The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  My head was swirling. ‘The baseball player was named Len? Len Spurgeon?’

  ‘That’s right. He played two seasons for the Giants, then something or other happened to him, and he left the game. Come to think of it, maybe it was my brother Mark that happened to him. I never thought of that before! At any rate, I think you’re an honest fellow, someone seeking the truth, and I wanted you to see what Mark wrote to explain himself. You have to understand that at the time it cut me deeply. I was young, just starting out in life, just twenty-three, twenty-four, and I didn’t really understand what he’d written. Well, I understood the words well enough, I just couldn’t understand what he could have meant by it. So I put it all away. The letter. Our brotherly love. All of it. For so long. My brother Mark was good to me. And how did I repay him? … Well, maybe now I can repay him. You have a fax machine there?’

  They did and luckily I’d already learned how to use it.

  ‘I think it may support your idea that someone other than my brother wrote the two pieces we looked at today. This letter really has Mark’s voice the way I recall it and I’m no expert, you understand, but it doesn’t seem to be the same as that excerpt you read.’

  A few minutes later I received the two-page, handwritten letter. It was dated April 27th, 1974, and the opening paragraphs were exactly as Thom Dodge explained them. Then came the part that I suspected had ‘cut deeply’ into Thom and which he’d not understood then, and who knew, maybe still could not understand or accept now. Following Mark’s line that he’d thought Thom would want to meet a major league baseball player, he went on to write:

  Len Spurgeon and I met last October after the Conference playoff games he was out here to pitch for. It was at some party. The minute we looked at each other, I wanted to tear his clothing off him. I did so that night, in his hotel room. I ripped off his clothing but kept him wrapped in it, trapped in sleeves and buttons so I’d be free to kiss his face and neck and body, to lick his chest and front and legs, to suck and bite and tear at every single part of him, both evident and hidden from sight. Len has a taste that is part like those salt-water reeds we used to gather and suck on at the marsh edge but also like what wheat smells like in a barn after spring rains when it goes to black rust, drugging and maddening livestock with ergot.

  That first night we spent hours with each other’s bodies. I finally let him free, so he could do to me back what I’d done to him. I swear we were like animals in rut. We sucked and fucked for maybe five, six hours, until our peckers and mouths and assholes were rubbed hot and red and too sore to touch anymore. Then we got into a bathtub together to cool down and wouldn’t you know instead we continued doing it there until we fell asleep from exhaustion.

  Thom, brother, I have had girls. You’ve seen ‘em, you’ve even seen me and Pete doing it to them, although you thought you were completely hidden from view. And I’ve had guys. Yeah, queer guys like I am. But I swear to you, I have never had anyone or anything like this Len Spurgeon. He is like heroin and LSD and grass and the best Scotch all rolled into one. I can’t get enough of him. I can’t separate from him one second but I don’t ache all over needing him. And I can’t go to sleep at night or go to my typewriter unless the smell of him is on my face and on my hands and in my hair. I’m glad that he loves me for now and that he will stay close to me, because if he didn’t I swear I’d chain him, tie him, strap him down. And if he got loose I’d follow him to the end of the earth and bring him back and if he spit in my face and told me he hated me, I’d kill the bastard and keep his rotting corpse in my room so I could be with him always.

  What I’m saying is, we kids never had any idea – any idea AT ALL – that life could be this – thrilling … terrifying. I will not ask your forgiveness or even your understanding but merely say that I am doing what I want to, love to, must do.

  BOOK FOUR

  The Leo-McKewens at Tea, Part 1

  He resembled an immense yacht that had seen more extravagant days, that perhaps had been fractionally stripped at one point and reappointed with less enthusiasm – and a good deal less discretion.

  Mitchell Leo,

  After the Piano Recital

  TANYA CULL HAD MENTIONED TO ME on the phone in a final aside that the university – although by no means specifically the Languages Department – had recently received bomb warnings and other related threats from nationalists of some Pacific island – an atoll vaguely related to some financial and scientific interests of the college – demanding their independence. This explained the surprising amount and depth of security around Sproull Square, the metal detectors at Sather Gate, as well as at each building’s entrance, each of which now sported a white-armbanded guard, although in the school’s tradition some of these security people looked as though they’d only a few days before been hawking nipple rings and tattoos to students and tourists a few yards away on Telegraph Avenue.

  I was directed up the hill toward the tower, to what must have been the oldest building on campus, South Hall, a great Victorian object with dormer windows and a dozen chimneypots which looked out of place in the sun-struck East Bay but would have fit in nicely with the rounded hills and flat pastures of western Massachusetts. The sign on it read ‘Library Sciences Annex’, but that had another, handwritten sign partly atop it, with a stenciled hand pointed in another direction, thus completely confusing me. Tanya would probably not be in till later on, she had told me, but she did give me the name of a colleague, Janet Carstairs, in the next office, who would let me in.

  As promised, Janet was in and got me cleared into the Languages building. She was waiting outside the elevator when it opened, a statuesque, dark-skinned Afro-American woman, still talking on a cellular phone as I got off. She signed off and closed the phone to warmly greet me.

  ‘Sorry about all this,’ she said referring to the security. ‘The times we live in.’

  I had the feeling she’d expected someone different, younger or older, or maybe less casually dressed, I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to calm her down.

  ‘At UCLA they would try to electronically decal everyone on campus. Right here –’ pointing to my forehead.

  ‘Sometimes Tanya and I wonder if America’s universities are responsible for propping up every minor dictatorship in the world. She thought she’d be back by five.’ Janet led the way, her heels striking the wooden floor like rifle reports.

  She unlocked the office door and flipped on the lights, saying, ‘Tanya said she left detailed instructions. If you need anything, just knock.’

