Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (7 page)

For his part, Howard, rather than ignoring his prying parents, decided to take me along on his next visit to Miami. Elaine, his mother, would always tell the story: “I was very suspicious. Who is this older man stealing my son away from me? But then I saw this face, and who could resist a face like this, like an angel?” she would say, and lean over to pat my cheek. She also told Howard regularly that “Brad is the kind of man women find attractive,” an appraisal that had a weird edge I tried to decipher but never could. Her reassessment must have taken place at the luggage claim at the Miami Airport, where I first met her, amid lots of hubbub. I could see her son in her tanned, urbane face. She was picking us up, driving us to the development on the lake, and then rushing off to play tennis in her sporty whites. Howard’s father arrived later, from work, the quieter of the two. If there was more drama, I was spared it. Howard and I drove around South Beach—mostly old age homes with grandmothers rocking on the porches. We skulked in sweaty Cuban bars and drank beers and talked, talked, talked, as if we’d just met. The Brookners went off for a few days and we queasily broke a taboo by making love in his
parents’ bigger bed: smell of suntan lotion, sound of lake crickets, view of planetarium stars in window.

If W. H. Auden was the “more loving one” in his lifelong relationship with Chester Kallman, according to the gossip at Joe LeSueur’s, Howard and I did not have any such simple equation. I think we were both in it equally, though our different temperaments registered matters differently. Howard sometimes felt I didn’t care because I was going off to Europe, or sleeping with a guy I’d met on the subway. I felt that Howard was mean, or belittling, and, so, uncaring, when he was hypercritical and faultfinding and bitingly humorous, which I called “chipping away.” “I know this is a flaw of my grandmother—complaining and criticizing people,” he admitted. “I have inherited this curse.” But the pluses and minuses always resolved into an equals sign. Whatever ghosts flitted occasionally through the apartment, the relationship was essentially strong. That season, I wrote a poem, typing at my big desk in the front room, that captured forever for me that place, and the feeling tone of us in that place—the tilted stage set of this second or third phase of our first love. It was another letter-poem, with no title, just “Howard,” a dash at the top, and memories of intimate times in the parlor:

And fire, fire is what you make dexterously in our dangerous

Fireplace, when it gets cold and we drink and talk, politely,

As though we were just introduced by the lamp to one another

__________

S
OMETIME IN SPRING, 1980, I TOOK A PLANE TO
Milan. Dan Deely at Wilhelmina made a deal with an agency in Milan with the spunky American name “Model Plan” for me to travel there. All the planning was done by telex, the great-uncle of the fax machine, and the price for the Alitalia ticket was advanced against future monies that I would undoubtedly be pulling in—an arrangement that resulted for me in a kind of indentured servitude, though I wasn’t yet intelligent enough, in the sense of “street smarts,” to foresee this. My head was too full of flashing strobe units and the contours of a smooth and glossy new world. Walking into the Men’s Division at Wilhelmina did feel like walking onto the set of a TV show. Modeling was a world controlled by the image-makers, as if we were all trapped inside a TV set or, flattened and two-dimensional, inside a mirror. I felt unstuck, out of place, and never shook that jangly, ominous feeling, a taste of poisonous excitement.

We had mirrors at home of course, too. Mostly I gravitated toward the standing oval mirror, framed in walnut, a Victorian umbrella
stand left by a bygone resident. I tried to figure out my best angle by turning this way and that. I was also going on “go-sees” for work (that never panned out) or test photographs by photographers who were themselves looking for work. Often these photographers wound up wanting to take nude shots and suddenly I turned from a standard-for-the-era promiscuous gay guy into an uptight potted flower who was shocked and could never do such a thing, while all the white-bread college athletes sent by the agency didn’t think twice as they slipped out of their Levis (and usually no briefs). I was more comfortable studying my angles in the mirror in the corner of our front room. Or checking out the tight, uncomfortable, tan Tony Lama boots I spent all my money on because they made me an inch taller, or the rough hair gel versus soft hair gel. Whenever Howard caught me in the act, he’d scoff or look worried, depending on his mood, while I’d pretend, as if we were in a “Lucy” episode, to be examining a splinter that might have flown into my eye or some other fake cover-up.

