I Can Give You Anything But Love

by Gary Indiana

  I clung to the sidelines, watching. I admired the club people. They weren’t dumb. They knew time was roaring past. They’d never be young again and claimed the moment in a frontal, risky way. I couldn’t identify with them entirely. I had a day job. I was noticeably gay. The official sensibility was anti-homo, though most people in the scene were sexually flexible. They kept the homosexual side of things veiled, or theatricalized it with a nasty mockery that left room to speculate that they were putting it on. But they were much less squeamish about throwing bottles and carving up their own skin than I was. They were often semi-closeted fags; I was a semi-closeted punk.

  As was later the case with the Mudd Club, if you remembered what you did at the Masque, you weren’t there. I have sunspot memories of shooting meth with Dane, falling facedown in the inch-deep muck on the Masque floor, pogoing like a gear with missing teeth, getting clobbered watching a brawl, a flying singer landing on me in a mosh pit. Sometimes I went home alone, sometimes I jumped in the car with ten people, of various genders, and drove to listless orgies organized mostly for more drugs and booze. Parties started after sunrise, meandered on in spacey pointlessness until late evening. Then drifted back to the clubs and restarted the spin cycle. All memories of that period run together, as a long vacation in a country no longer indicated on any map. Recently I was startled to discover that that vanished world, even my slight presence in it, had been amply documented by various pack rats who’d preserved the ephemera, recorded the club dates, noted the names of the bands and fans—there are more histories of Los Angeles punk, I think, than accounts of the Mudd Club, CBGB, Tier 3, Peppermint Lounge, Interferon, Limelight, and the other clubs that came and went in New York during my first years there, in the late 1970s and early ’80s.

  In November, Exene Cervenka from the band X moved in down the hall on North La Jolla and turned the rear apartment into a 24/7 mosh pit. The really gruesome noise kicked up anywhere between three and five in the morning—ironic noise, somehow, since it came in a deafening blast of EPs that bands I scrambled to watch at the Masque or the Whisky had recorded.

  I hated asking Exene to turn it down, not just because she never did, but because complaining about it placed me on the asshole’s side of some line of defiance, marking me prematurely old and out of it. Los Angeles punks weren’t particularly rude or hostile to people they didn’t know, but Exene was, and I hated her.

  Whenever Dane stayed overnight, sudden brain-rape by Exene’s speaker system drove him nuts. “I’m going over there.” “No, don’t, she’ll turn it up louder.” “Then I’m calling the cops.” “Then those people will spit on me every time they see me! It’s easier to move out.” “You should move anyway, this place is depressing.” “All right. I’ll start looking around.” “I know a place downtown you could probably move to. The Bryson. It’s like a hotel, so you wouldn’t have to pay a deposit or wait till the end of the month.”

  I ran into Exene and her gang on the sidewalk the day I moved out.

  “You’re moving? What a drag! We’ll miss you!” Strange to say, they sounded sincere.

  On an airport immigration line in Istanbul, the couple ahead of me debated which passports to use. They each shuffled five, like cards in a poker hand, all issued by different countries. Their voices were postcoitally blowsy. They asked if I’d been in Taksim Square the night before. They had been sprayed, it turned out, by the same tear gas I’d walked into three blocks down the street. Like me, they’d spent all night rinsing their eyes, and now could have easily fallen asleep on their feet.

  “We just got married,” the woman confided, making a little snort, as if they shared a few doubts about whether it had been such a great idea. She was forty-ish, dubiously blond, pale, strong-chinned, green-eyed, pretty, of unguessable nationality, wearing a wrinkled Chanel suit and no makeup. Her partner was youthfully loose-limbed but paunchy, quite a lot older, possibly Lebanese, with soft gray eyes and a stippled, whitish fringe along the edges of his thick black hair. One striped aubergine shirttail fluttered at his zipper; the other was stuffed carelessly into his pants.

  He was trying to be amusing and, unlike most people in airports, succeeding.

  “Guess where we’re going,” the woman quizzed with mock haplessness.

  “Cairo, jewel of the Nile,” her new spouse chimed in, rolling jaded eyes skyward at the ironies of travel.

