy of the Mineshaft “dress code” posting that I had charmed out of someone, maybe the doorman. Paradise Garage was alcohol-free, meaning that it was purely a druggie club. I went once with Howard, and remember a side ramp going up to a dance floor filled with mostly Latin and black kids. The bar was a regular hangout of Keith Haring, who had arrived in town the year before. (I later found out that Keith was the culprit writing “CLONES GO HOME” on the street, and that he had founded FAFH.) Howard’s other favorite was Mudd Club, which opened that fall on White Street below Canal. As it was more of a punk-rock club, I only went there a few times, and only with Howard. A joke on Studio 54, the club had a black-leather, instead of red-velvet, rope strung outside. As at the Mineshaft, only more so, fucking was taking place against the walls, and in the bathrooms, but mostly boy on girl. At the Mineshaft you heard trippy Terry Riley or Brian Eno electronic “head music.” At the Mudd Club you heard David Bowie or Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. Both spots were vehement enemies of 54 and disco.

Howard and I had the good sense, without discussing the issue, to know that if we wanted to get to know each other we would need to spring free of our routines, erratic as they were. Or maybe we both just wanted to get to the beach. It was August, and New York seemed hotter and more humid then than now. Howard, unlike me,
did
have an air conditioner, an appliance as gigantic as a washing machine, set in one of his front windows, though he complained that it only cooled three square feet of the loft. Howard was usually the more capable, get-things-done one. Pretty soon he took to describing me as a “luxury item.” For example, as part of his barter with the Bari brothers (who yelled out “Howie” every time they
saw him walking down the Bowery, as if he were some kind of pet or mascot) he was now mostly renting out their apartments to fellow film school students. He rented one particularly shadowy little place to Jim Jarmusch and his girlfriend Sara Driver. Jim had been a poet at Columbia, another Kenneth Koch student, who advanced farther into the future by deciding to be a poetic filmmaker. At NYU, he was a teaching assistant to Nick Ray, the wizened (at least in my memory) director of
Rebel Without a Cause.
That apartment turned out to be haunted, furnished in heavy wooden pieces left by the haunter or his wife—I forget the details of its horrific backstory.

So, naturally, Howard was the one to find our scam of a shack on Fire Island. I had been there two summers earlier, to the Pines, which was basically the West Village loaded onto the Long Island Railroad, then transferred to a ferry, then plunked down intact on this beautiful barrier reef island in the Atlantic Ocean. The Pines was filthy with money, young white males, angled beach-wood high-modern homes built to be flimsy, with the kinds of pools David Hockney was painting in southern California, a pervasive smell of coconut suntan lotion, and a loud persistent rumbling disco beat every night. Fantasies ran high. On my previous trip, the summer before—I was writing copy for a L’Oréal hair-care catalog, a job I scored by sleeping with the beach house–owning art director. I’d gone to the early-evening dance party, Tea Dance, where someone dressed as Batman, with a French accent, led by leash a Filipino boy dressed as Robin. The next day in the high sun Robin laid out fluffy beach towels for Batman. Calvin Klein had a one-lane lap pool where exaggeratedly lithe guys did butterfly strokes.

But that was the Pines. We weren’t going to the Pines. We were going to “Skunk Hollow.” We giggled at the name, and indeed the
place fit the name. But the place also fit us, and our relationship, and allowed a kind of orchid of intimacy—or stinkweed tree of intimacy—to grow and flourish, which the glossier Pines might not have done. Skunk Hollow was seven miles up the beach from the Pines. Howard knew some film school friends who rented a cabin there for the summer but made an early, unexplained, suspicious exit, and we paid them next to nothing to take over. The hitch (there often was one with these schemes of Howard’s) was that Skunk Hollow was condemned, or zoned off-limits for vacation homes, as part of a government dunes-reclamation program. Cabins were still standing but they were meant to be taken down, or bulldozed, or naturally obliterated by the severe winter weather. We were technically illegal squatters. Howard had found the equivalent situation in real estate in a wilderness area of beach that he had gravitated toward on the edge of the East Village. It was also a fantastically beautiful, magically surrealist dream of a hidden spot.

For days we holed up in the cabin. Besides falling stars, the other major natural phenomenon that year was jellyfish, little vermillion globs that washed up on shore and which we counted, scared now of going into the water. We took turns showering by emptying on each other buckets of water cranked from a pump. Howard brought along a Polaroid camera, and we made lots of purple-tinted photos that we scattered on the back porch. Our only neighbor was a hippie nudist with a big untamed gray beard who sat on his slanted shingle roof and stared. We never exchanged a word, but did joke that he was the spirit of Gay Love, watching over us. At night we drank acidic Astor Place red wine we’d lugged out, and ate hot dogs, pinto beans, and Spam. Having filled in our negligible romantic pasts for each other, we’d begun trading more detailed background
information. Howard told me about having been on the wrestling team in junior high school in Great Neck. He had recently, awkwardly, run into his coach at Cowboys, a hustler bar on the East Side. I found it sexy that he had been a wrestler and leeringly fantasized some.

