Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (6 page)

As our lives merged in our ramshackle loft, beginning with a sharing of friends, and parties, we were also being pulled (or pulling ourselves) in centripetally different directions. Actually Howard kept doing exactly what he was doing the night we met. I, however, was having some kind of nervous meltdown that expressed itself as pursuing that card from the booker down the dizzying path of modeling. My pursuit wasn’t a midlife crisis, more like an extended-adolescence crisis. When I passed my orals for my doctorate that spring, I remember thinking that maybe now was my last chance to have an adventure before a dull future as a literature professor. Maybe I could write a novel about male modeling. Ironically, though, my first break in the modeling industry came my way at Columbia University, where I was a teaching assistant for Professor Edward Tayler’s undergraduate Shakespeare course.

Ted Tayler was a compact cube of a man, tirelessly devoted to maintaining his reputation on campus as an entertaining brainteaser of a professor. He was lecturing one spring afternoon on
King Lear
to a packed classroom of eighty or a hundred. At some moment in
his meditation on the cruel ironies of old age, Tayler looked out at his listeners and said, “You’re all nineteen years old. Not one of you understands what I’m saying. None of you believes he is going to die.” His voice cracked. I’d heard the same lecture as an undergrad and caught the same crack in the voice, the gazing out into the lecture hall, the poignant breaking of the fourth wall, but the studied repetition did not detract from the melodrama. (The only other lecturer in Columbia’s English Department who commanded rapt student awe was Edward Said, who wore dark-blue tailored suits and used the word “power” dozens of times in each lecture. I’d once snarkily counted.) As I packed my book bag to split that day, my fellow TA, a young woman, shared with me, unprovoked, that she was working part-time as an assistant to the fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville.

Turbeville, said she, had booked a job for something called
Vogue Patterns.
But she was an artist and hated dealing with “real” models and was looking for “nonmodels” for the shoot. Turbeville’s was a name in the atmosphere at the time. My fellow TA told me their main project that season had been shooting the private rooms of Versailles, and that the editor for the book was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When the French government intruded on a shoot where Turbeville was photographing partially nude female models in the golden light of the receding planes of mirrors, Mrs. Onassis called to ask her, “Can’t you just cover their titties?” Eventually the TA got to her point: I was perhaps the right “nonmodel” for the sensitive artist. I told her about the modeling card on the street. She looked disappointed and suggested that I not mention the card. Cut to meeting Turbeville, scattered, intelligent, with unruly brown hair, disheveled, wearing a peasant dress. She led me out by an
elevator to make a Polaroid for the client. The camera jammed, so the TA took the picture that came whirring out. Cut to me on a small plane to Gurney’s Inn on Montauk, Long Island, the last plane out of La Guardia as a hurricane was threatening. The art director was also an art director for Warhol’s
Interview.
The female model was taller than I. We were photographed in high winds, tousled, next to a seaplane at the East Hampton airport. The final result looked goofy, I thought, in a magazine full of sewing patterns.

My next big break came equally effortlessly. “Hi, Brad. It’s Marc.” Marc Lancaster told me that he had been at dinner at Da Silvano, a one-room Italian restaurant popular with artists and dealers on lower Sixth Avenue. He’d seen Eric Boman, a Swedish friend working as a fashion photographer, and told him of my one-day modeling stint. Eric said he thought I could do it and would I stop by his place to do test shots. Eric was about forty but looked twenty-seven, with blond hair and glossy skin. He took pictures in what he said was “golden, Italian light” on his penthouse terrace. The next day he called and said the contact sheets looked good. He was shooting a
New York Times
ad for Bloomingdale’s in Central Park. Did I want the work? I spent most of the day of that job in a trailer, watching women being made up, and flipping through an
After Dark
magazine with Jon Voight on the cover. The other models, both male and female, were, again, taller than I, and seemed to have much more presence. Just days later, a check for $500 arrived. This job is
much
better than teaching, I thought. So I decided that I needed “to get my book together,” a phrase that I had impressionistically picked up on the shoot.