In the fraught week before I left for Milan, I did the unthinkable. I went on a bender after a party and escaped to the Mineshaft, while Howard slept alone, using as his pillow a rolled-up sweatshirt of mine from France, with a rooster emblem and the word “Training” on it. (Not out of tenderness, just a weird mistake; he was drunk, too, but the tangle was my first bleary sight when I walked in, gray light beginning to suffuse the plastic window sheets.) We had a terrific hungover fight that went on all the next day, with lots of quiet yelling (resembling actual yelling, but neither of us raised our voices), and crying jags, unbroken until I blurted out, when he threatened breaking up, “Then I won’t be able to be the Beast anymore!” Somehow that cry from the heart broke the spell I’d conjured—that, and showing my understanding of the seriousness
of my act by having an emergency session with Sister Mary Michael in her medieval tower. She shared a few banal zingers, obvious news, backed up by past evidence. “You’re afraid of intimacy,” she said. “You two seem to need to fight every time you’re facing a separation.” If I’d been sniffy about doing nudes, that day I felt psychologically naked, and blushed with shame. So we reverted to our comfort zone of lawyerly deals. I recorded all the clauses in my journal: “We have a commitment not to find new lovers for the next 9 months, though we’re not committed to abstinence. Also H. may try to come to Milan to edit for a month.” At the airport, waiting for my plane, I was still scribbling: “I just feel
very very
relieved that we left on good terms, not break-up terms. Now I’m just exhausted from the tremendous emotional drain.”

I recently found a letter Howard wrote that Thursday, just a few days after I left. I don’t know why it was never sent but he expressed all the ache and roiling that I felt that long night on the way to Milan in my cramped tourist-class seat and tight Tony Lama boots—the confusion about what in the world I was doing. Was I running away? Would this quest make sense? (Absurdly, I dramatized trying to get jobs selling dress shirts or bridegroom pants as a “quest.”) “Monday morning I was on the verge of tears all day,” Howard wrote in blue ink on three-ring-notebook paper, in his pebbly penmanship. “Today again. I had love attacks all day, the melancholy kind. Tonight I came home to an empty house, and objects were weighted with all those things which provoke memory. When you are here, I still feel as if you’ve gone. Everything about you is precious to me. I love you as much when we are always together, as when we take little vacations away from each other. But when we’re apart, I dwell on the details. I can see your love flowing towards me. I don’t feel abandoned. This is
life. We are both pursuing careers, and this is the result. I know I can wait till you get back. I’ll work on the film, videotapes, be reminded of you when I go somewhere, hear a certain song, smell a whiff.”

Still crashing when I arrived the next morning, I made my way through the little glass Malpensa Airport, almost like a small-town airport, except for gray-uniformed guards with oversized machine guns. I was weighted down with my own brown L.L. Bean duffel bag. On the way into town in a cab I decided, “Milan is the Pittsburgh of Europe,” and then used that formulation endlessly, when I found it made people laugh. I had lived in Venice and Paris, after college, but wasn’t finding the intricate charms of those cities—cats’ reflections in canals, florid marble statuary, cracked ruins—in brutal, contemporary Milan. Squeezing under underpasses, we passed smokestacks, glossy billboards, and elevated power lines crowded with birds, arriving finally in a city center of stolid gray buildings. Long, red Communist banners hung from a department store as an angry crowd out front shouted slogans, shaking their fists. “
Sciopero
,” the driver said. “Strike.” (There were many in those days.) When we arrived at the address I’d written out—84 Corso Magenta—I was deposited abruptly on a sidewalk in the late-morning sun.

Model Plan (modeling, in Europe, in that era, was all about marketing American-style brands, using mostly American models, hence the agency name) was housed in a Renaissance-style palazzo, with a courtyard full of fountains and cypress trees, down the street from the church with Leonardo’s
Last Supper
mural, which was being restored the entire time I was there. Only able to make out patches of a painted yellow robe or snatch of gray beard behind workers’ scaffolding, I would often duck into its cool, dark shadows to escape the excesses of the Italian fashion world. The bookers’ room at Model Plan was
at odds with the solid, brown, antique shell of their building. Two men and two women sat around a clear plastic table, on plastic swivel chairs, talking on brightly colored plastic phones, all in sleek contemporary Brionvega design. One of the men’s bookers, Simon, was a black Brazilian, the other, Luigi, a native Italian. They feigned surprise at seeing me. “You weren’t supposed to come this week, were you? Did Dan say? Do you have your book?” They passed around my clunky book of pictures. “
Stupendo
,” exclaimed one of the women, thankfully. “But it’s a holiday and there is no work until next week.” “
Facciamo il ponte
, we make a bridge,” explained someone—Italian for stretching a vacation from Thursday until Tuesday. They made a few calls, set me up in a hotel, and out I went again, feeling blindfolded and spun about three times.

