City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (38 page)

Oddly enough, I felt she would appreciate the aptness of my portrait, that she would
learn
from my implied admonitions. Of course on another level I knew I was trashing her and that she’d be angry. When she really was angry, however, I was surprised.
I suffered over our break and for years afterward I’d dream of a reconciliation. Just as I’d dreamed of meeting her before I actually knew her, now I fantasized about a full pardon and a renewed friendship. Because I was bitter and fearful and felt guilty about my “betrayal” (if that’s what it was), I joked and said, “The worst thing about a reconciliation would be that then I’d have to see Susan. Ugh!”

But Susan was so angry that she asked Roger Straus, her editor, to contact all my foreign publishers and request as a courtesy to her and to him that they remove her blurb from the next edition of
A Boy’s Own Story
in every language. That move was effective. (Years before, Susan had done something similar to the gay American writer Alfred Chester, who’d used her words of praise without her authorization.) Maybe the break was worse because I’d made no effort to stay in touch with her or David. When my editor, Bill Whitehead, gave me a big masked ball in New York, complete with a brass band, David tried to barge in with a bullwhip; I suppose he wanted to beat me as a “cad.” He who’d written about Beau Brummell was given to such posturing. Luckily he was turned away by the bodyguards at the door.

Soon after I arrived in Paris I had lunch with George Plimpton’s sister, the poet and painter Sarah Plimpton. I told her I was planning on staying just a year in Paris. She said that she’d told herself the same thing but that now she’d been in France for twenty-two years. “You’ll see, it’s like lotus land,” she said.

Indeed that’s what it turned out to be, especially in those prosperous Mitterrand years. I didn’t really escape from AIDS. Many of my French friends died, including Foucault and Barbedette, just as back in America Bill Whitehead died and so did Norm Rathweg and so did my dearest friend, David Kalstone. Gradually I became more and more somber and my Parisian life became as dark as my New York life. I sat by many bedsides and held many emaciated
hands. I didn’t feel the famous survivor guilt only because I was positive myself and expected throughout the eighties to die within a few months.

Sixteen years later I moved back to New York, and one day I ran into Susan Sontag in a restaurant. I’d rushed over to her table without recognizing her because I’d spotted a Parisian friend, the Argentine film director Edgardo Cosarinsky. Suddenly I thought, “Oh, dear, this woman with the short white hair must be Susan Sontag after her chemo. And this other woman must be Annie Leibovitz, her girlfriend.” I hurriedly slunk back to my table.

But then, in a flash, there was Susan standing by my table. She said, “Ed, I hope you don’t think I was ignoring you because of our silly little feud.”

I stood and she embraced me. We agreed that we’d get together, that all was forgiven, that we’d patch it up.

But the next day when I saw her at Cosarinsky’s screening, she was distant. I realized too much time had gone by. That our reconciliation hadn’t really “taken.” That was all right. We’d both become different people.

When I look back at the seventies, I remember the decade primarily as one of professional struggle. I started the decade as an unpublished and no longer young writer, fairly driven but susceptible to terrible, almost suicidal despair. By 1983, when I moved to Paris, I was still hustling for money and I was never sure where next month’s rent would be coming from, but I was no longer entirely unrecognized and desperate.

What had made the seventies less harrowing than they might have been was that, at least among artists and intellectuals, a tradition of honorable poverty still remained. Writers and painters and composers did not talk all the time (as they do now) of agents, contracts, and movie deals. New York had not yet formed a tight
alliance with Los Angeles; rather, New Yorkers defined themselves in contrast to the West Coast.

Recently I consulted a book about the same period, this one by Mikal Gilmore. It was all about rock music and the downtown scene, about drugs and crime—not unexpected since Mikal writes for
Rolling Stone
and is the brother of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer studied in such depth by Norman Mailer in his magisterial
The Executioner’s Song
. I realized that though we went to many of the same places and probably knew many people in common, our books were entirely different—opposites, really. Although in mine I acknowledge the poverty and violence of a bankrupt New York in the 1970s, I write little about crime and say nothing about punk or rock music. Later I met Patti Smith and came to respect her, but in the seventies I knew no one in her world except Mapplethorpe.