The only photographer I really knew was Robert Mapplethorpe, now living just around the corner from us in a loft on
Bond Street. Usually, I only saw Robert at night at the Mineshaft. Once we tried to have a sex date but whatever self-administered hallucinogenic date-rape drug I took made me think Robert was the devil and the chill paralyzed me. I superimposed him in my mind against an onyx Lucifer bust in a corner of his living loft and photographer’s studio. To pop the question about my modeling portfolio, I stopped by during the day. When I brought up to Robert the news that we had both just won New York State CAPS grants, me in fiction, he in photography—an award with a $3,000 stipend—he scowled, “That won’t even cover my overhead.” I’d never heard the word “overhead” and was impressed at how adult Robert was. I discovered that during the day Robert talked a lot about money, and his desire to work for
Vogue
magazine, so I felt comfortable bringing up my career schemes. He was a likely coconspirator. Robert had a black assistant that month who knelt down next to his Mission armchair to go over the day’s “to do” list. When I went in the bathroom, a silver-gelatin print propped above the toilet showed the back of the head of the assistant (or a very similar head) bent down into the bowl in front of me. Robert was proud of pictures he’d taken for the cover of Patti Smith’s next album,
Wave.
Then he showed me more scurrilous shots, done in the studio in the back, of a milquetoast guy being worked over, voluntarily (at first), after hours by Mineshaft friends wearing swastika armbands. The series was painful, but mesmerizing. “Sure, I’ll help you with your portfolio,” Robert agreed.

I showed up at noon a few days later with a garment bag. Robert and I were both pretty clueless about fashion photography. I’d brought along all the “formal” clothes I had, changing into
corduroys, brown shirt, thin tie, ratty, black cashmere overcoat, and a short Scottish scarf. Robert did what he knew how to do. He produced a box full of cocaine powder, seeming like a snuffbox, which he held in his fine, ivory fingers. Robert was a boy from Queens, but he channeled an aristocratic WASP manner—the side of him that collected silver and antique furniture. This combination of contrary traits was common enough at the time, as in the Mineshaft doorman, part-time fussy fine-furniture curator and part-time faux-uniformed cop. Both those guys were drawn to uniforms and to images of controlled violence. Robert plied me with coke until the moment when I’d finally forgotten all about the modeling pictures. Then he decided, “Okay, let’s go in the back.” At that instant he either flipped a switch, becoming a mad scientist versed in mind control, or I imagined that he did, and was too zonked to tell the difference. He set his camera, on a tripod, at crotch height. I stood in piercing sunlight. “Move your index finger a quarter inch to the right,” he’d say. In the final portrait I look like a glazed-over victim of childhood abuse, dressed for a nice restaurant, with a jagged werewolf shadow cast behind—not a photograph designed to charm a fashion market still trading in all-American innocence.

Then things started to swerve off course a bit, after two years of our being together. Revision: Now that I think back, I can clearly see the “private ghosts” that Howard had prophesied all over the Bleecker Street apartment, like ghost-buster photographs that reveal, when developed, a congealed wisp of smoke next to a tea service, obviously the poltergeist that was slamming doors in the middle of the night. I believe the fault was mine. Well, no, I don’t believe, but I
feel
the fault was mine, though when I mull matters over I
understand
that we both collaborated. At the time, Howard believed the fault was entirely mine. I, contrarily, believed that there was no such thing as my ever being at fault. I had unlearned any guilty responses from Reichian therapy onwards, learning to honor my every impulse as the natural electricity of my sacred body. A favorite film of ours to see at an art house on the Upper West Side whenever it showed was Ingmar Bergman’s
Scenes from a Marriage
. Originally a TV series, and supposedly responsible for a spike in divorces in Sweden, the film was a flat sequence of coldly lit monologues or discomfiting dialogues out of couples’ therapy, all shot in suffocating tight frames. If the intense soundtrack wasn’t Anton Webern–screaking-atonal-violin-frequencies—it should have been. Soon enough the mood at Bleecker Street, with its tilted, splintered floors, was that of a self-conscious and introspective Bergman film.

© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The plot point that triggered the shift from Vivaldi major to Webern minor chords, from tonal to atonal, from Bruce Springsteen and Donna Summer to David Bowie’s “Berlin” albums, done with Brian Eno, like
Low
, playing on the stereo that season, was my pursuit of modeling. It was the snake in the Garden. The threat always hovered that I would soon be abandoning our almost comically cold-water flat, with its traces of carbon monoxide, for a different kind of life, or another lover. If my West Village “clone” life was suspect in year one, modeling put more of a gloss on those early suspicions. “Who
are
you?” was reintroduced. A sharp inflection could get into Howard’s voice when the topic, mostly left unsaid, insinuated itself. Or, more often, was tried out on third parties. “I notice that Brad has become vainer since he’s been thinking about pursuing a modeling career,” he helpfully told a mutual friend. A
nickname that began to stick was “Brooke,” for Brooke Shields, the fourteen-year-old appearing on the cover of
Vogue
in early 1980 (and, later that year, in a jeans commercial, saying the lines “You know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”). My eyes “wandered” onto a page that Howard scribbled (we both sent messages this peekaboo way): “I feel threatened by Brad’s going off to exotic places, doing exciting things, meeting interesting people, without me.”

Another insistent issue was sex. I had put together the pieces of my coming-of-age by mythologizing, or politicizing, sex. All those lurid ruby-red-lit rooms I’d stumbled through were scenes, in my mind, from
Orpheus Descending
, and in the private, last chamber of Hell, there was the Minotaur, and there was my identity. While other teen boys around me in public high school were budding, showing off newly grown penises and weeds of pubic hair, I was zipped-up and buttoned-down. From the time I ate whipped cream and a maraschino cherry off Bobby’s thing, making it a sundae when I was thirteen, not much happened until I came to college in Manhattan. I inhabited a physical and romantic flatland. When I finally found my way to the Gay Lounge in the basement of my dorm, Furnald Hall—while the rest of the students were protesting Vietnam, we “sat in” at the dean’s office to demand sticks of university-issue lounge furniture—I found other boys with adolescent libidos stunted and mesmerized by the same dark psychodramas, and we finally kissed.

Yet Howard brought me up short with his distress at my continuing casual hookups. He was ostensibly much hipper. He wore black jeans, black T-shirts, smoked lanky cigarettes out of the side of his mouth, and was snide, funny, and sarcastic. I often felt like
an ordinary television laugh track next to his biting Lenny Bruce running commentary. He, likewise, knew well that he was a refugee from ordinary first love. He was not delusional. But he came to different conclusions. “After eating my heart out over Rick, torturing myself for a year, I haven’t a great capacity for pain,” was the funny-bitter way he put it to me when I’d hurt him. Especially odd to remember was his great argument for monogamy, related somehow to his Russian-Jewish grandparents. “I want monogamy and I want the rewards that come from sacrificing for each other,” he’d say in so many words, while I’d slump in the armchair. “I haven’t had sex with anyone but you for months and months, and
never
in New York.” (I noted the nuance of “
never
in New York” but didn’t pursue.) Odd that seductive, Loki-like Howard in the middle of this maelstrom of erotic acting-out should have been voicing traditional wishes, while I put a utopian spin on the behavior, making it some kind of romantic quest or political action. And so we went on debating these two great alternatives periodically in our living room, like characters in a current gay allegory, our issues reflecting those of many other couples trying to work out love in an unruly time.

My nun-therapist Sister Mary Michael was blasé as I discussed my heated escapades over the years in her tower room at the Cathedral. (By now, Tim Dlugos was seeing her as well, and wrote a sestina, “Close,” as he sat in the Cathedral close waiting for my session to wind up and his to begin: “We share a therapist up there three stories. / I’m here to recollect, and recollect I shall, / but first let me get over this amazing blue.”) She actually emboldened and enabled my behavior, with her questioning of how it made me feel, or whether Howard had dealt with
x
or
y
yet, or the question of control, and other heady bits of analysis worthy of
Scenes from a
Marriage.
I clearly remember one comment: “Over the years, partners in couples often change roles.” A clue to one of those invisible
x
’s or
y
’s at play, not yet known to me, came up about that time. A message on our machine was from William, doing his W. C. Fields drawl, saying, “Howard, could you bring over three lightbulbs when you come?” Lightbulbs? Howard sidestepped, explaining that the “lightbulbs” were actually bags of heroin. Over the next decade we switched roles quite a few times. I was not always the libertine. He definitely was not always Moses the Judge. Rather, we were both addicts, needing our separate escape hatches from life and love, me with sex, he drugs. So we swerved, but also colluded in staying on track.

