Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (5 page)

From Port Authority we took a Martz bus, my usual transport, to Wilkes-Barre. The bus was crowded, so we had to sit on the long banquette in the rear. We didn’t get to see much of the Delaware Water Gap, and the rumbling of the motor was loud and disruptive, but our shared idea of lucky fun was met because of our fellow passenger—a straight, crew-cut Marine on holiday leave, going home. Howard flirted and interviewed him most of the way, while I looked on, getting my kicks vicariously. Whatever erotic charge Walt Whitman took from stage drivers, and Union soldiers, and “greasy or pimpled” day laborers, we took from, well, bus drivers and Marines and blue-collar-type guys. An element of Howard’s willingness to regularly visit what I thought of as a mind-numbing corner of northeastern Pennsylvania was this brush with white-bread folks and places out of his ken. My parents were shorter than I was. John Glenn Gooch, the president of a utility company, was five feet and some inches, Bette
Gooch, housewife, a couple inches shorter. Yet when Howard took to describing them to me, and others, as “the little people,” he didn’t mean physical leprechauns, but something closer to what Richard Nixon—even in disgrace, my father’s political, and styling, hero—meant by “the silent majority.”

The ranch house where I’d been a teen had been washed away by flooding from Hurricane Agnes in 1972. I was home from college that summer, and we wound up refugees in the home of my fundamentalist Aunt Lena, who threatened to throw my typewriter out the window. (Had she read pages I left lying about?) With fitting architectural feng shui, they now lived in another ranch house, turned sideways with an entrance through a garage annex. The suburban development was named after a TV sitcom,
Green Acres
, rather than, like
Beverly Hills, 90210
, having a show named after it. I wrote a story around this time, “Spring,” published a couple years later in
Christopher Street
magazine, in which my parents made a cameo appearance—my father, an accountant, driving his burgundy Ford Galaxie; my mother staying “pretty much at home.” I fit in a description of her going-out clothes: “a red tissue papery dress that tutus out . . . a box-shaped purse made out of glass.” Far more interesting to readers was its true-story ending, where I ate pineapple rings and whipped cream off the cock of Bobby, who lived down the street and was my training wheels of a boyfriend, when I was thirteen, and he twelve.

We all got along pretty well. My mother made up the convertible couch in the third bedroom, which was set off as a virtual bedroom for me—I never lived there, and never would—containing relics like high school yearbooks, and a ship-in-a-bottle that never belonged to me but seemed to belong
to some generic boy, some boy who
would
have lived in a community named after a TV sitcom, and embarrassing teen pictures of me looking vaguely Persian. Significantly, Mom arranged the bed as a double for the two of us, and there we slept together in a muffled cocoon from then on. My father enjoyed the role of tour leader. He was born in Wales, having come to America when he was seven and his coal-miner father emigrated to find work. Whenever relatives with impossible names like Gwilym came to visit, he would take them on exhausting day trips to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and everything else in between. Howard was subject to just such a tour of the very ordinary Christmas lighting on the porches and eaves of our borough of Kingston, with special attention to the far more exceptional corner house of a local living-in-plain-sight Mafia don. They gave us matching acid-rust and blue-orange itchy sweaters. I was mortified by all the well-meaning but decidedly unbohemian taste on display from my parents, fearing that Howard would break up with me the next week. To my surprise, he liked the nervous vulnerability that this awkward situation brought out in me, and grinned more than usual.

Howard seemed to have special powers. He could be a little minx, or a wizard . . . “fox” might work. Sara Driver, admiringly, described him as a “weasel.” But more than that: he was someone in whose hands the cornball spells in the
Necronomicon
might actually work. The example I think of now is the poem he wrote describing our future apartment. Of course we were going to move
in together. We knew that much the first night we slept together. But he eerily conjured up the place we wound up subletting, Steven Lowe’s apartment at 4 Bleecker Street, a few doors up from the Bowery, on the top floor, above Yippie A. J. Weberman, who was famous for going through Bob Dylan’s trash, becoming what
Rolling Stone
labeled “the king of all Dylan nuts.” (The leftist-socialist Yippies—young Marxists with Marx Brothers humor—maintained a headquarters across the street.) Howard forecast its layout in his poem—the former sewing factory with several families of Asians working and sleeping, taking up an entire top floor, was a maze of little rooms, leading into each other, or branching out from each other. Actually two apartments were joined, and you got from one to the other by climbing through a hole smashed in a brick wall, jagged bricks sticking out like teeth so you felt as if you were going into the mouth of a killer shark, or entering a circus House of Horrors. Howard not only predicted the puzzle of many rooms but also its haunted feel, its “sarcophagi” and “private ghosts.” We loved its dark, giddy, menacing romance.

