The dog had crept back into the room. Quietly it had moved up to where Bobbie was sitting, and slowly it had insinuated its head to directly under where her free hand lay. As she was speaking, she was pulling the curled hair on the top of its head, petting it.
‘So, I’m the one responsible for Jeff Weber beginning to think of himself as a writer. For switching his major from history and politics to English and theater, for moving to New York City after we graduated, and for getting him his first job at that branch of the Greenwich Savings Bank where I knew the manager. That was when, 1967? We shared an apartment on Hudson Street in the Village long before it was even close to chic. Then we found apartments that we could actually afford in Chelsea, on West 17th Street, long before that was so gay, one flat directly on top of the other.
‘In 1974 we started the world’s smallest publishing company, Stratospheric Press. First we published my novella Cayuga Street and then we published his poems, Picking Up Men in Lower Manhattan. In what soon became typical, mine was well reviewed in the New York Times and sold ten copies. Jeff’s poetry, with its openly gay title, was completely ignored by the media and was bought by half the queers in New York who knew what a sonnet was. It went into three printings, instantly provided him with entree to Christopher Street and The Advocate, not to mention bars, baths, parties, gay literary readings, Fire Island and a new pal, Dominic De Petrie, a successfully published author of three books. The rest, as they say, is Purple Circle history.
‘Do I sound bitter?’ she asked. ‘I am bitter,’ she answered herself. ‘So it would only be natural if I sounded it. Not that I wasn’t welcome as Jeff’s pal and as a writer myself. Well, some of the time. But it became clear early on that it was after all a boy’s club, and a gay boy’s club, so women were, how do I put it, just a little de trop!
‘Okay, okay, you’re saying to yourself. Enough already of the Redbook article “Hetero Women Who Love Gay Men”! Where’s Len Spurgeon in all this? Hold your horses.’ Bobbie looked down at the Bedlington. ‘What a jerk! This dog. And Len. And Jeff. And me too.’
‘Okay, Len Spurgeon. He came along in – what was it – ’78, I think. As I said before, Mark Dodge dragged him to one of those parties at the Robert Samuel Gallery the Purple Circle used to frequent. You ever hear of the place? Robert Mapplethorpe and his lover Sam Wagstaff put it together to show gay art and photography. Mostly Robert’s photos, but Platt Lynes and I also remember Arthur Tress’s work. It was on Lower Broadway, near 11th Street, on the second floor, just opposite that Gothic-style church, I can’t remember the name or even its denomination.
‘I never “got” Len’s looks myself, but he caused a real commotion among the guys. To me he looked cheap, like one of those teenage punks I used to know in Schenectady who hung out behind the high-school gym smoking dope and drinking hooch out of a brown paper bag. You know the type? Long, heavy, straight hair that falls over their face and naturally muscled bodies – don’t know whether it’s from their working-class genes or from eating so many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread as a kid. Big biceps and heavy calves on their legs. But otherwise skinny. No hips. Waists you can hardly see. Stomachs you can count the ribs on. Sort of bored expression on their faces, unless they’re pissed off, when it gets all scrunched up. A perpetual wooden toothpick wedged between sharp canine teeth, sticking out of scornful fat lips. Stubby noses – bull noses, I called them – wider than usual from the brow down and flat, as though flattened by a board when they were a kid. Surprisingly good complexion. Lazy-looking. Wouldn’t move to save your life, but athletic enough when they wanted to be, active as hell when they needed to be. That was Len Spurgeon.
‘He came from Texas, the Permian Basin, he said. Which I later found out was central and west oil country. So I guess he and Jeff had that cowboy shit in common. Len played up his juvenile delinquent looks, wearing form-fitting black Ts and the first pair of coal-colored jeans I ever laid eyes on, along with clunky black engineer’s boots and a torn leather bomber jacket. It must have played into some fantasy image Jeff had, because at dinner that night and for the next three days he couldn’t stop talking about Len, whom, by the way, I’d barely noticed. Well, Jeff was always having these enthusiasms about guys. He’d gone gaga over De Petrie when they’d first met. So I didn’t pay too much attention.
‘A week later, Len’s sleeping over when I drop down to Jeff’s apartment. And a month later, he’s still sleeping over. In fact, he hasn’t left. He’s living there, a first for Jeff Weber, who had at least until then retained that much of his Western propriety not to mention his last shreds of closetedness.’