There, I’ve said it. And having spoken, the finger moves on, as it did in our life together. Every so often we would simultaneously freak out from the pressure of rapidly changing atmospheres, our present so unlike our pasts. But, mostly, we were pleased, thrilled, to be who we were, with each other, where we were, then. Nostalgia has not sprinkled fake gold confetti on the before- and just-after-1980 period in New York. We knew it then. I remember conversations as you’d be walking down the street, and say, or have said to you, “Isn’t New York amazing?” Europeans would come for the weekend. Howard and I weren’t Studio 54 types (though I used to bartend at early parties there for grad school tuition money), but Bob Colacello, writing for Warhol’s
Interview
, said that friends would get off the plane from the Philippines, or Berlin, and take a taxi straight to Studio. That kind of energy filtered down or, more probably, filtered up as Studio was the final bloom of a lot of exotic gay-disco plants with names like Twelve West, the Loft, Truck Stop, Flamingo, Le Jardin. You
could feel inventiveness or freedom just walking down the street, as in the trend of guys’ not wearing underwear, and having holes in the ripped crotches and seams of their jeans. A hint of hairy balls was
fashionable.

A quality Howard and I shared with our zeitgeist (and may have tweaked by zoning out with our addictions) was the ability to step outside our bodies and see hilarity in ordinary life situations. Sometime in the eighties, Jackson Browne released a single, “Lawyers in Love.” I remember when I first heard the song having a mental image of Howard and me negotiating the many clauses of our relationship. A journal entry of his that I found from the time gives the flavor of some of the content of our analyzing: “I have something to lose in losing Brad. Is it more than companionship? Social connections? Career connections?” He’d say some such out loud, and then he or I would get a glint in our eye, as if it were a joke that we were in on. The joke was that we were both
sure
we’d be together forever. That punch line was the bottom line of our love. And our apartment helped by morphing into its own at-home version of a club, or did on nights when we had big parties. Perhaps the more gnarly the personal issues, the more we decided to open out the cast of characters. I only remember crowded explosions of unlikely types separated by the ding-dong of the downstairs bell that I’d clomp down to answer, while Howard turned the music way the fuck up (“This ain’t no party. / This ain’t no disco”), and poured tumblers of scotch firewater. I once heard from a girlfriend of Howard’s original boy-crush Kevin of Great Neck who remembered those parties, and Kevin at them: “He was such a complicated person—tender and ridiculous and scary and exhilarating. I don’t think I ever got over him.” Her one-line reminiscence—jagged, romantic, capsized—captures
those bleary nights that we never “got over” better than any reconstructed nosegay of numb faces and names.

Because of those parties, and because we were in lawyerly love, in a cool fashion that didn’t exclude others, our social life expanded. Some who had been friends of one or the other became friends of both. I had known Joe LeSueur since I’d been the boyfriend of J. J. Mitchell—they had both been intimate friends of Frank O’Hara, Joe having lived with the poet for over a decade, through four apartments. Then he had been a cute blond button. Now he was one of a species of gay tribal priests, preserving an entire history of underground gossip about gay, or simply bohemian, writers and artists, their sex and love lives and the backstories of their work that was still taboo (or concerned figures then of little public interest) for general publication and consumption, and so was only passed on through oral history. Once a month or so, Joe would have dinner parties of all guys crammed around a table in his teeny walk-up apartment on Second Avenue at First Street. On the walls I remember a big, blowzy, blue Joan Mitchell abstract oil painting that she had given to Joe; a Joe Brainard found-object work,
Cigarette Smoked by Willem de Kooning
, with the Dutch master’s scrunched cigarette butt, as relic, or homage; another beautiful enamel painting by Joe of a 7-Up logo; and some medium-sized canvases with swathes of abstract dark-brown paint messy enough to have been made by the sweep of a floor broom wielded by Mike Goldberg or Norman Bluhm.