  There had been rioting in Cairo for five days, since the military coup. I had a half-conscious flash that this couple wasn’t blithely jet-setting at all, but testing a much-rehearsed script for incipient snags, a fiction close enough to reality to pass unregistered in public. The immigration officer waved them forward.

  “And then, what the hell,” the woman laughed as she walked away, “Beirut. How’s that for a dream honeymoon?”

  seven

  Even here, where no common vectors of real-time information exist and the world outside thins to a trickle of dubious news in Granma (“Venezuela Expects to Be Agro-Superpower by 2015”), the existence of an outer reality creeps into the charmed daily stasis. Last night, at P.’s house, while she was busy with a tiki-torchlit philanthropic garden party, I was left alone with her precarious dial-up Internet connection, Coca-Cola, and a bottle of Havana Club. I had the unwished-for opportunity to see an article about me in an American magazine, circa a month ago, that burnished a widely cherished recent myth of the 1980s—not so much my myth, but the myth of a protean “downtown” Manhattan, held to have been a great churning centrifuge of creativity fueled by the Mudd Club, Studio 54, punk rock, performance art, et cetera, et cetera.

  A sentimental myth, slightly true. A lot of people devoted time to other things besides fucking, drugging, and partying themselves blind in clubworld. New York was more interesting. It wasn’t a giant suburb of nothing yet. I was young. Still young. Barely. By 1982, though, a hamster-wheel culture of recycling and imitation was well underway, in appropriated art, sampled music, postmodern architecture—the idea of originality had begun looking questionable.

  Maybe the human race, the white part of it anyway, had run out of things to be original about. The Manhattan makeover into a sterile tourist resort was encroaching, one neighborhood at a time, building by building, block by block, assisted by the art world, which planted itself in various neighborhoods that quickly became unaffordable by ordinary people and unlivable for even well-off adults. I arrived at the tail end of an era when New York had remained basically unchanged for thirty years—a real city, a dangerous one for the unwary transient, feared and detested by the rest of America. The ersatz, provincial, “post 9/11” New York is a holiday camp for university students and a pied-à-terre for Chinese billionaires, a place any young painter, writer, or musician would be wise to avoid, since it’s no longer possible to live there on slender means.

  The writer of the article phoned me out of the blue several months ago, describing himself as “a big fan,” intent, he said, on making a younger generation appreciative of my work. After several minutes on the phone, I gleaned that what he meant by “my work” was the art criticism I wrote for three years in the mid-1980s in the Village Voice. He hadn’t read any of my subsequent novels, or collections of essays and reportage, most of which have lately gone out of print.

  I smelled disaster, but gave him an interview anyway, on the condition that he read something substantial of mine beforehand, not a bunch of yellowing newspaper columns I never republished and haven’t cared about for a second since writing them a quarter century ago. I’m sometimes imprudently swayed by Ross Bleckner’s old mantra “ink is ink” when someone proposes to spill some about me, forgetting that ink can hurt all the same. Especially if you’re dumb enough to talk to a journalist. I have been a journalist, so I know.

  I’m beyond feeling hurt by other people’s opinions, I think, but how deeply, seriously skewed some of this is. The writer inserted obscenities into my quoted answers, making me sound raving and bitter, or, worse, an old person trying to s
ound hip. Brilliant. He says I look older than I am. A matter of opinion, and so what? He includes some gratuitous insults from a Canadian filmmaker whose basic claim to fame is that he was the first person in Toronto to wear a nose ring. Someone I met exactly twice, twenty years ago, when I was in Toronto with William Burroughs. No word from anyone who knows me. Fine. My life in a few paragraphs that size me up and judge me.

  It’s not exactly The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, but it isn’t how I care to be depicted, either. The photographer cropped my picture exactly where he said he wouldn’t. He moved the light when I wasn’t looking, accenting my wrinkles. I still can’t accept being old. “It happened too fast”—famous last words.

