There is no doubt that Caskey was deeply stirred, at first, by Keohane’s reappearance. They went off together to a steambath downtown, after an evening of drinking. Later, there were trips down to Long Beach to visit Keohane there. Once or twice, Christopher went along and tried to behave well, on the lines of “any friend of Billy’s is a friend of mine . . .” but, when alone again with Caskey, he sulked. Caskey took Christopher’s jealousy as something tiresome but neutral, he didn’t attempt to reassure Christopher; he was frankly under Keohane’s spell and made no secret of the fact that they were having sex together. Keohane himself was pleasant to Christopher but not particularly friendly; he seemed unaware of the situation which his presence created. He was a slim, well-built young man, a bit on the skinny side, fairly good-looking, with a mustache. Christopher found him neither charming nor amusing and quite unattractive sexually. As Christopher might have foreseen if he could have looked at the affair objectively, Caskey soon lost interest in Keohane, deciding that he had changed since the old days and was now turning into a queen. As for Keohane himself, this reunion with Caskey probably hadn’t meant all that much to him, even at the beginning, and he could get all the sex he wanted elsewhere. The two of them parted on friendly terms.
But, if Keohane had deflated Christopher’s ego, it was soon reinflated by John Cowan. All of a sudden, Cowan began to show a desire for Christopher’s company. The two of them would lie talking on the beach, passing back and forth a bottle of mixed gin (or was it vodka?) and fruit juice. Christopher liked being with Cowan. Quite aside from his physical beauty, he was very entertaining, a hippie born before his time, a great talker, full of quotations from books he had read, stories of people he had met, charmingly irresponsible and cheerful. He flattered Christopher, asking him questions about Life, Eternity and God—treated him, in fact, as a guru. And then, one day, when they were at least halfway through their bottle, Cowan announced that there was someone in the Canyon he could really fall in love with, someone he would like to live with, if only that person were free. “Who is it?” Christopher asked. Cowan answered, “You.”
Christopher was overwhelmed, dazzled, delighted. To him, Cowan was now The Blond—more completely so than Bill Harris had ever been. And The Blond had chosen him! It was a mythic kind of honor, like being chosen by a Greek god as his human lover. Without doubt, Cowan was full of blarney and capable of saying anything which came into his beautiful head; Christopher knew this, but it didn’t spoil his pleasure. For Cowan hadn’t spoken as Cowan but as The Blond; and, in the myth world, the words of a god must always come true. It was in the myth world only that Christopher wanted Cowan; the idea of leaving Caskey and setting up housekeeping with Cowan in the everyday world was ridiculous. This Cowan probably understood, as clearly as Christopher did. They went to bed together once—in the garage apartment, one night when Caskey was out on the town. I think Christopher fucked Cowan, but I’m not sure. What remains is simply the sense of having taken part in a magic act, an act of intense excitement and delight—which nevertheless didn’t ever have to be repeated, because it was essentially symbolic.
Sometime in 1946, Hayden Lewis started what was to be a long-lasting relationship with a young man named Rodney Owens. Rod was tall, dark, slender and very good-looking. He was also quite intelligent, funny, campy, charming and eager to be friendly. He and Christopher took to each other from the start—indeed, Rod used to tell Christopher later that he would have wanted to have an affair with him if he hadn’t met Hayden first. The arrival of Rod improved relations between Hayden and Christopher, though it didn’t remove their underlying antipathy. And Christopher had to admit that, for a while at least, Rod made Hayden nicer; they were desperately in love with each other and, during the first months, couldn’t bear to be parted even for a couple of days.
As far as I remember, Hayden and Rod went into business together quite soon after they met. They made ceramics—chiefly or entirely ashtrays—first in their home and later at a small workshop with several assistants. Rod proved to be an efficient businessman. In the course of a few years they became comparatively well-off.
