Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (3 page)

We exited back up into the fragrant air and honking noise. Across the street the clock tower of Jefferson Library beamed the time as after ten. We walked past the Eighth Street Playhouse, where, on weekends, it was always Halloween, as crowds lined up early for the midnight showing of
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
, dressed as the various characters. They were preparing to pop up during the screening to act out songs, like early karaoke. Just off the curb we walked over was stamped or painted in the street a warning that had been proliferating recently: “CLONES GO HOME.” We were descending now into the East Village, where what seemed like an achingly important stylistic battle was being signaled between the more punk East Village gays and the “clones” of the West Village—the first iteration of “gay lib,” supposedly identifiable by their leather jackets, flannel shirts, biker boots, beards, and sideburns. Howard and I only vaguely fit either type, and so were poor candidates for a Romeo–Juliet clash. Later there appeared the acronym FAFH (Fags Against Facial Hair), which was, likewise, very East Village.

“You’d better go home,” Howard cracked, since I lived in the maligned West Village.

I shrugged off the street stamps.

Eventually we arrived at his block, the last on Prince Street before Bowery—a burnt-out district, full of inky-purple shadows tinged with even more of a sickly yellow cast than the West Village, and a smell of gas, rather than dog shit, in the air. Few lived around here, except the street people, occupying empty eye sockets of windowless apartments across the street; the only business, a pizza shop one corner away. Howard’s loft was on the second floor of a fallow industrial building. I was impressed by his pioneer edginess as we pushed our way through a gray metal front door. Another friend of mine was living in what later was called “Tribeca.” He, too, was a pioneer, inhabiting a space in an old warehouse, installing plumbing, tearing up the flooring, breaking through an exterior brick wall to make a window through which he could see the World Trade Towers, like silver stereo speakers. By contrast, we were mere Hobbits in the West Village. Creaking upstairs in the dark, Howard said that he was paying $100 a month, $80 less than I was.

As we walked in, he clicked on a metal light clipped to gray industrial shelves near the door. I blinked into view one vast, rickety, undivided loft taking up an entire floor, from the tall front windows in green frames looking out on the bombed-out destruction across the street, toward the back, still mostly dark. The hangar space was subdivided by function, and by quirky, eye-catching items. Here a reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere on a white plaster column, there the red IBM Selectric typewriter from Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
, set on a gray metal typing table with adjustable flaps. The middle segment was a kitchen with a gray Formica-topped table covered with scattered knives and forks. In the rear I could make out a giant king-size bed and a padlocked shutter. I followed Howard in a vague
curve back to the refrigerator. Without asking, he pulled out a bottle of Gordon’s vodka, and poured two tall cold ones in smudgy glasses.

He then made his way straight to a red leather couch next to a white rotary phone on a little table—he owned an answering machine, I didn’t—while I slumped into a dowdy brown armchair with copper stripes. “That was my grandmother’s,” he told me. Howard used to visit his grandmother every Friday night in the Bronx, for “Shabbat,” he explained. I hadn’t really thought about his religion, but now I knew. He told me she was crazy, and he was afraid he’d go crazy, but he said it with a, well, crazy grin. “My cousin in California was Moe Howard, of the Three Stooges. I was named after him,” he added, the missing link perhaps being that madcap followed from crazy. Then he stood up and dropped the needle on a record on a high-tech German turntable connected to gigantic speakers. “It’s Bruce,” he said. “You know him?” “No,” I answered as the room was filled with loud guitar and drum that I associated with straight boys’ dorm rooms. He handed me the empty sleeve for
Darkness on the Edge of Town.
I examined Springsteen’s red-tinted rugged face.

He told me about Kevin Goldfarb, a friend from Great Neck, on Long Island, his hometown. I sensed that he had an unrequited crush on Kevin. That maybe the fascination with Bruce Springsteen was really a fascination with Kevin. “Candy’s Room” blaring, he told me that just the week before, Kevin was walking down Eighth Street and saw “Bruce.” Kevin caught up to say that he admired “Adam Raised a Cain,” and Bruce invited him to have a coffee. Earlier in the summer, Howard saw Springsteen play the Academy of Music, the old opera house on East Fourteenth Street. We also discovered we both, unpredictably, loved Donna Summer’s easy summer disco hit, “Last Dance.”

“Do you want another?” he said, taking my glass, without waiting for an answer.

