The Cool School

by Glenn O'Brien

  New York is a melting pot, yes, but let’s not forget, it’s a melting pot of families. Of Italians and Irish and Jews and Catholics, of Puerto Ricans and Germans and Russians. I think we’d all agree that one place where unusual personal habits have to be checked at the door is the classroom. And there, I really believe, the parents of America have every right to demand that no homosexual phase on their way to maturity, and that’s exactly when they’re the most vulnerable to seduction by an older person. If the gays can get at our children when they’re most susceptible to the virus of homosexuality, we risk an exponential increase of inversion in this country that will amount to a plague-like epidemic.

  Only people like you and me, ladies and gentlemen, can stop this obnoxious influence from spreading through and polluting America’s school systems, corrupting our young, and ruining the fabric of a great nation.

  I’m a New Yorker by birth and as long as there is a Roy Cohn, there’s one New Yorker who intends to stand up for American values and American beliefs.

  I know you all here feel the way I do, and I hope that now you’ll join me in singing my favorite song. I hope it’s your favorite song too. Written by Irving Berlin. Let’s all sing “God Bless America.”

  1992; Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010, 2010

  Richard Prince

  (b. 1949)

  Born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1949, Richard Prince grew up in Massachusetts, played basketball and golf, and attended college in Maine. As a young artist he worked nights for Time-Life in the tear sheets department where he began making artworks of re-photographed photography. Prince has been writing as long as he has been making art, and his 1980 exhibition at the CEPA Gallery in Buffalo was accompanied by the publication of his book Menthol Pictures. He became a key figure in the “Pictures Generation” group during his time with Metro Pictures gallery. He is famed for his cowboys, joke paintings, celebrities, car hoods, check paintings, and nurse paintings, among many other modes. Prince has written many essays and stories, published numerous books (including Why I Go to the Movies Alone and Wild History), owned bookstores, and now is a publisher through his company Fulton Ryder. “The Velvet Well” is excerpted from Why I Go to the Movies Alone. His Collected Writings, edited by Kristine McKenna, was published in 2011.

  The Velvet Well

  MAGAZINES, MOVIES, TV, and records. It wasn’t everybody’s condition, but to him it sometimes seemed like it was; and if it really wasn’t, that was alright, but it was going to be hard for him to connect with someone who passed himself off as an example or a version of a life put together from reasonable matter.

  He had already accepted these conditions, and built out of their givens, and to him what was given was anything public, and what was public was always real. He transported these givens to a reality more real than the condition he first accepted. He was never too clever, too assertive, too intellectual . . . essentially too decorative. He had a spirit that made it easier to receive than to censor.

  His own desires had very little to do with what came from himself, because what he put out (at least in part), had already been out. His way to make it new was to make it again, and making it again was enough for him, and certainly, personally speaking, almost him.

  HAVING FUN? They weren’t sure.

  IT WASN’T a misunderstanding about the feeling, or difficulty about how it could be appreciated. Nothing about shame, or like, hey, is this allowed, should we really be feeling this good? Nothing like that, or stupid, or anything. Just more like they were so keyed up about having Sex and being Serious that the amount of time funning never seemed sufficient, or quite substantial enough for them to form any kind of reasonable opinion about what fun was supposed to be anymore.

  They wanted to be flexible. They wanted to be able to say yes, we’ve participated, we’re acquainted with the emotion and have a pretty fair idea of how and why it exists, but aside from appearing happy, there was, in practice, only a slight commitment, and most of their energy was spent protecting their reservation and skepticism.

  They understood, too, though, that if fun was rejected publicly, others might point to them and say their preoccupation with S & S made them dark and square and something to be turned out. So, if they knew they could trust you, that’s when they’d come out and just say it, point blank . . . “Okay, out with it. If it was up to us, we’d rather have no part of fun.”

  They felt the sudden flux, an inflation, transitory . . . like being in love. A kind of swelling from fever. And, if it wasn’t too much to ask, all they wanted to do was move at a reasonable pace, sounding along at a nice kind of idle . . . so maybe they could get on with their work and their lives.

  For them, funning seemed to be another kind of pressure. An obligation they had come to expect as part of the routine. Something to be taken in doses. Part of the checks and balances. The good with the bad. Another factor to figure in what was prescribed to produce a healthy equilibrium.

  It was suggested, too, that fun existed on the same coin as guilt, and if the pleasure of its purpose wasn’t occasionally tossed and allowed to be “called” in the air . . . then the game could never begin, and sides could never be taken.

  “Lighten up,” was what they heard. “Don’t be such stones.”

  They’d hear the dig out doing the shopping. Hear it in the supermarket. Sometimes right in the middle of the week. They would try to smile and sparkle and move down the aisle. One foot in front of the other. They tried. They stepped. They remembered to participate.

  They did their bit and acted the part that was called for. Parts of the mood came back, like a view lit up by lightning. Slowly, carefully, as if egged on by some invisible sidekick, they managed to tickle themselves. And, if not exactly to death, then to an acceptable titter and gaffe.

