Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (13 page)

Dennis’s very young, androgynous boyfriend Rob, described by him proudly as an “it boy” of the downtown gay scene, was Candy Swanson, the most convincing girl in a black cutaway Ann Sothern dress, like a fifties secretary. Candy was living beyond her means, and searching high and higher for a sugar daddy to cover her expensive tastes. Donald Britton was Doris Brittania, the most proper of us, in blond wig, pearls, and clubwoman dress. She was the unflappably well-behaved wife of Mayor Ed Koch of New York City, then in his second term. To the next party, or perhaps the last, occurring on New Year’s Eve, arrived Joe LeSueur aka Lucille LeSueur (Joan Crawford’s birth name), and Tim Dlugos, as Bernadette of Lourdes, a very high-maintenance French feminist. Actually, Bernadette’s portrayal of a needy drama queen (at odds with her saint’s name, as Tim was still trying to screw loose from, or further into, his past as a seminarian) became slightly too real and an acute alcoholic psychodrama ensued, its causes I forget. By the final Ladies Party the tenor had modulated from John Waters hilarity to Douglas Sirk melodrama. We just skirted becoming maudlin Girls in the Band.

Howard’s postcards to me over the next few months attested to the impact of those Ladies Parties. Suddenly he was “Lili,” in his correspondence, and I was “June.” The postcards told a story of an increasingly peripatetic life. I was now the stay-at-home New York boyfriend and he the traveler, off to see the world, shuttling between England, France, Italy, and Germany, on various missions involving dubbing, or fundraising. On the back of a Folies Bergère postcard of can-can dancers waving red feather fans, he wrote, “Lili is too old to travel.” He informed me that the BBC had green-lighted a documentary he wanted to do on Canon West (who agreed, not letting on that he was flattered), but only, he added, “. . . if I will make a film on Spielberg & Alice Walker (
The Color Purple
) in Africa in 2 months. What should I do?” The message was heady stuff for the back of a postcard. From Paris, too, a photo card of the young Marcel Proust, signed “XXX Lili,” with the pitch, “How’s this for the cover of Christopher Street? He’s Parisian. He’s Gay. And he’s only 23!!” “Ciao bella June,” he scribbled on a postcard of the “Judgment of Paris,” with lots of pink buttocks, from the Uffizi. On the back of a shot of a plane on the runway of the Frankfurt Airport: “Lili misses you already. But her flight was filled with American soldiers. So many uniforms, such a short flight!! On to Rome.”

I have to wonder what the Ladies’ season was truly about. Not the parties, they were about hysterics, reinventing “camp” for our new generation. But calling ourselves by our girlie names also meant that we were changing gears into something resembling the old gay slang term “sisters,” meaning gay men who didn’t have sex with one another, a change that didn’t make much difference among friends, but did between lovers. Howard and I stopped going at it with each other in room 410. That was the year that he urgently recommended to me an interview he ripped from the
Advocate
with two old geezers who were lifelong lovers—not a typical article for that time, since gay couples of a certain age tended to exist in the media shadows, comfortably reticent. One of the lovers said that the most important element was the sleeping together every night, not the sex. That was news to us, but news that seemed relevant to our stage of life. Howard began repeating again his grandmother’s article of faith that she and his grandfather never slept apart one night for their entire fifty (or however many) years of marriage. Somehow in this shift, too, was our growing awareness of the condition by now being called “AIDS.” I looked at Howard and wondered what he was doing with all those rent boys in Europe, and I shrank back a chilly millimeter sexually, from him, from myself, trying to find a cautious balance. That tensing, combined with a feminine softening, was our new way of being in the world, but still so subtle that neither of us changed much in our unsafe sex mode with anybody else. We were not having sex with each other, but could still get caught in moments of heat.

