The Fall of Princes (15 page)

The only private space was Carmela’s darkroom, from which she would emerge at the end of every day with ten or twelve prints. She knew the work was good. It was she herself who was inadequate.

“You don’t love me,” she would say in the darkness.

“Of course I love you.”

“Well then, you don’t love me enough.”

“And just how much would be enough? How would you know?”

“When you get there, I’ll tell you,” and she would turn away from me in the dark, and we would sleep without touching.

In the morning, she would bring me coffee in bed, and we would drink coffee and smoke, and look at the wall opposite the bed, where she had pinned dozens of photographs.

One day, after I had gone off to work, she took down all the pictures, put them in a brown paper shopping bag and walked with them down West Broadway and into Sonnabend, the best gallery on the street. She talked her way into seeing Ileana, Castelli’s former wife, who presided in a wig and her regal obesity over some of the most exciting art being made in the city.

Carmela dumped the contents of her paper bag on the gallery’s desk, and twenty minutes later Ileana had scheduled a show. September. The sweet spot. It wasn’t luck. It was tenacity and brilliance. The tenacity of a deeply insecure person, like the mother who is, miraculously, able to lift the car off the baby.

The opening was a triumph, and she had nothing but future. There was a party afterward at our loft. Five hundred people came, including the homely waitresses and saxophonists who had posed for the pictures.

And, sometime during the party, Alan said good-bye to the world. We played the Albinoni adagio at the New York State Theater and sat silently through a slide show of Alan’s best work. Keaton spoke. Bette Midler sang “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Eros and thanatos. Glamour and death. Sooner or later, some side would win, one side would prove stronger than the other, and Alan would be largely forgotten, in the way that the five hundred guests, so used to going to openings and book parties at the houses of people they didn’t really know, would wake up the following morning and wonder, while the coffee dripped, exactly how they had spent the last evening.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Packing Up the Circus

C
armela divorced me by six o’clock on the day I got fired.
Semper paratus
. We had been together almost exactly two years. There was no issue, as I had always known there wouldn’t be.

The following morning, I walked into a Ferrari dealership and bought a $300,000 car, whose seats hurt my back. I bought it in a rage and drove it in pain until it went for pennies on the dollar in the great fire sale that my life was to become.

Carmela got everything. I gave with an open hand until there was nothing left but bare skin. I moved back into Hovel Hall, painted it battleship gray, and roamed the nights with the rats.

There was an unmistakable sense, no matter how perfectly the suits were pressed, that the tide was somehow turning, and I was helpless in the tidal pull.

Carmela had loved Solitaire, a game I had almost never played. Back at Hovel Hall, I sat on the floor every night, after coming back drunk and stoned from the clubs, and played game after game of Solitaire, an open bottle of gin by my side. I played until I passed out or the gin was all gone or it was time to go to work.

Slap
.
Slap
.
Slap
. The cards endlessly went into their piles.

I was in mourning.

Three months later, at five in the morning, I played a perfect hand of Solitaire, sitting on the grimy floor of the apartment where I had acted with such sexual profligacy, even as I lived with Carmela in one of the most beautiful lofts in the most exciting city in the world.

I played the hand out, all the cards falling into four neat and undeniable ranks, and then I put the cards away, and I never played again, and mourning was over.

But Carmela never ended, and Alan never ended; the red chandelier still hung in the darkened dining room, and nothing from those days was ever over.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In the Grip

O
f such terrors and demons, we are. The bodies litter the streets on which we walk. They ride with you in taxis. They sing hymns with you in church. They are everywhere, the dying, and their names are the names that fill your Filofax, which you grip to your chest with the passion you used to feel in a lover’s embrace. Every day, you cross off another name, and write in your calendar another memorial, another black suit, another eulogy, a reading from Millay, a song from
Chorus Line,
a pair of tap shoes and a red rose on some buffet table upstairs at the Russian Tea Room, still decorated for a Christmas long past.

It was 1984, the year the plague came out of hiding and showed its fangs on every street corner, and fear ran not just in the veins of our infected friends, but in the streets, like blood beneath the guillotine. Don’t share a dessert, don’t sit next to a man who has cut himself shaving, the year, in fact, that razors were no longer to be found in gyms, the virus can live in a teardrop, so don’t tell me you can’t get it from a toilet seat, and there was only one thing it meant in that sentence, and that was death. God forbid you nicked your neck shaving. You would count the days until the wound had healed completely, taking that as a sign you were safe.

My first thought, every morning—God help and forgive me—when I thought of my fallen colleagues, was that there were fewer dogs to bite me in the ass on the way up the ladder. I remember that thought with shame almost every day, and there is no undoing it, and there is no one to forgive me. Certainly I can’t forgive myself.

