Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (71 page)

In his memoirs, Gore described his first encounter with Kerouac: “We are standing in the back of the opera box, which is so crowded that our faces are only a few inches apart. I feel the heat from his body. The eyes are bright and clear and blue; the body muscular, not yet bloated; a drop of water slides alongside his left ear and down his pale cheek, not sweat, but water that he must have just used to comb his thick black Indian-like hair. We were also coming on to each other like two pieces of trade—yes, I was attracted.”

At the time Kerouac met Gore, he had already published
The City and the Pillar
. Kerouac’s
The Town and the City
wouldn’t be published until the following year.

Gore would not meet Kerouac again until the evening of August 23, 1953, when they came together at the San Remo Bar in Greenwich Village.

Kerouac was drinking with William Burroughs and Alene Lee, a beautiful black woman “with a tomboyish figure and mocha skin.” She and Kerouac had become lovers, though he seemed embarrassed to be living with a black woman. He introduced her as a native of India, though no one was fooled by this deception.

Born to a wealthy family, the grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, the rather dour Burroughs was a close friend of both Ginsberg and Kerouac.

Burroughs had just found success with his first novel,
Junkie
, that year, although in time, he would become celebrated around the world for his third novel,
Naked Lunch
(1959), which would become highly visible. His greatest acclaim was yet to come when Gore met him.

In time, Norman Mailer would declare him “the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius.” The British author and critic J.G. Gallard called Burroughs “the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War,” though Mailer actually thought he deserved that position.

Burroughs was already notorious when Gore met him. In 1951, he had shot his second wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City. He spend thirteen days in jail until he was rescued by his brother, who bribed Mexican lawyers and officials to release Burroughs on bail. Two witnesses were bribed to say that the gun had gone off accidentally while he was checking to see if it were loaded.

Burroughs fled to the United States and was convicted, in absentia, of homicide and was given a two-year sentence, which was later suspended. At the time of Gore’s meeting with him, he was working on his short novel,
Queer
.

Queer
would not be published until November of 1985. Editors in the fifties considered the book’s homosexual content obscene.

Gore remembered Burroughs as “looking like a traveling salesman who has traveled too far in a wrinkled gray suit.”

Burroughs had previously expressed a sexual interest in Gore when he saw his picture on the book jacket of his novel,
Judgment of Paris
(1952). Writing to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “His novel is funny in places. The man is primarily a satirist and should avoid philosophizing and tragedy. Why will people insist on attempting what they are not fitted to do? Is Gore Vidal queer or not? Judging from the picture of him that adorns his latest opus, I would be interested to make his acquaintance. If a man of letters is young and pretty, and possibly available, my interest understandably increases.”

Until their meeting in the San Remo bar, Gore had never seen Kerouac in casual dress. The last time he’d seen him at the opera, he’d worn a tuxedo. His present appearance in tight-fitting blue jeans and a muscle-revealing T-shirt evoked Marlon Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
. At the time, Gore was at the height of his good looks, and it was obvious that both Kerouac and Burroughs wanted him.

After only one drink, all four of them, including Alene Lee, left the bar and stood on the sidewalk. Lee asked Kerouac to return home with her.

“I’ve got to go with Gore,” he told her. “Gore Vidal and Jack Kerouac—it’s a historic occasion.”

“You’re drunk,” she accused him.

Suddenly he crouched, repositioned himself, and then, athletically, stood on his head to convince her he was sober.

“It’s either Vidal or me, goddamit,” she shouted at him.

Then, when Kerouac did not rush to reassure her, she tersely proclaimed. “We’re through,” slapping his face before storming off into the night.

Then, for some reason, Kerouac suggested that Gore and Burroughs join him for a visit to Tony Pastor’s, a lesbian bar flourishing at the time in Manhattan.

In a taxi en route to that bar, Burroughs was turned off by “the grotesque fawning of Jack over Gore. He even kissed his hand and called him ‘dear,’” Burroughs said. “I had never known him to behave in such a manner.”

After drinks with “some very tough women—not a lipstick lesbian in the bar—Burroughs, Jack, and I returned to the street,” Gore recalled. “Jack began to perform some Tarzan-like antics on a lamppost, and Burroughs stormed away in disgust. I think he realized I was Jack’s for the night and that I was not physically attracted to him.”

Kerouac suggested that he and Gore rent a room together at the Chelsea Hotel for a “shack-up”. On the way there, they stopped at yet another bar for a night cap.

“During our drinks, Jack tried to establish his heterosexual credentials,” Gore said. “It didn’t come as a surprise to hear that Anaïs Nin had been chasing after him. As a chicken hawk myself, I knew she was always chasing after some hot new artist, the way she’d done with me. Going after me didn’t get her very far sexually.”

“Anaïs told me that you’re prejudiced against Negroes,” Kerouac said.

“Even though you hang out with Allen Ginsberg, I hear you’re anti-Semitic,” Gore shot back.

“Perhaps it’s my family background,” Kerouac said. “My parents are from French Québec, where anti-Semitism flourishes. But Jew-hating is prevalent everywhere. The other day, I read a poll that showed that twenty percent of American soldiers stationed in West Germany believe that Hitler had done a lot of good exterminating the Jews. Let’s hear one for the Holocaust!”

