Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (8 page)

Back in New York, Howard was living our shared life for both of us, and somehow that life grew at an exponential rate, but so, too, did the minuses of solitude. Left with a half-empty mattress, he felt the same ache, a body-ache version of a toothache, as I did. Howard had a pulp romance in progress that spring and his letters to me about the book—“Who would have thought we would have a literary correspondence?”—were as romantic as the plot he churned out.

I’ve been kind of lonely lately, and this loneliness creeps into the book. It’s hard to write a tear jerking romance and not be affected myself, so the work goes slowly. A few things I’ve immediately noticed since you left. Most music seems somewhat depressing, and certain songs—disco, show tunes—put me into a funk. I’ve been afraid to play certain records at all. I’m sure you know which ones. The nights are the hardest. When I’m in bed I can see you there in characteristic positions. Last night I thought of you baring your teeth and making a sound, which I don’t think there is a word to describe but it sounds like you have something caught in your throat and a little like a heavy exhale and I started to laugh. Then I made the sound. It was then I realized that the worst thing is that we can’t communicate. I think of things to say to you all the time, but there is no release. Love attacks go unsatisfied when I get home.

He went off to Miami the week after I’d left, seeking some familial support. Drinking a neat scotch on the plane on the way down, he fantasized hijacking the plane and forcing the pilot to fly to Italy. “I could tell everyone I was in the Red Brigade,” he wrote to me, “then disappear into the crowd at the airport (everything’s so disorganized over there.)” Expecting more comfort from his
boyhood whippets, Kizzie and Tuffy, than they could give, he was let down: “They both slept with me last night. I used to think that a person was a weak substitute for Tuffy, but now I feel even his faithful presence is little consolation. I miss you, Brad. The oddest things make me want to cry. Cuban refugees. Parents of hostages. Divorcee friends of my parents.” Yet the raising of the topic of his “troubles” by his mother again caused him to book an early return flight: “She speaks about my ‘troubles’ as if I am some kind of paraplegic. Here I am missing my boyfriend, and she expects me to have a heart to heart about That Subject. Such is the insensitivity of the heterosexual. My father has become exactly like John Glenn Gooch, he doesn’t want to know any gory details. I wish my mother could adopt the same laissez-faire attitude.”

Back in Manhattan, Howard was more sought-after singly than the two of us had ever been together, and he had enough manic energy and sheer anxiety to pull off successive nights that ended at sunrise and then just started up again. “I came home and listened to the answering machine,” he reported. “23 messages.” When he was in bed, he’d read, appropriately enough, Elizabeth Hardwick’s
Sleepless Nights
. He went to a screening of a documentary about Virgil Thomson at MoMA. He went to the photographer Gerald Incandela’s “Third Anniversary in New York” party, where Gerald pitched a Bedouin tent on his terrace, torch lights set all over. He spent the first part of the evening talking to the photographer Marcus Leatherdale, “until Robert Mapplethorpe took him away to dinner.” A few days later he casually mentioned Marcus coming by, and their having a late supper: “He has had such a wild life that I’m sure he must be a liar, but probably he’s not. I’m just used to more normal things. After sunrise he finally left. I slept for two hours.”
At Gerald’s he fell into dancing with my boyfriend-before-him, Frank Moore. At another party, Frank brought gifts of basil plants, wrapped in paper still wet with red, purple, and gray paint that got all over Howard’s blazer. His personalized wrapping paper from Frank was emblazoned with “FUCK CUNT” in red and “FUCK FUCK” in black.

Either everybody in New York was bleary and out of it or Howard was and just reported everything out of focus. One morning, while he was doing his push-ups to the
Who’s Next
album, turned up loud (he’d gone out and bought seventy-six dollars’ worth of records the night before), Ruth Kligman, the girlfriend of the late Jackson Pollock, nicknamed “Death Car Girl” by Frank O’Hara for having been a passenger in the car the night of his fatal accident, phoned: “She said she is getting baptized in two weeks. She wants you to go to church and pray for her. She gave me her Christian Rap. We spoke for about a half hour and then she asked, ‘Who is this?’ She sounded drunk and a little bit like a bag lady.” Canon West invited him to dinner and he brought along Richard Elovich. “I hope you won’t be embarrassed if I talk about you, my child,” Canon West said, then proceeded to tell Richard he had “El Greco skin.” He also unhelpfully opined that I was truly a poet, not a model, and had made a great mistake by going to Italy. In the crew that night was a twenty-six-year-old priest from Georgia, Jeff, whom Howard mischievously enjoyed quoting, saying, “I was fortunate enough to realize I had a calling at an early age.” “We drank,” wrote Howard, “ate spicy food, drank some more, and drank some more.” Afterwards Reverend Jeff invited them for a nightcap at his apartment nearby: “He was lewd and suggestive and wouldn’t let us leave. After we left, Richard wanted to go back and fuck Jeff’s friend. He called from a pay
phone. There was no answer so we went down town.” When Howard got home—“I had been gone six hours”—he found ninety-two messages on the machine, many of them, eerily unexplained, hollow hangups.

