Everyone is Watching (9 page)

He announces that the construction of a tunnel directly beneath Castle Clinton will weaken the structure, making the Aquarium there unsafe. So he evacuates the fish. The lights
are switched off. The pumps are disconnected. The display cases are dismantled and scrapped. The castle stands empty.

Next, he tells the city that Castle Clinton is in need of structural repair, and as there is not enough money to pay for this, the castle will have to be demolished. He is not
sentimental about the past. The past is nothing but a distraction of time. He orders a high wall to be built around Castle Clinton.

Campaigners fight to save the castle. They persuade the National Park Service to take it over. The castle is saved; the public have won! But Moses tells them they are too late
for he has already knocked their castle down. He tells them that it’s gone, it’s all over. He says, You were the ones who wanted a tunnel. They all believe Moses – City Hall, the
press. But one member of the public doesn’t. This man demands the key to the gate at Castle Clinton. He storms down there and lets himself in. He climbs over the pile of debris and sees the
castle, standing as it has always stood, solid, permanent.

Eventually, the Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel is built. For Moses, nothing at all has changed. Castle Clinton is left untouched. Traffic travels underground. Nothing can be
seen by anyone. There are no visible changes here. The Battery remains the same and life goes on as it did before. No one is seen to be moving anywhere. A public work that remains invisible is just
a waste of money.

Two men are standing in a derelict room amidst broken floorboards before three glassless windows. One man is crouching down, sucking the other man’s dick. His hand is
pressed into the buttock of the other man. The other man is holding him by the shoulders and bending over, his curly hair hanging down.

Two men are lying naked side by side on the ground. The sun is streaming across their bodies. They are touching each other, a hand on a shoulder, a finger on a mouth. Their
dicks are pointing towards one another as if engaged in conversation.

Three naked men are outside in the sunshine. One is lying on his front, legs spread. Another is sitting with his back to the camera. The last is standing with a leg perched on
a wooden pylon, his buttocks large and round in the sun. He is wearing black plimsolls and white socks. The interior of the pier is black.

Many men are lined up along the pier, which has a large gash in its wall. Their bare legs hang over the Hudson. They are sharing conversation, sitting out in the sun.

A pier has deteriorated. Its outer shell is warped into undulations. Its shape reflects the choppy water beneath it.

A pier is an expansive white box. Manhattan looms in the distance, large and black. Two figures are standing on the pier, one bent over, the other behind.

A man, naked from the waist down, stands on a bollard and looks into the pier through a broken window.

A police boat is pulled up against the pier and tied there. Cops are standing around a naked corpse. The back of the corpse is marked with deep lacerations. Pulled freshly from
the Hudson.

There is nothing compared to the feeling of being able to lie on a floor that you have laid yourself, says Walt. Covered over by a ceiling fitted by your own hands. The places
where we live shape us, Bucke. My family and I built houses in Brooklyn. We marked out the plots and laid the foundations. We nailed in every plank of wood and secured every window. In many ways,
building a house is the same as making a book. Many parts are added together to form a whole, and people live within both. I am a poet and a builder. In my experience, land developers and
publishers always want to raise the devil and break things apart. They want to manipulate creation but, despite this, I have continued to build many houses and write many poems.

Bucke’s eyes have not yet grown accustomed to the dark. As a child, Bucke longed to die just to see what would happen. Would there be a God? He imagined there would be nothing. Not even
consciousness left.

Gordon Matta-Clark has sawn through a wooden-framed house in New Jersey, splitting it in two.

The two halves of the house are leaning and separate.

Sunlight shines through the split.

The sky is visible through the split in the banister, floor and ceiling.

Rooms are separated by the split.

His friends come to visit him from New York. They park their van in an adjacent field and laugh about how far away they are.

What do your neighbours say? his friend says.

They say it’s about society pulling apart, he says.

I’m starving, she says. Do you have a kitchen? Or has the stove been cut in two?

Gordon likes the view from the top of the house. Standing on the roof and leaning as the roof leans, he looks out over the land. He feels good standing on this roof, but it is not New York. When
he is in New York he walks all over the city. There, he stands flat-footed on the ground. The architectural rupture of that place at this time is greater than anything he can accomplish here.

You know, you should get a tattoo, says Robert Mapplethorpe.

I already have one, the man says.

Oh yeah? Where?

The man smiles.

I should have guessed, says Robert. Now turn around.

The man does what he’s told.

Robert moves the camera. He repositions the lamp. He takes a photograph.

I’m gonna use a whole roll, Robert says.

He takes more photographs.

Now just stand straight and tall. Look right into the camera. Don’t move, Robert says.

Robert has transformed his studio into a living-room scene with a comfortable armchair and a table lamp, a mantelpiece with ornaments, a side table with deer antler legs.

The couple come in full leather gear, wearing chains and reins. They stand and sit. The man who is shackled at the wrists and ankles is sitting in the chair, his hands on his lap. His bearded
partner is standing beside him, holding the reins and a riding crop. Their shadows loom on the wall behind them. Outside it is night. They look at the camera.

Robert’s leather portfolio includes: the glint of a dog collar and a leather jacket. A close-up of a genital pouch.
Ramsey, New York, 1979
– black man,
leather vest, penis out. Cock in a vice, nail hammered into the end. Next, all the blood resulting from this. The man’s fingernails are cut short and grubby. A laughing devil mask is
positioned beside it.
Two Men Ass Sucking
,
1979
. Face with a boot. Clothes-peg mouth: pegs secured to the top and bottom lips then fanned out. Gimps, cowboy, a man reclining.
White male / bearded / kneeling on zebra bedspread / blinds in back / tattoo on arm (double | symbol) nipple ring, tear on
. The man is pudgy and kneeling, leather trousers, his tongue is
out.
Richard, 1978
, bloody cock on torture board with mask.
Cock – penis/balls hanging out of white leather, 1981
.
Unidentified / Ass / Man facing backwards on toilet
jock strap on
,
1979
.
Ron Stevenson, Shaved Ass, 1978
.
Dominic and Elliot – grabbing cock and balls
,
1979
.
Charles and Jim Freeman
,
1976
– lunging in for a kiss and the chair is tipping.
Jim and Tom Sausalito, 1977 / kneeling mouth open, no pee
. The finger enters the head of the penis –
Lou,
NYC, 1978, similar to map184/ finger in penis hole
. Knife in cock (the cock is fake). Muscle man dressed up in fishnets and bra, eyeliner, curly hair. He is sitting down and protecting his
private parts.

