by Hilton Als
We faced these faces so many times: white women who had been denied nothing most of their lives feeling bitter about me and SL because they could not be part of “us,” but continuing to be attracted to us past the point of reason since they lived to be disappointed; white guys who wanted to fuck me for sport and who resented SL’s presence because he was perceived to be the embodiment of my conscience, which could not be defiled; black women who called us freaks since we somehow represented their twisted relationship to their own bodies and other black women; ambitious black male artists who resented our presence, largely because SL and I did not play by the rules they followed in their quest for success—a sad game James Baldwin describes in his 1961 essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” which concerns his intellectual twin or father, and occasional nemesis, novelist Richard Wright:
[O]ne of my dearest friends, a Negro writer now living in Spain, circled around me and I around him for months before we spoke. One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party...cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he for real? or is he kissing ass?...Negroes know about each other what can here be called family secrets, and this means that one Negro, if he wishes, can “knock” the other’s “hustle”—can give his game away...Therefore, one “exceptional” Negro watches another “exceptional” Negro in order to find out if he knows how vastly successful and bitterly funny the hoax has been. Alliances, in the great cocktail party of the white man’s world, are formed, almost purely, on this basis, for if both of you can laugh, you have a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other.
We felt sad when all those Negroes couldn’t look us in the eye at parties. But we understood. No narrative preceded us. We were not “menchildren” in a promised land, as Claude Brown would have it. We did not consider ourselves as having “no name in the street,” as James Baldwin did himself. We did not suffer the existential crisis that afflicts some male Negro intellectuals, as Harold Cruse presumed. We did not have “hot” souls that needed to be put on ice, as Eldridge Cleaver might have said. We were not escapees from Langston Hughes’s “Simple” stories. We were nothing like Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, nor did we wear white masks, as Frantz Fanon might have deduced, incorrectly. We saw no point of reference in The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger, by Cecil Brown. We did not see the point of Sammy Davis Jr.’s need to be loved by not one but thousands, as detailed in his autobiography, Yes I Can. We were colored but not noirish enough to have been interesting to Iceberg Slim. We were not homies in the manner of John Edgar Wideman’s young proles floating around Homewood. We were not borne of anything Nathan McCall or Ishmael Reed, in his recent books, certainly, might deem worthy of talking about. In short, we were not your standard Negro story, or usual Negro story. We did not feel isolated because we were colored. We did not want to join the larger world through violence or manipulation. We were not interested in the sentimental tale that’s attached itself to the Negro male body by now: the embodiment of isolation. We had each other, another kind of story worth telling.
No one seemed to understand what we were talking about most of the time. There was no context for them to understand us, other than their fear and incomprehension in the presence of two colored men who were together and not lovers, not bums, not mad. Sometimes, as a joke, I’d wonder aloud to SL if we sounded like this to them: Ooogga booga. Wittgenstein. Mumbo jumbo oogga booga, too, Freud, Djuna Barnes, a hatchi! Mumbo lachiniki jumbo Ishmael Reed and Audrey Hepburn. And because the others couldn’t understand us, meaning was ascribed to us. We couldn’t be trusted. We should see a shrink. We should not spend so much time together; we were only hurting ourselves. We should spend more time in the art world, separately, so that SL could have more of a career as an artist. We should get on with our lives, separately, since there was no such thing as fidelity anymore.
I would be lying if I didn’t say these various opinions—or really one opinion—didn’t affect me: I’ve lived in New York long enough to know that any kind of failure is considered contagious. But something else overrode my fears: once I was with SL, once we were a we, I wanted to house myself in SL’s thinking. It was so big and well lit, like a large house sitting solid on the bank of a river.
We tell each other stories in that house, largely unencumbered by the sound of other people’s fear, and for the most part that was true until our we began to disintegrate, in 2007, a parting that killed the world for us. But that was later. Just now the world is whole. It’s 2000, and I’m forty, and I have a real home at last. I’ve dropped my bags at SL’s door. The house itself is composed of his skin and thought. Nearby, lilacs bloom in the garden door. Or are they hyacinths? “My mind forgets / The persons I have been along the way,” Borges said. And yet it’s those persons—in addition to my I—SL wants to hear about; he says they’re a part of who I was. Oh, Lord, don’t ever let this end: he smells like no one else on earth, and he sounds like no one else on earth. (SL’s voice is so deep that people often ask him to speak up, but he is always speaking up.) I love listening to what he says as I have loved listening to no one else talk. Once, after I’d written a piece SL enjoyed, he said: “Mama likes.” Once, while crossing a street in the East Village with a friend, she said, with a sigh: “Lord love a duck,” and SL added: “And other homilies.” Once, after a white girl insulted me about my weight, SL said of her: “I know how Daisy can lose seven pounds. Cut off her head.” And another time, when I described running into a white girl we both admired, SL, always starved for style, said: “Was she wearing anything at all?” About another person I longed to trust—I was always longing to trust someone; I was making life a fiction, or writing fiction; I longed for people to not be who they were, another thing SL forgives me for, and shall always forgive me for, even when he has to deal with the fallout, which is often, God bless him—SL said: “I’d trust her with about five dollars.” SL is a bullshit detector par excellence. His inability to fictionalize the truth—a habit I picked up from my mother, who was always hoping for a better day, she died hoping for a better day; I suspect SL doesn’t want me to die with similar hope flakes on my lips—is what makes me cleave to him, my protector, my truth.