So many dead. So many funerals. People who had never needed a dark suit before, now finding themselves putting one on two or three times a week. So many mothers and fathers who found out that their sons were homosexuals only when they saw the hideous bruises on their handsome young faces. The gaunt young men, strong and eager just a summer before, shuffling the streets of the Village. A restaurant called Automatic Slim’s, whose name became synonymous with the disease.

Those nights in the clubs, in the dark bathrooms, the nights of unbridled sex, were now coming back to tear a whole generation into shreds of paper, tiny announcements in the
Times
. “After a short illness . . .” So many dying with not one solitary soul at their bedsides. The riotous spending by men who knew that their debts would die with them.

Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot

Yet he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day

. . . the feats of bravery and cowardice, of foolishness and fear, young men whose lives turned into a sea of sorrow in an instant, with the first cough, the first red blotch on their sweet skin, and nobody paid attention, nobody paid attention, and there wasn’t even a test until 1985, so the only way to know you had it was to get it, the outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible death, the day the music died, to steal a phrase, and there couldn’t be any sharing of glasses or toothbrushes, no kissing, that greatest of inventions of Western civilization, and still men went to the baths and roamed the halls naked until dawn, fucking anything that passed, often not caring, some actually longing to be stricken so as to join their brothers.

And I’ll say this once, and not again, and then I’ll lay out the cards and you tell me the answer. People say there’s no such thing as bisexuality, that bisexuals are homosexuals who are too afraid to embrace who they really are, and I say those people are lying to you, because they can’t admit in their drab lives that there are men in whom the sexual urge is so strong it can be triggered by many forms of beauty, I lived with women and I fucked men, always on top, always the aggressor, the dominator, and I have never been happier, and have been less happy since the day the roads diverged in a yellow wood and I chose the one less traveled by, and I was diminished because of that choice and long for the days when I would wake up with her in my arms and meet him for lunch at the Pierre. Lunch for $700, the beauty of touch at noon.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home

Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named

. . . and he will say, “I was there. I bear witness and what do you do? You place ads online and meet men for five minutes in a cheap motel and call that love because you cannot, will not grow up, because in all the world you are denied the right to couple, because you would rather spit on yourself than be spat on by strangers in the street, strangers who hate you, who wish you dead.”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day,”

Except the scars are invisible now, the cry of pain is muted by the noise of the world, the yackety yack of young men who march in parades half-naked to proclaim their solidarity, their mothers and fathers walking beside them, and the whole idea of gay rights has turned into something that says that two men are free to kiss and feel each other up in front of Tiffany’s.

And being a homosexual has lost its hidden power, its intoxicating allure, because it has lost the vicious prison of its secrecy, and love is no longer made on the gallow’s steps, but en plein air, with all the world to watch, and sensuality has been replaced by mere vulgarity, and we who are old and have lived through it, yes, strip our sleeves and show our scars to a world that does not watch and does not even care.

And you want to say to all those mincing, self-loathing queers filling the aisles at Barney’s, “You think I’m old and useless and unattractive, and I am, but I’m here to tell you that I invented you, I allowed you to become the kind of man who drinks mojitos at the Standard in Palm Springs, to fill the clubs on Mykonos every night with shabby, sanitized versions of what we knew and made live because there was a burning in the blood, a burning for sex, that act which, regardless of reproductivity, creates life every time it is performed.”

And, if I could recreate for you the sexuality, the unstoppable force of kissing in 1979, the compelling secrecy that was homosexual life, the cruelty that caused Helter Skelter to jump out the window upon hearing his own death sentence, in the years just before the war, the feeling of lying skin on skin, and tongue to tongue and cock to cock, you would reel from the power of it, as though you had been struck by a Taser. You could not handle it. You couldn’t bear it.

We are unfit to teach children.

We are unfit to raise families, an oddity like a dog that walks on its hind legs.

We are the death of religion and the albatross around the neck of American politics.

We are the starving children wolfing down as much as we can at the table of American culture.

We are incapable of playing the romantic lead in a Hollywood movie.

We were once the love that dared not speak its name, and still we lay naked and tangled and sweaty, children huddled in the storm, so tender, so kind, so violently in love. Now we blare that love with bullhorns during the second act of
Tosca
and we have become as heartless as the rest of America, the most heartless country on the planet.

We have been bound with barbed wire and beaten to death, we have killed one another, because for all the marches and the banners and the drag queens on TV, while Holly and Candy and Jackie are forgotten, we are still, as children, taught to loathe the thing that makes us who
we are.