Between-the-lines, and in-the-lines, of many of the tales told were drugs and alcohol. One Friday night he went to the Bronx apartment of Joe, his old boss at the Met, and Joe’s Hungarian nephew, Istvan, and bragged of trying to turn them on to cocaine: “I left at midnight . . . the subway ride was depressing and to die from.” Joe LeSueur and a record-producer friend stopped by uninvited one late afternoon—“We all sat around snorting coke (mine) and drinking.” The record producer invited them over for supper, said Mick Jagger would be there, but they went to Joe’s tenement instead: “I came home. I read for a while. I slept for an hour. I called you, as you requested. I read some more. I felt like shit. I had an anxiety attack, which suddenly and mysteriously subsided.” Those letters were full of tossing and turning—“Then at some point the pain just stopped. All at once I felt relaxed and passive, like I had just taken a shot of junk.” Burroughs came for lunch, then dinner, with Giorno, and Richard E, “and nine other peoples.” For all the detail, Howard left gaps in these dispatches—“I realize I have left out many juicy details.” Among those, I later found out, was a friend of ours nearly OD’ing on the floor one of those evenings. Howard’s snapping out of his nod to stop a third party from calling the cops, and reviving said friend, prevented several nearly ruined lives.

At last, all the date books went empty and all letter writing stopped. That month of August is obliterated from all my files. I didn’t need to write down a single note, because Howard and I were together again. We met in the beginning of August in Rome.
Howard had a rental Citroën Deux Chevaux, the two-cylinder French proletariat car, I believe because Howard’s visit had begun in Paris, where we were to return the car mid-month. I believe the hotel was the Hotel Londra (I was on my way from Venice, where I did a job that involved jumping into a swimming pool in a linen suit.) Howard was in Rome because there was a poetry festival involving William Burroughs. He told me within minutes that the night before he had dressed up as a woman, with Jackie Curtis, who had much more practice, and they seduced and blew an Italian policeman. Howard was lively when I’d first met him, but a cork had definitely blown during those three months I was absent from Manhattan that was never again to be replaced. There was a bitter irony here: I had gone off on this great adventure and wound up in the eye of the dopey weather pattern of male modeling, feeling at times like a ghost hunter in search of the ghost of my former self, or Peter Pan trying to get Wendy to sew back his shadow, while Howard, by staying home in downtown Manhattan, 1980, had liveliness bursting from the seams of his suitcase. Either way, we fell into what felt like a bed of silk that night and just held tight.

For our August vacation, we drove the sleek Mussolini-era highways that cut through the midair of Calabria, a rocky region still full—like a Middle Eastern country—of women in black veils, and then took a ferry to Sicily and a boat to Panarea, one of the Aeolian islands, formed of black volcanic ash, where much of the Milanese fashion crowd went for their regular August holidays. “You can take a little boat to Panarea”—Howard liked to repeat the instructions we received from a Tadzio-like boy on the docks in Palermo. Feeling rambunctious, rebellious even, wanting to shake off the restricting coil of modeling, I ducked into a barber shop on
the wharf and had all my wavy brown European-style hair shaved to a more severe, American military boy’s crew cut, a gesture that felt liberating enough. We took that little boat and spent a week reaffirming our self-evident love on an island that we decided qualified as “punk,” with its black beaches and reliance on generators, making electric service as fitful as in our apartment on the Bowery. We lived in a white stone retreat set back in the hills, a cave really, illumined at night only by our flashlight, candles, and lanterns, overlooking the dark parchment of the Tyrrhenian Sea, making love like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, a cheesy shared fantasy we enacted. Here was a bumped-up version of our Skunk Hollow cottage of two summers before.