  Luckily for them, their having the requisite gullibility, simplicity, and tolerance for repetition made some of life’s little jokes impossible to grow out of.

  GOING OUT became as private as staying in. Performance became less public, or at least less visible in public, and unless you were a lucky stiff, the witnessing of a natural sequence in light was pretty unlikely. Anything seen in person was probably, at best, received, rumored, or whispered . . . usually by word of mouth (from ear to ear). And, the source of the telling was either confessing under pressure, or bragging and boasting, acting like a big cheese . . . trying to negotiate a brownie point for, say, passage out of the city.

  There were two markets. Black and box office. And, if one wasn’t, shall we say, discretely camouflaged . . . charged with an ability to adapt by distorting, then the percentage of looking real became cut in half, and the chances of being left out, possibly even terminated, doubled.

  What this was about was “watch out.” What was real was very real, and it wasn’t all that unique to feel terrorized by the real thing. The game was ghost. And whoever became the least recognizable without totally disappearing got to go home.

  He was almost there. Near the end. One step away from autonomy. He made sure that everything about him looked the same, and as natural as it had when he first appeared. He was the look generation, and the effect of his appearance was so unreal that his reality began to resemble a kind of virtuoso real . . . a very real Real capable of instamatic ambience.

  HE WOULD go to the post office and stand in line. When it was his turn to go, he’d let the person behind him, the one second in line, go ahead first (ahead of him), he’d be first in line once again. As long as there was a line, he could be at the head of it, the next one to go.

  Allowing those behind to go first was a way of testing his word against theirs. The performance was perfect, transparent, and if properly executed, undetectable. The appearance of politeness without budging an inch. Top dog without the bark. The absence of aggression in a position reserved for a breed apart. An enlightened master? Incredible! What could be better?

  Fortunately, he was never perfect, at least
when he tried, and on the second day he found himself standing alone just after lunch. When he was called he failed to move. When he was called again he stood firm and refused to step forward. Security was called and he was removed.

  Offering himself as a scapegoat was one of the ways he liked to mock and criticize the tradition of romantic silence.

  BEING HIP has usually been associated with being new, being “with it,” onto something that’s in before it’s actually in, certainly onto something that’s in before it’s out.

  The hipster has usually been associated with being a number, a hot card, something oddly independent, responsive to whatever circumstance he finds himself in, disaffiliated but sovereign to whatever turf he finds himself wise to. Impulsive and nomadic, he’s the one without any of the problems that underscore a sudden change, a white shark, so to speak, easily navigating his environment in a smooth and offhanded way.

  For him his fashion is more habit than reflex, the cool for the most part always put on, like a well-worn accessory, the play of it often supplemented with an affected and studied style.

  Pretending to know anything like this is a terrible strain, but I’m afraid the manner of this thing, this sense of reserve, this type of definition and attitude, got to him early, got to him first through parents . . . his parents . . . and later, seconded by an older brother and sister in shifts!

  The simultaneous pressures were not, he imagined, unlike spending time in a temporal inferno, a mendactic internment where he found himself being seriously fucked over.

  Its anti-commercialism bore a striking resemblance to vows of voluntary poverty, an issue he thought truly emotionless and amoral, and fought hard to undermine.

  But his parents and his brother and sister were obsessed by the concoctives of modern living. The canon of their convictions seemed sacred. Their laws, natural ones, instructive and unspoken . . . with rites of passage not to be shrugged off or meddled with.

  Early on these conditions were breathed, mentholated. It was difficult to do otherwise, its rap was passed around the house like a container of shampoo. There wasn’t much one could do, it had always been there, it was there from the beginning, and he was helpless to its charge, being a kid, and impressionable and unformed.

  Even after, when he was a teenager, the finer elements of its verse, especially its cynicism, came to be unconsciously absorbed. At times the “cool” seemed unapproachable, as if the particulars were ordained, and only those few who truly sacrificed on all occasions could discipline the gestures into posture.

  But mostly, he found its instruction prehistoric, and in time he secretly subverted its registration from imprinting its mark permanently, knowing somehow its brand would burn deep into his hide, and telegraph a sign, the kind of sign they put on cattle and slaves.

  It was for shit and it was hard to figure out, but those assholes had given up on the idea of being human, and everything they thought was theirs got hit on to do the same.

  THEY WERE never sure why, when the names of the great ’50s artists were mentioned, Rod Serling’s name wasn’t included. To them it wasn’t a question of inclusion, or even nomination: Serling was by far the most entertaining of the bunch, and it seemed wrong that his work was not regarded with the respect they felt it deserved.

  They hoped that it was just a misunderstanding, a question of time, that perhaps along with the other so-called “commercial” artists, the new producers might one day get a good dose of romanticism before the official fiction . . . what usually came to be called history, would be written.

  THEY WERE always impressed by the photographs of Jackson Pollock, but didn’t particularly think much about his paintings, since painting was something they associated with a way to put things together that seemed to them pretty much taken care of.

  They hung the photographs of Pollock right next to these new “personality” posters they just bought. These posters had just come out. They were black-and-white blowups . . . at least thirty by forty inches.