The first sip of the second bracing glass of vodka, no ice this time, burned my throat going down. But I finally lifted off, and I could tell, by looking, that Howard—stretched out on the couch—had lifted off as well. We didn’t make out yet. Instead we talked and, in that stretch of two, three hours, ran through many of the topics that would remain high on our list for the entire time we knew each other. Howard thought that film (which he was doing) was going to become the universal language, the Latin of our times, because it was visual and so could be understood by everyone. I argued that poetry (which I was doing) was the ultimate, the only way to hit the gong, and was bound to become the form for the shiny future now that the novel was finished. Howard, weirdly, I thought, argued in favor of the State of Israel, I, for a Palestinian state, both of us ignoring the compromise of the two-state solution for our hot controversy. We also talked about nuclear bombs, Kraftwerk, the movies of Nicholas Ray, death, extinction, and the use of hypnosis games in sexual seduction back when we were both suburban teenage boys.

All this talk was, of course, foreplay. But an even bigger thrill was that I was now feeling the insulated, contrived ecstasy of not being “myself,” but with someone else who was also obviously not “himself,” both of us highly stimulated in an intimate pod that felt both natural and miraculous. Another way of saying the same thing: I fell in love with Howard during that first animated, abstract, improvisatory jazz piece of a conversation in his front room. “I’ll show you the back deck,” he said, springing up, his body wiry. As we walked to the rear, Howard yanking down the metal pull chains of ceiling light fixtures along the way, I quickly eyed the waiting big bed, towered over by a precariously leaning balsa-wood bookshelf. Howard undid a metal contraption to open the door and we stepped onto a tar-covered back porch, actually the roof of the floor below, into the sticky summer heat made more intense by the tar. “I kill plants,” he said, pointing toward some brown stalks in big pots. Then we sat on the ledge, identifying Greek-named constellations in the sky.

I think Howard leaned over and kissed me. Or I leaned over and kissed him. Or we both leaned over; very innocent stuff. Then we returned inside and we were soon embracing inside his big boat of a bed. I remember the musky smell of Howard’s body—again, something I associate with the Middle East, an oily mixture, some (is it possible?) saffron. He complained that I was a “bad kisser.” (Like turning my
tartare
into a hamburger, his comment was impolite, but as intimate as trust.) The lights were off now and his dark tan made his eyes burn even more intently in the shadows. I don’t remember any details, other than smell, and the touch of his almost hairless skin, but I do remember a sensation of being a mere composite of iron filings pulled in by the life-size magnet of Howard’s body. We made a big physical impression on each other that smoothed the sharp angles left from all of the heady talk earlier. We were both reeling drunk, and stoned, and lost in a cloud of sheets, and then the phone was ringing. It was morning.

It was Sunday. Gay Pride Day.

“I’m having a cookout,” Howard announced, standing in white Fruit of the Loom skivvies, his palm clamped over the enormous handset of the phone. “Can you stay?”

“Sure,” I managed to say, throat raw from the cigarettes and sex the night before.

I actually felt a bit of a downbeat, accented with shy apprehension and disappointment, to be meeting Howard’s friends, before I’d even seen him alone (and sober) in the daytime. When he wasn’t being indolent and shockingly unproductive, Howard could be extremely animated and daring, “stirring up mise-en-scène,” as he liked to say. It was dynamic of him to be having a holiday barbecue, I thought, but then the party hadn’t been planned with me in mind. I was stepping late onto an already moving train.

While Howard peed in the narrow bathroom opposite, I stood on the bed in
my
white Fruit of the Loom skivvies to survey the bookshelf. When I really took in its height, and its threatening tilt forward, some books already edging over, I wondered whether I would ever be able to sleep there again. The collection might easily have been mine, filled with the same classics from the Columbia College Humanities “Great Books” course, the same line of little metallic paperback Greek tragedies. I reached for a brick of a volume that I did not own,
The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence
, and toted it with me. Howard exited, and I passed him, distracted, as if we were already living together. Sitting on the toilet, I read “Snake”: “A snake came to my water-trough / On a hot, hot day, and I in pajamas for the heat / To drink there.” I cleverly made the connection between Howard’s penis and my reading this poem. I was feeling very limber.

By the time I left the closet of a bathroom, Kevin had arrived. I quickly figured out that he wasn’t Kevin from Great Neck, the Springsteen-loving straight boy, but rather a gay Kevin, Kevin Dowd, a self-defined “pervert,” and proudly so. Unloading an Acme
shopping bag filled with chips and gigantic plastic bottles of sodas, he was gangly, with glasses, an unassuming short-sleeved plaid suburban cotton shirt, a beard cut as sharply as the Sheriff of Nottingham’s from
Robin Hood
of the fifties TV series, and an unctuous, monotone way of speaking with his jaw clenched. His perversion was detectable as a lilt in the eyes. He had placed an ad recently in the pink “Personals” pages of the national gay newspaper
The Advocate
, soliciting East Village punks and offering to service them in broad daylight on Second Avenue. Kevin was working as a grip on Howard’s documentary, and they were collaborating on a screenplay for a film titled
Gang
, about street gangs in Chinatown. If Howard was the more infatuated one in his friendship with the first Great Neck Kevin, I quickly understood that this Kevin, the early-morning shopper, was the more infatuated vis-à-vis Howard.