In Floral Park, Harry Mapplethorpe looks out of his kitchen window. The front lawn is at least two inches longer than that of the neighbours. It is spreading into the
flowerbeds. Harry sips his coffee and lights a cigarette. His friend is coming up the path.

Your grass is getting long out there, his friend says.

Just thinking the same thing, says Harry.

I took a trip into the city last week, Harry. I went to see Robert’s exhibition.

Harry looks out at the overgrown lawn.

I don’t know, Harry, I’m no expert, but there’s something seriously wrong with that kid.

The Flatiron Building emerges through the mist. The prow. A glorious ship coming to a rest. As beautiful as any painting.

If Edmund wants to write about New York he must try not to yearn for what is no longer there. But it is difficult to leave the past alone.

When Edmund wrote
The Joy of Gay Sex
he talked to all the men he knew and asked them about their lives and sexual preferences. He asked them what worried them the most. He talked to
doctors and professionals. He asked them the risks and dangers of particular acts. He asked them what techniques they knew to be safe. He organized the information in an a–z list and wrote a
paragraph on each –
Anus
,
Blow Job
,
Body Image
. Whenever Edmund grew tired of writing he made himself imagine the young boy sitting alone in his bedroom, looking
out across the pastures of his family’s farm, confused by his emotions, without a friend in the world, without any guidance, containing desires, feeling afraid. Edmund thought about this
lonely boy and he thought about himself. What if this boy could read Edmund’s book and finally understand that he was not alone?

Edmund sat in his New York apartment and he wrote alone. He wrote about sex on the street. He imagined it happening beneath his window. He imagined it filling up the city. He worked very hard on
the book. He worked so hard that in order to have the time to write about sex he had to give up the sex. He was left with words only. He became a symbol of sexuality instead of a man. The writing,
although enjoyable, could never replace the physical act. I am a man, he thought. I am made of flesh and blood.

Edmund takes the notebooks from his desk. He rips out the pages and lays them on the floor.

I remember when the city was different, not clean but fuggy, filthy.

The city, as it was then, was broken, on its knees, on the edge of disaster, and in many ways so was I.

He witnessed the birth of sexual revolution. Here it lies across the apartment floor on pages of unlined white paper, their edges scored and jagged from extraction, their edges ripped and torn
from the hurry of wanting to put it all into place.

The man in the apartment across the street is watering his plants. He tips his whole body forward as he performs this act. He is wearing just a singlet because of the heat. He seems very old.
His body is stiff. The movement of his tipping over is not smooth and continuous but a series of awkward individual labours.

Edmund pulls his books from the shelves and scans the pages for information. He wrote these passages himself but now they make no sense to him.

He switches on the television. A news feature shows a pretty woman standing on the steps of the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side of New York. Men, women and children are standing beside
her in old-fashioned dress, self-consciously not looking at the camera –
This is how it used to be – this is where we come from, from the Lower East Side where workers of this city
built the industrial foundations on which we have secured a comfortable future
–

He switches channel.

Eyes closed, grip, hard, intense, clutching. The man is red all over from exertion, he pushes, pushes. His partner is mute, trussed up, silenced with a gag, fellated and assaulted. This is
ridiculous, yet Edmund watches.

Edmund is finding it hard to imagine.

Edmund sees life in bright flashes. These disjointed scenes come to him on a rolling film but with each vignette he has missed the titles and the set-up of the drama and he cannot get a handle
on the plot. These are individual flashes of things he has seen or things he has invented – he isn’t sure which – he cannot remember – two men fucking in the corner of a
dark club, right at the beginning of liberation. He watched two men in the dim candlelight and he thought the scene looked so romantic. It meant that things were changing, didn’t it? He was
fresh back from Europe where everything was old.

He picks up
The Joy of Gay Sex
.

If you have trouble swallowing him whole, try it in the morning when the gag reflex is weaker
.

And:

Old age is the unspoken horror of homosexuality. It is said that to grow old is a death sentence, but true love knows no boundaries. True love sees past things like age. If you love someone,
age doesn’t matter. There are many physical pleasures to be had at any age, even if you are old.

Jane Jacobs is sitting at the window of her Hudson Street apartment in 1959. She is watching her neighbours sitting on stoops in the sun. They are sharing beers and lying back.
Kids sketch hopscotch grids on the ground before them. As the sun drifts down the street, the kids drift with it. After an hour they are playing down the street. They join other kids sitting on the
stoop there. Out comes a skipping rope, and this game takes over. Their skipping routines are fast and elaborate. They begin to attract a crowd of passers-by. When they are finished they bow to
their audience. The crowd applauds and moves on. The children produce a deck of cards. They sit on the ground and deal out the cards.

This kind of thing happens all the time here. Children play in the street instead of the park because they want to be where the action is. Her own son likes to play in the street. He uses the
narrow gap between two buildings as a safe place to store his treasured possessions: his tennis balls, his comic books. This space is his den, his hollow tree. Jane is happy to let him do this
because her neighbours are watching from their stoops. Everyone is watching the streets. This is how New York works.