Skunk Hollow clinched our deal. This really was first love for me. I’d had crushes, as had Howard, on straight boys, or assumed straight boys, all through high school and college. I think for gay guys, at least of that generation, the adolescent spring of first love, the pang often described in short stories, was invariably arrested. I suppose we
were
still recovering from fifties’ childhoods in a repressive society, where there was no such thing as “gay” or “coming out.” Most of us experienced our first love in our mid-twenties, in the seventies. And even though the smell and pitch of fast sex was palpable on every street downtown, so, too, were aching hearts and love-tossed looks. The seventies had a romantic aura because of so much first love among grown men. Howard and I said “I love you” for the first time in that cabin, and the tenor was far more resonant than anything I’d experienced with boyfriends I’d been dating until then. I forget who went first. But we didn’t do much talking about issues beyond that. I woke up the last morning with a choke of a cry, surprising myself, not telling Howard. From then on, we made an effort every summer to re-create that time together, the axis on which our world revolved, ever faster. Our bond was sealed with a look, the look I first got from Howard at the Ninth Circle, and again there, that last day on the beach.

The next year involved lots of walking. Either I walked to Howard’s gigantic loft in the East Village, or he to my little shoebox
in the West. That walk is bookmarked in my mind along with a gas station on Prince Street, lonely, moonlit Prince Street. When I saw that incongruous gas station, never open, its solitary Edward Hopper pump always seeming as if it belonged in a small American town of the 1920s, I knew that I was getting close. I was always walking to Howard’s place in the dark, after I finished my “homework” (I was back in graduate school, taking one more year of classes). Even closer was St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral at Prince and Mott. If we walked by together, Howard would reiterate that Martin Scorsese had gone to that church as a little boy and been inspired to moviemaking by its stained-glass windows and the stories they told. I would only make the reverse commute during daylight hours. My mental bookmark for remembering the reverse walk was turning down a decrepit cobblestone alley, around noon, after having brunch, and hearing Deborah Harry’s wailing “Heart of Glass” from a passing car radio—a one-time event—accompanied by a quick, fleeting flash of the awareness of being alive.

We had a poetic kick-off season. I know because some of the poems and letters that we wrote to each other have survived in this or that file or storage bin. I also know, reading back through the worn pages, that we were both already a bit sliced up by life, and that all was not smooth, could never be smooth. Yet the basic tenor was poetic, sexy. One day I ripped a pale-pink page from a collegiate notebook and wrote Howard a poem-letter, leaving every other line blank. A pulse of sexiness beats between those lines. I then made that half-hour walk, the mortar-brick-by-layer-of-brick of our relationship, to drop the page off and return home, a surprise for him to find on returning: “My running over here to leave this note is probably the kind of thing to make you look at me—after all a 26 yr. old man—and say, ‘You’re crazy,’ Well, yes and no. But these kinds of feelings can only go like arrow to tree (O hot cock!) The way when I’m feeling good I go straight in mind to you (O hot cock!). This is a romantic note. Truth wears lipstick, carries KY in hip pocket of Levis 501 button down jeans with white Fruit of Loom Woolworth’s Kresge’s underwear. There is no place I’d rather be now than here. XXX Brad.”

Howard also began writing a poem a day. I seemed to bring out the writer in him—one of his upcoming gigs was churning out a series of paperback porn novels for a heterosexual porn publishing house. He was able to stay up all night (with artificial stimulants) and concoct tales of coed nurses, horny cheerleaders, and hot wives, with surprising success. When he was late once, William Burroughs helped out by typing a few spontaneous pages of filler porn. He also turned out to have a talent for pulp romances. Howard was paid a couple hundred dollars in cash for each one, with cloying titles like
Whispers on the Wind
. The flip side of this talent was exhibited in his poetry. Actually I can’t distinguish many of his lines from my own. They were partly parody. A bit of one went: “Today, in your honor, I promised to write / a poem every day. I didn’t promise to type / well, punctuate, or proofread. My poem today is as follows: / The sun on Fire Island spreads itself evenly over my body. / Today you are the sun and tomorrow the smell of sex will be your calling card.” Its finale showcases the casual honesty that kept us ever alert, like some edgy party game of truth-or-dare that never stopped—“I don’t think I’d ever return to Rick, if he should return / to me. But I know I’ll never feel the same passion. / At certain spaced moments of passion, you erase his memory. / At others, you emphasize his absence. A terrible line, a terrible truth.” The humor, opening with
a cheap joke line, is Howard’s, as well as the peep show of his own depth psychology.