“Do you want these in here, Howard?” he asked in a near whisper.

Around one or two, others began showing up. I already sort of knew one of them, Darryl Pinckney. I had been aware of Darryl from afar at Columbia as a black writer—in Howard’s class, not mine—who’d won an important prize and was cool in a brainy rather than posing way. A crucial distinction was that he had been a writing student of Elizabeth Hardwick (prose), across Broadway at Barnard, rather than of Kenneth Koch (poetry), like me. Howard and Darryl had been roommates, and had worked together as interns at the
New York Review of Books.
They had lots of funny literary-style anecdotes. Howard Moss, poetry editor of
The New Yorker
, made a pass at Howard at a party. Howard came home and said to Darryl, “A rolling Brookner gathers no moss.” Repeating this jibe cut them up. Darryl liked to tell the story of quoting a
remark of Elizabeth Hardwick’s to someone at a dinner while she was present and her reprimanding him, “Darryl, you are not T. S. Eliot, and I am not the Greeks!” I heard both these witticisms for the first time—though not the last—at that urban barbecue on the black tarpaper-roof in the noonday sun.

Most of Howard’s friends wound up playing zany parts in his student films, shorts on yellow spools of celluloid he showed at least once in a film school screening room. I remember Darryl played a cabdriver spouting a line from Flannery O’Connor’s
Wise Blood
, “Jesus is a trick on niggers.” The next friend to show up for the barbecue was Joe Krenusz, head usher at the Met, a Hungarian with a thick accent and a love of Eastern European opera divas. Joe lived in the Bronx. When Howard wasn’t visiting his grandmother, he was just as often visiting Joe, returning home late on the IRT train loaded down with boxed-set recordings of Berlioz and Janáček operas. I believe that Joe wore a brown toupee, or I have retrospectively invested him with one, as it would have fit. Joe had a nephew along that day, Istvan, living with him, with an equally powerful accent. Joe liked to have parties where young guys got drunk on licorice liquors. In his cameo in one of Howard’s movies he was Count Krenusz. The joke line, delivered in high camp, trilled bitchy fashion by Melinda, of Paris, was: “He’s not a count, he’s a discount.”

We were all seated in a haphazard configuration at a wooden picnic table, our legs half in and half out, with Howard making clouds of smoke, much as he had the night before in my kitchen, while cooking hot dogs and hamburgers on a sturdy grill. Kevin, twinkling eyes cast down, was sous-chef. Suddenly a most unlikely friend of Howard’s appeared, his head popping up from the low wall of the ruins of the roof next door. It was Jimmy, or “Jimmy
the Bum,” as Howard called him. We would now describe him as “homeless.” His head was a round bowling ball, like a Jimmy Cagney head, and he handed Howard a bottle of vodka. He was full of good cheer. Howard was like the kid who made a fortune with his neighborhood lemonade stand. He had lots of gigs and angles. One of them was working for the Bari brothers, who ran a restaurant supply store on Bowery and owned most of the real estate on the block. Howard found them tenants, and in exchange got his loft at low rent. In return, he also convinced them to let the “bums” sleep in the buildings. Jimmy was thanking him for the effort. He, too, had a walk-on or more of a stroll-on or roar-on cameo in one of Howard’s screwball shorts.

By late afternoon it was decided that we would head over to a Gay Pride celebration on Christopher Street. We walked across town into the crowds: guys in cutoffs, white Adidas sneakers, scruff, kissing. Christopher Street was blocked off, with a line at Village Cigars at the corner of Seventh Avenue waiting to buy rolling papers. I remember a lesbian with a T-shirt, “Anita Dear, Shove It,” the big issue that year having been Anita Bryant’s anti-gay campaign in Florida. At sunset there would be fireworks over the Hudson River, by the dilapidated wooden piers, several stories high, where cruising went on all day and all night, and where boys and men disappeared with one another into little rooms pungent with the sweet smell of poppers and the bitter smell of urine. At the corner of Hudson and Christopher a wooden stage was set up. Camille O’Grady was singing. As Black Irish as her name, a Jersey girl much like Patti Smith, tall, in leather vest, boots, and all manner of bracelets and amulets, she belted out her new anthem, “Toilet Kiss, Porcelain Piss.”

“I know her,” I bragged to Howard.

