What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (21 page)

Of death, mortals are absolutely ignorant. The dead, fortunately, are beyond caring.

N is for New York

Downtown’s Room In Hotel History

Whatever facts support their findings, biographies and histories are also inventions that rely upon human imagination and fascination. Conscious and unconscious interpretation, inclusions and exclusions alter our record-keeping. Often memory is cast as “ours,” history “theirs,” but sometimes the two battle: suddenly you—in this case, I—find your writing inside exhibitions and books that represent a period under investigation.

Since childhood, I have gorged on biographies, real-life crime, and literary and cultural histories: Abigail Adams, Bloomsbury, the Surrealists, Freud’s circle, the Cambridge spies, Leopold and Loeb, Americans in Paris. Other lives summoned possibility, freedom, difference; I could imagine people unlike any I knew at home. Then I saw Paris for the first time. Its streets were not paved with bohemians and I realized my bedtime readings were also fairy tales. So there’s a beautiful irony to my inclusion in a cultural designation called Downtown.

Under this rubric, an assortment of art, film, video, music and writing from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s has returned for scrutiny and appreciation. There have been two exhibitions, “East Village USA,” at the New Museum in 2004–2005, and, in early 2006, “Downtown: The New York Art Scene, 1974–1984,” at the Grey Art Gallery, and an anthology,
Up is Up
But So is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974
–
1992
, edited by Brandon Stosuy. Like others included, I am doubtful about Downtown’s significance as well as resistant to being placed inside a “scene,” as if living on a film set or behind glass in a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. Others may see you as part of something of which you feel no part. So, I reject some of the claims made for Downtown, but I’m also curious about its purposes for the present. Given its apparent return or resurgence, Downtown appears, at least, to have been a moment, or had its moment, because it has taken a room in the historical imagination.

Usually a term exists in opposition to another, but what is Downtown’s opposite? Uptown makes geographical sense, but Downtown is and isn’t a place. It’s also a virtual or mental space. Downtown might mean lower class, but most musicians, writers and artists arrived from the upper and middle classes. If Downtown means avant-garde, mainstream would be its opposite and also incorrect, since many straddled both: Patrick McGrath, Ann Magnuson, Dennis Cooper, Peter Hujar, Barbara Kruger, Richard Hell, Richard Prince, Eileen Myles, Nan Goldin, Eric Bogosian, Reno, Spalding Gray, Gary Indiana, Patti Smith, Richard Foreman, to name some. Downtown comprised many disciplines, and there was crossover between them.

Literary readings happened in galleries and clubs, artists formed bands, poets wrote plays, and musicians published poetry. And, during this brief moment in time, without an overarching plan or script, some people acted in synch, or merely coincided, clustering in some of the same spaces, partaking of the same events.

Watergate, Punk, Vietnam, civil rights, women’s and gay rights, Minimalism, conceptualism, Warhol, anti-aesthetic and anti-narrative theories, these movements, ideas and events were both background and foreground, a kind of political and cultural geography, for Downtown. Earlier art and culture played an influential role: David Wojnarowicz revered Rimbaud, Kathy Acker plagiarized Dickens, and Cindy Sherman recreated a social history in her “Film Stills.” As practiced in various art forms during this time, appropriation was parody and homage.

But styles and practices varied too widely to call Downtown a movement; there was no coherent aesthetic. Cool and hot, figurative and abstract; narrative films; non-narrative video; political art; conceptual and text-based work; graphic sexual photographs; streetwise fictions; gothic fantasy; New York School poems; transvestite; lesbian and gay theater; performance art; AIDS manifestoes: formally, the work was all over the map.

Downtown didn’t represent waving fields of wheat, crumbling barns and open skies. It was urban, the city Downtown’s trickster muse whose characters’ celebrations and problems, visions and traumas, as well as rats and heroin overdoses, were sources and material.

Historically, the city developed along with industrialization and modernism. In early 20th-century New York, Djuna Barnes apotheosized the city as the exemplar of the modem, while in Paris, Walter Benjamin anointed the flaneur, Kazin’s walker in the city, modernity’s citizen. Ecstatic or frightening, the city became a metaphor of freedom, change and chance. It thrived on speed, just as the Futurists wanted, and had a center, so it could be captured as an image by its inhabitants.