Howard had trouble giving Rick up—mostly a fantasy figure from the mise-en-scène he admitted to stirring up, as much a figment as a relationship Sister Mary Michael might call “real.” Sometimes, though, these figments took revenge on him, sorcerer’s-apprentice style, distancing him from felt life. I likewise had trouble giving up my own figments—the sexy boys at the bars and baths and the Trucks, a line of parked trucks in the West Village mysteriously left open nights and full of others like me doing nasty things to each other. My concession, more etiquette than morality, was that I started going to bathhouses so that I would be around at bedtime in case Howard called. The baths went on all hours of day and night, and lots of other sneaky types were hiding out there. The narrow cubicles were confessionals. After having sex with a stranger you would sit and talk about your lives, or hear a baritone and a bass next door talking about theirs. At the Everard, on West Twenty-eighth Street, Hasidim would hang around the edges of the cave of a steam room during the afternoons, bellies wrapped in towels, with long scraggly hair and thickets of beards, and wedding rings. Alternatives were the Continental Baths, on the Upper West Side, where I first went while in college, and where Barry Manilow and Bette Midler performed; and Man’s Country, in the Village, a tame playground, with a plastic model of an actual-size transport truck, along with a fake jungle gym prison cell of rubber bars.

Our warped lives, our shared predilection for the “far out,” was a bond between Howard and me, as well as between us and our peers. We were all trying strenuously to walk on the wild side. But the two of us were also drawn to each other’s
conventionality. Each of us had a family, and our connection to our families kept us trying to assimilate these weird daily experiences back into what we had known. At the time, living arty lives in Manhattan, and coming out in an increasingly bold and expressionist phase of gay culture seemed by far the more interesting half. In retrospect, maybe our attempts to build on some foundation, a shared instinct for something recognizable, was our more ambitious and interesting half. Early on, Howard talked of having children, long before even adoption was standard practice. He attributed his desire to being Jewish. And he was the first to bring up living together, in one of his autumn poems: “I think of the loft we are going to move into. / Strictly in my imagination you understand, I’ve / never discussed it with you; but I think of the / rooms, Bedroom, workroom—set off, sound proofed / with separate entrances. Rooms for being alone at night / Rooms for exorcising those private ghosts we both carry / Rooms to create sarcophagi, rooms to protect us from / each other.”

Howard liked to talk about how his grandmother bragged that she and his grandfather had never slept apart one night of their married lives together. I can’t say that we were yet sleeping together every night. But we were at least in the same town every night, which in itself seemed a remarkable intimacy. Enough so that I remember Howard’s first trip
out
of town, to film Burroughs in Boulder, Colorado, while staying in the Eldora cabin of one of William’s young disciples, Steven Lowe. When I was in grade school I knew a tall, pale, creepy but sympathetic boy who used to devour books about the Third Reich. Steven was of that ilk, with redder hair, but equally spooky. The filming was of William shooting his beloved guns. In keeping with the spooky style, Howard sent me a postcard featuring Alfred Packer, a local cannibal who had killed and devoured a party of miners in the 1870s. Howard’s message didn’t quite fit the medium: “Fri night, wish you were under me. Mysteries here in the mountains. Every mystery, every change I think of you. Sleeping alone is painful. I don’t dream and hear strange sounds in the night.”

Getting to know Howard meant getting to know William Burroughs, or not exactly getting to know him, but being around him, or in his den. I remained the suspect and never-entirely-comfortable onlooker. I adored
Naked Lunch
, which I’d read in high school, feeling inchoately aroused by its scenes of hanging boys with snapping erections. But among the important aesthetic divides of the times was that between the Beat writers (many gay: Bowles, Burroughs, Ginsberg),
and the New York School writers (also many gay: O’Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler). A letter from Burroughs, written in the mid-sixties, surfaced that included the chilly line: “On the credit side of ledger Frank O’Hara was hit and killed by car.” O’Hara would have been considered too French, too soigné, too campy, and, finally, too expansively humanistic for someone like Burroughs. I was already covered in that O’Hara French-school pastel paint. Grauerholz, though, liked some stories I was writing, and mentioned them to William as being “like Jane Bowles,” and so I was cut some slack. In any case, I would have gotten to tag along because of Howard, with whom William was unusually supportive, even gay-uncle-like. As Howard had written on that postcard from Colorado: “William is very cooperative in the filming, though I am very uncomfortable; but he’s trying to put me at ease.”

