Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (14 page)

One New Year’s Day a couple years after college, I went to a fun-house walkabout in Wilson’s loft space downtown. I left feeling that the world was about to open up. On the way home, I did meet Ruth Kligman, who brought me to her loft and sort of seduced me, and we wound up writing a bad script based on a romantic memoir she wrote about her love affair with Jackson Pollock. In that way the installation did jumpstart something new for me. (When her terrace door would blow open while we were writing, she would be convinced it was Jackson’s ghost, approvingly visiting us two.) When Wilson, with Philip Glass, created an opera just as hypnagogic and far out as
A Letter to Queen Victoria—Einstein on the Beach—
in the fall of 1976, over a year before I met Howard, I went to two of the performances at the Metropolitan Opera. The very venue cast an empowering, Zeusian lightning bolt into our downtown sensibilities. I remember that Wilson, characteristically, delayed the first curtain, as he wasn’t ready—a dramatic gesture in itself—and my standing out front at sundown talking to Jerome Robbins until the doors finally opened. I remember, too, a few minutes into the minimal music and knee plays onstage, the painter Joan Mitchell exiting her seat down front in the orchestra and walking out in a huff of a statement. I remember getting stoned, as was standard practice
at Wilson productions, and ambling about during the long show, catching bits on video screens in the men’s room. I remember a whirling dervish, stage right.

In the fall of 1983, Howard was summoning his energies for the new project, and the involvement with Bob put a nearly metaphysical spin onto his own creativity and ambition. Not only was he beginning to film the various parts of the visionary work that was supposed eventually to bring together different pieces of the epic drama being created in separate countries by different actors and composers and writers, but, like Wilson, he was on a hunt for his own funding. So he and Bob were padding on parallel paths. Bob rehearsed sections, and Howard filmed—in Cologne, in December of 1983; then in Tokyo, in January of 1984; Marseille in February; Rome in March; and Minneapolis in April—all in uneasy anticipation of the arbitrary finish line to be imposed by the Olympics in Los Angeles in July. Howard put together a much more complicated production package this time, involving separate yet linked deals with German, French, British, and American television. And the postcards kept coming. Some still on the lady theme. On a postcard of bare feet from Paris, he wrote, “Love and kisses from Lili. Miss you. Trying to find the bacon. See you soon.” The bacon, of course, was more money for filming. In Rome he was taken to dinner by producers from RAI television—“one of whom was a ‘lady’ who took me out to a place a lady would like.” But the Alitalia plane, with “Isola di Panarea” painted on its snout, made him nostalgic for our boat ride to, and vacation on, that Italian volcanic island, just three summers earlier.

The collaboration with Bob was more existentially significant for Howard than his relationship with Burroughs, except of course for the
pivotal introduction of heroin, as Howard had first procured and shot heroin in Burroughs’s circle in the early days of filming. Burroughs was an indelibly great and self-enclosed writer whose inscrutability and dark aura were magnetic, but as far as Howard’s life-path, his importance was the film itself. Howard “found his voice” as a filmmaker, to mix metaphors. Bob was closer in age to Howard—still in his early forties—with a genius for mounting extravagant, original productions, as well as a genius for convincing rich people to contribute money, or, as was the case with Isabel Eberstadt, to crawl across stage in
Edison
in her Madame Gres gown. These were compatible interests of Howard’s, and so he studied and learned from Bob, whose superhuman energy matched at least Howard’s ambitions. I cowrote the text of a play of Wilson’s about a decade later, in Sicily, and I was the chosen one, who stayed up nights with him, drinking vodka and talking. Collapsing at three or four in the morning, I’d slide off to bed in the room next door, and hear him beginning to make his calls to America, because of the time difference. He did not sleep. Then he would be down at the car at nine, ready to dictate faxes on the drive to the theater. When I asked Philip Glass, the composer on our play (titled
T.S.E
., after T. S. Eliot), how Bob did it, Phil answered, “He’s like Picasso. He doesn’t have to go next door for his ideas.” I felt Howard’s batteries recharged by Bob. His response was to try gambling on his own work with bigger chips.

