Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (19 page)

Getting the care situation calibrated took a while. Howard qualified for assistance from one of the AIDS care organizations, either GMHC, or God’s Love We Deliver. They sent someone over, a well-meaning helper, selflessly giving of his time. Howard put him to work doing light accounting, straightening out the books, which was not really in the spirit of the enterprise, so he didn’t last, and moved on to a more conventional charity case. Eventually the planets lined up with Tony, whom I took to calling “Nurse Thing.” Tony was a black guy, loved the word “fierce,” and was very snap-snap in the style of the street guys who had begun hanging out on the western fringes of Christopher Street, toward the piers. He wasn’t an official drag queen but had some of that sharp sensibility so that even a whiff of the presence of Madonna kept him on board, with occasional sightings of a Sean Penn or a Matt Dillon, whom he could dish and scream about on the phone with his friends. He and Howard were a good team, a comedy team, occasionally veering uncomfortably close to shades of
Driving Miss Daisy
, but always regaining some dignified equilibrium. Elaine always included his favorite white-powdered-sugar doughnuts on her long shopping list.

Tony taped to the refrigerator a comment of Howard’s that reliably got lots of knowing laughs. Actually Howard directed him to write down the comment, succinct as a fortune in a fortune cookie, and tape it there: “There’s so much beauty in the world. That’s what got me in trouble in the first place.” Each time Howard repeated the words, they were more elongated and slurred than the last, and his laugh more disproportionate. He’d first made the crack to me on the phone from L.A., around the time he made an entry in his notebook, while he was still in the “honeymoon phase,” and still had the faculties to be melancholy and elegiac about his own destiny: “When I die, my education dies with me. All those years of Latin, French, Italian. We all share the same education, including television, film, music, events. But each person’s mix is slightly different. My particular mix will be removed soon from this planet.” When I later found the notebook, I realized how early he understood the score.

At the moment Howard was writing those lines, he had stepped outside himself, and saw himself as clearly as a character in a film. I’m not sure that I ever stepped outside of us, of him, so clearly while the action of those days was still being improvised. At first I was too charmed by his good looks and seductive projects to notice. Later I was too drawn into desperate attempts at medical intervention to think. Yet he was clearly an intellectual beneficiary of his educational training, of years of reading and writing and looking at everything, from prep school to Columbia to film school to the Sony TV always on in our
Chelsea apartment, all the raw footage that he was busily splicing on a control board toward more ambitious creation. He rightly recognized his own talent, with that same preternatural clarity, his ability to do well in six months what had taken four years, and the promise to continue to do so. His connivance to be both Hollywood and indie East Village as a life project was working, and would have worked.

In September
Scary Kisses
came out. The book party was a classic shiny eighties launch, with a dinner before, at the club-restaurant MK, started that year by André Balazs, in a converted bank building with arched double-storey stone window frames on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street—one of those clubs where, around midnight, a forest of silhouettes would gather in front of the door and Howie, the doorman, would arbitrarily let you in, or not. “If you don’t get in within two minutes, you have to move on,” a friend of mine, Tommy Page, a pop singer right then, taught me. My party was filler for the earlier part of the evening. The surprise guest at the elegant dinner given by my publisher at around seven o’clock was Howard, in his wheelchair, who decided, last minute, to show up. The effect was a bit like his announcement on the phone sex line that he was in the hospital with AIDS. Or like the afternoon that Randy Quaid walked into the apartment after not having visited in a while and Howard said, “You look like you just saw a ghost.” The publicists weren’t prepared for such a presence “in the mix.” Gay with its shadow of AIDS lacked splash that season. I was surprised, thrown for a second, but Howard added a depth of field that I would never have wanted denied. I met Bret Easton Ellis for the first time at that party. He was an icon
that year in literary social life. I loved his book
Less Than Zero
, and having him was like having Warhol, an imprimatur from the era. Howard stayed a long time, even when the party opened into hundreds, being wheeled around on cold marble floors by Tony, having his picture taken, smiling authentically.

