Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (15 page)

San Francisco’s literary scene was now dominated by the Language poets. In
Biting the Error: Writers on Narrative,
Bob Glück wrote, “It would be hard to overestimate the drama they brought to a Bay Area scene that limped through the 70s . . . Language Poetry’s Puritan rigor, delight in technical vocabularies, and professionalism were new to a generation of Bay Area poets whose influences included the Beats, Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, the New York School (Bolinas was its western outpost), surrealism and psychedelic surrealism. Suddenly, people took sides. . . .”

Dad was among those who took sides. Initially intrigued by the group, he ultimately found their work too abstract and formal. In a 1979 issue of
Poetry Flash
(“Language Poets: An Introduction”) he chided the poets to remember that “obscurity is not a virtue in itself.” In his monthly column, he questioned the group’s powerful influence on the scene and how they hindered other voices:

I see the moral guardians are at it again: Should Kathy Acker write this or should Bruce Boone talk that way summed up questioning at 80 Langton poetry and politics forum. It’s the same old saw that separated [Robert] Duncan & [Denise] Levertov years ago. Theories are fine but one must go where one’s poem or novel takes one (a passivist view?) and if you can’t say what you want in your own writing, as Kathy pointed out, then where, pray tell, can you? Which isn’t to suggest that questioning certain modes of discourse isn’t beneficial (here columnist does a dance of Subtle Distinction, trying to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes).

These others writers, including Acker but especially those Dad met at Small Press Traffic, approached their work with a deeply personal and often political consciousness that wasn’t found among the Language poets. Kevin Killian wrote that the group wanted to “recuperate narrative from the trap of modernism by rearticulating it as a postmodern conceptual art.” In my father’s second issue of
SOUP
, published in 1981, he named their style “New Narrative.”

The community Dad found in New Narrative was not only professional but personal. In an untitled essay on Georges Bataille, Dad wrote, “Real friendship is based on extremity where the boundary lines between people break down. It’s like if you’re in an elevator with a group of strangers and the elevator breaks down. Suddenly you look into each other’s eyes and you’re no longer strangers. You can only have real communication when you realize you’re facing possible disaster.”

The disaster, as Dad and others saw it, was the emerging AIDS crisis and the cultural attacks instigated by conservatives against gay men and women in the early 1980s. It was found in the cruel indifference of President Ronald Reagan, who wouldn’t publicly address the epidemic until the end of his second term, after twenty thousand Americans had died, and the hostile rhetoric of conservatives close to Reagan like Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Pat Buchanan, Reagan’s future speechwriter. In 1983, Buchanan wrote of AIDS, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution.”

AIDS transformed the landscape for gay men in the 1980s. For writers like Bob, Bruce, Kevin, and my dad, this new landscape couldn’t be addressed with Language Poetry, which, focused on pure language, was detached from everyday experience. Since Language Poetry worked to remove the “I,” New Narrative formed as a way to reclaim personal space in writing, a way to address this communal crisis.

By 1983 and 1984, Dad regularly entertained versions of the New Narrative group for dinner or drinks in our apartment, often introducing them to visiting writers and artists, our spool table acting as a rotating salon. Over the years, he hosted filmmakers (Curt McDowell and George Kuchar), literary lions (Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, and Robert Duncan), and various odd characters Dad was profiling at the time, such as the anthropologist Tobias Schneebaum, who was notorious for books in which he confessed he had sex with the Peruvian and Pacific Islander tribes he was studying.

As a teenager, I viewed these frequent visitors as nothing but eccentric intruders in our tiny one-bedroom apartment. When I complained about our chronic semi-poverty, which was especially hard for me attending private school, I openly questioned the legitimacy of Dad’s work. “What kind of writer are you if
no
one’s heard of you, and you make
no
money?” Furthermore, and more importantly, Dad’s appetite for transgressive outsiders threatened my own fragile sense of identity. There was a thin line between cool and weird and I didn’t want to be on the weird side anymore. So I was aggressively indifferent to Dad’s crowd, all except for a twenty-something writer as handsome as the British rockers whose images wallpapered my room: Sam D’Allesandro.

