The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  Almost seven more years would elapse before Weber published another book. The Odds in Ocean Park was based on a series of magazine articles he’d done about the effect of AIDS on various people: a week of a young internist’s office visits by the freshly tested and newly infected, a nurse’s month in an intensive-care hospital unit dealing with the disease, the opening of a hospice for those dying of AIDS in the eponymous area of Santa Monica, California. Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine and Los Angeles had published the originals Weber had expanded into a book, and as a result the book was widely and quite well reviewed. The briefly public and open Weber of the days of the short stories was long past, however. He had withdrawn from socializing with the other Purples by then. He had moved to a small studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and he’d begun traveling a great deal for the magazine, work that was now paying the bulk of his living expenses. Axenfeld’s letters to the Leo-McKewens, as well as McKewen’s and De Petrie’s journal entries of these years, mention the others seeing Jeff briefly, coming or going from errands on the streets of Manhattan, usually having just flown into town or on his way back out, headed to Bali or Ireland or the Comoros Islands. ‘He was polite but distracted,’ Axenfeld wrote. ‘He remembered to ask after you two, but halfway through my brief recitation of how you were doing, he began asking after Dom and Damon.’

  By November of 1985, when the book came out, the Purple Circle was long disbanded. Even so, Dominic De Petrie wrote in his journals that all of them except Mark Dodge (who was at the time himself hospitalized by a meningeal complication of the disease) were at Weber’s publication party. De Petrie and Axenfeld had given the book-cover blurbs. Von Slyke reviewed it for the Washington Post Book World, and McKewen discussed it at length in his Philadelphia Gay News column. Despite this support from his colleagues, it was after all non-fiction, little better than reportage, not the work of his imagination, and Jeff Weber sharply felt the book would never be considered first-rate by the others. He wrote as much in a letter about the party to his new boyfriend: ‘They all made me feel I was special. I am special. And a lot less than they are. Any of them.’

  Possibly this attitude was exacerbated by Weber’s internalization of his own infection by the HIV virus (he’d been diagnosed the week of the publication party), which would slowly come to take over his life, his relationships and his work. The relative success of The Odds in Ocean Park, did bring Weber more publication in magazines, more reportage, and for the first time in his life book royalties.

  During 1986, Weber began writing the half-dozen interleaved stories that would form his final work, Cheyenne August. This last book, published October 1988, a month before his five-month hospitalization and death, combined the techniques of fiction, autobiography and reportage. As a portrait of small-town western characters, attitudes and mores, it is unique, useful and wonderful to read. As Thaddeus Fleming pointed out, Weber’s voice was never stronger, more succinct, more flexible or more real. It’s a summation of his work to that date. De Petrie got early galleys of the book and passed them onto Mitchell Leo in Europe with this note: ‘This is the Jeff Weber we all used to know and enjoy so much in the ’70s. The “ornery old bartender who’ll bend your ear till you run screaming”, the “blushing young maiden”, the “half-drunk old Indian grandma”, the “insane yet strangely prescient town castaway”: they’re all in the book, just the way he used to do them for us. Odd how the more Jeff distanced himself from us (and from his home back in the West), the more familiar, the more likable, he’s become.’

  But to get a sense of the strength and unity he’d achieved and for an idea of the direction Weber’s work might have gone had he lived longer, one must turn to his ultimate work, what Reuben Weatherbury called Jeff Weber’s ‘masterly swan song’, what Cummings called ‘his most assured work’: the story ‘In the Tree Museum’. Published four years after his death in the first volume of the Reader, it is a Chekhovian tale of a doomed from the start, afternoon in a park encounter between two desperately love-starved young men from utterly different backgrounds, mental sets and cultures. ‘On his deathbed,’ Fleming had written in his study of the nine members of the Purple Circle, ‘Weber achieved a single luminous vision of the human tragedy.’