Since I’d never published a book with a big publishing house before, I didn’t know what to expect or any of the standard paddle-lines or score-keeping tallies along the way. “The
PW
is in,” Joy called to say. “What’s a
PW
?” “They’re just a bunch of kids who don’t know anything, get paid fifteen dollars a review, no one takes it seriously,” she said. I knew enough to know the review must have been bad. In my mind, I was an experimental poet of a novelist. In my publishers’ wishful minds I had written a glossy commercial novel about modeling, so they tried to sucker in inevitably disappointed readers looking for a young-guy version of Danielle Steel, while snubbing my own little cadre of five hundred downtown readers. The book tour was a step into a distorting funhouse mirror. One day I was on a TV show with my old modeling agent, Dan Deely, and model Michael Ives, taking live calls from moms wanting tips for their own sons or daughters who wanted to break into the business. The next day I was reading in a punk club in L.A., and then I was cross-legged in a chair in an apartment in San Francisco, being taped for a literary radio program by a cerebral host who detected whispers of Foucault in my novel. So many talk shows, so many guests. I learned to talk TV-talk, which takes place at double-speed, with no pauses, or spaces between words, completely artificial in its reality. When it was all done, I came home to Howard, content to be there, even if home now meant illness, and the “big fear,” and issues about which items of his might have been stolen by this or that delivery person or repair guy.

We had a new film project. Howard decided that he wanted to film
Scary Kisses
. He asked about buying the rights, so I called Joy again, and again she placated. The notion was that he was going to videotape everyone visiting the apartment reading a short chapter. We sold him an option for a dollar. He had his video camera set on a tripod and—in his original way—transformed sickbed visits into something more unique than dropping off flowers, or having a strained conversation. Not everyone was comfortable with sickness and death, as I had not been either until this immersion course. Now they were either made more comfortable, or less, but everyone had to agree to signing this “guestbook” in the form of a taping. The enterprise seemed a bit like the O’Henry story about the ivy leaf that an artist paints on a wall outside the sickroom of a young woman who says she will die when the last leaf falls. I’m sure Howard fitfully believed that art would keep him alive, and I chose to believe, too. We were both playing the odds, even miraculous ones, for a limited recovery, when a cure was found. And so one after another, an unlikely mix did their screen tests: Sean Penn, Barry Diller, poets from Columbia, Sarah, Chris Cox, Jennifer Grey, director Tom DiCillo, a kid from London.

One of them was Derrick, twenty-one, his baseball hat swerved studiedly “street” to the side. He was my new best friend. For a few months Sean had been my best friend, but he had drifted away, depressed, floating between New York and L.A., more lost with the hospital regimen taken away. Derrick was very immediate, here and now. He was tall, animated, black, and, as a hustler at Rounds and a go-go boy in a Keith Haring–painted T-shirt at the World, on East Second Street, had lots of stories to loudly tell. Andy had snapped him at dinner in that T-shirt when he was eighteen. From a
Cosby
-style family (his father was dean of John Jay College of
Criminal Justice) he’d perfected a ghetto style with “Yo!” big basketball sneakers, a jacket of many colors and logos, and rap-musician gestures with fingers and arms and legs that he could turn on and off like a pantomime. Derrick had the kind of past that got my dark imagination all agitated: graffiti artist; brushes with the law; expelled from high schools like the Cathedral School, where he flunked catechism for not knowing the makeup of the Trinity. But I didn’t feel any alarming energy coming from him. Mostly I felt his quick, smart intelligence: reading Henry Miller, Genet, Sartre, and talking about it all, when he wasn’t impersonating a thug.

And then in December it happened again: Howard was back in the hospital. Just the night before, Derrick and I had been walking up Seventh Avenue after seeing
Matador
, an Almodóvar film about melodramatic, campy, romantic loving and dying, very different from the clinical version going on behind the shaded windows of St. Vincent’s. As we passed by, I thought, “I hope I never have to go back in that place with Howard ever again.” I didn’t say the thought out loud because I didn’t want to give it any real place in the world. When I got home from church the next day, I called Howard. His voice was just a whisper, far away. I asked him how he was. He said, “I don’t know.” I asked him what was going on. He said, “I don’t know.” Where are you? I asked. “In the bathroom. Come over. I’m hallucinating. When are you coming? Good.” So I hurried right over.

Howard was in bed. Duane, a nurse assigned for house monitoring, was there. Duane told me later that Howard had visibly calmed down the minute he heard my voice at the door, and had smiled. When I walked into the bedroom, he asked me if I saw the faces up there. He asked me if I heard the sounds, “Click, click, click, click, click.” He was sometimes holding his head. He went into a
shivering spasm, with teeth chattering. Andy had been there, Duane was telling me. There was a chance that he was dehydrated and so must drink lots of Gatorade. Andy was coming back soon, maybe to take him to St. Vincent’s Emergency Room. Andy had spoken with Dr. Josh. Howard kept talking to me in fragments: “You know”; “So what”; “What’s going on.” But it was a kind of delirium, a faraway soliloquy. I kept getting tears in my eyes, those tears again, and wiping them away. But he looked on blankly, not touching or caring or even registering the tears, though observing them, sort of. He did not respond to any of my reliably entertaining air kisses, or even to squeezes and expressive hugs.