Meantime I was going through the motions for both of us in the Chelsea Hotel, everything held together by inertia, as I came to understand some of what Howard felt during my absences. Lots of my social memories of that season involve Chris Cox, as a friendly stand-in. One night I saw the only ghost I’ve ever seen in my life. I’d been asleep, then bolted up, switched on a floor lamp, and yelled out,
“Who’s there?” to a gentleman with black-rimmed eyeglasses. When Chris and I went to Virgil’s the next evening and I told my ghost story, Virgil retrieved a book with a photograph of a man with prominent eyeglasses whom I identified as my ghost. Virgil informed me that he was Charles Jackson, author of the novel
The Lost Weekend
—a closeted gay man who killed himself using Seconal tablets, in the hotel, and had lived just a few doors down the hall from us on the fourth floor. In Chris’s room, on another evening, I met the younger writer David Leavitt, who had just graduated from Yale but represented to me a new generation of gay writers, as he was completely knowledgeable about editors at the
The New Yorker
and publishers at major publishing houses, like Knopf, and not just small presses. New Year’s Eve of that year or the next, Chris and I went to Susan Sarandon’s apartment on Tenth Street off University Place (Chris had been a stage actor for two minutes and they’d met; he became godfather of her daughter). At midnight, filling a silent pause after all the hooting commotion, a mess of a Leonard Bernstein boomed out, “It’s midnight? I’m supposed to be at another party!”

Kept going by inertia, that fall and winter, was my sketchy sex life. I was making the moves that I had learned in the seventies and had been keeping up pretty much ever since. With a whole apartment to myself in the Chelsea Hotel, I was, in theory, left to follow my bliss—not a happy situation as it turned out. One night I brought some guy home from an after-hours club who flashed a concealed knife at me as he left the next morning, explaining that I should be more careful in the future. That put some sand in my engine, slowing down my zesty spirit. A new permutation, gay gyms, began, too, with Chelsea Gym, all gray and chrome, and a new kind of clean-cut muscle guy. We hadn’t been too interested in our bodies
in the seventies, but now we were. A veritable lifeguard type named Tom McBride was the class president of buff young men, and highly promiscuous. He was a photographer and an actor who’d been in
Friday the 13th
. I flirted with him some, and he came over to the room one afternoon and nailed me on the rug. I don’t remember the event because the sex was so singular but because that was the last of its kind for me. (McBride, who died of AIDS in 1995, was the subject of the documentary
Life and Death on the A-List
by Jay Corcoran.) Soon after my afternoon with Tom, I began having night sweats, as I heard of more cases of friends and sex partners developing AIDS. When I told my still-therapist Sister Mary Michael, she suggested I remove the blankets, which I did. The sweating subsided, but not the panic of thoughts and fears. I discovered that I was a very fearful man, not at all the steady sailor I’d figured I was, as I was faced with a historical-class horror. So I began a regimen of what would later be called “safe sex” that bordered on muscle-deep emotional frigidity. I put my enthusiasms away, after a decade of cultivating them.

Like Howard’s, my career was proceeding more briskly now, a response to the prevailing winds of the times. The 1980s was a turn of the page: careerism became important, along with muscles and money and celebrity. The more we encountered the serious depths lurking in the epidemic that we had been trying to deny, the more superficial and driven by stress we became. Not that a career always fit into that Manichean splitting of creativity and cash. My own career development included the publication of my stories, from those first written on the floor of my Perry Street apartment before I met Howard, to the final few written in my office in 410. For the cover I loved one photograph of Mapplethorpe’s I’d seen on a postcard, of a punk with a classic rainbow Mohawk, and suspenders, and skinny arms.
Turned out the image on the postcard was a working rock musician, and his agent nixed the usage as too much gay exposure for a punk-rocker. So I asked Robert to photograph his cute younger brother, Eddie, instead, which he did, though not entirely happily, not sure why. His brother then was the cover of my book
Jailbait and Other Stories
, published by the all-gay Sea Horse Press. (Because the stories included straight people, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop on Christopher Street refused to officially carry it, though you could request it and they would sell a copy under the counter.) Dennis Cooper (aka Mavis Purvis) had a book published then, too, by the same publisher. His was titled
Safe
, the cover model his “it boy” boyfriend Rob (Candy Swanson). We held a joint publication party at the former church flipped into the discotheque Limelight, on a Sunday afternoon.

