Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (10 page)

I can’t say that I would have wanted to stay on Planet Warhol forever. It was a giddy, weightless planet, but without much oxygen. Howard was the oxygen in my universe, but he came with some pain, the pain of taking deep breaths, and definitely with gravity, a coming down to earth. We were each other’s oxygen pack. We grounded each other, and, therefore, we needed each other, but we also needed an escape hatch. When Howard arrived in Paris we had some heady nights with Andy, and he quickly took over my spot on the love seat. I remember the two of them carrying on in a sustained giggle. “Howard’s able to supply voracious Andy nonstop with information,” observed Fred Hughes. I don’t know what I supplied, and the supply was
limited, though I would keep seeing Andy back in New York, too, at the Factory, or at a couple of parties at Mr. Chow. At one dinner that I thought of as a throwback “Paris dinner,” at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, with the usual entourage, when the check came, Andy autographed the menu as payment. Whenever I had more than two nights of Warhol, I felt the tug of Howard, and, once immersed in Howard, wished for a hit of Andy. If I were drawing a cartoon of my life in that brief period, such would be the scenario, with my vacillating soul in the middle.

In preparing himself for Paris, Howard first went to Miami, still his home base. There he sat alone, down by the lake at night, drinking Harveys Bristol Cream on the rocks, smoking cigarettes, and finishing another of Stephen King’s—as he described them—“psycho-religious” novels. Howard worried over matters close to him. He’d brought for his younger brother Steve’s birthday Bruce Springsteen’s new album
The River
, but while they listened together, Steve told him that their mother got depressed whenever he played a Springsteen record, and asked him not to play any when she was around. She said it reminded her of a sad time in Howard’s life—the connection being that he played a lot of Springsteen anthems at high volume the weekend that they asked him if he was gay. And he worried over larger matters—the election, just a couple nights before, of Ronald Reagan, truly the beginning of all that would underline the high-contrast decade to come. Howard was prescient about its coming polarizing significance. “I waver between fear and hope,” he wrote me. “Anything is possible now, the greatest extremes.”

The big revelation to him, and to me, though, was that he had been trying heroin seriously, and was having his first bout of
kicking the addiction. The cause, I always maintained to myself, was his seduction of Burroughs for his film. The circle of young guys around Burroughs, his disciples, always seemed to be players in junk, and shot up with their hero in a ritual, where he shot first, and passed the needle down, perhaps explaining his own longtime survival and the death of many around him. But Howard also implied to me, in the timing, that the need for a fix was a response to the pain of my going off, and my betrayals. I blocked out that explanation, not entirely believing, and certainly not wanting to feel a terminal knot of guilt in my chest. Probably the explanation was both, and I was implicated, and so do still carry a kind of junk sickness when remembering the first-heard notes of that harrowing little melody of addiction that would become a leitmotif from then on in our lives, rising, falling, like the Rhine maidens in Wagner, and never entirely going away. “I am also getting over (just starting to stop) another habit, which I picked up after you left,” he wrote me. “I was in such incredible pain, sleeping alone, and then finding your diary. And I have no way of dealing with the pain, and am afraid of it. So I numbed it, and now all these numbed feelings are rushing back, as the drug leaves me.” He didn’t name the drug, but for the first time, and not the last, he was suffering through its shivers, insomnia, hot flashes, cramps, and diarrhea.

I met Howard’s plane a week later at eight in the morning at Charles de Gaulle Airport. I don’t know if you’d call it emotional filing away, or whatever the explanation, but when we were together in the same space, much angst dissipated, and the immediate joy of being together returned. The phrase “molecular joy” pops up, as the sensation of seeing Howard again was a physical jolt—leather jacket, laser eyes, and quick succession of movements,
like Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photographs of a galloping horse. First thing down the ramp, he handed me a paperback copy of essays by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton,
Love and Living
. He knew that I liked Catholics. And, of course, due to the upset caused by my cutting out, the title pointedly (and Howard was always pointed) spelled out the theme of a long talk, or series of unfinished small talks, we needed to have. I could smell his musky smell, like tincture of Shiraz, when I pulled him close to me, and he me. Then the luggage carousel and then the trunk: a classic black oversized steamer trunk, with metal stripping, filled with all his unedited clanking reels of footage from the film that we lifted together and squeezed into the trunk of a Parisian-gray cab. The stairs up to Melinda’s spiraled, with three-minute timed lights that we outlasted while trying to hoist the trunk upwards. I joked about the casket toted and heaved throughout Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying—
not the last time we’d strain that trunk up stairs, through tight spots, and down some narrow escalators.