Burroughs lived in what he called “The Bunker,” with its punkish Hitlerian resonance (the same resonance evoked in the Eagle’s Nest leather bar, named after Hitler’s Alpine retreat). His “bunker” was the basement of a former YMCA on the Bowery, a half block from Howard’s loft. William liked it because there were no windows. The original graffiti were still sprawled on the concrete walls of the bathroom, with stalls, and a tall porcelain urinal. William enjoyed its soundproofed solitude. He could write at his old-fashioned imposing typewriter on a metal office desk facing a blank wall. At night he started drinking vodka, and there would be dinners with everyone sitting around a long table in orange padded chairs as if we were at a board meeting—but a board meeting out of
A Clockwork Orange.
William had some favorite routines, like the one about the drag queen in St. Louis who advised him, “Honey, some people are just shits.” If he was in a good mood, he would show off his collection of rifles, or a switchblade, or a gleaming machete from the jungles of South Africa. When William was away, Howard and I sometimes slept in his bedroom—a black hardcover copy of a book of dark spells, the
Necronomicon
, set on the dresser nearby—beneath an abstract reddish painting by Brion Gysin. I had some of the most vivid nightmares of my life in that room, about voodoo, and being buried alive.

Attempting to keep the books of his psyche balanced that season, Howard went to visit his parents in Miami, a second separation for us. The trip was traumatic for Howard. Even though he had not clued them in on our relationship, they decided to try to address, on that visit, what his mother termed his “big problem,” meaning his homosexuality. Howard’s father, Lester, was vice president of a
community college, Miami Dade, where he was semiretired, after having been president of Long Island University, and moving to Florida, for the pace and the weather, with wife Elaine. His parents actually turned out—when I met them the following year—to be more sophisticated than they sounded, on the gay issue; but that was then. I was entirely “Don’t ask, don’t tell” with my own WASP parents, whom Howard claimed to prefer because of their more checked-out, blank refusal to wade into his (and our) fraught personal lives. Howard was the middle of three brothers, and there would be some hint later that he had been his mother’s favorite. The family had lived in Turkey, when Lester was at the American University, but mostly in Great Neck, Long Island, and generally fit into whatever suburban image the place evoked.

The ambush of a conversation took place at an Italian restaurant, and, typically, for all its pain, Howard wrote me a hilarious, deadpan account of his discomfort: “It was in this atmosphere that my parents decided to embark on a discussion of my mental state, complete with a heart-rending and completely sadistic speech by my mother on the subject of my happiness; my ability to lead a ‘normal’ life with a ‘woman’; to choose my own lifestyle, not influenced by ‘others’ (read ‘deviants’).” They apparently had been clued in by Howard’s boyhood rabbi about some incriminating signs. But Howard must have turned up the heat as Elaine knew enough to bring up his more recent romantic car wreck with Rick: “She also asked me whether I was still depressed about the bad love affair I’d had with ‘this person last winter’ (lack of gender can mean only one thing—or am I just nervous). Anyway, Brad, this was a most uncomfortable Scungilli dinner for your humble narrator. I grinned a lot (a mother
can see right through a nervous grin), and promised to see a psychotherapist twice a week for the rest of my unnatural life.” I was reminded of the Frank O’Hara line, “All things are tragic when a mother watches!”

His parents went to bed, but Howard stayed up reading all the magazines he’d bought at the airport, watched
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
on TV, and then sat down by the lake until after four a.m. The Brookners lived in a development, in a kind of Fire Island–modern glass house on a little manmade lake, which eventually became a favorite location of ours, though not yet. He had a Miami boyfriend, Steven, and had seen him, but spent a paragraph bragging about his decision not to have sex with him, because of me, stressing, “This does not imply you have any responsibility reciprocal, or otherwise.” As the horizon grew brighter toward dawn, he went on: “Yes I think of you every time I look at the ocean horizon (a certain two-toned part of your face). Yes I think of you when I look at myself in the mirror after a shower, and when I stretch out on the couch late at night with my shirt off, my reflections in the glass wall. Surprisingly, I can’t remember a dream about you; not surprisingly you are my prime j.o. phantasy. I hope I can be open enough to be vulnerable to you. Clearly this letter is petering out. And so, to sleep.”

Soon enough Howard met
my
parents. I hated going to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, hated visiting my family, even though I was an only child, and kept to a strict regimen of three visits a year. Howard went with me that year, and from then on. Always, when telling anyone about our relationship, he stressed that he
went every year at Christmas “to see the Gooches.” Actually, that Christmas Eve we stayed on Perry Street, going first to Macy’s to buy presents to take the next day. At seven in the evening we were riding escalators in the nearly empty department store, feeling like two Charlie Chaplins in
Modern Times
, as if we were getting away with something. I don’t remember what token gift we found for my parents. For ourselves, we bought a portable black-and-white television and brought it back to set on a shelf in my apartment and, cornily, watched
Miracle on Thirty-fourth Street.
TVs counted as high technology in those days. Howard already had one. The first time I walked the West Village streets, while still a college student, I remarked at all the color sets visible in ground-level windows and, from that consumerism, registered the middle-class privilege, the entitlement, of this “first wave” of “out” gays.