I love listening to his stories. In his early, back-to-America days, SL hung out with some white lesbian separatists on a farm; there, he planted burdock, and ate cold griddle cakes, and read Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was the times. Everyone in his world was wearing plastic jellies except SL; his feet were too flat. One night, one of the girls approached SL; she wanted to be intimate with him; it would feel like part of his fabulous conversation. SL turned her down; she wanted to know why. They talked about it for hours, they processed and processed. The next day, SL left. He didn’t want to besmirch his utopia with his own presence. He repressed his heterosexuality to save women from it.
Once, in his house—a house of many embarrassing corridors that sometimes made one think something about a mother, I don’t know why—I asked SL what his life among the lesbians had been like. He said: “You mean women?” SL has a way of removing one category—lesbian—by getting at its root. It’s 2000 or something, and I’m on my way to SL’s. He has a studio in Chelsea; there, he photographs any number of women for queer magazines and the odd album cover. I love his pictures; they look like a cartographer trying to approximate a dream. Sitting on the subway, the lights go by but the people don’t. Standing above me and around me I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we’re a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love. And there’s my mouth, too, and it’s filled with SL, so to speak, including his idea that race doesn’t make much of a difference at all in his world of—aside from me—women.
But that’s not really true. It’s impossible to say whether or not the women SL has been involved with would have loved him as they did had he not been blac
k, but I’d hazard a guess they probably wouldn’t, just as SL had his type, too. In the words of one academic: there are no neutral narratives. Of course, all this contradicted SL’s everyman approach to life, its sidewalks and greasy diner countertops, just as SL’s object choices contradicted his tenderness. What SL’s women shared was this: they found other people’s misfortunes funny. SL and I did not find anyone’s misfortunes funny, but here comes another SL axiom: people do not sleep together because they’re similar. SL loved being an educator. He was hilarious and sage. Once he said about a number of women he knew: They’re fucking multiorgasmic, but what really gets them off is a cheap rent. His gargantuan patience had an enormous influence on any number of young women who lacked home training, and who leaned mightily on attitude to get them by. This was interesting to me: SL’s lovers had, in abundance, the very things he wanted to tame, which was the stuff he was attracted to in the movie stars he loved most, too. SL on Bette Davis: “Ugly and with attitude? Fabulous.” SL on Elizabeth Taylor: “I love her in almost any movie. It’s like she’s always saying, ‘Are you too fucking stupid to understand what I’m saying?’” He also loved Janet Shaw, who played the laconic, don’t-careish waitress in the sleazy bar in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt, and anything featuring Grace Zabriskie. In fact, one of SL’s early video pieces featured images of Zabriskie taken from Gus Van Sant’s fabulous 1991 film My Own Private Idaho. In the clip SL used, Zabriskie stands in a room looking over a trick (River Phoenix) with a cold, appraising eye. She walks around Phoenix slowly and, as she does so, she pulls her robe closer about her. Overwhelmed by the presence of this woman—and the memory of the first woman: his mother—Phoenix collapses. What boy doesn’t understand that moment? And it’s part of SL’s genius that he doesn’t know where those moments come from in his work, just as he doesn’t understand why he’s attracted to women he wants to school when they will not be schooled.
In 1999 or so, SL’s mother came to visit her son. She lived in a small town in the Midwest. Mrs. SL was handsome and small; she looked the way the director Robert Wilson described his mother in an interview: “My mother was a beautiful, intelligent, cold, and distant woman...She sat beautifully in chairs.” Sitting with the beautiful Mrs. SL in a restaurant, one was reminded that one of SL’s favorite movie scenes involving a mother occurred in The Grifters. In that 1990 film, Anjelica Huston plays a mother and con artist who loves her only son, but not at the expense of herself. The scene that amused SL most in that film takes place in a diner. Huston lays a fresh dude out by cuffing him in the throat. Then she complains to the management: Isn’t it a shame a lady can’t feel safe eating out on her own?
SL’s mother looked at me across the dinner table with don’t-careish-was-I-stupid-I’m-pulling-on-my-Grace-Zabriskie-robe attitudinal eyes. But we had another dinner together, and she saw how much her son loved me, and she did what most women do in similar situations: she adapted. I was her best friend until she didn’t need me to be her best friend. And in a bid to be included in what turned her on, which is to say what she perceived as a boys’ club—she didn’t have much truck with women—Mrs. SL pretended to understand what we were talking about, but I know she didn’t. How could she? How could any girl? We were better mothers than any of them.