Probably a sign of exactly the same shifting uncomfortably and often inconsistently for a new position in response to AIDS was my amping up of my new writing venture—porn reviews for the gay newspaper, the
New York Native
. I didn’t think then of that beat as having anything to do with the still faint thrumming of the epidemic, but now I can appreciate its psychic cleverness as yet another slight adaptation, allowing me to have my
frisson
and eat it, too. By 1983 we understood that AIDS was a virus, but were far from a treatment, or even knowing its source: Semen? Air ventilation systems in the Mineshaft? Saliva? So a freeze set in, a holding of that pose, a game of
Statues. My quirky pieces attracted underground notice; enough that they led one gay reader, who was a
GQ
editor, to invite me to write “real” pieces, which I did, first about the artist Andrew Lord, then about L.A. poets Dennis Cooper and Ed Smith. I think the tailwind of interest was stirred partly by others in the same fix turning to porn for sublimated, safe arousal, something that happened conveniently at a moment when gay porn was having a golden minute. Celluloid, not videotape, was still its medium, and, as there were no real gay films, some gay directors had an overly sanguine notion that these films could cross over as European-style art movies.

As stimulating, or liberating, in a slummy way, as the films, were the venues you needed to frequent to view them—especially the Adonis, at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue. A baroque movie theatre from the Gilded Age, when such places were palatial in size and ornamentation, the Adonis was now gone to seed. Christened, in 1921, the Tivoli Theatre, instead of Rudolf Valentino’s
The Sheik
or
Gone With the Wind
, the Adonis was now screening
The Bigger the Better
, or
Boots and Saddles
. With high vaulted ceilings, double tiers of balconies, and loge seating, the place was crowded with dark figures lurking, creaking, standing and sitting, rising or falling, in silhouette against the screen, blending in with tacky disco music soundtracks. One of my favorite bits was a WARNING FROM THE MANAGEMENT, a public-service short, alerting us about pickpockets afoot in the theater. You’d hear a voiceover, “Forewarned is forearmed,” then see on-screen a cute pickpocket wearing only cutoff denim shorts servicing an unsuspecting stud . . . while reaching into his back pocket to pass along his fat wallet to the quick hands of a waiting confederate. Its style was pornographic, a savvy case of “Know your audience.”

The Adonis was a state of mind, as was porn, and before or after screenings I usually wound up walking the Times Square
quartier
, reliving the seediness of years past, but with more looking than touching. I went there to smoke joints, chain-smoke cigarettes, and feel like a pervert—in short, to have irresponsible fun. The gay-straight divide was broken down in this still shady section of town, as its video booths and movie theaters attracted a jumble of buzzed clients. I liked the upstairs at Black Jack. Downstairs was gay, while upstairs, female prostitutes sat behind Plexiglas sheets with tiny voice holes punched in, and for a dollar their interlocutors could get off with them. Across Forty-second Street was a straight porn theater, and I used to compare the films, and ambience, with the gay versions. I found the straight porn films to be much more realistic tales of swinging couples, or boss-and-secretary workplace situations, rather than the more far-out cowboy and motorcyclist scenarios that were a staple at the Adonis. Upstairs was a “couples balcony,” to solve the problems of what to do about women customers. The mood there was even more violent than at the Adonis. Real cops kept banging around in the back, traipsing up and down stairs with their equipment belts jangling and guns and handcuffs getting in the way. A cloud of smoked weed hovered.

I loved all that darkness made half-visible. And I suppose I loved the same quality in the movies I was, quote-unquote, reviewing. I fancied myself an intellectual of porn, as these little pieces were quite heady, almost programmatic. I was keen on plot, and even cried once in the dank, dinky grandeur of the Adonis while watching a film titled
The Idol
, its plot revolving around memories of a young athlete killed in a car accident, replaying in the heads of mourners gathered around his grave, while the most implicated mourner of all, his boy
friend, watches from a hill above, where he leans on his bicycle. We see a sex scene first—with his high school girlfriend, then with his coach, following a massage in the boys’ locker room, building to an authentic heartbeat romance with the boyfriend, introduced in a pool scene while “Love Is in the Air” fills the soundtrack. I marvel even now that such a structure could have existed in such a film, and of its perspicacity in sounding themes of love and death that were still just lightning flashes on the horizon. Another film,
Cruisin’ 57
, was a gay porn version of
American Graffiti
, with “the works,” as far as fifties costumes, cars, and sets were concerned. I argued for plotted movies, and against daisy chains and cum shots, like some kind of demented Puritan with a dash of Parker Tyler.

