Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (16 page)

__________

I
WAS STANDING BY THE WINDOW IN THE ROOM IN
my apartment that I used as my office. The room was cramped, the desk a plank of wood balanced on a couple of filing cabinets. I was talking to Howard on the phone. The news was not entirely unexpected. We had been going together for check-ups to my doctor, Barbara Starrett, regularly, like most everyone we knew. My T cells were holding steady, but cracks had appeared in Howard’s tests. His T-cell numbers were falling, and that could mean anything: maybe he was run-down, and some people just naturally had fewer. But there was more, too, about his white blood cells, their increase. (Blood tests in those early days were often only given for confirmation after significant drops in T-cell numbers.) He was calling now to say that he had been diagnosed as
officially
HIV-positive. That could still mean anything, we said. Lots of people were HIV-positive who never developed symptoms. They were asymptomatic. He seemed pretty much fine. And then we started crying. Now we were the ones crying, and he was the one with a prescription in his
hand.
Howard
. I said whatever I said to him in very slow words, with lots of deliberate, spaced pauses.

While we were talking, and after I’d put the phone back in its cradle, I was looking out the window, through plastic slats of venetian blinds. It was as if the world went from color to gray, and stayed there. It was raining. No “as if” there. It was raining, hard. It was a dark afternoon in the spring of 1987. So many memories of those last few years of the eighties are like that: rainy, bleak. It’s not possible that the weather was dismal for years on end, the same throughout all four seasons. But those years, taken together, were like one of those mornings when you wake up, the clouds are dense, the barometric pressure low, and no one calls. You feel as if your legs are a little heavy because the weather is creating a low-level system of depression throughout the city. That years-long day just went on and on and on. A traffic light changed, and Howard and I crossed to the other side of the street, and everything was different—ever so slightly different at first, and then wildly, shockingly different.

Howard was healthy—but was he really? Wasn’t he thinner than usual? Were those dark circles under his eyes so pronounced before, we wondered. We examined his face, together, in the mirror. When I slept over, or he slept over—we had adopted adolescent language now for going to bed together—his ribs felt as if they were sticking out. “Like Kafka’s hunger artist,” I lamely joked. We went to Chinatown and bought ugly smelly roots that we steeped in a large, beige Crock-Pot that needed to be lugged—if Howard were coming uptown for the night. Then there were the immune-boosting Chinese teas to be prepared. We bought a blender to combine just the right fruit juices with AL-721, an experimental drug made from egg yolks that was being prescribed to patients with swollen lymph
glands. In bed, we played oceanic-sounding tapes with subliminal healthy messages floating throughout, and warnings on the box not to start them in the middle, or stop them. Howard told no one but me, and we mostly kept our weighty secret for a year.

We were not the only ones keeping secrets. During one of those same weeks, Sharon Delano, my editor at
Vanity Fair
, called to say that my agent, Luis, needed help, needed someone to take him to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. I knew he had been sick, but all was very hushed, no one was asking, and no one was telling. He lived nearby in London Terrace, though I had never seen his apartment. Luis was a grand number—flamboyant, insouciant, as smart as anyone I’d ever met, exuding some kind of Puerto Rican aristocratic lineage, I forget the pedigree. But when I walked in on him he was shattered. I helped him gather his things. His housekeeper, a guy in jeans, more like a “trick,” as we called them, than an employee, arrived, using his key to enter. Luis, unconvincingly, told him that he was going on vacation. I hailed a cab, as he collapsed into my side, my first such act of transport to a hospital. Sharon said that he claimed I had been a very good nurse, a natural, after I left him following his admittance. Soon I heard he was dead. At the packed memorial service, at a theater in midtown, Howard and I wound up sitting on the steps leading down to the stage. Luis never said the word “AIDS,” and the obituary in the paper listed his cause of death as cancer, as most did. So who knows? But it was a classic AIDS service. I don’t remember whether his father was there. His mother and half siblings may have flown in from Puerto Rico. He led a compartmentalized life, so there were surprises, like Mike Nichols, whose office he had run, though he never mentioned him. Howard and I exchanged alarmed darts of
looks that said, “This could be you.” We were feeling that the bell was tolling for us.

Otherwise much life was stirring. The prospect of developing a full-blown case of AIDS, the possibility of facing down his own death, rather than facing down a rent hike, or a spat with a disgruntled lover, brought Howard to life in a startling way. Maybe it brought both of us more fully to life—but, no, Howard was especially galvanized, as if struck by a lightning bolt. Every moment that he wasn’t being pulled down into the yawning dark wormhole of encroaching horror, he was setting himself free, at least during that first secretive year. He countervailed, not prevailed, but countervailed. I often thought of him as a daffy type, which is why it made so much sense for him to be channeling Damon Runyon’s humor. I remember thinking that he was now like one of those Looney Tunes creations—Daffy Duck or Speedy Gonzales—dodging bombs that were making ink-black crater splashes in the ground, as they scampered over a cliff into midair escapist ballets of revving legs. He never told me that he was tapping into hidden reservoirs since his diagnosis. But he would never have said anything so solemn.

He did start keeping a video diary, recording himself talking on the phone, even jerking off. He used the diary to test angles, lighting, and to test feelings and ideas that were too personal to survive outside the opaque waters of solitude—the traditional use of diaries in written form, too. The day after Luis’s death, he made one of those recordings, at sunset, at Bob’s loft. Dressed in jeans and a dark, hooded sweatshirt, he announced into the camera, “Luis died yesterday, my agent. I’ve been sad all day. I never got to thank him for getting me this film. I miss talking to him. I feel sad for his parents.” In the violet light, he added, “Luis, this is for you.”
He pulled back his hood like a Capuchin monk, and played at high volume “Hymn to Her,” sung by Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders (he’d been thinking of her for
Bloodhounds
): “Something is lost, something is found, / They will keep on speaking her name.” He zoomed in on windowpanes: the Empire State glowed gold, rush-hour traffic on the West Side Highway glittered like rhinestones, and the sky turned punk pink. He stepped forward, back, adjusted angles, light, performed semicircles of dervish whirling, in a casual manner, confident even in his hesitations, more confident than ever, lost in his art.