  Weatherbury had thanked Roberta Bonaventura of the Jeff Weber Estate for releasing that story for the publication of the anthology. And as the Purple Circle Reader had been my own first contact with Jeff Weber’s writing, almost eight years ago, it had forever colored how I thought of him thereafter; that and the odd, sad photo of Jeff Weber, inside the book, caught just after a bookstore reading he’d done during the winter of 1980, snow on the window panes behind his backlighted head, his hair fallen over his forehead, his hand lifted as though in greeting or repulsion, his eyes staring off to one side of the photographer’s lens.

  And now I was driving through the fast – seventy miles per hour – heavy – five lanes wide on either side, only five feet from bumper to bumper – six-forty p.m. rush-hour traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, headed directly into the glare of a big red sun, just beginning to set over the Pacific Ocean, on my way to meet and speak with Roberta Bonaventura of the Jeff Weber Estate: Bobbie as she was known to most; the Widow Weber herself.

  I left the Celica at the Venice Avenue public parking lot and took an open tram up aptly named Electric Court to where it became Hampton. A block east was Douglas Street. Finding the number was more difficult. This area was considered beachfront, densely built up: overarching trees closely abutted one- and two-story wooden-frame and adobe houses, seven-foot-high fences and gates, all on top of each other, with barely an alley between, and each one held numbers and sometimes half-numbers, behind which I supposed were flats.

  Bonaventura’s number was even more hidden and unreadable than most. When I had found it, hassled to unlatch the gate and got through a slot of a passageway made almost impassable by a pocket jungle of overgrown succulents, there was nothing but a screened door. I knocked and heard a TV. I shouted and heard what sounded like Bobbie’s voice telling me to come in.

  A narrow eat-in kitchen, leading to a shadowed office. The TV noise was coming from a third room. But as I tried to decide what to do, I heard a shout of ‘Damn you!’ and a fuzzy, soap-covered dog of no immediately discernible breed shot out from a door I’d not noticed, past me and through the screen door.

  Bobbie Bonaventura dashed out of what I now saw was a bathroom, yelling, ‘Get back here! Get back here!’ She ran into the tiny yard, where the dog barked loudly but outmaneuvered her and wouldn’t let itself be caught. She chased it, until I saw it cornered behind a thick-leafed plant with sharp tips, growling, nipping at her hand whenever she would get near. She finally said, ‘Fuck yourself, stupid! Lick the goddamn soap off yourself!’ The dog replied with a bloodcurdling howl.

  Bobbie stomped back into the kitchen. She was wearing another pair of dungarees, cut above the knees, without a T-shirt beneath, and she was soaking wet. Outside the dog was still barking. She ignored it, went to the fridge, got out a mango-guava drink, swallowed its contents in a few gulps. Only then did she notice me, though both had had to maneuver around me before.

  ‘Oh, you! Von Slyke’s little amanuensis!’ She made that last word sound utterly pornographic. ‘Did you bring it?’ And when I nodded, ‘Well, I’m wet. Go into what my roomie calls our living room –’ staring in the direction out of which the TV emanated. ‘I’ll dry off.’ She offered a drink and I said no.

  The living room was vacant, the TV set either tuned to or replaying a video of a local beach’s volleyball tournament, a sport I’d never in my life seen televised before, but which I knew to be almost twelve-hour-a-day standard West Coast cable fare. I got comfortable on one of two big upholstered chairs, looking for the control panel or remote. I’d not yet located it when Bobbie entered. She was wearing a furry pink terry robe, her hair pulled back with a silver band. She held another drink in her hand, dropped into a chair and yelled ‘Off!’ at
the TV, which shut itself off instantly. ‘Now! Let’s see what you’ve got!’

  I handed her the manuscript. She read a few lines, furled through the pages, then got up. One door turned out to be a closet, probably a linen closet when this was still a bedroom, with a dozen horizontal wooden shelves. Each held a manuscript, or magazines, or envelopes. All very neat. All precisely labeled. She knelt to the lowest shelf, rummaged, found a manuscript, threw it in my lap.

  It was a photocopy of what I’d brought her. Exact copy, page by page. Except on top of this version, on page one, written in fine green ink script was, ‘Len Spurgeon’s childhood story’.