My memories of the next month are a chopped salad. We did drive back to Paris. I had a translation of Proust’s
Remembrance of Things Past
to read aloud to Howard on the road. I recall a scene involving an elevator in a Balbec hotel. In Paris, Howard introduced me to Melinda, his campy friend from his Paris year—in one of his student shorts, she put a sweetheart’s film through a meat grinder, then zanily tried to patch it together. She was living in the apartment of an enigmatic French art dealer, Arnaud, and it was arranged for me to rent a small room with them. But at Glamour, my unbelievably named agency in Paris, my new agents, Bernard and Stefan—a bit like the Vegas animal act Siegfried and Roy—expressed horror at my buzz cut and insisted they couldn’t use me until my wavy hair grew back and that I might as well go back to New York and have Dan telex when my hair was at the proper length. “This look is not commercial here in Europe, baby,” Bernard, the younger, clucked, scolding me. So Howard and I returned to Bleecker Street in tandem.

I spent a few weeks back in our New York life, feeling the entire time as if I were walking a few inches off the ground, never quite relaxed, skulking around as the lame-duck boyfriend. Every week I’d visit Dan Deely for the humiliating exercise of examining my hair length, until the telex was finally sent announcing its acceptable length, and then back on the plane I went. In big brush strokes, my second departure turned out to be a replay of all the distress, separation anxiety, and punchy psychodrama of my first exit, though the cards were played in a slightly different order. Our goodbye this time was formal and awkwardly unruffled. I flew on Air France instead of Alitalia. I traveled to an actual apartment promising an adult life in much more intriguing and dimensional Paris. But I inadvertently left behind a ticking bomb, like Poe’s telltale heart, on an orange-crate “table” by our mattress: my black sketchbook journal in which I’d scribbled all my private thoughts as well as descriptions of illicit escapades, a slip whose implications I didn’t need Sister Mary Michael to explicate. Tick-tock, tick-tock. For several days, Howard, on phone calls, didn’t say a word about the diary, and so neither did I.

We did our talking now from the rotary telephone in my new home, Melinda’s Paris apartment, in a hall off my bedroom. Located on Rue de Douai, near Place Blanche in the ninth arrondissement, the Proustian vanilla-walled apartment rambled through three bedrooms, a living room (
salon
would be a better word since all furniture and sepia-tint photographs were nineteenth-century), kitchen, and two bathrooms. The apartment actually belonged to Arnaud, a dealer in neoclassical
objets
. Before I got to Paris, the buzz, mostly from Howard, was that the thirty-two-year-old Arnaud was never seen in
the apartment and led a mysterious private life. But it seems that before my arrival he’d contracted some nineteenth-century-style mild tubercular ailment and was forced to stay home, and, consequently, his patterns had changed. I was surprised on the afternoon I arrived that Arnaud was the only one in the apartment. I was surprised, too, to find that he was so friendly, since Howard had said he pretended not to know English, when really he did, to avoid conversation. But we got on immediately. Arnaud made tea and toast, his hand shaking as he poured the hot tea, apologizing for having taken so long. I of course said no, not at all—“
pas du tout
.” I think we got along because we both enjoyed oriental bowing, thanking, and apologizing to each other.

Sipping my tea in the living room that afternoon, I observed Arnaud—a bit shorter than me, with thin blond hair, translucent skin—as he slipped into his room, returning in a red smoking robe and with a cigarette holder, explaining that the holder reduced nicotine intake, cough, cough. Soon I’d learn Arnaud’s routines: whenever he went out he usually put on different kinds of pale corduroy clothes, but always looking very elegant. Rumors were that he spent much time at the Arab baths, but he never mentioned them. When he stayed home nights, he’d buy a bottle of good wine, not so much to drink it all, there was always plenty left over, but to sip, and have nearby. He arranged cut flowers in vases, rotated paintings on the walls, and lit fires in the fireplace. That day, light streaming in the front windows, he invited me into his bedroom, where he kept a large collection of old books from his grandfather’s collection, a heater, and a tape recorder with a few classical tapes, such as Fauré’s
Requiem
, which he often played. I studied a book next to his bed about German alchemists of the sixteenth
century, in which he’d underlined many phrases. Over his bed was hanging—somehow rightly—a reproduction of David’s painting of the stabbed Marat in his tub of blood. Arnaud would fuss, languish, and occasionally erupt, quite the hothouse flower. Mostly kind, he snapped at me only once: “Why do you have no wrinkles? Has nothing happened to you in life?”

Although the apartment belonged to Arnaud, and his moods hung over the place as pervasively as weather, Melinda was the lady of the place, its animating wife, and typhoon. (Note: I identified her as the
apartment’s
wife, not Arnaud’s.) Then thirty-six, American, but having lived in Paris ten years, she spoke along an ascending scale of high notes and trills. “Oh my deaaaaar,” she began when she bustled in later that day with supplies for a dinner party that evening, and then just kept bustling. Soon I came to know Melinda’s routine, beginning with when she stirred in late morning (except on days when she went to French class, a joke in itself as she had lived in Paris for a decade without getting as far as the subjunctive). She would make a bowl of café au lait, dial a round of phone calls, then work on her watercolor drawings, mostly illustrations from Proust—looking like Aubrey Beardsley’s, but in color—into the afternoon. She did drawings on commission for rich people, or restaurant menus. A friend requested Wagner, so she concocted a drawing of an India-ink concert grand with a bust of Wagner atop and two dashing men playing together four-handed, their coattails swaying behind.