Dad discovered D’Allesandro in 1984 when he reviewed his poetry book
Slippery Sins
for
The Advocate
. Born Richard Anderson to a humble ranching family in Modesto, California, he changed his name both to add glamour to his persona and to protect his more conservative parents. Sam convinced me he was the son of Joe Dallesandro (whom I’d not yet heard of at age thirteen), and was later sued by the Warhol actor when Sam read at an LA venue around the corner from his home. Dad’s friends weren’t as impressed as Dad was by Sam’s first book of poetry, but when Sam starting writing prose he developed a pure and poised style. Kevin Killian even considered him a “genius.”

I knew nothing of Sam’s writing but, like everyone, I was captivated by his beauty. He was tall and lean, with piercing blue eyes and pillowy lips. And he was radiant, as though lit from within; I couldn’t help but stare.

I flirted with Sam shamelessly, never seeing his sexuality as an impediment to his affections. (It never was with my father.) And some of my dad’s friends noticed my crush. Kevin jokingly called it a waste. But Sam returned my attention. He frequently joined Dad and me on walks into Golden Gate Park or out to the movies or to go shoe shopping. Since I didn’t know Andy Warhol, he gave me his back issues of Warhol’s
Interview
magazine. Sam even showed up at my birthday party, giving me a Hallmark card written in Spanish, crossing out the text and adding his own in an energetic hand.

Sam seemed especially sympathetic to my teenage boredom, my need for excitement and newness. Sam would take me to the Double Rainbow café on Haight Street, where the boys wore dyed hair and thick-soled creepers and the girls dressed in crinoline skirts, cowboy boots, and red lipstick. Sam also introduced me to Jono, a young painter friend of his who lived across from the Double Rainbow.

I’d sometimes pop over to Jono’s after school. He’d buzz me into his cavernous floor-through, filled with his large canvases, glossy color-block portraits of long-faced, lean-nosed men like himself. The Mutants or Talking Heads would be blasting as he painted. I was content to just watch him, to eavesdrop on his goings-on: receiving phone calls, making plans, and painting. In this way I imagined my own life as a grown-up, filled with friends and music and art.

Photo by Jono Weiss

That spring, I returned to the English Haight Street hairdresser who’d first cut my hair short. I asked her to sheer my bangs so that my hair resembled an overgrown crew cut. When she finished, I immediately went up to Jono’s. I can’t recall whether I asked him to take my photo or if he offered. I just remember being fourteen, hair dyed black as pitch, posing in front of Jono’s big-nosed paintings. Pictures show me in a slate-gray pillbox hat and a vest with snap buttons, a black t-shirt, leggings, and red, red lipstick. (As with my photographer neighbor Robert, I relished the possibility of transformation in these poses.)

When Sam stopped by Jono’s that evening, I asked him if he could buy a bottle of bourbon for my friends and me. We were planning a weekend outing to Golden Gate Park. He laughed, saying he had done the same as a kid, and agreed to meet me on Friday night outside Cala Foods on Haight Street. In the parking lot I waited with my friends, all of us dancing and jumping in place to ward off the damp cold, when Sam’s sinewy figure emerged from the shadows. He smiled, said hello, and I handed him the ten dollars my friends and I had pooled together. He passed me the paper-sheathed bourbon and I felt flush with warmth, proud that this hip, good-looking guy was my friend.

Sometime later, totally by accident, I discovered Sam was going out with Sean, the smiling Southerner who’d sold me gummy bears at Coffee Tea & Spice only a couple of years earlier. Sam had seen Sean working behind the counter of the shop. Sam wrote his number on a matchbook cover, pushed it into Sean’s hand, and said, “Use it.” But Sean was intimidated. “He was so good-looking and so intense,” Sean later told me. Not until he ran into Sam five years later in a downtown coffee shop did they finally start dating. When Sam became sick with AIDS, Sean nursed him. When Jono became sick several years later, Sean took him out to expensive lobster dinners. But though Sean was diagnosed as HIV-positive, he never got sick himself.