It was only in the eighties that publishers were swallowed one after another by corporations, that the Barnes & Noble superstores pushed out the small neighborhood bookstores, that the multiplex movie theaters chased away the small art-house cinemas. Every time I would come back to New York from Paris in the eighties and nineties, I was shocked by how sleek it had become, how expensive ice cream boutiques had replaced the corner shoe repair shops, how the city neighborhoods were being gentrified as more and more rich young workers in finance moved into town and drove out the older, poorer ethnic minorities. And the bohemians. New York was no longer a dangerous, run-down ghetto; it had become a chromium, spotlit, palm-festooned singles bar.

AIDS killed off most of my circle. Every time I would come back to New York, more and more of my friends would be dying or dead. Chris Cox found a lover, a young curator at the New Museum, and Chris first buried him, then died himself. Chris had become a successful editor at Bantam Books; the last time I visited him (I was right off the plane from France), his hospital room was full of
socially inept straight guys, his authors, guys who wrote murder mysteries and were used to hanging out in a sort of collegiate way. I certainly couldn’t ask them to leave and Chris was too polite as a good Southern boy to get rid of them. Maybe he preferred their company to mine, their feeble jokes and half-professional deference rather than my seriousness. I’ve found that people in the terminal ward never want to talk about death.

During the 1970s I moved away from seeing myself as a socialist and even a fellow traveler to recognizing communism for the sustained international nightmare it was and myself as an anarchist (not the bomb-throwing sort but an extreme individualist). I became suspicious of most collective behavior—and of all politics as invariably a form of lying. If novelists attempt to keep all the nuances in, politicians hammer them into extinction under the blows of a deadening rhetoric. Novelists are precise and create scenes; politicians generalize and wallow in warnings and bromides.

As I was slowly moving away from communism, I also stepped back from the avant-garde. My first two novels to be published had been experimental, but by the time I got to
A Boy’s Own Story
I’d acknowledged that life had handed me a brand-new subject and that my job was to present it in the clearest, least wavering light. A straight writer, condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks. Gay writing in the seventies gave a greater depth to autobiographical fiction than had ever before been achieved, a profundity that other writers, straight writers, could benefit from.

In the 1970s, through my agent Maxine Groffsky, I met Marie-Claude de Brunhoff, who almost instantly started writing me from Paris on her sky-blue stationery with her capricious spelling and almost nonexistent punctuation. She would send me French novels
to read hot off the press, though I scarcely knew what to do with them at the time. It would be another decade before I could read French easily. In Paris, Marie-Claude became my best friend—as she would remain well into the new century until her death.

She came to fill the void left by David Kalstone’s death. He and she were my ideal friends and shared a certain style—a deep pleasure in the delights of every day, a warmth that was never
mièvre
(French for “mawkish”), a fierce loyalty to the inner circle, never the slightest hint of disapproval toward me or other loved ones, though both of them were terrible snobs. Both of them liked to entertain and to go out, to hear the “latest,” to meet the current genius. David was always up on intellectual currents and Marie-Claude on literary ones. She was a professional reader who read three or four books a day; she read French books for Knopf and English-language books for Gallimard. David, who was half-blind, was a keen observer and had a novelist’s interest in how stories turned out. David was divinely silly—a dimension that Marie-Claude lacked and deeply regretted (she often referred to the much envied “English wit,” a phenomenon that exists vividly in the French imagination if not in French manners).

