Smash Cut: A Memoir of Howard & Art & the '70s & the '80s (11 page)

We had only a month left in Paris. We’d been having talks. I don’t remember the words. It was like a jazz piece. Howard spoke in tenor sax, and I answered in tinkling piano. But the music underneath was moving us closer to going back to Manhattan. Behind the dynamics of our conversation was one theme: we wanted to be living together in a more intentional way. I was already into my thirtieth year, and my plan for my life had always been to give up the willful odyssey of modeling and cut my losses by eventually writing down the collage of material I’d collected in a novel. “Every time you leave I follow you,” Howard wrote in a vulnerable note, and said as much to me in our conversations. “I don’t know how long this can go on, perhaps, at least I hope, until you are ready to settle down. But I’m spending all my money on these little trips to be with you, with no opportunity to earn money in Europe. But this is still a cheaper price than loneliness and emotional pain killers.” Those “emotional pain killers” got to me. And this time, we were making the decision together.

Those last few weeks in Paris I let go of modeling altogether, although I would continue dips and slides when I returned to New York. I was wrapping my head more around our commitment to living together (though hadn’t we already done so before?) and around concocting a narrative out of all the imagery and bits of conversation I’d been hearing. Influenced by Howard’s irresistible pull, and maybe playing up to Thomas Ammann, who had been talking of movie producing at the dinner, I briefly and unsuccessfully tried hedging my bets by simultaneously turning my notes into a screenplay titled
Glamour
, in honor of my agency, or more exactly their agenda book, with
Glamour
in big gold letters on the front. Instead of fighting about which of our mediums—film or
literature—was superior, we were now collaborating. I went to the screening room and helped Howard make editing decisions about cutting Allen Ginsberg here or there. He helped me think about writing a film script, or a novel, or both. (Turned out that I was better at writing novels that I imagined were movies than actual movies; but that realization came later, helped by Thomas’s disinterest in my script that could never decide whether to be East Village minimal or Hollywood maximal, and also his contrasting great interest, and investment, in Howard’s documentary.) My last memory of Paris, in keeping with the film motif, a reel that sputtered out rather than coming to a controlled “
Fin
,” was the two of us walking down yet another wet street to a charcuterie. Unlike Thomas, he was encouraging my ambitions.

HOWARD
: I think that first scene you wrote should be filmed very straight on, low-key . . . that even though it’s funny she should say her lines in a kind of jet-lag mood.

BRAD
: I agree. In fact, most of the lines I write sound best in monotone. That’s why there shouldn’t be a shot of a plane taking off at the beginning. Too exciting.

HOWARD
: I agree. . . . And I thought a great thing for the credits would be to have a head sheet open out and just zoom across and stop at the picture and the name of the actor, but blur over the others, then, click, stop again.

BRAD
: That’s a wonderful idea.

HOWARD
: I have ideas, too, one or two.

I felt for a sputtering instant that we were happily married: married by art.

__________

H
OWARD AND I SHOWED UP IN LATE JUNE AT THE
Chelsea Hotel, answering an ad for a sublet. The only hard-bitten sacrifice we made to be together, and to stoke our adventure in Paris, was the loss of our Bleecker Street place. Neither of us had the cash to hold onto the apartment while we were away. We knew the Chelsea Hotel well, and it beckoned to us. I had never actually been inside, but I had frequently walked by the tall, red-brick Victorian gothic apartment building. Most often I had been on my way to or from leather bars on the western tip of Chelsea—a largely Hispanic, or “Puerto Rican” as we used to say, neighborhood at the time, much like my old college neighborhood of Morningside Heights. Its bronze entrance plaque gave credit to some old-time celebrity boarders: Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe. Howard and I could easily update that list in our minds: the Warhol films made there (Viva was still living on the premises); Patti Smith and Robert; the ghost of Sid Vicious’s knifed girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, still blamed for elevators stalling on the first floor.

We looked around the lobby, its walls crowded with art, mobiles hanging from the ceiling, everything rusty silver or faded pastels. Like much of the hotel during our time, perhaps always, the legendary was mostly gold bits grifted from a mucky stream of ordinary life. I did recognize one piece: a group-grope tableau Larry Rivers traded to stay in the hotel. Most of the residents passing by us in the lobby were mangy middle-age parental bohemians, looking like aging porn actors with bellies and retouched hair, who were often serious, maybe too serious, composers, sculptors, filmmakers, and writers. Stepping out from his office, owner and manager Stanley Bard invited us back for our interview. My impression was that we three experienced love at first sight. Stanley was wiry, with receding hair, a bad suit with wide seventies lapels, and a loud paisley tie. But he could have been an uncle of Howard’s. He twigged to something in Howard’s businesslike rap. Everything that had been a liability in procuring an apartment was suddenly a plus—I was a poet, Howard was shooting a film on Burroughs. Instead of a sublet, he offered us, in his high, winding whine, a leased apartment, not cheap, for $1,000 a month, which we took.