When I meet Sean again nearly twenty-five years later, his moustache is gone, along with much of the dazzle in his eyes. “I’m one of the few people I know from that period who was diagnosed with HIV and is still around,” he tells me. “Nobody can relate to it. The whole topic is so . . . It’s as if it’s something in the past.”

HANGING OUT
with Sam and Jono, immersing myself in the Haight’s New Wave scene, I built up confidence at school. Where before I preferred to lose myself in the lines of my art-period drawings, or hide behind my camera at the middle school dances, I now paraded the halls of French American wearing an anti-Reagan t-shirt Dad got for his fortieth birthday and a bright blue nylon Fiorucci jacket he’d picked up in Europe.

I tried out for Bac A Dos, the school’s evening of bilingual one-act plays, which included Tennessee Williams’s
This Property Is Condemned
, and nabbed the lead. I played Willie, a girl who lives alone in an abandoned home after “quituating” school. She spends her days walking the railroad track in her dead sister’s evening dress, singing to herself, and clutching a grubby baby doll. It was the highlight of my stage career. Ginger, a redheaded senior, told me she cried watching my performance. My English teacher called me “Willie” for weeks after the play ended to see if I’d still answer, and I always did—gladly. The play earned me a public respect that I’d never before known, a sense that I was carving a version of myself that was my own, apart from Dad, and one that was worthwhile. In my yearbook, a senior boy who’d starred in the French-language one-act would write that, like the heroine in Williams’s
Glass Menagerie
, I should be careful because “beautiful glass unicorns have a tendency to lose their horns.”

Then, one morning in the corridors of French American, a popular transfer student named Sarah said she liked my Fiorucci jacket, but when I smiled back she added with a smirk, “You might want to wash it, though.” Only then did I look down to notice how the cuffs and seams were creased with dirt from my constant wear. She laughed her rich-girl laugh—deep and chesty—as she proceeded down the hall, and I got a sick feeling in my stomach, wishing I could disappear completely.

Another afternoon, my dear friend Niki quietly pulled me aside after class and asked if I used deodorant. When I gave her a puzzled look, she added, “When you become a teenager you can’t just take showers.” When I again looked confused, she sighed, rolled her eyes, and gave me the talk my father should have given me. “Your body goes through
changes
. You have to wear deodorant.” She then pulled from her bag a smooth blue block, labeled, appropriately enough, Secret
,
and gently put it in my hands. “I bought this for you. You need to use this . . . every day.”

The following week, I was out with Niki and the girls at Uncle Gaylord’s, a tall-ceilinged ice-cream parlor around the corner from French American where we’d sometimes nurse caffe lattes after school. I noticed a couple getting up from a nearby table, leaving behind half of an ice-cream sundae. Nonchalantly, I wandered over and picked up a spoon and started to finish their ice cream.

“What are you doing?” Niki cried.

“Finishing their ice cream,” I said, swallowing a spoonful of hot fudge.

“You can’t do that!”

“Why not? It’s just going to be thrown out.”

“Come over here. Come
over
here. You can’t eat other people’s leftovers. That’s disgusting.”

Sheepishly, I put down my spoon. Though I didn’t exactly see what the big deal was, I suspected Niki was right, and I felt overcome with that familiar feeling of confused shame.

Why was it still so difficult to contain my weirdness, to hide my dirt and mask my scent? These are painful memories to revisit, even now. “I hope you weren’t too embarrassed,” Niki would later tell me. “Someone needed to tell you.”

Munca, my grandmother in Kewanee, Illinois, wanted to be that someone. But I only saw her in the summers, and though she taught me how to discreetly dispose of “menstrual pads,” I cringed whenever she talked with me about my impending “menses.” Furthermore, she neglected to tell me about deodorant or even tampons (Niki would later reveal this other womanly secret to me).