That summer Howard went to Los Angeles for a few months. He was following up on a clutch of successful forays. From an earlier visit, I remember Luis’s voice on the other end of the phone telling me, “He’s met everyone in a week who people spend their careers trying to meet, David Geffen, Barry Diller. He’s going to take a meeting with David Puttnam, the chairman of Columbia Pictures!” Before leaving, he wrote a goodbye note on the back of a car registration card from Vassar College, where he’d worked a deal to use student editing equipment for free, or some such rigging of the system. He addressed it using one of the series of pet names we had been using for a decade: “Dear Bug, Thank you for being so sweet and still loving me after all this time. I love you too. I’m going to stay strong and then we can live together as old dinosaurs should. Have a lovely summer. I hope you can come visit for a while. My ph # is (213) 661-3588. Love, Howard.” He rented a bungalow in Hancock Park. I never did visit, but one time—I was floating in a pool in the Hamptons—he shared on the phone that he had befriended a porn actor who talked about the early “honeymoon phase” of the disease, a phrase that he gladly took to.

I was experiencing emotional whiplash. In my little office, where I’d heard the worst news I’ve received in my life, I was receiving, on the same phone, looking out the same window, lots of promising career news. I had written a proposal for a biography of Frank O’Hara, perhaps hoping to summon the fading New York that he represented to my generation, to me, and to Howard, when we first came to the city to be artists and poets, when we first met at the Ninth Circle, a venue full of youth and fantasy and alcohol. O’Hara’s friend J. J., my first boyfriend, whom I’d met there, too, had died the year before of AIDS, April 1986—check. The last time I visited him, at Beth Israel Medical Center, his blond hair had turned white from horror, he was unable to converse as vivaciously as usual and just said, pointing at a nature program on a TV mounted in a far corner, “You’ll have to get it from the TV”—his last words to me. So there was lots of recouping involved in my hatching that project. But I’d never written a biography, and the proposal was highly
unconventional. I had a new agent, Joy Harris. She kept calling the day of the deal to report on what, counterintuitively, turned into a spirited auction among ten publishers. Not many months later, I finally untied myself from my chair, and finished my novel about modeling,
Scary Kisses
(a title that unintentionally revealed some of my fraught feelings around AIDS as much as about fashion). Then, too, the news from Joy was good. The eighties was a strong time for young writers, and—thanks to great hopes for national bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble—the money was pretty good. I took it all in, while feeling the steady tugging of our truly scary secret.

My whiplash was a mere crick in the neck compared to the jagged contrast between Howard’s highs and his ultimate low. Howard received seed money for
Bloodhounds of Broadway
from the American Playhouse series on PBS, and then in one memorable meeting at Columbia Pictures he managed to convince David Puttnam to back this auteur production of a first-time director with a $4 million budget. His script turned out to be magic, a group hallucination among many young Hollywood actors, all wanting in. Some took a bit more work, but Howard’s charms were working full tilt. A meeting took place at Madonna’s apartment on Central Park West. She lay on her bed, while he convinced her not only to play a Broadway showgirl, but to dance and swing and sing a swanning period duet with Jennifer Grey, getting her to commit to perform the indie-style role in the fall when she would be back from her 1987 “Who’s That Girl” world tour. I don’t know if she was briefed on Howard’s gay not-so-past. Sarah—reeled back to work in the production office—told me of Madonna’s coming into the office one day and asking, in a
haute-contre
voice, “Who’s Brad Gooch?” as if she felt she should have known, or had been kept out of a loop. To convince Matt Dillon, Howard took him to
Umberto’s Clam House. At the climax of the lunch and drinks, he had his now-line-producer Kevin Dowd (who toted the potato chips for the cookout our first morning on the Bowery) drop off a manila envelope that Howard presented to Matt. Inside were vintage photographs of Joe Gallo lying murdered on the floor of that very restaurant, a Mafia-Damon-Runyon-style rubout. The show business worked: Matt agreed, and later Howard pilfered a pair of his white socks from his dressing room and brought them home to me as a memento, a fetishistic wink. Randy Quaid signed on, and Esai Morales, Julie Hagerty, Rutger Hauer, Steve Buscemi, and Fisher Stevens, and soon they were all reading in a circle in Howard’s (borrowed) loft.

Production began on the movie in late September or early October. Most of the filming was done in December and January, in Union City, New Jersey, and the West Village, and most of the time the temperatures were below zero. I never visited the set, was supposed to have been an extra in one scene but couldn’t get there, I forget why. I did hear bits of the action from others. Howard was bravely standing up to the bond companies. They kept fighting him over costs, about how much money another inch of snow would add, until finally he banned them from the set, an almost unthinkably bold gesture for a first-time director, but his boldness was part of the bravado of seizing what he felt might be his only chance. He sometimes called me from a heated production van, when they were filming on lower Fifth Avenue late into the night, while angry neighbors pelted them with eggs. Once he called to tell me that he was hiding from going back on set for the shooting of the scene of the death of The Brain, who spent the entire film with a stab wound trying to get to a hospital. Howard hinted at seeing his own death in the scenario and pulling back from that vision. His voice that night sounded stripped, like his old heroin voice. I asked if he was doing drugs. He said he wasn’t. Maybe he was simply exhausted, getting by on mere slivers of sleep, with all this weighty responsibility, in freezing temperatures, delirious to deliver the goods.