When I brought Howard around, to my relief—I was always a bit nervous when introducing different pieces of my life to one another—Joe was captivated. I felt that it could have gone either way. Joe decided, within minutes of their sitting together on a couch covered with tan canvas material, that “Howard reminds
me of Frank! That’s what Frank was like!” I never entirely understood how so, but Howard did work his charm on Joe. And Joe paid him the biggest compliment available for someone with charm, echoing one of the common comments about O’Hara, that fifty people in New York thought of him as their best friend. I remember Howard sitting on one side of the couch, in khakis, moccasins, his dark eyes glittering, telling tales—often teasing, or naughty ones. “He had a very chow-down-able butt,” Howard said, describing a gaffer, to Joe’s great giddiness as he poured another cognac and lit more joints. For someone whose secret motor was his need for the security of a committed relationship, Howard liked to add a soupçon of sexual titillation when about in public. In one of the stories circulating at Joe’s dinner table, when O’Hara first met the painter Larry Rivers—the painter somehow both straight and available—he slid with him behind a curtain at a party and mumbled, “Let’s see what a kiss feels like.” Howard seemed like someone who might flirtatiously part a curtain at any moment. Joe began taking him around (without me) and talking him up to friends like the poet and dance critic Edwin Denby, who likewise professed to see O’Haraesque qualities in him. Writing for a soap opera, and making good money, Joe also agreed, at a crucial juncture, to invest in the Burroughs movie.

Another friend of mine who took to Howard in a forceful way, and, more surprisingly, to whom Howard cleaved, as well, was Canon Edward Nason West, the subdean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. When I had lived in Paris after college, I’d read a collection of Thomas Aquinas’s writings titled
Treatise on Happiness.
Often recovering from, or getting, a flu, jaundiced, weak, and living in a studio apartment behind the Montparnasse cemetery, I
became entranced with the French medieval spirit and style, beginning with the cathedrals. So I got into my head that I wanted to be a contemplative monk, and when I returned to Manhattan, having never participated in a mass in my life (I grew up with a “Jeffersonian” agnostic father), I tried to infiltrate the Roman Catholic Church, but everyone kept nudging me toward the Episcopalians. A young, handsome priest, Tom Pike, said Canon West was the man to see. So I showed up at the cathedral, and was ushered into a movie set of an office: two stories of dark wood shelves of books with ladders, dusty air filtered through clerestory windows. In the midst sat this 2-D movie character of a holy man, bearded, arcane, wearing a black cassock, his black cape draped over a nearby chair. In the library next door sat the writer-in-residence, Madeleine L’Engle, author of
A Wrinkle in Time
, who had only begun writing late in life after Canon West questioned her about her ambitions at a party. She was devoted to him. He was also an easy target to caricature, which she did in the character Canon Tallis in several of her novels. “You’ve come to see me, so you must have decided to grow up,” he said to me as his opener, reaching for an oversized teacup emblazoned with his self-designed coat of arms.

The first time I brought Howard along to Canon West’s, the opening half hour was pretty much a parenthesis of awkward silences. Howard was leery of ornamental Christianity. Canon West was several times interrupted by phone calls on his black rotary phone as we sat on his leather couch. These were often calls from people in trouble or needing money. He kept an active ministry going amid all the Tiffany glitz of his apartment, upstairs from his office, full of icons, photographs of godchildren, the Czarevich’s communion cup. Then he finally talked to Howard, discovered he was
Jewish, and lit up. “The Jews are the exposed nerves of the human race, my son,” he said, earning points. There ended the serious part of the evening. Soon vodka, followed by shots of Glenfiddich scotch, kicked in and they discovered a madcap element in each other. Canon West trusted a drinker. Howard trusted someone who basically got high every night. Soon enough Howard was dressed in a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, and cape, and Canon West’s gold-tipped walking stick, to take the dogs downstairs for a pee. I remember thinking that Burroughs in his sealed bunker, and Canon Eddie in his mirrored-lined quarters, while opposites, one representing Lucifer and the other Jesus, were not so entirely dissimilar.