The trigger for getting us to give up our long nightly walks back and forth, and take the bigger step of moving in together, was a fight, one of those fights young love depends on. We always said that we never fought. And that was true, too. But we did have—what to call them?—moments of intense, shared discomfort, perhaps simply because nothing that involved sex and emotion had ever been smooth for either of us, so why should this be. These were less fights than tests. This particular test was an invite from my friend Marc Lancaster, an English painter, and “private secretary” to Jasper Johns, for me to go with him for a few days to
Johns’s house on St. Martin. I went (deserted beaches, twittering birds pecking sugar packets from the tables of La Samanna restaurant, Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein over for lunch), but Howard wasn’t invited. I remember Howard complaining that Marc was never friendly to him except to plug for details about me. As soon as the plane took off I knew that I wasn’t going to enjoy myself. On my return that Sunday night I went straight to Howard’s loft, where there was a message that he was in Bellevue Hospital. Drugs were involved—I’ve erased which, or why. From that ugly neurotic knot, rather than from anything light and positive, came our decision to live together. We discovered we cared enough to get under each other’s skins.

The apartment was far from ordinary. Howard brokered the sublet deal with Steven, who mostly lived in his Colorado cabin. I believe the last tenant at 4 Bleecker Street had been the poet Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, though she was already married to the artist Richard Tuttle and lived mostly in New Mexico. I found a poem or two of hers in a cranny. She won the 1980 National Book Award for Poetry the next year. Either Mei-Mei wasn’t bothered by fearsome gods, or Steven had been in residence again, because when we moved in, the apartment was punctuated at crucial turns with shrines to wooden Caribbean deities decked out in war paint and weaponry. They were can’t-live-with-them-can’t-live-without-them statues. To stash them away seemed a living burial that was sure to bring malevolence, but leaving them in view meant living with a shadow of evil, a kind of kitsch demonism. We finally dared to put them all in cardboard cartons that we stuck on a top kitchen shelf, a spear peeking up from one corner. Then we scattered curse-breaking salt.

Paula Court

In a photograph Paula Court took of the two of us in the kitchen soon after we moved in, we look like each other’s doppelgänger, both in flannel shirts, and matching curly locks, Howard smiling gleamingly while poking with a knife at a turkey in the oven in the dirtiest kitchen imaginable (for Thanksgiving, 1979), me smirking, looking down, overwhelmed, at a counter strewn with a dirty jar of mayonnaise, a dirty black pepper tin, a dirty Triscuit box. On the wall above the refrigerator hung two banners covered in Sanskrit script. The exceedingly bohemian kitchen, done in twenty shades of grime, was at the far end of a long room that extended to front windows covered in sheets of plastic for keeping in heat in winter, helped by a gas heater with blue flame. A flimsy mattress, on the floor, where we slept together each night, was pushed against one wall. After passing through the smash in the brick wall, an entry vestibule of some dead space led into one room with a teacher’s desk, where I disciplined myself to write stories, or read the stories of Flannery O’Connor to get
myself stoked. Beyond, through “Clue”
-
board-era glass drawing-room doors was the living room, with Howard’s chairs from his loft and a working fireplace. Someone left behind a slim volume—Proust’s
On Reading—
that I avidly absorbed. An elbow away was a makeshift workroom where Howard crammed his Steenbeck flatbed editing machine, which droned on, day and night, with disembodied voices starting, stopping, starting again, while shadows flickered on a hanging sheet separation.