Melinda’s prime time was evening, when she either went to a dinner party, or made one herself. She was intensely social. Many of her friends were homosexual men. She was most in love with Colin McMorty, doting on his blond hair and striking intelligence. Colin was Arnaud’s business partner and was both knowledgeable and
witty. Most of Melinda’s friends were witty. Her social circle was a mélange of American and English expatriates (well, Colin was Irish) and native-born Parisians who got together to create a replica of
ancien régime
society, the foreigners even more convincing than the French. These friends are difficult to describe, though they already acted and sounded as if coming off the pages of antique novels. Playing roles so much, they knew well the difference between public and private, the divide making for most of their nuances and jokes. If I had only met Melinda at parties, I might dismiss her as a “fag hag,” or think we had little (except Howard) in common. But the staged dialogue at dinners was nothing like our sweet, cooing daytime talks in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil. In the apartment, water often was boiling on the stove, either for coffee or tea. I usually bought honey for the tea, as well as milk, endives, pâté. Arnaud bought wine, cigarettes, and flowers. Melinda bought everything all at once for her dinner parties and always served, for dessert, a baked apple covered in cream and sugar.

I was working some modeling gigs. In those first few weeks I booked all the shoots I could manage—beginner’s luck—for the remainder of my time in Paris. I lay in bed in a tux with a negligee-clad woman wrapped in Christmas tinsel, the photographer on a ladder, looking down from the ceiling. When I asked if I should look at the camera or the woman, her breasts level with my eyes, he answered, “Look at the girl. The viewer doesn’t know I’m here.” I suppose I was overthinking the situation. Or I stood barefoot in Lee jeans on a cold afternoon at five o’clock in a high wind, eating tomatoes out of a picnic basket with two women and another guy in the Bois de Boulogne. Gossip circulated on that shoot about my first photographer, Deborah Turbeville, having
that summer marched her female models around hot, stinking Venice all day until they collapsed on some café chairs, and at that point said, straight-faced, “That’s it, that’s what I want,” and took the shots. I posed as a goofy groom (with a woman this time) for an image that wound up on the curved walls of Paris Métro stops. I swayed on skis on fake tissue-paper snow, mostly pretending to laugh at all the cutting up by the photographer, who resembled Fearless Fly with his frizzy blond hair and silver jumpsuit, playing air guitar with a broken-off broomstick, or ogling the girls when they appeared in their bras and panties. Surrealism in Paris was by now a chapter in art history, but a kind of surrealism verité thrived each day in its fashion studios.

About a week later the phone rang and reality came crashing back into all this surreality. I knew something was terribly wrong from Howard’s voice, suspected the cause, but filmmaker—or sadist—that he was, he drew out and framed the anguish, telling how tired, bedraggled, and dizzy he had been since I left, unable to fall asleep until dawn, thinking about going to the baths, but then not going. He said he remembered telling me he thought we should be faithful to each other while we were apart, and that I, of course, had said “No,” but he decided that he would anyway, and then pretended I was doing the same. The night before, he’d gone to see a late screening of Pasolini’s
Arabian Nights
, with its implicit moral for our situation left unsaid: Aziz, unfaithful to Aziza, realizes his horrible mistake only after she is gone. Coming home from the film, he crawled into bed and, said he, found my diary. Some excuse papered over the indiscretion, such as his thinking I’d asked him to read it or some such. Either way, deciding to be current, he turned to the last page, where his eyes fell on my confession (to myself) of having just
returned from an afternoon of sex, of my being afraid he would find out, but writing that perhaps his anger would relieve my guilt—a neat insinuation that I really wanted this discovery.