Howard couldn’t come to that party, as he was traveling. I didn’t blame him or feel paralyzed by his absence. Limelight, an Episcopal church sold and flipped into a Satan-lite disco, was, weirdly, the club of the moment, which shows how oddly the zeitgeist was skewing in the eighties. We had our book party in a barroom in the back, sunlight filtering in, and we even had celebrities—John Ashbery and James Merrill—in attendance. The only vague uneasiness was Howard’s absence, fitting into a larger pattern on both our parts. The previous summer marked the first time that we had not taken our annual August vacation, to Fire Island, or Vinelhaven, or Panarea. We noted the oversight, superstitiously. When Howard wrote me a postcard from Checkpoint Charlie, he observed, curtly, “I got your letter. Thanks. It’s the first time you’ve written in years.” His travels were becoming more distant. Once he called from one of the phone booths on the Champs-Élysées where you could speak internationally for a single franc coin, and shouted into the phone, “I’m getting on a plane to Tokyo with Bob Wilson and Bianca Jagger!” He traveled to Israel, which he claimed was full of “the most incredible types, though this is the straightest country in the universe. I miss you Eilat.” He failed to mention his clearly non-straight affair with an Israeli soldier on a scuba-diving trip to the Red Sea.

We had stopped sharing our affairs. The three-way phase slid into separate beds, though sometimes that bed was still our queen size in the Chelsea Hotel. I didn’t feel any pious obligation to keep Howard’s indentation in the mattress vacant during his travels. By the time he returned, sort of, the next year, the practice was mutual. We’d begun having separate affairs again, as distinct from the occasional casual liaison. Probably the most significant of Howard’s American romances was with a young actor, let’s call him Sean. He met Sean one night at the St. Mark’s Baths, while I was away somewhere. The Baths were all about men walking around in white
towels, with keys on ankle bracelets for rooms (more expensive) or lockers (cheap). Howard’s attention was caught by this dashing twenty-one-year-old guy who was striding around, coloring outside the lines by being fully dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt, and shoes. Just as striking, and pretty, were his face and eyes and bone structure, very much a young actor of the ilk being pushed forward in the eighties in films full of young male actors, like
The Outsiders
, released the spring before with Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, and other such new talent. Sean, who spoke with a barking Boston street accent, aspired to do film work, which added electricity to Howard’s fantasies. Sean fit, as well, into his professional plans. Becoming a feature director was his current desire, and so he had become interested in actors and actresses, a perfect fulcrum for his love of beauty and for his ambitions, which had lately turned more Hollywood (Howard’s version of responding to the times). Sean would make just such a Hollywood film within two years.

Howard brought Sean back to the Chelsea Hotel. He confided in him, at least as the story filtered down to me later, that we were having problems, and might not continue living together. We had indeed entered into conversations about possibly moving into separate apartments. Howard was often away, and planning to still be away; the expenses were high; and I didn’t want to manage Chelsea Copy any longer. By then we had the same agent at ICM, Luis Sanjurjo, and, like a good agent, he told whoever was interested, “They need space to do their separate work.” He was probably correct in his spin. I didn’t have the kind of stormy emotions around that move that I might have expected. Somehow it seemed natural. We kept looking at each other levelly with that same light in our eyes that had been there the first night at the Ninth Circle. Our mutual trust remained intact. Comic was the reversal that resulted in Howard’s parents summoning us to a lunch, at a restaurant across from Lincoln Center, and questioning these plans. They both were fraught, especially Howard’s mother. Doing a one-eighty turn, she argued against any such move, while Howard was left explaining that we weren’t breaking up, just separating our living spaces. But Elaine was having none of it.