Downtown’s shows and parties, held inside a small perimeter, allowed for quick comings and goings. You never had to stay; you could usually walk home. This cosmopolitan life, rootless, maybe, sometimes unheimlich, uncanny, ordained that home wasn’t necessarily homey. The city grew fields of the unfamiliar and unexpected, which trumped the humdrum. The city’s virtues and Modernist values—such as strangers and strangeness—were the small town’s vices and fears.

In a sense, this Downtown of thirty years ago presented America in a new guise. It was no longer small, homogeneous towns complacent with simple pleasures. In Downtown’s music, art, writing, the city represented America, as it was. America was gay and straight, women and men, of all major religions, some minor, believers, nonbelievers, with conflicting values, both high and low, whose manifestations suggested varieties of obsession, disgust, beauty, pleasure and despair. Notably, Downtown was overwhelmingly white, though living inside a city that wasn’t. Many of us didn’t notice our white skin and European stock. Nominally international and without prejudice, debunkers of the so-called real America, Downtown was also American, racially divided like the rest of the country.

Today’s city is post-modern; it sprawls; the walker sits behind a wheel; the crowd is Internet community. Modernism was a European and American phenomenon, no matter from whom it borrowed, while post-modernism is resolutely global. Seoul, Los Angeles, Peking, Tokyo and London are exemplars, though New York City has finally embraced its growing boroughs. If I were an
historian, I might declare that Downtown signified the last hurrah from the last inhabitants of the last and premier modernist city.

When your work is historicized as Downtown, it sits inside vitrines or hangs on walls with captions that explain it briefly, often inadequately or quaintly. You—I—never see yourself or your contribution that way. I don’t know if it matters; my version will be countered by another’s. Maybe, as I still do when reading books about the past, people will view Downtown’s art and artifacts as escape, lesson, amusement, hope.

Still it’s implacably odd to know that lives function for others in uncontrollable ways. Historians can agree about an event’s occurrence and importance and dispute its interpretations forever. In the same club at the same time, people tell different tales about how the singer fell off the stage. These contestations engage now in then, in things that might have relevance. We don’t always know what’s relevant or what history teaches, but it affects us, anyway.

Downtown’s inventors contributed some generative, brilliant, and bold objects to consider today, still relevant, I think. And even flawed accounts reveal something about the past. We are all unreliable narrators, after all. Inevitably and maybe not unreasonably, the present will make its own terms with the past.

O is for Outlaw

The Boss of Bosses

Here’s my pet theory: Right after godfather Paul Castellano was gunned down in front of Sparks restaurant in December 1985, crack spread uncontrollably on New York streets. Castellano’s death, like Capone’s imprisonment in 1930, triggered mayhem: Wiseguys set out on their own with just enough venture capital and entrepreneurship to start doing business. Later John Gotti reined them in and restored a kind of disordered order. In the meantime, other gangs already in operation—Colombian and Chinese—cashed in on the disarray and brazenly branched out into new territory. There were freelancers, also, reveling in the Mob’s temporary glasnost.

Given my parti pris, I was curious to read
Boss of Bosses—The Fall of the Godfather: The FBI and Paul Castellano
, by Joseph F. O’Brien and Andris Kurins, if only to discover that Castellano had been the antidope La Casa Nostra pope. In the early 1980s Castellano dictated “Two Commandments”: “No one caught dealing drugs after 1962 . . . could ever become an initiated member of the Gambino family,” and “anyone caught dealing drugs, and whose activities in any way implicated other family members, would be whacked.” Before his death, some member of LCN were already dealing it, warily. Here were the seeds of discord. It was open season when he died.

One like to have one’s pet theories confirmed, which is precisely
the level at which this cleverly constructed and predictable booklike docudrama operates. Everyone’s predigested versions of the Mob and the FBI are once again trotted down the aisle, a fashion show of mediated wisdoms. Written in short chapters, or scenes,
Boss of Bosses
is the script for the movie of
Boss of Bosses
. O’Brien and Kurins score points with the premise that the Mob learns its line and gestures from movies and book about the Mafia. Their book does too. Reading it one can actually sense representations building one upon another, piling up into mountains of images and words, to create what seems like “real life.”