He began rattling off incidents, having read not just a page, but backwards through many pages, starting with my saying I had “jungle fever.” (Hence the outings Mapplethorpe and I sometimes made, he more regularly, to Keller’s, a bar for black men and their admirers at Christopher and West.) Then there was some Milanese, Sandro, and a model from Nebraska named Scott. Or the Brazilian from the Paris Club Sept I somehow snuck in while we were in Paris at the end of August. After reading my journal entries back to me, Howard revealed that he had actually called at four in the morning his time, earlier in the day. Someone visiting Melinda informed him that I had not come home the night before, had stayed out all night, but I was never told. “With your record, I know what you were doing,” Howard, in effect, said. “You knew when you left you were risking our relationship. Now it’s done. We’ll make some equitable living arrangements if you return to New York. I know now I’ll never be able to trust you. I wish I had drugs, anything to numb me. I love you so much. But I want a lover who is faithful. I may never find one, but I’ll start looking.” Click.

Thus began a horrible emotional log-flume ride that went on night after night, at odd hours to adjust for our work schedules and the time difference. We would talk and give up and hang up and talk again. I felt terminally punched in the gut. I had never entirely bought the argument that I was doing something so horrible. Yet after all those hundreds of sessions with Sister Mary Michael, and the softening of all those nights when Howard and I were trustingly wrapped in each other’s arms, even with my history as a classic West
Village seventies guy, I had allowed a more ordinary definition of intimacy into my emotional dictionary. In a brilliant debating-team tactic, Howard argued as someone more Brad than Brad by spinning on the word “faith.” He even sent me a sixteen-page neatly handwritten letter, in that familiar blue-ink script of his that somehow got to me more than any of the words expressed, including an appendix of familiar quotations about faith, ending with Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Eeek. Those words, written over several days, were excruciating to read, but, finally, by the end, he, and other friends of ours, had, thankfully, blessedly you might say, talked him back into my (“faithless”) corner again.

Howard offered a deal, an experiment in monogamy, as a condition for our reuniting: “Let’s do it for six months. If it is impossible for you to do it, after six months, we can talk about changing it. . . . And also, we
must
speak our minds. Discuss all anxieties, insecurities, as they occur. I know this all sounds a little Hesse-esque, but we have a couple of years together. We have proven we can enjoy an adult mature relationship. We have succeeded at what most people seem to want, and miss in their lives. I want to get to know the other you who I have just discovered in your journal, and let you know the other me. The one who risks his life for drugs in order to numb himself. We both have these self-destructive, anxiety-ridden, self-hating, egotistical, insecure people inside of us. We must get to know each other intimately, and help each other.” Ambitious for love, eager to escape pain, and melted by the scorching of his letter on faith, I agreed. The plan: in two months he, too, would live at Melinda’s, editing his accumulating Burroughs footage.

During those two months I punched my modeling card less and
less, falling into a magical lassitude, unusual for me. I sat on the couch by day, reading Paul Bowles’s translation of a Moroccan novel,
A Life Full of Holes
, by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, and I playfully scribbled and taped one of its sentences on my wall as a description of my model’s life, which it hardly was, except in my hardcore fantasies: “For a few days I looked around the city for work. There was no work. No one was working and no one was eating. . . . The stork has to wait a long time for the locust to come. Then he eats.” I’d wait for rain, not a long wait in Paris in autumn, and then walk into the fluorescent-lit Chapelle Sainte-Rita on Boulevard de Clichy, filled with sick people who were seeking the protection of Saint Rita; or to the steep hill of food shops lining Rue Lepic, one with a scratchy loudspeaker always playing Edith Piaf; or to intensely popular Bruce Lee movies in the Arabic neighborhood Barbès. I bided my time until the sky turned copper, signaling evening, when Melinda might be ready to go out and take me with her.

Typical nights out from that season were buffet parties at David Rocksavage’s, the seventh Marquess of Cholmondeley. Melinda called David a “tax deduction,” as he was one of several English lords who needed to live outside England or lose a large sum of money because of British tax laws. He was twenty-one, studying philosophy at the University of Paris, very sweet and very spacey when he came for dinner at Melinda’s. She and Colin, and most of the over-thirties crowd, worried that he would be hurt by “sharks”—people seeking to use him for his money or coat of arms. I suppose there were some sharks at the party but I wasn’t attuned to picking them out. Equally high profile was David’s infamous counterpart, John Jermyn, the seventh Marquess of Bristol, in a position similar to David’s—English, young, rich—but using his
powers rather differently. He purposely surrounded himself with sharks, and himself looked like a shark, or a rock star, blond hair cut ragged, given to pranks like spilling drinks in friends’ laps. His majordomo was a tall, gray-haired American with a voice like Rock Hudson’s, a dummy laugh, and, often, a pretty woman on his lap. Both times I saw him he was wearing a flower behind his ear. “My dear, do you think he’s a CIA agent?” Melinda cooed to me one night, eyes wide with mockery. “Do you think he’s queer? I think his voice is too
deep
for a heterosexual.”