  I didn’t understand.

  ‘Len Spurgeon’s childhood story?’ I read it aloud. ‘This is what you called an unpublished story in the collection catalogue?’

  She dropped exhausted into the other chair and sipped at her mango-guava. ‘That’s Jeff’s handwriting. The green ink. What did he write on top?’

  It wasn’t what she’d notated in the Purple Circle Collection catalogue as ‘What Occurred on Route 90’.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘It’s Len Spurgeon’s childhood story,’ Bobbie said. ‘At least what he claimed to be a story from his childhood.’

  ‘But,’ I tried, ‘Jeff Weber wrote it!’

  ‘I don’t know who the fuck wrote it. It was typed on Jeff’s old IBM Selectric, using the Elite Type Ball he used for Ode to a Porno Star and the stories in Slights and Offenses.’

  I said what was obvious: ‘Then it is Jeff’s story?’

  ‘If it’s Jeff’s story –’ she tried to be patient – ‘then why in screaming hell did he write it’s Len Spurgeon’s story?’

  ‘Maybe Jeff used that name as a pseudonym. The way James Joyce used Stephen Dedalus to represent him,’ I explained.

  ‘Well, that would all be very literary and neat. Except that Len Spurgeon was a real person.’ And when I looked astonished: ‘A real person, who was Jeff Weber’s … I daren’t use the word lover, as that implies some smidgen of affection – so I’ll simply say that he and Jeff fucked for a while. Several months.’ And as I was taking that in, Bobbie went on, ‘Around the time Jeff was writing some of the stories and the Ode. Which may explain to you why I did not include this with the other stuff that I definitely knew Jeff had written, when I sent his stuff to the collection.’

  ‘And you didn’t find this until?’

  ‘After Jeff was dead. So I couldn’t very well ask. I did go through his letters and things of the time, looking to see if he’d mentioned this story to anyone. I got nowhere.’

  I had to get it right. ‘Len Spurgeon was a real person.’

  ‘Depends what you mean by “real.” He lived, if by living you mean eating and fucking. And he fucked Jeff Weber but good. Actually and metaphorically. If that’s real, then Len Spurgeon was real. I met him. Others met him. Satisfied?’

  ‘Others? As in other Purple Circle members?’

  ‘In fact, one of the Exalted Nine, Mr Wonderful himself, Mark Dodge, introduced Jeff to Scumbag Len.’ She gulped more. ‘Others knew Len. Prissy Etheridge. Mitch Leo.’

  While she’d been speaking, the dog had sneaked back into the house, and was now lurking right behind the ajar door to the room. I could see it, but I wasn’t sure if Bobbie could too, until she suddenly leapt out of her chair and charged. There was a great scrabbling of dog claws and human limbs on the floorboards as they went at each other. She must have gotten it by the tail or ear or paw, as I could hear her drag it howling and barking into the bathroom, where she swore loudly. I heard the dog let out two very loud barks, heard Bobbie yell and the dog take off through the house. It slid in front of the TV room doorway momentarily, hit the opposite wall, caroomed off, and scrambled in the other direction out the screen door into the yard. In those few seconds I could see that Bobbie had succeeded in rinsing off the soap, revealing an old gray Bedlington terrier.

  By the time Bobbie had reappeared in her third outfit in fifteen minutes – big blouse and shorts – carrying more soft drinks, I was ready. I had brought an ultra-microcassette recorder with me. I’d hidden it in my top pocket and turned it on. I accepted the drink she offered and said in what I hoped was a properly naive, sincere tone of voice, ‘So, who exactly was Len Spurgeon and what did he do to Jeff Weber to make you hate him so much?’

  ‘Really want to know?’

  ‘Do Gorillas have hair?’ I repeated Aaron Axenfeld’s dictum to me of the previous day. ‘Do hair burners have sex?’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and I could tell she’d been waiting for years for this very moment, ‘I’ll tell you.’

  ‘First, and there’s a reason I’m asking this, what did the others say about me. Axenfeld and De Petrie and Von Slyke?’