While I skulked in seedy movie theaters, Howard was suddenly popping into legitimate film respectability. Well, not suddenly. He had been working his way by inches along an arduous road ever since we met, unlike me with my helter-skelter flirtations and oddball gigs, such as modeling and porn reviewing. That fall Howard’s film was accepted into the New York Film Festival. Nothing seemed fully real about the anticipation and excitement in the lead-up until the Friday night when Howard and I were walking in our old neighborhood of the East Village, past Gem Spa on Second Avenue. The
Times
of the next morning, Saturday, was out, as it used to be, around eleven p.m. We stopped at the newsstand, as Howard knew that Janet Maslin’s review of his film was due, and there were the opening words: “Rarely is a documentary as well attuned to its subject as Howard Brookner’s ‘Burroughs,’ which captures as much about the life, work, and sensibility of its subject as its 86 minute format allows.” And then more magic words: “The quality of discovery is very much the director’s doing, and Mr. Brookner
demonstrates an unusual degree of liveliness and curiosity in exploring his subject.” A light rain was falling, or a rain of light.

The next day was the screening at Lincoln Center, October 8, late in the afternoon, the day before the festival closing. The theater was packed. We were seated in a loge balcony. I remember James Grauerholz sitting in front of us, and watching the back of his neck for blushing, as there were moments when he made some uncomfortably damning remarks about how he was the son William had wanted instead of his actual son, Billy, an awkward comment. I remember such anxieties as there often are around biographical treatments. (Howard shot a scene of Billy Jr. with William, but the younger Burroughs had died in 1981, of cirrhosis of the liver.) The audience was palpably following the momentum of the film. When it ended, in raucous applause, a spotlight swerved from the projection booth to the loge, where Howard stood in a shaft of vanilla moonlight that made my heart burst. At moments around the acclaim of that film, as the caliber and the number of phone calls to room 410 accelerated, I did feel some pricks of jealousy, or some unease at a new dynamic that mainly didn’t interfere with our long-established intimacy, but sometimes did. Yet that afternoon I did not feel anything but an emotional release of happiness for Howard. I remember Kenneth Koch telling us in class that when Frank O’Hara’s unexpectedly voluminous, posthumous
Collected Poems
appeared, he had the feeling of seeing someone, a shaggy friend, for the first time in a tuxedo. And so I felt that day, proudly sitting next to Howard, in his relatively new gray Brooks Brothers suit.

The press of excitement did not stop but spilled down the stairs and out into the lobby, where Jasper Johns was standing over there, Jackie Curtis and Brion Gysin here. Paula Court was flashing
photographs, and everyone talking about the film. Howard and I had a test for deciding whether a film was great: when you left the theater, you felt as if you were still in the movie. Howard’s was the first documentary I remember giving off that afterglow: its lounge-lizard blues and ragtime music, the blacks and violets, salmon pinks and pale greens of its palette. Its candid content was jarring: intimacy with Burroughs, the least intimate of men. So there was lots of hot moral debate, too. “Watching Burroughs in Howard’s movie was like reading one of his books,” I think Sara Driver was saying. “I really like him, start to hate him, and in the end he wins me back.” But I also saw Burroughs as part of Howard’s “creep collection,” the distance between him and Melinda or Jimmy the Bum in the student films not so great. Jumping out of frame from the stream of our life together for just a few seconds that afternoon, I saw Howard the way others in the lobby were seeing him—as a cresting young genius with an ambitious vision.

This success led to Howard’s involvement in his next project, a documentary about Robert Wilson’s epically challenging quest to make a global-scale production for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles the following summer, titled
The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down
. I don’t remember exactly how or when that film project was put together. We both knew Bob some. When I was in college, he had been a major culture hero among us boys. I had a friend, Richie Horn, who wanted to be a playwright, and Wilson was one of his obsessions, so we went to
A Letter to Queen Victoria
, playing in an actual Broadway theater for a few nights in 1974, as we would go to a sanctuary, taking in all the abstract music and discontinuous dialogue and a black actress wrapped in white, like a statue, or like one of the Furies enclosed in an Ascot gown. The play was as revelatory as we knew it would be, a theater of dream imagery that shifted our hearts into our heads or our heads in our hearts, as its prime sensation. (Richie’s other obsessions were Stephen Sondheim—he’d written, the year before, a fan letter about
A Little Night Music
that was used as a full-page ad in the
Times—
and artist Joseph Cornell, whom he’d visited at his house on Utopia Parkway in Queens. Cornell mailed him a beautiful parakeet collage, which he enshrined somewhere in his dorm room.)