Pensione Carrobbio was a few blocks down from the gray mud-drip Duomo Cathedral, which was on a square banked with Times Square–style billboards and the glass arcade of the Galleria, where boys skateboarded on wet pavestone all night long. The hotel was fine for tourists on a budget, less fine as a home for four months. My cell of a room was a fusty conglomeration of a narrow bed, a shuttered window that muffled all light, a plastic bidet stashed under a corner sink, and, the only touch that, weirdly, reminded me of my real life—my already former life—a copy of a Bronzino painting of Neptune. More vivid was the parlor downstairs, like the parlor of one of my aunts or grandparents in Pennsylvania, with the one available phone. Much time was spent trying to call Howard in New York, or trying to be there when he called. More attempts than not were failures. “
Aspetta
,” the owner would say, taking the paper on which I’d written down our number in New York for the nth time that he had to call from his little office with the framed cheap illustration
of the Virgin Mary, roses sprouting around her face, pasted on the wall, while his family sat in the kitchen eating pasta and smoking and yelling. Fidgeting on the couch, I flipped through a pile of books left behind, mostly cheesy Harold Robbins novels. In and out were American kids, all would-be models. I realized I’d been typecast, but wrongly. The first of my colleagues I met was a tall basketball player from Michigan whose “girlfriend from college” and “real girlfriend” were both living on our floor, he informed me, stressed. Having spent a decade escaping high school, I felt dragged back.

Milan was an innocence-destruction machine. My own innocence was mostly gone. But other newbie models tended to be juvenile, on the cusp of their twenties, often never having been out of the Midwest before. A lot of the young women ended up on yachts rather than go-sees. Modeling in Italy came awfully close to prostitution, with bookers doubling as pimps. I was the only openly gay male model I knew, and I was circumspect, as if I were back in high school. But there were, I noticed, a number of guys going off for the weekend on a Greek island with an Italian designer and coming back with contracts for a big campaign. Especially because I wished to write a novel, the more dramatically their innocence was challenged, the more interested I became. I did spend lots of time in my room, where it was always dusk, scribbling notes about these kids, romanticizing them as a new “lost generation,” partly to put a nice spin on my own plight and keep me from imploding from a combination of nerves and boredom.

I was entranced that spring by one of the earliest of the famous Calvin Klein male models. When I left New York, or on a quick trip back, his image, naked and muscly from the waist up, filled a several-stories-high painted billboard on Times Square. In Milan, he was rumored, in knowing asides, to be a heroin addict who kept
stealing camera equipment on shoots to pay for his habit. True or not, when he’d stumble, or stride, into a casting in some courtyard, in Army fatigues and reflector sunglasses, I’d watch for signs of collapse, wishing he would be my new best friend, imbuing his distress with James Dean tonalities.

Gay cut both ways in that border time in that border culture. To Italians, all male models were assumed to be gay hustlers. So outsourcing male fashion jobs to Americans wasn’t entirely a compliment. No self-respecting Italian male peacock would do the dirty work. I was booked to do a shoot for
L’Uomo Vogue
by Oliviero Toscani, who was adding to Italian fashion what Fellini added to film—a circus atmosphere. The spread, dominated by wedding scenes, was titled “Matrimonio.” In mine, the edgiest, dressed in a double-breasted business suit, I held hands with another boy model, also in a suit. Ahead of its time, the shot was seen less as the call to liberation Toscani presumably intended than as a punch line, and, like a Hollywood actor doing a gay part (considered career suicide at the time), an aura of queasiness stuck to me. My biggest near break came when Giorgio Armani summoned me for a one-on-one as the “face” of his next campaign. Armani was impressive, a mensch. Short, tan, robust, with wavy silver hair, wearing some approximation of a white lab coat, sitting at a black marble table in an eighteenth-century palazzo, he looked at my pictures with a long-stemmed magnifier. “I like your hair back like this,” he said, tapping a photo. “If we use you, we will probably wet the hair.” When the booking failed to materialize, Luigi (at Model Plan) told me it was because they’d heard I had sex with an Armani assistant I’d met at Prima Donna club—high school, again. No matter the homoerotic subtext to these ads, rumors of actual gay sex were a hard no.