  ‘Axenfeld was the one who mentioned you,’ I replied. ‘He said you and Jeff were lovers in college and remained close thereafter. And that you nursed Jeff during his final illness.’

  ‘To be precise, I was Jeff Weber’s first and last heterosexual lay,’ Bobbie said. ‘We did it twice. It was wonderful for me. So-so for him. I was in love with Jeff then. And forever afterward. That’s why I chose to remain his friend after he’d come out, why I put up with all of his shit, and why at the end I saw him out that final doorway.’ She paused. ‘Some people think I’ve wasted my life. My family. My friends. Lots of people. What do you think?’

  ‘I’m too inexperienced to make judgments like that.’

  ‘Well, either you’re wise beyond your years or shrewdly diplomatic,’ she said. ‘They call me the Widow Weber behind my back, you know, Von Slyke and Axenfeld. They make fun of me. But I’m proud of it. I mean what else do I have? I used to have a lot more – promise, potential. When we first met, Jeff and I, I was the one with all the talent, I had all the promise. Bet you didn’t know that? No, no one does. I had a one-act play put on in high school. By the time I’d graduated college I already had three of my plays produced at the college and one at a local summer stock theater.

  ‘That was how I got to college in the first place, never mind such a fancy one, on a theatrical scholarship. My dad was a worker in an auto-parts plant in Schenectady. There were five kids. He couldn’t have sent me to college. I would have worked in the town bakery like my four sisters, icing donuts and marrying some Italian factory worker who cheated on me and kept me pregnant until I was too old and fat for anyone to notice.

  ‘One of my plays was even published. It’s over there.’ Bobbie nodded in the direction of a bookshelf. ‘That was Painted Ladies and Pretty Men, my ’60s play. Hippies, nudity, free love, political rebellion, women’s lib, all rolled up into one. Sort of a mixture of Oh! Calcutta! and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a touch of Gorky thrown in. It’s dated, naturally. But that was how I met Jeff. He showed up at the college theater to audition for a role. Told us he’d been an actor since he was ten. He didn’t look like it, but he handled the “sides” we gave him like a pro. Miles beyond anyone else we saw. So we gave him the lead. I was the painted lady; Jeff the pretty man.

  ‘You ever see a picture of Jeff Weber at eighteen? He came from Wyoming, you know. Still dressed country, in shit-kicking boots and skin-tight jeans, with those piping-lined checked shirts and a big wide belt. He still had that West of the Platte River twang to his voice, unless he was acting or public speaking, when he was letter perfect. His eyebrows were blonder than his honey-colored hair and fuzzy, and Jeff learned how to use the muscles in them so they sort of shaded his eyes. And those eyes! Oh, my! Not a photo, not a video exists to tell you how blue Jeff Weber’s eyes were. The blue of the first clear sky after a storm, the blue of hope chest panties, the blue of every gift you ever opened as a kid. He would bend one of those eyebrows and twist his mustachioed upper lip and squint one eye so it sort of concentrated the rays it could shoot out, and then he’d laugh, a great big man’s laugh, with big white, perfect teeth.

  ‘A laugh bigger than he was physically. Jeff was only five-seven or so and
never weighed more than 150 pounds. But he looked big on stage. Had he gone on as an actor, he would have hit the silver screen and looked big there too. Like Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise did, despite their height. Sometimes I wish I had pushed him into being a screen actor. He would have done well, he would have played the “I’m straight” game longer and maybe he would have lived longer. That’s hindsight, isn’t it? I loved him. I wanted him around. Not in Hollywood or Cinecittà, where they didn’t want me.

  ‘Then, too, Jeff was a real writer. I knew that the first play he showed me. Bauxite Flats it was titled. A Western. Not deep. But real. And strong. Good characters. A few good scenes. Not my kind of thing. He went back to the material again and wrote it as a section of Cheyenne August. The part about the cousin who borrows all the money for the mining operation and what happens to him, how he drinks himself to death, when the mine goes dry?’