“Of course, being anti-Semitic puts you among some very distinguished members of the American literati.” Gore said. “Some of our greatest artists were or are anti-Semitic, anti-black, and homophobic. Jew-haters are led by Ezra Pound—of course, he’s crazy. Others include H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill, E. E. Cummings, and Theodore Dreiser.”

“My friend, Tennessee Williams, is anti-black,” Gore said. “But he was bornin Mississippi and never grew out of the youthful indoctrination implanted by his mother. Katherine Anne Porter doesn’t like either blacks or gays, although she’s had an affair with William Goyen.”

“I met Goyen at a party at Anaïs’s,” Kerouac said. “She constantly praises his novel,
House of Breath
, claiming it’s done in her style. I didn’t know how Porter managed with Goyen. At Anaïs’s party, he propositioned me.”

“Then there is what I call homophobic homoerotics like J. Edgar Hoover and Graham Greene, our fellow author.”

[Ironically, in the year to come, Gore would label Kerouac as a homophobic homoerotic.]

“Speaking of homophobic homoerotics, there is a belief that we’re about to witness an onslaught of Jewish writers led by Norman Mailer,” Kerouac said.

“Mailer calls James Baldwin—a friend of mine—a black faggot,” Gore said. “He usually has nothing but snarls and sneers for me, as well. His latest victims are William Styron and James Jones.”

“Styron told me that Mailer rages in frustration over his pent-up homosexuality, and actually wants to take it up the ass,” Gore said.

“In his exact words, Styron said that ‘James Jones is his cock-object, his secret desire. Mailer resents my close friendship with James. He’s also jealous of James’ talent. After all, which is the greater of the novels to emerge from World War II—Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead?
Or Jones’s
From Here to Eternity?”

With Kerouac, Gore decided to break his own rule about not having sex with anyone older than himself. At the time, he was twenty-eight years old; Kerouac thirty-one.

At the Chelsea Hotel, they checked in under their real names, Kerouac telling the night clerk that one day their signatures would be very valuable.

[Charles R. Jackson, author of
The Lost Weekend
, the film version of which brought Ray Milland an Oscar, would commit suicide in a room here on September 21, 1968.]

In their hotel room, if Gore’s memory in the 1970s served him accurately, he recalled “no window shade—just a red neon light blinking outside, giving the room a rosy glow. Kerouac wanted to shower together, where I learned, to my surprise, that he was circumcised. For an instant, I saw not the dark, slackly muscled Jack Kerouac, but blonde Jimmie Trimble, my long lost blonde warrior lover of World War II.”

Gore recalled that once in bed with Kerouac, he was the recipient of a blow-job. “That was right before I turned him over and sodomized him,” Gore claimed. “He raised his head from the pillow to look at me over his left shoulder. His forehead was half covered with sweat, dark curls—then he sighed, as his head dropped back onto the pillow.”

The next morning, Kerouac woke up with a hangover. He told Gore that he had no money and asked him for fifty cents to get home. Gore reached into his wallet and produced a dollar, admonishing Kerouac with, “You’ll owe me a dollar.”

Later, when Ginsberg heard this, he asked, “How cheap could Gore get? Didn’t he think it was worth a dollar to fuck Jack Kerouac, considering he’d get literary mileage out of that seduction?”

As Kerouac later reported the crowd at San Remo, “I gave Gore Vidal a blow job.”

“He seemed rather proud that,” Ginsberg said. “That came as a complete surprise to everybody. If Jack ever admitted such a thing to anybody, he would the blowee, not the blower.”

In later writings, Kerouac would devote a chapter to his seduction of Gore in his novel,
The Subterraneans
. He also dedicated a poem to Gore called “Mexico City Blues.”

As Kerouac’s biographer, Ellis Amburn, wrote, “His childhood and adolescence were lived in a pitch of romantic intensity and fulfillment rarely equaled in adulthood when he became tormented, and often paralyzed, by conflicting sexual passions. Kerouac saw his life as a sexual drama, as indeed it would prove to be, as he moved restlessly from homoerotic to bisexual and heterosexual liaisons.”

Amburn commented on that transfer of cash between the two men. “Kerouac liked the designation because male prostitutes, often known as rough trade, can have sex with men and still think of themselves as straight. Vidal’s delusions were of another order: He thought he was ‘butch’ enough to qualify as rough trade. Both, of course, were kidding themselves. They were two monstrous egos clashing in the night.”

Gore later claimed that Kerouac “had employed his physical charms to advance his career as a writer. Sucking asses to get published.”

Motivated by spite, Anaïs Nin telephoned Gore two weeks later. “I thought I’d tell you that Jack Kerouac spent the night at my apartment. He told me that you and he had sex, and that he did not enjoy it. He also said to me that he prefers my…shall we say, Delta of Venus.”

“I suppose ‘fruit’ always tastes better when it’s ripe, or, in the case of the persimmon, overripe.” Then Gore put down the phone.

After the publication of
The Town and the City
, the Kerouac novel published in 1950, Anaïs joined other members of the literati eager to welcome the new novelist into their coveted circle. “The intellectual family of New York has spoken,” said Norman Mailer. “After midnight and in voices like snakes and nettles and rats, hiss and titter, prick, and sip.”