No one was around that first weekend of Howard in Paris, so we had the apartment to ourselves, for getting reacquainted. We went to a sauna in the Arab quarter. A Frenchman, wrapped in a towel, sat on a bench, and I remember through the steam hearing him ask Howard, in English, what sort of film he was making, and Howard’s answer, “Part comedy, part documentary.” I thought his answer smart, and I was moved emotionally, even sexually, whenever someone young, taut, and fiery said something smart. We picked up charcuterie food (shredded carrots, a slice of goose pâté in jelly), and ate supper stretched on the oriental rug of the main salon. “This room would look better upside down,” Howard cracked. “With the white plaster ceiling as the floor, and having
to climb over the door lintel to get into the room.” “Our Bleecker Street place is already like that,” said I. Later he imagined that a flaking brown pipe in the toilet was a dinosaur’s leg and that if the dinosaur awoke we’d be in trouble. As Howard’s daffiness resurfaced, the junk issue subsided, by a kind of unspoken collusion. I let myself feel that I’d just met him at a cocktail party and was impressed, while feeling simultaneously that I knew him better than I knew anyone in the world. Years later, when I read a remark by Betsy Sussler, editor of the downtown literary magazine
Bomb
, remembering Howard as a “magical being,” I flashed first on that revelatory weekend of our Paris reunion.

Lots came into focus by looking at the familiar with another set of eyes, his. The giant gilded mirror topped by a Venetian lion’s head in my (now our) bedroom that had become completely ordinary to me never failed to spark some irony from Howard; as did the Ceylonese houseboy who kept arriving regularly no matter how often Arnaud complained of the bottoming-out of the market for nineteenth-century French paintings on classical themes, or how much Melinda resorted to borrowing francs to pay for taxis to her dinners. When we strolled in nearby Pigalle, I saw everything more cinematically, imagining Howard’s point of view, feeling his framing aesthetic at work on Boulevard de Clichy after midnight, the Arab teenagers with excited looks in their eyes, the transvestites, an old Scottish couple with gray skin, tourist buses mainly for Germans, Japanese, fat people with hanging cheeks, scrawny vendors for the bottomless shows, grifters and pickpockets, the sliding-closed glass door of a shop, an ass disappearing around a corner, everybody burning. Even though I wasn’t a filmmaker, I wrote like one, relying on exteriors, and thrilling to the seen and heard, as
did Howard, so we practically burned holes through dark windows, trying to take in all the sensual details, while psychically holding hands.

In the apartment, Howard was a welcome foil for Melinda, who adored him and loved triangulating in dialogues about Brad. “But my deaaaar,” she would say, “if anyone heard about this poor model living in Paris taking cabs home from a dinner party to his room with his handsome movie-director boyfriend no one would feel sorry. He should save his blues for twenty years from now when things get really serious and he’s going to be fifty and won’t have the same looks and hasn’t become a successful writer. But even then I’m sure he’ll be invited to faaabulous dinners!” Our back-to-back fifteen minutes (I guess half-hour) with Warhol wound down, but Howard, like me, seemed smitten, and found a copy of
The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
at Shakespeare and Company to add to our pile. I took Howard to the Glamour Thanksgiving party at yet another nightclub. The saddest day of the winter was December 8, 1980, when we received news that John Lennon had been shot outside his apartment building in New York. Howard took the news as hard as I ever saw him take any news and spent the entire sleety day walking the hard streets and curlicue bridges over the Seine, listening to “Imagine” and other Lennon songs on
his
Sony Walkman. In the complete obverse of that mood of serious cultural engagement and mourning was the season’s silliest day: my twenty-ninth birthday, in January, in the apartment, all men, talking in treble clef, in suits, drinking champagne, the only woman its impresario, Melinda.