Boss of Bosses
recounts the Paul Castellano reign, as told by the FBI men who were responsible for bugging his Staten Island residence and bringing about his fall: An indictment by the government and assassination by Gotti’s men. To execute the placement of Gotti’s men. To execute the placement of the listening device took months of planning. As the authors humbly put it, “A more crucial quarter-hour would be difficult to locate in all the annals of the fight against organized crime in America.” In that 15 minutes the FBI invaded the Castellano residence and wired his kitchen, where he did most of his business.

O’Brien and Kurins report what “O’Brien and Kurins” had to do in order to get inside. In the third person, they reconstruct their dialogues with one another and their superiors, which set in motion the invasion of the godfather’s mansion. In reverential detail, they relate how Paul Castellano came to be Boss of Bosses, how his particular brand of wisdom served him well and moved him up the ranks. But there wouldn’t be a story without an equally reverential analysis of his fall: He was complacent and out of touch
in Staten Island; he wasn’t watching his troops; he was home, because he was sexually obsessed with his Colombian mistress/maid, Gloria Olarte; and worst of all he kicked out his wife, Nina, violating the code any reasonable Mafia chieftain obeyed.

To make the story worthy of being read or filmed, O’Brien and Kurins must construe the Boss and themselves as bigger than life; otherwise they might look too little on the screen. The FBI’s bringing in some businessman who heads an illegal corporation isn’t as thrilling as bringing in, say, a tragic hero. “Of all recent Mob Bosses, he had the most self-discipline, the most restraint. He kept his ego out of his businesses. He did not make the kind of mistakes—mistakes that generally sprang from character flaws rather than mere tactical misjudgment—that precipitously brought down other Dons. The more impressive Big Paul’s track record became, the more he began to haunt the imaginations of certain Special Agents. He was growing into a figure worthy of obsession.”

From the FBI agents’ point of view, Castellano’s obsession with Gloria is central to his downfall. Castellano had been impotent since 1976—”ironically, the same year he became the omnipotent Godfather. The disability apparently had not greatly bothered him until the Colombian maid entered his life.” From the tapes they learn that he will undergo an operation—a penile implant—to be able to have intercourse with her, a source of sly humor throughout the book. Gloria is a troubling, salacious punchline, a dirty joke that messes with Big Paul’s mind. The writers ask what they think is the Mob’s question: “Why did he indulge this crude, sharp-tongued unglamorous woman, this foreigner
with her accent and her appalling table manners?” But in their words, she’s just a hole: “‘You wait and see,’ said Andy Kurins. ‘He’s following that metal dick of his into a cold and lonely place.’” The special agents’ “obsession” with the Boss must never be thought of as sexual. A sprinkling of misogynist dialogue and some innuendoes about Gloria function to separate the men from each other.

When they bust him, Kurins and O’Brien given Castellano respect. They allow him time to change into his suit; they don’t cuff him in front of his family. On another day, bringing him to court, they escort him to the Second Avenue Deli, for his favorite—a corned beef sandwich on rye. After months of surveillance, the FBI agents are sad to take him in; they’ve come to like the Godfather. Passing Castellano over to the marshals “they felt strangely like they were giving the bride away at a wedding.”

In the current exposition of cops and robbers, everyone is the hero, and everyone the antihero. Besides, if the supposed bad guys don’t have stature, the good guys look bad. Castellano has to be heroic, for if he isn’t, what are the FBI guys? Just a couple of antihero-worshipping G-men, playing with an underworld figure’s civil rights.

The Real McCoy

From the universe of possible reasons for a book’s going out of print, there might be collected an anthology in cultural politics, with a chapter for “unpopular culture.” One could imagine Horace McCoy there, as all his work is OP, even his famous-for-a-minute Depression-era marathon dance novel,
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They
? (1935), which returned to print, briefly, with the movie of the same name. Collectors know a real find: McCoy’s
I Should Have Stayed Home
, sitting in a used bookstore on a dusty shelf, positioned somewhere between Precious and Obscure Oblivion. My paperback copy’s cover proclaims it “Hard-boiled,” “Perverse,” “shockingly Brutal.”