‘All this took place where?’ I had to ask.
‘Manhattan. The Village. Are you listening or are you playing with yourself? By this time in our thirteen-year friendship, I’d learned not to get involved in any way in Jeff’s romantic or sex life. I mean, I knew nothing about it and could know nothing about it as I was a woman and these were guys and anyway, I’d be jealous, so what was the use? Even so, I can tell that Len has Jeff spinning like a top. Part of the idea of Jeff getting the “stupid bank job” is so that he would have free time and a free mind to do writing before or after work or maybe on weekends. But he’s not finished the essay that he’d promised some magazine, and the draft of his new story is just sitting there, untouched, although an actual magazine editor says he’s waiting for it.
‘Meanwhile, Jeff and I hardly ever see each other. We used to talk on the phone twice a day, now I’m lucky if it’s twice a week. And when we do talk it’s “Len this” and “Len that”. Whenever I try to broach the subject of writing, or of his future, Jeff avoids comment. Then one day he tells me they’re doing things in bed he didn’t think he was capable of. I reply, “Don’t tell me!” but it’s clear that Jeff is beyond infatuated and also that Len Spurgeon, besides being Mr Venus in Furs, also has a little Freud thrown in too, as he’s helping Jeff work out his considerable problems with his fuck of a father and bigoted mother back in Wyoming.
‘The next step is, of course, drugs. We’re talking about the very same Jeff Weber who signed a pledge when he was fourteen never to drink alcohol, and who would pass a stick of grass, averting his nostrils so he wouldn’t have to smell it. Suddenly he and Len are dropping LSD every weekend. Partly, it turns out, this is allegedly “therapeutic” as it allows Jeff to loosen up and experiment more sexually. Partly it’s also allegedly “analytical” as it allows Len to fuck with Jeff’s until then fairly adamantine mindsets. Jeff assures me that Len knows what he’s doing, as he’s had plenty of experience with drugs – no shit! – and goes on to tell me that furthermore this will even help his, Jeff’s, writing. They are revealing each other’s deepest secrets to one another. One of which, I years later figure out to be this piece of manuscript about Len Spurgeon’s supposedly unintentional fratricide.
‘Who knows what secret Jeff told Len? Probably that he was repeatedly sexually abused by a grown man over a four-year period, this friend of the Weber family who had encouraged Jeff to become a child actor, and used occasions of long solitary drives with the boy to and from rehearsals at a theater in the next county to sodomize Jeff and force him to fellate him. This I discovered only years later when Jeff was dying.
‘Whatever is going on between Jeff and Len, it’s tight, and I’m so far out of the picture that I admit the fact although it pains me incredibly. For months Len and Jeff remain together. Len has no occupation I can figure out, but always seems to have money and always pays his share. The one week I’m home from work sick, I spy on him, but he’s not hustling, not seeing other guys. Occasionally he puts on a suit and goes out with an attache case a few hours at a time.
‘This, according to Jeff, is Len’s alleged work in “sales”. Sales of what neither ever says, and if it’s drugs, it’s on a small scale. So I say to myself, okay, Jeff’s comfortable and you’re overreacting; now go get a life. For a few weeks I even believe it. Then it happens. One day the bank
branch that Jeff works at is robbed. In fact, Jeff is the teller who is robbed.
‘Some of this I discover at three-oh-nine on a Wednesday afternoon, when the bank manager, my old pal remember, calls me to say come get Jeff at work, he’s still in shock. Well, that’s putting it mildly. Jeff’s a basketcase. And while all of us can understand this as a result of having someone put a revolver up to your head and demand money or your life, we don’t know all the lurid details.
‘Until later. Later, when we get home to Jeff’s place and everything is a mess, and it turns out all Len’s things are gone. And even later, when Jeff breaks down yet has sense enough to swear me to secrecy before he tells me that in fact Len Spurgeon was the bank robber who put a revolver to his head. And Jeff tells me that this was not a surprise to him, as they had planned the robbery together. Jeff’s part was to tell Len what time of what day he believed his till would have the most amount of cash, and his other part was to be too upset to tap the emergency floor button.