It is 1981. A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican drag queen who calls herself Putassa walks into a room full of men in evening clothes and I say to a friend standing beside me, “Who is that creature?” so perfect in her loveliness, so graceful and charming and delicate, so unacceptable in every way outside this room, outside of this moment, and he says, “That is the most beautiful boy in New York,” as the lights dim and Holly and Jackie in black sequins and boas descend a staircase singing “Broadway Baby” from
Follies
. And Putassa gets up the next morning and goes to her day job at Saks, modeling designer clothing for rich women to choose from, including a blue satin ball gown by Oscar de la Renta eventually bought by a slightly heavy woman from London named Alexis Tayloe, who, to this day, wishes she had found more effective ways of cutting me to the quick, after I had expertly fucked her for eleven nights in a row.

But, people will tell you, look how much better things are now than they were then. Equal rights, equal protection under the law. You can GET MARRIED!!! And those same people leave Matthew Shephard to rot in a ditch in Montana, and feel squeamish when two female lawyers with two children move in next door, liberals on the Upper West Side who snicker behind their hands when two men walk by with a Vietnamese baby in a stroller. Two successful young men turning a slant-eyed baby into a queer.

And I, who could find nothing but self-loathing on either side of the Rubicon because what I wanted was both, because I wanted it all, and that is not allowed, despite my voracious appetite for both, because that is not allowed.

You play the violin all your life, does anybody call you a violinist? Suck one cock—BRANDED, that’s how the old joke goes, and I love old jokes and now I am one.

And if you ask me if I pity myself, I will say to you, goddamned right I do.

And if you ask me if I despise myself for the things I’ve done and the men and women I’ve slept with and hurt, inevitably, how could I not, I will tell you.

But if you ask me if I despise you, the answer is, often, yes. Sometimes I despise even the few who are left whom I hold dear in my heart. I despise them and love them at the same time. I think of every person I have loved every day, and every night I keep them in my prayers.

No woman will touch me because I may have known someone who knew someone who slept with someone who had
it,
and men will not touch me because I am somehow a betrayal of their fucking lifestyle. Because I do not like sitting around the pool at Joshua Tree with an all-male group in white linen, with identical bodies and identical patterns of speech. I stepped outside the logo-strangled tribe once too often and I am not to be trusted and now it’s over, anyway. I am too old to care. Not too old to want, but too old to care. People think that, as you age, the fire of your passions burns down to ash in the grate, but it is not true. It rather quickens and intensifies, like a pasta sauce you have let reduce on the stove to bring out its richest, fullest flavors.

And, after all the funerals, and after 700,000 deaths, starting with those forty-three in 1981, starting with Patient Zero, starting twenty years before that in Africa
,
still fifty thousand people get it every year in this country, this country where we never even think about it anymore, and all of Africa is dying and who cares, and we go to our jobs and lie in our beds at night and remember one night, one late night at Studio in the balcony with my friend Nancy on one side and some bartender on the other and how can you help but not miss it.

I was there.

I remember.

Who the fuck wouldn’t remember. Nobody does, now, these laughing, ageless boys with their sleek haircuts and their jobs in advertising and their weddings in the
Times,
but how could they? Forget? How could they affront their fathers, their brothers, the men who fucking invented them? We look through the paper-thin slices of lime you hold in your beautiful teeth and we spit on you. Because you know nothing. Because you forgot. You didn’t know?

The men who survived, only to find their relationships and desires a burning crude-oil wasteland around them—
forever? The men who never got their mojo back, who wake up now in a cold sweat of remorse, survivor’s guilt? Men who cannot look another man in the eye without seeing the shadow of the virus floating there? These people were, are still in some cases,
friends
of mine, and we are, even to each other, aliens. For so much of what we know there are no words, not one gesture to hold the heart together. Not anymore.

Matthew, are you there? Will you ever be home? I think about this all the time. Rick? Who got the Mercedes? Billy, have you seen Tony? Has anybody seen Billy? He doesn’t answer. And Morgan, where in France are you and will you be gone long? Gone forever? Who will cut my hair?

And I knew, when I first read the article in 1981, July 3rd, the day before Independence day, about the poor forty-three who had been diagnosed with a mysterious “gay cancer,” that I had the disease in me, that I had carried it since I was a child, lying dormant, and that every woman and every man that I had slept with was going to die, just as I was going to die.

I not only had the plague, ran my thinking, I
was
the plague. I had pawned my moral compass for a pair of shoes and a gold Rolex, and the devil had me by the balls, brass though they may be.

But I didn’t die. My lovers didn’t die. I, in fact, thrived.

My years of apprenticeship were over, and as people died all around me, as we crossed the street when we passed St. Vincent’s Hospital, the money just started to pour in. Like a septic system that gets stopped up, the shit was everywhere, covering everything with green. Nobody ever mentions it, but there is no color more beautiful.