In my twenties I courted people, much as I’d learned to do in high school; only in my thirties and forties was the goal not to make friends but to enjoy them. In the 1970s gay New Yorkers had decided to separate out friendship, love, and sex. The friend, the lover, and the fuck buddy were three different people, not the same one, as they would become in the eighties. This division of labor in the seventies gave the starring role to friendship. We assumed that love affairs would be stormy and temporary and cause more pain than pleasure. We seldom knew or remembered the names of our sex partners; indeed, we were bewildered in the early days of AIDS by the surprising (and pointless) injunction “Know the names of your partners.” No, our friends were the ones we cherished and
pursued and cultivated. We could say strategic things to lovers and seductive things to tricks, but a friend deserved the truth. With a friend we had to get things right.

At the end of the 1960s I was in despair over my writing. I was going nowhere quick. I had a drawer full of unproduced plays and unpublished novels. By the end of the 1970s I was on my way as a writer. It had taken longer and was less rewarding than I’d anticipated, but like a character in Balzac I’d always been a monomaniac—just one great obsession, to be published. Friends had helped me all along the way. Richard Howard had arranged for my first novel to be published. David Kalstone encouraged me at strategic moments. Marilyn and Stanley would listen over the phone to every word I wrote. Keith McDermott was a constant inspiration through his own unflinching dedication to a bohemian life of art. At times I wrote to amuse my nephew. My editor, Bill Whitehead, became a real friend, though he died young from AIDS. Susan Sontag arranged for me to win awards and gain recognition. The members of my writers’ club, the Violet Quill, encouraged one another to explore fearlessly this new gay subject matter.

The Romantic American myth is that the artist works in solitude and that he can create as well on a farm in Vermont as in New York. But I recognized that the artistic climate of a particular city and milieu was crucial to the development of a writer; after he found his way, perhaps he could go off to that barn outside Burlington. I was lucky to live in New York when it was dangerous and edgy and cheap enough to play host to young, penniless artists. That was the era of “coffee shops” as they were defined in New York—cheap restaurants open round the clock where you could eat for less than it would cost to cook at home. That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts, when the kind of people who were impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.
The seventies saw the last gasp of the old bohemian Greenwich Village, but this time with more of a gay aspect.

I got to know New York better by spending long periods in San Francisco and Venice. In contrast with those more decorous cities I could see how consumed New York was with ambition, how little urbanism or planning of any sort prevailed in New York, how improvised and transient all of New York’s arrangements were. All three cities are ports; Venice is many islands, and Manhattan, Long Island, and Staten Island are also islands. Venice, however, is married to the sea, whereas Manhattan turns its back on its rivers and the ocean. Venice and San Francisco glory in their quite different pasts. San Francisco’s past is only a hundred years old, whereas Venice’s is more than a thousand. New York is a nineteenth-century (and even eighteenth-century) city, but no one notices. Few people are even aware of its history.

I suppose that finally New York is a Broadway theater where one play after another, decade after decade, occupies the stage and the dressing rooms—then clears out. Each play is the biggest possible deal (sets, publicity, opening-night celebrations, stars’ names on the marquee), then it vanishes. With every new play the theater itself is just a bit more dilapidated, the walls scarred, the velvet rubbed bald, the gilt tarnished. Because they are plays and not movies, no one remembers them precisely. The actors are forgotten, the plays are just battered scripts showing coffee stains and missing pages. Nothing lasts in New York. The life that is lived there, however, is as intense as it gets.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nick Trautwein for his expert editing—he’s a man with a keen eye and a receptive ear, not to mention impeccable judgment. Michael Fishwick has enthusiastically been behind this book from the beginning and has cheered me along to the finish line. He has proven to be a friend to me and my writing.

Michael Carroll, my partner, did a careful word edit of
City Boy
before I dared to show it to anyone.

I am grateful to my fellow writer David McConnell for reading the manuscript before anyone else and giving me copious notes. Tom Beller, the wonderful writer and editor of
Open City
, has been an enthusiast from the beginning, as has my friend the architect Sam Roche.

Beatrice von Rezzori welcomed me graciously to her writers’ retreat in Tuscany, Santa Maddalena. She is also a warm and fascinating friend.