‘Well, it turns out Jeff told Len when – he had 22,000 dollars in the till when it was robbed – and he did manage to panic enough not to push the emergency floor button, because during the robbery Len Spurgeon clicked off the revolver’s safety and scared the everliving shit out of Jeff Weber, threatening to kill him if he wasn’t faster, and further whispering that he would find and shoot him if he ever revealed who Len was. This will explain Jeff’s lack of surprise when we got home and Len’s stuff was gone. And explain Jeff’s feeling that he’d been manipulated, preyed on and utterly betrayed by Len Spurgeon.’
Bobbie looked at the dog, who looked up at her. ‘So, that’s who Len Spurgeon is. Satisfied?’
‘And Len vanished,’ I asked. ‘Just like that?’
‘Well, you see, that’s exactly the problem. Len didn’t just vanish. He turned up a few months later, tanned and cheerful, at a party given by Mitch Leo and Frankie McKewen, who were seeing a lot of Len at the time. And Len went on to become really palsy with Rowland Etheridge and I believe he lived with Axenfeld a short while. I lost track.
‘The point is, Len didn’t vanish. That at least would have allowed poor Jeff to deal with it all. To come to some sort of closure. Instead, Len stuck around. He never explained to anyone why he suddenly moved out of Jeff’s place. And while at the bank no one ever hinted that it was an inside job, partly because of how truly upset Jeff was when it happened, Jeff eventually left and found another job in that dopey little social work agency, where he remained until almost, well, the end. Needless to say, Jeff never took LSD again, did go into real therapy, which sort of helped, and never had another relationship until he was already infected and it was pretty much too late for true love.’
I’d been sitting there with my mouth hanging open. ‘Wow!’ I finally said. ‘Yet you’re not sure who wrote the story. Weber or Spurgeon?’
‘As I explained before, maybe Len dictated and Jeff wrote. Or Jeff wrote it after Len told him the story. I’m not sure it’s true or whether Len Spurgeon just used it to further sucker Jeff into being his accomplice in the bank heist.’
We stared at each other a minute, then Bobbie began petting the Bedlington again. I heard my microcassette shut off inside my pocket. I thought surely she must hear it too. But she didn’t. Then, in the sweetest possible voice, she said to the dog, as she caressed it, ‘You think you had it bad today! Your suffering has only begun! Tomorrow, I’m going to clip your hair. Yes, I am! Yes! Yes! Yes!’
BOOK THREE
The Dodge Brothers Inc.
There are at least three types of betrayal, he found himself deciding, but probably the worst was the one where the stupid son-of-a-bitch then spent the rest of his life explaining to all and sundry (including naturally yourself) exactly why it was that he’d screwed you.
Mark Dodge,
We All Drive Fords
‘I DISCOVERED WHO WROTE THE MANUSCRIPT I found among the Von Slyke papers,’ I repeated. ‘We won’t have to meet after all.’
On the other end of the line, in the background, I heard a baseball game on the radio or TV, and voices, male voices, rooting for a team.
It was mid-afternoon, the day following my visit to Bobbie Bonaventura. I was calling on a cellular phone from the pergola-roofed rearmost garden of Von Slyke’s Hollywood home, where I’d retreated with a bottle of papaya-mango iced tea and my laptop, trying to escape the day’s intensely hot sunshine and a suddenly stifling indoor atmosphere. Given the noise on the other end, it sounded as though I’d reached Thom Dodge in his home, while I’d intended to phone him at his place of work.
‘I found it too!’ Dodge surprised me by saying. ‘The five pages you faxed. And another five. Not a continuation. Another story. Years later, when the boy – what was his name? Paul? – when he’s grown up.’
How could the story be by Mark Dodge? Bobbie told me it was by Len Spurgeon?
‘I never knew the second piece existed until you faxed what you had,’ Thom went on. ‘That first part was there, and so were these other pages, in the back of it all this time.’
Had Bobbie lied? Made up all that about Spurgeon? Why? To aggrandize another piece of writing for the Weber estate? Despite how short, sketchy and of not terribly high literary value it might be?
‘Are you telling me the story was written by your brother?’
‘Why else would it be here?’ Thom said. ‘It’s a hell of a story. I mean, what it says about Mark.’
‘You’d read it before,’ I tried, ‘when you prepared his papers for the collection?’