Christopher and Caskey sometimes visited the Manns during 1946, at their Pacific Palisades house. I have a clear memory of Thomas holding forth with his urbane pedantry and good humor, smoking one of his big cigars. The extremely serious operation on his lung—Christopher was given to understand that it might be cancer, but apparently it wasn’t—seemed merely a momentary interruption of Thomas’s work—an interruption which Thomas refused to take seriously. By early June, he was back home safe from the Chicago hospital, still shaky, no doubt, but very much his former reassuring cigar-smoking self Christopher loved him for his toughness. He had simply made up his mind not to die before his novel was finished. In fact, he lived for another nine years, finished Dr. Faustus and wrote three more novels.24
Toward the end of the summer, the question of Christopher’s citizenship came up again. I believe there had been a test case related to citizenship for pacifists which was decided favorably by the Supreme Court—anyhow, the regulations had been to some extent relaxed. So Christopher was examined and his case investigated, for the second time. I remember a hearing at which he was asked if he would be prepared to load ships in wartime. “Yes,” he said, “if they were carrying food.” “But not if they were carrying arms?” “No—not if they were carrying arms.” “Suppose, for the sake of argument, the cargo was entirely foodstuff except for one rifle?” Christopher looked at the questioner for a moment and then said, “Honestly!” This made them all laugh. Later, it was decided to grant his application—the decisive point in his favor being that he had actually volunteered for noncombatant service in the Medical Corps while the war was still on; he was over military age at the time and knew that the age limit was most unlikely to be raised again, but that didn’t matter!
So, on November 8, Christopher went to the court downtown to be made a citizen. Peggy Kiskadden insisted on coming with him, as a sort of godmother. They found themselves part of a crowd of several hundred people—a number of them presumably pacifists, since this was (I’m fairly sure) the first opportunity for a pacifist to become a citizen, in the Los Angeles area. Because of the crowd, Christopher couldn’t see the judge and could hardly even hear him. And now, after all his protests and explanations, he found himself required to take the ordinary oath of allegiance, without any modification whatever. He did so, reflecting that his objection to it was already a matter of record. After the ceremony, he used the privilege of a newly made citizen of the U.S. to rid himself legally forever of his two middle names.
This day, November 8, was also the sixth anniversary of Christopher’s initiation by Prabhavananda. And it was to be the day of the first opening of I Am a Camera, out of town, at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1951.
Late in December 1946, Christopher and Caskey flew down to Mexico City to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve. They visited the pyramids of Teotihuacán, Cholula, Puebla and a little town called Tepoztlán (maybe it’s big and well known, nowadays) on a side road off the main highway to Cuernavaca. Tepoztlán impressed Christopher more strongly than any other place he saw on that trip. They arrived at sunset and went up onto the roof of the church, from which there was a long descending view through a gap in the hills to the coastal plain. Christopher experienced a moment of stillness and calm, sitting on the roof, which he can still dimly recall. He was drunk, as usual, but neither too much nor too little, and he had “that sense, which comes so seldom and so mysteriously, of having reached the right place at exactly the right moment.” (I quote from a magazine article—too slick to be worth reprinting in Exhumations—which Christopher published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1947. Caskey’s photographs to illustrate it were rejected. Without consulting Christopher, the editors substituted for them an idiotic would-be-elegant art-posed picture of some gesturing boys and girls on a staircase, which had nothing to do with anything.)
While in Mexico City,
Christopher and Caskey spent a good deal of time with a young painter [. . .] and his friend, an architect, whose name I have forgotten. [The painter] had a brother, [. . .] whom Caskey had known in New York. [The painter] was attractive, good-natured and “gay in a melancholy way” as so many Mexicans are. One night, when they were all drunk, Caskey kissed him and Christopher got suddenly jealous and slapped Caskey’s face. [The painter] was delighted. He embraced Christopher, exclaiming, “That’s what we Mexicans are supposed to do—you are a real Mexican!” Back at the hotel, Caskey and Christopher made it up in a highly emotional scene and Christopher fucked him, which was unwise, because Caskey was having an attack of La Turista. This is the only occasion I can remember in my life when, as they say, I hit the jackpot.