I didn’t say, “I love you.” I wanted to. I thought, “What if he were to die without my saying ‘I love you’?” But I worried the saying would be a tip-off for him of my fears.

Turned out that Howard was not dehydrated, which might have been better news, easily remedied. Andy, Duane, and I escorted him to the St. Vincent’s Emergency Room again. I kept flashing on the afternoon, nine months earlier, when Andy and I had taken him to the hospital the first time, with me sitting in the back of that same car, sunk into the burgundy plush seats. That time there was a baseball game on the radio. This time there was a football game. This time they wheeled him immediately into the back of the emergency room where a little miniward of beds and screens was now set up. I was sorriest to notice that when there was talk of a “spinal tap” Howard didn’t even balk. A strange new passivity had suffused him on this reentry. He’d said many times, over the past weeks, “I’ve lost the will to live,” and I did see an airy listlessness moving in.

“But maybe his willpower will come back,” I thought, lying on my narrow bed in my blank room with the icon. I couldn’t believe
I was back
there
again, either. I hoped his force would come back, for my sake as much as his. I’d miss him. So much of my life was wrapped up with his. I felt I would be horrified by the loneliness. I knocked around my eerie apartment. I couldn’t concentrate on working or doing anything but walking toward walls and back away from windows. Maybe I should have waited at the hospital. Anyway, I came home. I figured he had hours of waiting, testing. Andy was there. He’d call if he wanted to leave and needed a replacement. One pedestrian thought plodded after another. My head was blown apart again, like a photograph of a nebula explosion in black and white, an explosion that by its presence only spotlighted the void that was there all along. I wanted to be with Howard somehow. But how? I was frazzled and splintered.

When I arrived at the hospital the next night, Sean was there, and Dr. Starrett was talking to Howard. I asked her if she could explain what was going on. She said that Howard had a progressive brain disease that they would treat with experimental drugs.

Howard said, in his faltering way, “How many people does it work on? Ten percent?”

“No,” she said.

Howard, brightening: “Twenty percent?”

“No,” she said, holding his hand, the plainness of her tired face like candle wax.

She explained that no one had yet survived the brain disease. In the old days, she said, pneumocystis was incurable and everyone died soon after diagnosis. Now they had pentamidine. Rarely did deaths follow now from pneumocystis, though other types of opportunistic infections eventually moved in. If Howard were to weather this brain disease, he would be the first.

“Maybe we’ll luck out,” she said, with a complex smile.

After she left, Sean started to fidget nervously, rambling in manic half-sentences about how Dr. Josh had knocked Howard’s apple juice off the tray earlier.

“Would you leave?” Howard said to Sean, simply, with no malice. “I want to be alone with Brad for a while.”

We sat there in the gloaming of the eerie light of the efficient hospital lamps, with a white curtain pulled halfway around on its overhead track. I felt it was important to say whatever was on my mind. Every so often I had to stop. But mostly I finally said it all.

BRAD
: Do you believe in life after death?

HOWARD
: I hope not.

BRAD
: Why not?

HOWARD
: Because I’ll go down.

He pointed with his thumb in the direction of Hell.

BRAD
: Because if there is, be sure to come and visit me.

HOWARD
: I’m so sad. I’ve never been sadder in my life. It just hit me. I never thought I was really going to die.

It was true. I’d known it. He’d known it. But even to imagine death spreading out its presence of absence right there where Howard was, “And therein campeth, spreading his banner,” as Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in a sonnet about “the long love,” was breathtaking and nauseating and still finally impossible to comprehend.

HOWARD
: I’m in shock.

Then he instructed me to go to his storage room, and destroy everything there, as the papers or whatever they were would be embarrassing to him. He said to either keep or destroy his paintings (ugly surrealist things from Exeter that I always made fun of when they were hanging in his Prince Street apartment, but which I could never destroy), but to definitely keep the copies of all of his films. He had one print of each of his movies, including different versions of the movies, all of the versions of the
Burroughs
movie, for instance, and all of the little reels of his early film school movies. He suggested that maybe we could have a retrospective someday, or show clips at a memorial service.