Our first room was on the fifth floor, front, number 511. We still kept a few sticks of belongings—the TV, Howard’s grandmother’s chair and couch. A “housewarming” gift from Howard was a red Schwinn bike that I left to rust on the balcony through the winter, a sore point between us. In the bedroom, I tried to write some. I had been flirting with a straight boy poet from Los Angeles, and I dedicated to him a poem titled “Ed’s Boots,” which was published in an L.A. poetry magazine,
Barney
, and included a line about “the hands that pick up your boots,” very fetishistic stuff. “I went to the signing party for the issue and people were asking me if ‘Ed’s Boots’ had anything to do with me,” he wrote me, in a noncommittal monotone. “I said, ‘Yeah, well I was there.’” Howard and I debriefed each other about the kinks of the hotel. I told stories of my foiled attempts to flirt with an androgynous punk living at the end of our hall. “He won’t even play his music loud enough for me to bang on his door to complain,” I moaned. Howard won the contest. “Oh God,” he said as he walked in one day, slapping his forehead at the macabre scene he had witnessed in the lobby. A fifty-year-old alcoholic, living on the seventh floor, was wheeled out, in a black body bag, by ambulance attendants. As the gurney passed the front desk, Jerry, the loud, hilarious attendant, shouted, “Checking out?”

A more charged memory of that summer involved reading an article in the
New York Times
. I sat on the couch, gray muted light through tall balcony windows, a misty day, no sunlight, pretty quiet. It was the July Fourth weekend, 1981, exactly three years after Howard and I first slept together. The article was titled “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” As I read, I felt a palpitation of fear in my heart, a palpitation that became synonymous with my heartbeat soon enough, but not yet. I talked about the science-fiction-sounding piece to Howard, but don’t remember my words. Howard said that Burroughs once had Kaposi’s sarcoma in a toe. “More proof that he was avant-garde,” he joked. During that same stretch, I saw my friend Matt at the YMCA across the street. He was a literature grad student, a friend of Sontag’s, a reader of Beckett, Irish background, pale skin, freckles, thin black hair, I’d had a crush on him, written a couple passionate poems for him, we’d had sex at Columbia. He told me he believed he had the “gay cancer.” A chasm opened up in front of me on the gym floor. I looked out the window toward my bike on our balcony, felt an animal panic, a sweat, and mumbled a few words of disbelief.

Our response to this news item was that we entered into a year or so of three-ways. We agreed that rather than having clandestine sex on the side, or being loyal and monogamous—an experiment that was now collapsing for both of us—we would express our solidarity with shared glue. The strongest of those glues was Nick, an Italian boy Howard found who liked to come over and drink bittersweet aromatic liqueurs that we supplied, in front of our fireplace, stocked with Duraflame fake burning logs. I loved the general
atmosphere
of these three-ways, but I was a tease. I began a pattern of dropping out when matters heated up and Howard (politely? I don’t think so) wound up closing the deal. For all my claims to promiscuity, I’d always been more of a fantasist, a voyeur, and in these three-dimensional grinding situations, I turned out to be the wallflower, the cold fish. Our most memorable three-way occurred on my thirtieth birthday. We would now be into January 1982. We had a party in the apartment. Nick, in a wife-beater T-shirt, was the popular bartender. Howard and I devolved, staggering, later, to the Mineshaft, and together, on our knees, blew a facsimile of a cop, in his NYPD uniform, down in the damp basement of the fading club. I remember locking eyes with Howard during that forced fun, realizing that neither of us was happy, and feeling sad at our loss.

That winter, too, my job life as a fabulous male model finally hit the wall. I was hired to do an editorial shoot for
New York
magazine at the Gramercy Park Hotel, then even more decrepit than the Chelsea. The clothes were meant to evoke a snooty English drawing room. I fit well into buttoned-up black-tie-style costume, and so I was featured, my hair sleeked back. I remember gazing at myself in a gilded mirror and thinking maybe this job isn’t so bad after all. Then the fashion editor from the magazine arrived. Her name was Anna Wintour. Eventually she would turn into
the
Anna Wintour of
Vogue
. But then she was a young editor with an English accent, seemingly just right for the mannered mood being cultivated by the photographer. Her first move was to sit in the corner, wearing her (later) signature dark glasses, watching wordlessly, like a scolding sphinx, until everyone was uncomfortable. Then the lights began blowing, apparently from faulty wiring in the old hotel. I remember thinking that she was a sorceress and had cast a dark spell on the poor photographer. Eventually she rose and started ripping up his concept. Fast-forward a few loooong hours, now well after dusk, and she had a guy and girl half naked in a sketchy bathtub, drinking champagne, looking wrecked, and me sidelined. The photograph was undoubtedly improved, edgier. I wondered who this talented, chilly editor was, but resolved that I’d had enough black fashion magic. I had never quite managed pulling off modeling anywhere but in foreign cities that were removed from my life as a writer and a boyfriend. I also noted I was getting very little work.