I don’t remember that Christopher got La Turista on that trip, but he suffered at first from the altitude. He had palpitations, which he cured with some drug he was sold by a chemist—I think it was digitalis. Soon after, to his dismay, he felt definite symptoms of an attack of flu. Not wanting to succumb until he had to, he went along with the others to visit the church of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Christopher stood for some time watching the worshippers who hoped to be healed of their sicknesses, as they approached the shrine inch by inch on their knees, up the nave from the west door. The look on some of the faces moved him profoundly and his eyes filled with tears, but he could never have joined them; he didn’t even feel that what they were asking for was right—according to his own beliefs. . . . It was only much later, when they had gone on to Teotihuacán and were climbing a pyramid and Caskey was saying, “We don’t have to worry about those human sacrifices—they only use virgins!” that Christopher suddenly realized his flu symptoms had completely disappeared.
On New Year’s Eve, they didn’t go to bed at all, since they were to leave early next morning. They drank and danced at a succession of bars, ending up in one which was called The Paricutín.[25] (“As explosive as its name,” Christopher says politely in his article, but I don’t remember that anything dramatic happened there.)
* * *
1 Christopher always thought of Caskey as being much more Irish than American. Actually, Caskey was also part Cherokee Indian. He himself believed that this strain was dominant.
2 When Caskey did hit Christopher, Christopher seldom hit him back, either. One such occasion is mentioned in The Condor and the Cows—at Trujillo, Peru, on December 12, 1947.
3 The statements made in this and the following paragraph raise, but do not answer, the question: Why is wrestling a feature of the Whitmanesque relationship? Here is an attempt at an answer, made after much introspection. It sounds corny and is embarrassing to put into words—which suggests that it may come fairly near to the truth.
Whitmanesque homosexuality is concerned with the mating of two completely masculine males. One of these males may be younger than the other, but both must be real men—no effeminate intergrades need apply. A Whitmanesque male must have acknowledged another male to be a real man before he can accept him as a lover. First, they must test each other’s virility. Therefore they have to fight. A sex duel is the necessary prelude to sex play. But the sex duel isn’t really a fight. The would-be lovers are in no sense trying to destroy each other. They wrestle naked, without weapons. There need not even be a winner and a loser. Wrestling is an isometric exercise; it makes both wrestlers stronger than they were before. And, as they wrestle, they discover and learn to love each other’s bodies.
Sex making can be accompanied by all kinds of pretenses, concealments and theatrical performances. But in the utter nakedness of the sex duel there is no room for a lie; this is basic physical contact. So it can be claimed that you reveal more of yourself and find out more about your partner while you are wrestling with him than while you are making sex. That was how Christopher often felt. To him, the experience of the sex duel seemed so intimate that he was usually shy about admitting to other people how much he desired it. Among the German hustlers he lost all his shyness, however; that was what made his sex life in Berlin so wonderful. Stripped and locked body to body with one of those sturdy shameless youths, he felt strong and free and uninhibited as never before in his life.
Boxing also could be a form of the sex duel, though the pleasure Christopher got from it was of a different quality, tinged with sado-masochism. At St. Edmund’s, there were regular boxing sessions, supervised by a member of the staff. Anybody who wanted to fight could volunteer and an opponent would be chosen for him. Christopher found a sexual thrill in the very idea of being matched with another boy—even if it was with a boy who didn’t attract him physically. There was an atmosphere of solemn exciting ritual as your gloves were tied on and the two of you stepped out into the cleared space and faced each other. You were like a wedded pair, joined to fight in the presence of these witnesses. Christopher regretted having to fight in shirtsleeves. He would have much preferred to be naked or at least stripped down to gym shorts. And the fight itself was spoilt by the formalities of competition. The master who supervised the boxing was himself homosexual and no doubt got his kicks from watching it. But he was obliged to keep up the pretense that this thrilling sex ritual was just another good-sport schoolboy game. There were rules and scoring—at the end of the bout, you had lost or won on points. Christopher was lacking in competitive aggression and he disliked getting hurt. So he usually lost.