‘I’d be lying if I said I did. There was a whole bunch of papers I didn’t know what in the hell to make of. It’s not as though I’m a professor or anything. I’m just an Air Force man. I always felt Mark had done himself a disservice making me his literary executor. I looked for what the Timrod Collection asked for. But there was a lot of loose stuff that hadn’t been published. Without titles and all. Weatherbury looked at all Mark’s unpublished works when he put together the first volume of the Reader. I gave him free run. He took what he wanted. Photocopied it. Left the rest.’
‘Did Weatherbury see those pages?’
‘If he did, he never said anything. Maybe he put them together. You know because of the same name and all.’
I heard cheering: televised and in the room.
‘Prieto just hit a triple for the As,’ Dodge explained. ‘You have the Angels there right?’
‘And the Dodgers.’ I was unnerved. I’d thought it had been settled. It would make a lot more sense that Mark Dodge wrote the piece. He actually had older brothers, unlike only-child Jeff Weber. Even so, it was confusing.
‘So you coming tomorrow?’ Dodge asked.
‘You found the pieces among what Weatherbury thought was Mark’s unfinished autobiography?’
‘That’s what he thought,’ Thom said. ‘I was never all that sure. And those titles he came up with!’
‘Man in a Jar?’ I asked. ‘Framed by Life?’
‘Mark used to fool with titles all the time. He’d make lists of ’em. I remember one time my mamma telling me she’d visited him in a hospital out East and he left the room for some tests and he’d been writing something in a notebook; when she went to pick it up it was just a list of words. She thought it was a poem, but he told her no. Sometimes he’d make up a title then write the damn book! That last one? We All Drive Fords? He had that title a dozen years before. I’d catch him saying it, rolling the words around in his mouth to see how they sounded.’
Dominic De Petrie wrote the same thing in his journals, how he and Dodge would make up book titles they never planned to use, for the hell of it. ‘You don’t believe those titles are what your brother was going to use?’
‘Worse,’ Dodge replied. ‘I’m not convinced my brother knew what in the hell he was writing a lot of the time, especially later on. I don’t mean disrespect. But you gotta understand, at the end there he was scattered in his mind.’
‘I know he developed deme
ntia,’ I said, ‘as a result of the HIV virus.’
Both Fleming and Cummings had written that, reproducing in appendices to the group bios Dodge’s death certificate showing ‘Herpes Triplex’ as cause of death: i.e. the disease had passed the blood-brain barrier. Not having experienced anyone with dementia myself I couldn’t say how it would manifest precisely.
‘Mark’d be talking back to the television set as though the woman giving the nightly news were right there in the hospital room with him and Ma.’
‘I see,’ I said, horrified.
‘But then, very next minute, Ma would ask him something – you know, to check out his attention – and that son of a gun would be sharp as a tack. It was hard to fool him. Even so, he might have been writing a half-dozen books at the end. Not just one. He was that scattered in his head.’
I did understand. But I still couldn’t figure out how the manuscript could be Len’s, maybe Jeff’s – and Mark’s too. ‘You think I ought to come see for myself?’
‘That’s what you were planning to do, right?’ Then in a quieter tone of voice than he’d so far been using, although not quite a whisper, ‘And anyway I wanted to tell you something … we’ll talk when you get here and there’s a bit more privacy.’
I wondered what he meant by that last enigmatic bit. Instead, I said brightly, ‘Well, then, see you tomorrow!’
‘You know the East Bay? You need directions?’
‘I’ll phone if I get lost.’
There was a single burst of cheers from the other end, and I was sure it was from people in the room. Obviously a home run, on top of Prieto’s triple. Thom hung up.
Two pigeon-like birds I’d not noticed before on the property – perhaps mourning doves, for all I knew lovebirds, their clay-colored feathers dappled with circles of bittersweet chocolate and white, their sleek, nougat-colored heads, marbled tan-black eyes and eggwhite beaks – were cooing as they pranced and postured for each other, delicately pirouetting in and out of view among the richly velvet, purple-veined, deep green leaves of vine festooning the arbor above my head. Unexpectedly strong drafts of nearby jasmine and honeysuckle wafted complex attars across my face, strong as animal pheromones, nearly causing me to gag.
The Book of Lies Page 14