  Apparently I mentioned times long ago in California. Reading this magazine’s garbled version of whatever I actually said brings up more memories of Ferd, and others, but what can you do? Memory is partial, colored by mood and contingency. The key is to remember clearly, but it’s not possible. Conversations dissolve into mist. Interiors turn spectral, people lose their definition. I took a photo of Ferd standing in the surf in Pinar del Río, but I can’t find it. There are YouTube videos, Ferd receiving a citation from the mayor of Los Angeles, but by then he was wasted from liver cancer, and looked awful.

  After they invented protease inhibitors, Ferd could wear pants that weren’t beige for the first time in a decade. I wonder why, of all things he ever told me, I remember him telling me that? We come into the world shitting ourselves, we often leave the same way, but why dwell on it?

  Strangely, the general tone of the article is admiring, despite its possibly uncalculated, patronizing tone. Admiration is widely imagined to be a positive feeling, but often turns out to be toxic. Besides the obvious matter of stalking, there is the question of approbation for the wrong reasons, and the subsequent disillusionment. There is the element of envy, and All About Eve, and the easily reversed loyalties of crackpots, and the lack of reciprocity involved in hero worship.

  It wasn’t only the article that sent my mind running along this route. Elsewhere in the room, P. had placed an artfully casual-looking pile of thick art books, among them Annie Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life. I had a testing, dirty sensation as I slid it out of the pile. I can truthfully say that little that interests Annie Leibovitz interests me, but I knew this book contained, among the celebrity portraits she shoots for Vanity Fair, many pictures of Susan Sontag, taken after my friendship with Susan ended. I knew the book featured pictures of Susan’s dead body. They had been “controversial” when Leibovitz first showed them, though Susan had doubtless consented to have them shot. A kind of pornography, unfortunately a kind Susan and I shared a strong predilection for.

  I was surprised to hear, when we were no longer friends, that Susan had befriended various new people like the dreadful, self-appointed widow of Fassbinder, Juliane Lorenz, and Marina Abramović, an artist the Susan I knew considered ridiculous—but then again, Juliane is powerful in her own ill-gotten realm, and Marina is now a huge Art Celebrity. Susan often cultivated people she privately held low opinions about, if they were famous enough. The larger surprise was Annie Leibovitz herself—on many long-ago occasions, a prime target of Susan’s disdain for the crassness of celebrity culture. Susan loved to parse the difference between “fame” and “celebrity”—people were famous for doing something, she opined, whereas anyone could be a celebrity for any reason at all: celebrity was a transient thing, fame a lasting condition. This doesn’t quite hold up. Today the famous are perhaps more quickly forgotten than celebrities, who, if they do nothing else, work tirelessly to stay in front of the camera flash.

  I flipped directly to the death pictures. Susan was hard to recognize in the bruised, bloated carcass. So formidable in life, so insistent on her uniqueness. And here she was another slab of livid meat, like every other corpse.

  I wasn’t surprised by the ressentiment apparent in so many of Susan’s obituaries. She was exasperating, often cruel, and, in a less than endearing way, oblivious to the impression she made on other people. She never stood away from herself to question her motives, or to consider anyone else’s point of view, or their feelings. She thought other people were stupid—her friends were only tolerably less stupid than the general run of humanity—and never imagined they could be less than awestruck by her relentless display of intelligence and erudition, or that anyone could see behind the carapace she projected, from which every utterance was an imperious defense mechanism. She had an uncontrollable need to prevail in any argument, and bullied people she disagreed with, often out of personal animosities she wouldn’t acknowledge.

  I was regularly exhausted by her limitless capacity for admiring things. She was perpetually “moved” by this Japanese film director, “exalted” by that lesser-known Janáček opera, “besotted” by the contortions of some ballerina. When the pleasure of her company segued into pedantry, I usually glazed over. I could be pedantic, too, but … I once told her bluntly that this need to be exalted every minute of the day was terribly draining for people who had to pretend to be exalted along with her. Susan took, as was her wont, umbrage. It wasn’t her fault if people were lazy and unadventurous, didn’t care to eat a hundred-year-old egg or plod through a thousand-page Hungarian novel, though for the life of her she didn’t understand why people were so lazy, though no doubt it had something to do with television coarsening their sensibilities.