  The photographs of Pollock were what they thought Pollock was about. And this kind of take wasn’t as much a position as an attitude, a feeling that an abstract painter, a TV star, a Hollywood celebrity, a president of a country, a baseball great, could easily mix together . . . and whatever measurements used to distinguish their value would be done away with . . .

  I mean, it seemed to them that Pollock’s photographs looked pretty good next to Steve McQueen’s, next to JFK’s, next to Vince Edwards’, next to Jimmy Piersall’s, and so on . . .

  THEY WERE used to seeing things cropped, with the scene or the image up close and filling up the whole frame . . . making whatever was there “larger than life” . . . making it a lot more than what it was supposed to be.

  This particular way of looking at what was inside was nothing new, and the effect of this experience was only questioned by those few who still couldn’t come to terms with the idea of substitute or surrogate relationships.

  Sometimes they found themselves “falling for,” and thought maybe what was outside was as good as, or even better than, what was presented inside the crop. It happened, the trip-up did occasionally occur, but when it did, they were the first to admit to their foolish curiosity.

  They should have known better, but after they had seen the commercial for the Bronx Zoo they said, “Let’s go! It looks incredible!”

  There was no hesitation, and looking back it’s difficult to determine who to blame for that kind of absence of mind. The “fall” was pretty much like giving in to the temptation of a velvet well, and the “go for it” pitch of the entire advertising industry made sense, that Bud . . . that zoo for them.

  Polar bears jumping and splashing in arctic waters. Gorillas swinging from cages and beating chests. The monorail safari train, and the promise of an Arabian night on a Bedouin camel. Bengal tigers prowling around in the open wilds. The tom-tom drama of the African jungle. One began to wonder if Johnny Shefield, the original boy in Tarzan, might be tied up somewhere in an unspeakable pygmy punishment machine.

  As it turned out, of course, the only punishment was standing in lines with mobs of New York natives waiting patiently to see each attraction. Three to four deep, standing outside the houses of reptiles and birds and fish.

  The safari train was filled with families and screaming babies. The elephants were swaying from side to side in neurotic replay. The only large gorilla refused to emerge from his little cement hut, knowing full well that dominance in Planet of the Apes was light-years away.

  The tiger that had been so beautifully presented in the ad (a nice, tight head shot), was camouflaged and buried under leaves not less than a football field away!

  The polar bear looked stuffed, and the lions were locked up. The rhinos moved around with about as much viciousness as a herd of contented cows.

  Well, what could they say? An honest mistake? Nobody’s fault? Could’ve happened to anyone? Sure, of course . . . it happens. No hard feelings . . .

  They still liked the ad. They still stopped and pointed to it, and joked about what came to mind when it came over the TV . . .

  There . . . you see . . . you had to have been there to believe it. You gotta see it to believe it. You should’ve been there. There’s more to it than meets the eye. The naked eye. Ain’t nothing like the real thing. Can I get a witness? Show me, I’m from Missouri. Live. It’s Saturday Night. Wow, I could’ve had a V-8 . . .

  RECENTLY THERE’VE been a lot of articles and talk about book burnings. Books, pamphlets, periodicals, pornography . . . fuel for the new bonfires. People burning The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, burning Tom Jones, too. The fear of Tom and Becky, and the fear of the other Tom, his genitals, mostly. The fear of his “equipment” moving slow and subtle, like a real enemy.

  Last week when he bought the newspaper there was a Pleasure Magazine right next to the paper on the stand. On the cover of the magazine, right out there on the street, out in the open, was a picture of a naked girl with pin
k breasts, and three titles to articles inside, pasted up over the girl’s head.

  The titles to the articles were Ram It Up My Ass, Suck My Open Hole, and Huge Latex Rod. They were printed in big, bold, bright yellow letters.

  Suck My Open Hole. It startled him. He remembers laughing and saying to himself, come on . . .

  He didn’t know what to think. His reaction was mixed. It took him by surprise. He didn’t particularly like what he saw. But he was fascinated by how extreme it was.

  He really didn’t know what to do, you know? Stand still. Set the fire. Wait. Walk away. Buy it. What are you supposed to do with that kind of take?

  He thought it was kind of like saying to someone, okay, step over this line if you want to fight, and the someone does, and you step back and draw another line.

  ONE OF the things they liked about this place was a particular type of density. The kind of density tempered for the most part by diversity. The source of this fabric was hard to define, but getting to its ingredients was becoming a lot easier, and hopefully, the continued availability of these ingredients would make some conditions less restricted, and maybe even help establish workable redistributions to make things less conflicted and more even.

  The best of this place has always been the variety, and, at least up until now, there had existed the possibility of choice; even though the catch to the possibility was mostly a promise.

  The promise of diversity had in some ways existed literally, but mostly its existence was a notion, something that looked good on paper. The implications of choice as an availability in reality, of course, could spell disaster for those traditionally desiring, or already in, a position of power. A chicken in every pot was a political ploy, and in a real sense, had as much chance of becoming a reality as fingering a wish on a wishbone. And, up until now, the practice of such a spread happened only in various forms, and only then because they were affordable.