By the time Howard and I, and our group, arrived at West Street, clocking from the time we met at my apartment just about twenty-four hours before, though it seemed weeks ago, we had filled each other in scattershot on our romantic pasts and present—what my therapist, an Episcopal nun, Sister Mary Michael, her tower office at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, called a “relationship history.” One of
my
episodes had been falling in love with Shipen, the head of an experimental hippie monastic community of men and women affiliated with the Cathedral. I joined the community, against the advice of its advisor, Canon Edward Nason West, who told the group, “Beware of Greek boys,” referring to me. He was right. My presence caused tension. Shipen tried to gas himself in the community bus named “Athanasius,” and Sister Mary Michael stepped in to help, leading to my exit. Next I was involved with the painter Frank Moore. He lived in Paris on a grant at Cité des Arts, where we created a collaborative book of poems and etchings. But the distance had grown longer recently, and soon a French poet friend of ours, Pierre Martory, would inform him that “Brad met someone.” News of love was a priority and traveled quickly.

Howard’s “relationship history” was not as meandering as mine—equally convoluted, but more compressed. He was recovering from a “relationship” with a straight boy, Rick, who had also been at Columbia. Rick had a girlfriend, and Howard was obsessed with tracking their movements, excruciating as that tracking was for him. One episode involved watching the couple through the plate-glass windows of Phebe’s restaurant on the Bowery. A student film of Howard’s from this period,
Wires
, was filled with imagery that reeked of romantic espionage. For a time Rick was Howard’s
roommate in the loft. This may have been the subtext of the talk the night before of fear of madness running in the family, for Howard wound up on a prescription antidepressant. He described watching Rick and girlfriend making love in the apartment, insulated by the soft drug, which he craved, observing dispassionately, as if through the wrong end of a telescope. We both presented ourselves as more available than we probably were. Frank and I had never officially discussed closure. Howard was still obsessed with Rick. But things moved fast in those days. So we just rearranged.

The next month is a blur. We both had previous lives continuing. Most of Howard’s was still taking place out of my view. We were a split screen. But weirdly significant shifts happened in both our lives at just that time, on that cusp. I had been feeling anxious about writing stories rather than poems on my clunky little typewriter. Then I hit on writing stories in the present tense in movie-script format, which became my style for the next decade. Was it the influence of having met a filmmaker? Another plot point: Walking down lower Seventh Avenue near my apartment one afternoon I was caught up to by a cheerful Paul Rackley, who said he was something called a “booker” for a modeling agency, Elite. He said I should try it and handed me his card. That card began to itch and buzz, like a fluorescent fly, in a corner of my brain. On Howard’s side, I remember having brunch with him and James Grauerholz—a tall, blond, Nordic midwesterner, Howard’s age, who was William Burroughs’s assistant and intimate—in a greasy spoon on Prince or Spring Street. James had arranged for Howard to shoot William for his student film short, and the talk now was
of going big with the project and Howard making a full-fledged documentary. So we were both expanding.

But that insight is hindsight. We did meet and we did make some right turns. But it was still the Roaring Seventies and mostly, at least for several weeks, I lived, by virtue of inertia, or habit, the life I had been living, not aware of any pattern-interrupt. That life wasn’t defined by work or school but by wandering the streets, beginning in late afternoon, and often going into the late night, early morning. A marker along the way, a signpost showing where things were heading, appearing sometime mid-decade, had been the Toilet, on West Fourteenth Street. You rode a dicey freight elevator up from the street. Half the club was borrowed from the recent past: a disco dance floor where poppers were sniffed, tambourines banged on butts, while shouting and gyrating emphatically to Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” The other half was a first glimpse of the near future: a transgressive line of dirty-theme toilets (on message with Camille O’Grady’s song) and sex-scene raunchy orgies that you could either watch or take part in.

The logic set in motion by the Toilet actually did arrive at a bottom line, a finding of limits, like a crash test, at what I definitely thought of as
my
bar that summer of 1978, the Mineshaft, at the corner of Washington Street and Little West Twelfth. I believe I was there on its first night, or one of its first nights, in the fall of 1976. On my way nowhere special, I saw two shadows dart into a door I didn’t know, probably on my way to the Toilet, which was practically around the corner. It was early, say ten p.m. I followed them, and found myself in a single room of what became a downstairs den of the full-blown club, with just a few other shadows drinking silver cans of beer. When I returned a week or so later, an adjacent door
now led to stairs, and a dress code was in effect, posted, with a guard in place to enforce: no colognes, no “designer sweaters,” no “rugby styled shirts or disco drag.” If you wore any offending clothing you had to strip it off at the “coat check” and put it in a plastic bag to be checked. Some guys in proscribed khakis or dress pants stripped in the glare at the door and walked about in briefs. Sneakers were forbidden too, and some walked barefoot on the iffy floors. “Jock straps” were approved, “& sweat.” Seemingly every week a new vanishing point was introduced: a sling where fist fuckers fisted; a scaffold for whipping willing victims; a bathtub for those desiring “golden showers.”