  It was impossible to like half the things Susan claimed to find marvelous. There was something freakish about the vastness of her enthusiasms and her habit of classifying them, grading them, scoring them, boxing them with calibrating adjectives. She feigned astonishment that you hadn’t heard of something so arcane that absolutely no one except Susan had ever heard of it. Sometimes it was something really wonderful. More often, it was pointlessly demanding and trivial. On one hand, I was grateful for a friend whose appetite for reading was even larger than my own. On the other, I found her mentoring urge, expressed in the pushy demand that I absorb any arcane cultural phenomenon she happened to think of, an oppressive generosity.

  She worked up to her exaltations with an eye to impress those around her with a depth of feeling that seemed a bit dramatized and artificial. It took formidable willfulness for her to cry at the end of Vigo’s L’Atalante, I thought, when she had already seen it thirty times. No doubt she was moved all over again, but why? Because L’Atalante is a moving film. On the same syllogistic principle, X’s poetry is great because X is a great poet, et cetera, et cetera. At times, Susan resembled one of the face-pulling schoolchildren in Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke, incarnating lofty sentiments by striking noble poses. Like the chalk-white, avuncular bust of Salvador Allende down on the paseo on Los Presidentes, one arm raised heavenward in a permanent access of revolutionary fervor.

  Transports of ecstasy were a vital part of her image. She disliked being called a critic, yet her eminence derived from her unusual ability to bestow importance on other people’s books and movies, and on the perception that she was more intimately familiar with the vast realm of culture, and hence more discriminating, than anyone else. Susan heaved from one enthusiasm to the next, a storm-tossed vessel calling in at every Port of Epiphany. She wanted you to see that she appreciated things more fervently, more insightfully, more … well, more movingly than you did.

  She flew to Europe once or twice a month, to see a museum show, an opera, to hobnob with the cultural brand names that decorated European journals of opinion and literary quarterlies. I saw her in Paris, in Rome, went with her to dinners full of film stars and theater people and the cream of the intellectual crop, and all these people viewed her as a sacred monster, an American anomaly who hoovered information up and then did battle with it, battle with many negative forces in the world, of course, but also, perplexingly, battle with her friends, her colleagues, and most cruelly her lovers, whom she regularly embarrassed and humiliated by catching them out in an innocent stupidity, some statement that exposed their l
imitations after Susan had seized on it and held it up for ridicule.

  In New York you could find her at the most out-of-the-way screenings and performances, front row center, being moved and exalted and besotted by everything from Sophocles to Betty Boop. If she liked something, she watched it every night it appeared, forming in her mind those terse, laborious endorsements that served, for many people, as a certificate of top quality on a book jacket or a movie ad. An ideal evening might include a play at La Mama, dinner in Chinatown, followed by a film at the Bleecker Street Cinema, with a midnight kung fu double feature in Times Square as a nightcap.

  This chronic aesthetic gourmandizing filled her with a histrionic rapture that required live witnesses, I suppose one could say, to the showy movements of her soul. More prosaically, she contrived to be admired for the powerful effect the higher things in life had on her.

  She hated going anywhere alone, hated being trapped with herself. She even wanted people around when she was writing. This horror of solitude aside, the world felt more real to her when other people were in the room. When she discovered something, she wanted to share it right away. “That way I have my pleasure and the other person’s pleasure, too,” she said.

  Susan often expropriated her friends’ discoveries as hers, claiming, after the fact, to have come across something years before “getting to know it again” with someone who had actually introduced whatever it was to her. This peculiar habit of revising history—history, moreover, of no consequence to anything except an implacable vanity—made something as simple as seeing a movie into a competition over who saw it first. Susan was either brazen or oblivious enough to predate her first encounter with x, or y, right in front of the person whose experience she was, in effect, devaluing as belated. For a long time, until I recognized it as a symptom of an awesome will to power, I considered this a harmless quirk of someone who wished to be seen as generous and bestowing, or, at worst, a jump ahead of anyone else. Because she was—often—astonishingly generous.