More often than not someone would be sleeping propped against the downstairs gray-metal front door in the morning. Since the building was illegal for residence, the gap between them and us was not all
that
wide, or so I guiltily convinced myself when I felt the thump of a body on the other side. CBGB’s and the Amato Opera company were across the street. One block over, on East Third, was the Hells Angels clubhouse that I strolled by more often than necessary to ogle the tattoos and motorcycles, and feel the danger. The teenage boy behind the counter of our deli on Bowery had splotches of red on his face from the time a customer threw acid at him. A story I wrote in the front room, “Mister Brown,” not surprisingly had a character modeled on Burroughs, but also lots of “shots” of our turf, as its leads, Cabel and Eileen, walked to the Kiev restaurant for a breakfast of kielbasa and eggs and coffee: “They go down Third Street past the Men’s House of Detention, veering to the right and left, by instinct avoiding certain characters, and make it to Second Avenue, turn left, and continue on a freer path. . . . Eileen stops once to look in the window of a stationery shop. Cabel stops once to look at a peeled-away poster showing four young men in black and white with cut black hair and instruments who make up a band.”

The films that Howard was cutting in the back room were always jumpy. If I had to pick one image that would encapsulate them, it would be of the windows of the apartment, panes divided by white wood, open to let in a breeze, the shot tilted at an angle, a bloody handprint on one pane. The films were a clash of
noir
and thirties Hollywood camp-vamp comedies, passed through the grinder of a seventies aesthetic, with a wink to Howard’s being gay. I remember the titles better than the story lines. There was
Killer Come Home
(backing up that image of a bloody handprint).
Apollo Belvedere
was another, its
Maltese Falcon
device the chalk bust on pedestal that Howard toted to our new apartment from Prince Street. And
Leo de Janeiro
, the only image I believe I retain, a guy in wife-beater T-shirt with cigarette burn hole, and sprouts of underarm hair. Around this time Howard wrote and shot a scene for Dr. Benway from
Naked Lunch
, where William played Benway, and, as the nurse, Jackie Curtis, the Warhol “superstar” Howard befriended as he/she hung out at his/her grandmother’s corner bar, Slugger Ann’s, on Second Avenue. Jackie, in nurse drag, splattered in blood, and whisking back a cheap brunette wig helped Dr. Benway (William) operate on an ailing patient (Howard) on gurney with a toilet-bowl plunger and Sani-Flush. I’d been in college when I learned of Jackie, in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”—taking speed and valium, and thinking “she was James Dean for a day.” Now I saw him usually in jeans, a poet, coming by to hang out with Howard.

In the spring of 1980 all of Howard’s doggedness and ambition for his film paid off in a contract between Burroughs and Howard’s new corporation, Citifilmworks, created expressly for the purpose. He had advanced, step-by-step, from his original thirty-minute film school senior “portrait project.” He later told me that on the night we met, his crew, at the invitation of James Grauerholz, had actually only been filming the filming of Burroughs by a Swiss documentarian in the Bunker. By the end of that year, December, he was invited to film the Nova Convention, a four-day festival in Burroughs’s honor at a theater on Second Avenue. No longer at one remove from the action, he was interviewing Patti Smith, Brion Gysin, Lauren Hutton. In one sliver of a shot, I was an extra, looking like a smudge surrounded by curly hair, in black cashmere sweater, white shirt, squeezed into a smoky crowd next to Camille O’Grady. When he got around to editing the footage, two years later, he wrote me a tender letter, addressed “Dearest Beastest” (by then my nickname was “the Beast,” and his “the Hairless Beast”): “While viewing the Nova
Convention party scene, I saw a shot of you—my hairy beast, the Gooch. You look so young and sweet . . . but now you look sexier and handsomer.” (I got the nickname because I had a hairy chest and a doglike unkemptness.) Around the time of the contract, Grauerholz set up a “country home” for Burroughs in his own college town, Lawrence, Kansas. Sealing the deal, an impulse not foreign to Howard, he helped James rent an eighteen-foot truck that they stuffed full of boxes and drove together nonstop to Kansas. The two talked ceaselessly in the front seat, Puccini and Verdi blaring from Howard’s cassette player, both popping white crosses—speed pills—and smoking Marlboros.