Punish Me with Kisses (39 page)

Q. Any background on the murder story?

A. There were a number of so-called social register or debutante murders that inspired me, not so much in terms of the details and who-done-its, but because of the setting. There was one particularly famous case in the Mid-West in which one sister was murdered in her bedroom on a grand estate owned by a very prominent family, supposedly by an "intruder," while the other sister slept soundly in the next room. I knew a reporter who'd covered this case, and though there'd been no arrests, (and, for that matter, never have been) he mentioned casually that the police were looking very closely at certain family members. It struck me as impossible that the sister, father or mother in this family had been involved, but this reporter's comment sprung an idea. I started researching incest murder cases, and from that premise worked out my plot.

Q.
  
You mentioned that the title is a bit trashy. How did it come about?

A. My editor back then considered himself a master at thinking up titles. He was the guy who came up with the title "Jaws" for Peter Benchley's white shark attack novel. One day he said to me: "Your story is great, but you need a riveting title. I came up with one over the weekend. It just flew into my head: Punish Me With Kisses." At first I was appalled. I hemmed and hawed, and at one point even suggested that we play with his title turning it into "Punish Me (With Kisses)", thinking that adding parentheses would make the title sound more intelligent. He shook his head. He wanted me to use his title exactly as is. I went along. Considering what I was trying to do, it didn't seem worth fighting about, and, in the end, by embedding the phrase several times in the text, I felt, and still do feel, that I made it work.

Q. You seem to have caught what it was like to live in Manhattan during those years.

A. We lived there when I was writing the book. I used a lot of things I knew about: jogging around the reservoir in Central Park; office politics at publishing houses; the singles bar scene; etc. It was the early 80s, and rereading the book, I feel I caught the spirit of that time fairly well.

Q. The cats! Where did they come from?

A. There actually was a shrink, a Dr. W, who owned a commercial building in the heart of the West Village most of the floors of which were used to house her huge collection of cats. I knew a couple of people who'd been her as patients. One recognized she
 
was running a cult and quit; the other, sad to say, evidently stayed on until Dr. W died. . . at which point, I heard, that when the authorities went in there they found a nightmare scene, more than a thousand cats, many dying or already dead. Her patients totally believed in her and her bizarre notions concerning "cat therapy," and they organized "maydays" much as described in the novel. One patient rented a storefront in her building where she operated a yarn shop; this young woman, sadly, was murdered in her store by a drugged-out street person or robber. This murder had nothing to do with the cult, but it brought attention to it and that was more or less the beginning of the end. I used what I knew about Dr. W and her cat cult, because it seemed so very weird and at the same time so very particular, a strange underside to life in the big city.

Q. There seems to be a novel out titled "Punishment With Kisses." Know anything about it?

A.
 
Just what the author, Diane Anderson-
Minshall
(who, it turns out, is quite prominent in gay magazine publishing), wrote on her acknowledgements page. She wrote that she read excerpts from my book aloud to her eighth grade classmates at Payette Junior High in Payette, Idaho, and for that despicable act was sent by her English teacher to the principal's office. She goes on: "Ever since I read
Punish
in the early 80s, I dreamed of a lesbian
revisioning
. There is very little in common with the original but inspiration, born from my hormone fueled adolescent fantasies and Bayer's warped words." I'm not sure that there's very little in common: she has a sister carrying on in the
poolhouse
of a palatial estate while another sister watches from the shadows. There's a murder, and the surviving sister starts immersing herself in the dead sister's life, even finding her sex diary, and going on a sexual odyssey of her own. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so let's just say that I'm moderately flattered and leave it at that.

Many of
William Bayer
's novels are available in e-editions from Crossroad Press: his
Janek
series (
Switch
,
Wallflower
and
Mirror Maze
); his two Kay Farrow novels (
The Magician's Tale
and
Trick Of Light
); his foreign detective series, (
Tangier
and
Pattern Crimes
); and his noir novels,
Blind Side
and
The Dream Of The Broken Horses.

Bayer's books have won several literary awards including the Best Novel Edgar. He and his wife, food writer Paula
Wolfert
, live in the California wine country.

For more information, please check out his website:
www.williambayer.com
. You can also write him directly at [email protected].

THE MAGICIAN'S TALE

A Kay Farrow Novel

T
he sun is about to set. I check myself in the mirror—glowing eyes, dark brows, small triangular face, medium-length dark hair parted on the side. I brush down some wisps so they fall across my forehead, then dress to go out—black T-shirt, jeans, black leather jacket, sneakers,
Contax
camera around my neck.

I wear black to blend in. My hope is that by dressing dark and with my face half concealed by my hair, I can slink along the streets, barely seen, covertly stealing images.

I pause at my living room window. Dusk is magic time, the sky still faintly lit. Streetlamps are on and lights glow from windows, making the city look mysterious and serene. The view's so spectacular it's hard to tear myself away:
 
North Beach, Telegraph Hill, the Bay Bridge sharply defined, all still, silent, glowing behind the glass.

I move to my telescope, set the crosshairs on a penthouse terrace just below
Coit
Tower. The image is so clear I feel I can touch it if I reach out. Garden chairs, pots overflowing with geraniums, sliding glass doors leading to an art-filled living room behind. No lights on inside.

The Judge must be working late. I know him well. I have no lover now.

I take another moment to take in the view. I'd like to stay, watch the sky turn black, perhaps wait until the lights come on in that living room across the valley. But it's time to go out; I have an appointment with a friend.