I shared private excitements I’d squirreled away with Howard, like the dodgems (“
les voitures trompeuses
,” in French, or,
more street, “
les accidents
”) that had been set up in the Clichy
quartier
as a temporary moneymaker, the shacks where all the riding and banging took place strewn with colored lights. One rainy afternoon—always icy rainy, always to-the-bone cold—on the way to a tailor’s, Howard asked me why I had switched from being attracted to older men, by which he meant the Eagle-clone scruffy daddies, to the high school boys with earrings who hung around the dodgems. They had been
his
territory, he implied, almost competitively. “Modeling’s cured me of seeing myself as an object of attention,” I philosophized. “With older men, the younger is the object of attention, with younger men, vice versa.” “Shrewd,” he said, as, I think, a compliment. Somehow, discussing our attractions in this aesthetic manner was not at all threatening to either of us, but was instead a zone of shared interest. We were both philosophers of the bedroom at heart. Burroughs also came to spend a few days, while Arnaud and Melinda were away. Howard said that it was like having our grandfather staying with us, and “Gramps” became our nickname for him during that stay, when he indeed reminded me of my Welsh grandfather with his (their) gray flannel trousers, and soft tan Hush Puppies–style shoes, and quavering voice. Displaced from his lair, the Bunker, he seemed more fragile, and warmer, especially around Howard, whom he trusted, and we three would sit at a card table covered with a cloth (Melinda’s drawing table) in the front room for breakfasts of eggs and chèvre cheese and big bowls of chicory coffee mixed with milk and little bricks of sugar, as he reminisced, in a truly relaxed manner, about his days in the sixties at the Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Git Le Coeur.

The first week of February was Fashion Week, and, a younger
Rip Van Winkle emerging from a long Paris nap, I booked a few shows. I fuzzily recall one group show, the first, I believe, for the designer Thierry Mugler. On a runway, I wore his broad-shouldered jackets, like football-player couture, the beginnings of the power look of the eighties. Most memorable was the booking, as much as the show, for Pierre Cardin. Monsieur Cardin sat in a Louis Quinze–style drawing room, on a chair that resembled a throne, and we guys walked up and down before him. In a game of musical chairs, we were then picked and dropped,
oui
or
non
. Weirdly, probably as an outlier, I was picked. The show, the week’s finale, was the most desirable because Cardin eschewed rehearsals in favor of an aesthetic of spontaneity. We showed up on Sunday night at Espace Cardin, were given haircuts, then were given cocaine, which basically dropped from the sky, unexplained, then were shoved, buzzed and zonked, onto the runway with no clue, having been dressed randomly by backstage dressers in a crossfire of boots, paisley shirts, red velvet bathrobes, and props, such as long cigarette holders—more a publicity stunt than a seriously considered spring line. Cardin recited poetry through a megaphone, again, spontaneously, as it rolled off his mind. As I walked the plank, I realized that the front-row seats on either side were filled with familiar New York faces—Dan Deely, Andy Warhol—and I was so stoned that I stopped to fumblingly talk and smile an elastic smile, making logistics worse. Somehow, afterwards, Howard and I wound up having dinner in a little booth at Maxim’s, which Cardin had just bought, with him and his business partner, Pierre Bergé. The enabler was the young, handsome Swiss art dealer, Thomas Ammann, then just beginning his ascent,
and in talks with Howard about possibly backing his Burroughs film. Cardin seemed nonplussed by having to dine with one of his pawn models—me—as if I were a double agent around whom he had to watch himself, but Howard distracted him with sparking non sequiturs, and Thomas was the epitome of a sexy newish nexus of art and money and fashion: crew-cut dark blond, just thirty, Swiss accent, he dealt Picassos along with Warhols, and already, or soon, young Clemente and Bleckner and Fischl.

A week later, for Valentine’s Day—another American holiday made much of by American models fancying themselves in exile—I left a “card” propped for Howard on our bed that was a full page of the brunet American model Jeff Aquilon, posed with a golden Labrador, in an advertisement for a store on Saint-Germain, shot by Bruce Weber, ripped from
Vogue Hommes
. In our ricocheting erotic life we both agreed on the masculine beauty of Aquilon, who began the male modeling wave and convergent amateur athletics boom of the early eighties, with the male-as-sex-object cultural advancement promoted by Weber and Klein, and in whose undertow I was being pulled along. On the page, I drew a heart in black Magic Marker and wrote: “For Howard, Happy Valentine’s Day, 1981, Love Brad.” In return, waiting for me was a far more exquisite and vulnerable and beautiful card that I’ve kept over the years: a baroque heart painted in pink and silver and red watercolors, with the message: “A Heart for a Beast in Love From His Howard,” the border of the heart the word “Forever,” obsessively repeated and linked, in blood-colored letters, with the entire cutout mounted on black-bordered parchment, and cut from a newspaper the phrase “left ventricle” pasted in the upper-left corner, a brilliantly composed collage that, in frilly punk, seemed beating still.