[Only one person] ever really shared Christopher’s mystique about boxing. Both of them were deeply aroused by the shape and smell of boxing gloves and the feel of leather on their bare flesh. [This boy] got excited by the mere mention of the word “fight.” Unlike Christopher, he wanted to punch and be punched hard; if his nose was bloodied, so much the better. Christopher has a vividly erotic memory of sparring with him, early one morning, in [his] living room on Amalfi Drive. [The boy] has nothing on his naked body but the big leather gloves. (“That’s all you ever ought to wear,” Christopher used to tell him.) As [the boy] jumps back and forth, punching and dodging and grinning at Christopher, his erect cock keeps slapping against his belly.
[4 Also known as Matty’s Whore House; it supplied hustlers to such well-known clients as Cole Porter and the character actor Monty Woolley.]
5 Some specimens of Caskey’s humor (taken from the notebook or from memory): Carlos McClendon (see here) had been talking about a rich man he knew, saying what an unpleasant person he was. Caskey: “Why, Carlos, I’m afraid you only dislike him for his money!”
Caskey (looking out of the window at 4 a.m., into thick icy fog): “It’s going to be a scorcher!”
At one of the beach restaurants, there was a notice on the back of the check which asked the customer to state his opinion of the portions, the cooking and the service, choosing an adjective to describe each. The adjectives from which the customer was to choose were—portions: too large, enough, too small; cooking: delicious, satisfactory, fair; service: excellent, adequate, poor. Caskey suggests that the waitresses themselves should be classified as: delicious, satisfactory or too small.
Christopher had been to a puja at the Vedanta Center and been given a whole cake as prasad. At their next party, they served it to the guests. Caskey said: “Do try some, it’s delicious—Chris brought it from heaven.”
Caskey’s humor, like most people’s, depended largely for its effect on the way he delivered his lines. He made jokes with an air of great enjoyment, giggling as he spoke. He pronounced words like “delicious” mockingly and campily. He seldom said anything bitchy. His fun was nearly always good-natured. In fact, he was the very opposite of the sourly witty, deadpan comedian.
6 [Another boy Christopher knew] had had one adventure in the classic Whitman style—at the age of fourteen, he had left the city and taken to the road, wandering away down into the deep South. One day, out in the country, several blacks had taken a fancy to him and had forced him to strip and have sex with them by threatening him with their knives. [The boy] admitted that this had excited him, even thoug
h he was terrified. He had had an erection throughout the “rape.”
7 There is a demonstration of how a myth can keep a marriage going, at the end of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. When Jimmy and Alison find it intolerable to go on being themselves and still relate to each other, they change focus and become The Bear and The Squirrel in their private myth world. And instantly they are happy and safe, because, in the world of the animals, hatred is impossible; The Bear and The Squirrel can only love each other. They focus their aggression on mythical external enemies.
8 The parrot may have been suggested to Christopher’s imagination by the “parent—parrot” misunderstanding of the previous day. But it’s curious to remember, in this connection, Christopher’s vision of the parrotlike bird which is recorded on November 12, 1940 [in D1].
9 According to Caskey (in a letter written twenty-five years later and therefore not absolutely to be relied on) The Pits had disappeared by the fall of 1948, when he and Christopher returned to California. Their site became part of the grounds of a beach club, which also owned the Marion Davies lot. Her beach house was torn down but her swimming pool is still in use.
10 George Platt Lynes, Cartier-Bresson, Cecil Beaton, Horst.
[11 He was a captain.]
[12 Keate recalls it was the Hollywood Biltmore, not the one in downtown Los Angeles.]
13 For some reason which I can’t recall, Christopher associated this song particularly with Caskey. Another Caskey theme song, in Christopher’s mind, was “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
[14 “Seascape, with Frieze of Girls” from C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s 1924 translation, vol. 2.]
15 Simone de Beauvoir had been one of Natasha’s professors at a college, when Natasha was seventeen or eighteen. Natasha, who could be very witty at times, later described her as “an alarm clock inside a frigidaire.” De Beauvoir can’t have been all that frigid, however, for she had had an affair with Natasha before passing her on to Sartre.
Lost Years Page 16