I
t's chilly tonight. I turn the collar of my jacket up, peer around. A cable car is poised at the top of Lombard. Tourists disembark to descend the famous crooked street. I enter the park in front of my building, named for George Sterling, poet of the city. He composed some good lines, was eloquent on the fog, wrote "its touch is kind," described San Francisco as this "cool gray city of love." He also wrote:
 
"At the end of our streets are stars." Not bad. Unfortunately, Sterling was no Carl Sandburg, but then San Francisco isn't a "city of the big shoulders" either.

I pause by the Alice Marble Tennis Courts, turn to look back at my building, slender in the dusk. I make out lights in some of the apartments and the glow of a Japanese paper lantern in mine. I shrug, cross the park, look for the young bearded homeless guy who sometimes sleeps amidst the bushes. Failing to find him, I take the stairs that descend the steep western slope of Russian Hill.

Polk Street:
 
It's quiet, residential at its upper end, but as I stride south it takes on a different character. Apartment buildings give way to stores and restaurants, then, slowly, block by block, to sleaze.

Around California Street they begin to appear—the crazed, the addicts, the dispossessed. Sad, sick, broken, they perch on the sidewalk beside signs and cups, or slouch within doorways against glossy garbage bags filled with their possessions.

I pass a cavernous old movie house, a trio of junk shops, a metaphysical bookstore, cheap Chinese restaurants, funky hotels and saloons, sleazy erotic boutiques and adult-film rental joints. The strip here, called, sometimes affectionately, more often disparagingly, Polk Gulch, intersects with alleys bearing the names of beautiful trees:
 
Fern, Hemlock, Myrtle, Olive, Willow.

In these passageways I observe young men poised alone against the sides of buildings, others lingering in small groups, twos and threes. There's a glow about them, a force field of energy. Hustlers of different races, objects of desire, they stand still, silent, awaiting clients.

I've been roaming this neighborhood since the beginning of the summer, always at night, always armed with my
Contax
. Those first weeks I didn't take pictures, preferring simply to look, explore, make my presence known. As I picked out probable subjects, they too began to notice me. Spotting my camera, they gave me a name, Bug, short for Shutterbug. I disliked it but pretended I didn't, since a street name here connotes acceptance.

"Hey! It's Bug. She's on the street." Word flashes down the Gulch as if by semaphore.

Some also note my affliction.

"You blind, girl?" a scrawny, tattooed kid bellowed at me yesterday as I staggered along on one of my rare daylight excursions. "What's with the shades, Bug? Drugged out?" Then, when I ignored him:
 
"Think you're a fuckin' star?"

I know better than to respond to taunts, a lesson I learned painfully on school playgrounds years ago. But to those who become my friends, I cheerfully reveal my handicap.

I'm an
achromat
, which means I'm completely colorblind.

The correct name for the malady is
autosomal
recessive
achromatopsia
. It's rare; I doubt there're five thousand of us in the U.S. I lack cone function in my retinas and thus cannot see colors. My visual acuity is poor, though better than most complete
achromats
. My biggest problem is photophobia, the reason that in daylight I must wear heavy, dark red wraparound shades. Outside, on a brilliant sun-filled San Francisco afternoon, the rods in my eyes become saturated, the world goes white, I become lost in a dazzling blizzard—a sensation, I'm told, close to what vision
normals
experience as snow blindness.

But there are advantages. One is aesthetic—seeing the world uniquely in terms of gray tones instead of hues. Another is good night vision. In darkness, I like to think, I can see like a cat.

I'
m searching for Tim. He called this afternoon, said he needed to talk. There was urgency in his voice, perhaps even fear. I offered to meet him at once, but he said he had to see someone first. We agreed to meet at his spot on Hemlock Alley at seven then go up to the Richmond for dinner since he didn't think he'd feel like hanging around the Gulch.

It's 7:10 now and I see no sign of him as I occupy his niche beside the dumpster. The brick wall behind me, against which I've photographed him many times, is thickly layered with graffiti—names, symbols, dates, obscenities, most fading, a few freshly applied. I wait as the traffic thins out on Polk, but few passersby peer down the alley. It's still too early for the chicken hawks.

Tim and I met when I started taking pictures here. Of all the street people I've come to know these last months, he's the only one I think of as a real friend. He doesn't know it yet but he's also on his way to becoming the central actor in my project. All my best shots frame him—alone, surrounded by others, or on the periphery of a group. As for the formal portraits, his are the strongest. It's his eyes, I think, so large and luminous, and the fine shape of his chin and jaw that make the camera love him. He's got the cheekbones of a Greek god, the unruly hair of a savage. Whether pouting in his niche against the graffiti-scarred wall or posing bare to the waist on Angel Island with the city gleaming white behind, he emerges as a splendid modern
ephebe
—urban warrior, heroic, fragile, seductive. Yes, the camera loves him. The photographer loves him too.

Seven-thirty, getting cold, not a typical October night. Where are you, Tim?

He claims he's twenty, but barely looks seventeen, perfect disproof of the adage that a life of vice will mark your face. His unsullied beauty is his capital. Creamy of skin, fair of cheek, he's the eternal adolescent of his clients' dreams. He tells me he intends to work the street a few more years, save his money and retire. He pauses, then confides he's already got fifty thousand dollars stashed. When I stare at him in disbelief, he shows me the smile of a sphinx. Surely if you have that much, I tell him, it's time to quit right now.