It’s a measure of SL’s difference in most ways that he didn’t fuck me up after I expressed—silently and sometimes not so silently—my occasional reservations about his family. (Typically, he was more concerned with what he called my “terrible need to confess,” as opposed to what I expressed.) Most colored men can’t deal with anyone talking about their mama. But it was a measure of SL’s trust in me—and his interest in the philosophy of language; why take it personally when you didn’t have to?—that allowed for those moments when I felt out of control because people of color were out of control toward me. The issue of racial loyalty is a tricky one, and largely specious if you knew the colored people we knew. Vis-à-vis that whole endlessly fascinating and tiresome race subject, SL and I lived for the actor Morgan Freeman when he said he didn’t play black, he was black. And it broke SL’s heart when I assumed fraternity with other black writers because, for the most part, they could care less what I felt. What interested them was how much of the black pie would I get. Or take away from them. Literature was a market. For instance: a black gay woman I was friends with at the weekly newspaper where SL and I met had a brother who was dying of AIDS just as my beloved K was dying of AIDS. In fact, they had the same name. I used to go to one hospital to cut her brother’s hair, and then to my friend’s hospital, so he could kiss me good-night. Both those young men died, and it was some months later, to win her white straight male boss’s approval, that that black gay woman took me out to lunch to ask if I would give my health insurance up—someone else needed it. SL liked to die as he watched me try to fill that dry fallacy of brotherhood with the Botox of faith. He turned his face away as those people behaved badly toward me because they could: they saw that I believed in them because I felt I should.
Of course, when things turned bad, SL was the beneficiary of my angry sadness. Once, at a party, when I felt he was ignoring me, I threw chairs at him. I, too, could be unschooled. But I could not do what I saw white women do to him, which included everything I did to him. I belittled him because, upon occasion, his empathy and stoicism annoyed me even as it turned me on; I complained about him to other people—white women mostly—because I just knew he didn’t love me, and wasn’t it always going to be about some other bitch, but when I had lunch with a white girl who knew us both, and she compared SL to her ne’er-do-well black lover, I said, SL doesn’t hurt people like that, even when they want it, and I never really spoke to her again. And where was the love I wanted to scream as SL held my hand through my mother’s death, in 1993, and where was the love and when will I see you again I wanted to plead as SL held my hand and heart up in Barbados two years later, it’ll always be one of the sadder islands to me because my mother died there, and, while SL and I traveled around visiting several of her relatives, trying to feel what she must have felt in her ancestral home, her relatives expressed a dry lack of concern over the fact she’d gone home to die, I think that was important to her, but where was the love, stand by me, I wanted to sputter when I felt as though I would collapse between the army of words I had to produce in exchange for shelter, and the army of words I wanted to produce in exchange for myself. And where was the love, when will I see you again, I belong to you, I hissed through gritted teeth even as SL read our book of days—smiling.
In SL’s house there are many mirrors. We don’t get in their way. What would be the point? Our eyes are monstrous, reflective, and loving enough. “My mind forgets / the persons I have been along the way.” And yet SL wants to know each and every one of those persons who had gone into the making of my me. How dare he stand there waiting for my I of selves? No one can have them, or me. But he counters with: How can we be a we, if I don’t know your I? Edna St. Vincent put my rejoinder best: “Why do you follow me?— / Any moment I can be / Nothing but a laurel-tree.” Still, SL’s love wanted every bit of me while I ate secrets in order to formulate a self; those selves were more interesting to me than my I. No one else can have those selves. Or me, who’s not nearly as interesting as those other stories—about Marlene in her white dress standing near a tree, or one of my sisters walking into a room and changing everything. How dare SL stand there waiting for my I. Is this what love gets up to, one person demanding self-exposure so there’s more to love, a feeling best described as the devil eating you alive, from the toes up? About that toe. In SL’s house, I read Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Despair (1936). In that book, a Russian émigré businessman named Hermann Karlovich meets his doppelgänger—a German word I’ve just learned means “double goer.” (The French words for “pairs,” or “some pairs,” is des paires. Marvelous.) Despair doesn’t tell much of a story—I should talk if my I did talk—but at the heart of the book is the story
of love. Hermann is always looking for it, and it’s always out of reach because he’s looking for it, like any number of us. His first double is his brother. Hermann recalls talking to his shallow wife, Lydia:
I told her about my younger brother. He was a student in Germany when the war broke out; was recruited there and fought against the Russians. I had always remembered him as a quiet, despondent little fellow. My parents used to thrash me and spoil him; he did not show them any affection, however, but in regard to me he developed an incredibly, more than brotherly adoration, followed me everywhere, looked into my eyes, loved everything that came into contact with me, loved to smell my pocket handkerchief, to put on my shirt when still warm from my body, to clean his teeth with my brush. At first we shared a bed with a pillow at each end until it was discovered he could not go to sleep without sucking my big toe.