  Once inside Cull’s office – one not much bigger or better furnished than those made available for instructors at UCLA, I noticed with satisfaction (although it had a great view of the Berkeley Tower) – I was directed by Tanya’s notes to the computer terminal, and a tall file cabinet. Only one drawer was unlocked, marked ‘Mitch Leo’. When I opened it, a sheet of instructions for its use lay on top.

  All this is available on the computer screen. I trust you know Windows 100. You may access first lines, paragraphs etc. by striking MITCH:MSS and going into Search or Global Search modes. For names, titles etc. do the same thing but go to Direct Search mode. Actual file names for anything on the screen are always in the upper right-hand corner. You may hardcopy anything you want, not to exceed ten pages. Or mark what you want to download with a double dot, and enclose your net or modem address, it will be sent to you directly. But nothing else – and no disks – can either be inserted or physically leave the files or room for computer virus reasons. University rules. Hope you find what you need.

  As instructed, I typed in the first line of the manuscript I’d found among Von Slyke’s papers, then went into Search mode. ‘Not found’ was the response. So I tried Global Search mode. ‘Not found’ was repeated. I then keyboarded in two more lines and tried again. Still nothing. I keyboarded in the first ten lines. Still zilch.

  Disheartened, secretly wondering if the system really was as complete as Tanya Cull claimed it was, I trie
d the opening lines of the second manuscript I’d found, the one Thom Dodge had given me. Search. Nothing. Global Search. Again nothing.

  Next I inserted the name ‘Paul’ – the narrator of the second, and a character of the first, manuscript – into the system and, following Tanya’s instructions, put it in Direct Search. ‘File?’ it asked. That was more like it. I asked it to check ‘All files’ and waited. To my surprise, it responded.

  ‘Two files found. View #1?’

  Absolutely!

  I struck ‘Access’ and was rewarded by having a manuscript appear on the screen. Or rather the middle of a page of a manuscript, which I immediately recognized as not having anything to do with the anecdote about the two kids in the cars, as I’d hoped, but which I did recognize as being from somewhere in the first section of Mitch Leo’s fourth book, After the Piano Recital, published in 1983. The area highlighted by the cursor read, ‘We lived first with Tom’s Princeton friend Paul, but discovered him to be pathological in too many respects – including food, sex, drug use and dress.’

  This extremely minor character, Paul, returned once more briefly, much later in the novel, as I discovered when I asked the machine to access the next place in the file where the name was mentioned. That read, ‘Around two o’clock in the morning, we heard something hit our hull, and looked over the side to see Paul in a small boat shaking hands with its sailors. He came up and asked, “Anyone got hashish. Mother’s brains are simply marinated from being screwed by the crew all night!”’

  And that was it. Unfortunately. As it proved at least that the computer’s search mechanism was working. The question now was if it was working for all the files or only for the files of the published work. What I needed was to get into something I knew was not published. Not that there was much Mitch Leo had written and not published. A true follower of the literary aesthetic of Flaubert, Leo had written little, worked slowly, carefully reworked his writing many times, and had at last released it only with difficulty. This, despite the fact that once his 1981 novel, Refitting Tom Devere, had ‘broken through’, Leo had become a regularly published author for the few remaining years left him.

  Wait a minute! There was a possibility. The bulk of Mitch Leo’s unpublished work probably lay in his letters to Aaron Axenfeld! They’d known each other for two and a half decades and had lived far enough apart during at least half of that period to have corresponded weekly. Once the Leo-McKewens began making regular spring pilgrimages to Europe – mostly residing for two to three months in Florence – the letters were even more regular. Ditto once the Leo-McKewens would arrive at the Leo family beach house, every August through October. Axenfeld had left Manhattan in 1982, further adding to their distance and need for correspondence.

  Those many missives, and their responses, had formed the basis of an entire chapter of Erling Cummings’s group biography, focussing as it had on the Leo-McKewens as the gay literary couple of the era, and had in addition provided the meat for that section of Thad Fleming’s study of the group in which he’d concentrated on their and the other Purple Circlers’ experiences in Europe, which he had titled – felicitously I thought, given their many sexual adventures -‘Tramps Abroad’.

  I’d begun typing in Axenfeld’s name when I thought, wait, the Leo-McKewens never called Aaron by his real name. They’d never called any of the others by their real names either. According to both Cummings and Fleming, they had fabricated ‘drag names’ for all of the Purple Circle’s members. Or more precisely, pet names, since they were seldom female monikers: more like names that were coined as a result of peculiar circumstances or odd personality quirks, or arose who knew how, most of the circumstances being lost in the miasma of the past.

  Each other the Leo-McKewens called ‘Baby’ or ‘Babe’. Mark Dodge of course was Marco. Or Marco Polo. Or sometimes the Pole. Odd but understandable enough. As was Rowland Etheridge’s nickname of ‘Metheridge’ or ‘Meth’ or sometimes ‘Drina’, the latter two names being short for Methedrine, a recreational amphetamine quite stylish in the 1960s (and the 1990s, although there was no indication that Rowland used or abused the drug in either decade). After that the naming became more complex. Von Slyke’s sobriquet of ‘Dame’ – short for Damon, used by the other Purple Circlers – wasn’t enough for the Leo-McKewens, who had changed it to ‘Camellia’ or, more simply, ‘The Lady C’, in reference to Dumas fils’s novel La Dame aux camélias. In a similar bit of legerdemain, Cameron Powers’s name had gone from ‘Cammy’, which the others most often used, to ‘Cameron of Sulleyville’ – a town not far from where Powers had grown up in Mississippi – to ‘Sulley’ and via some unknown incident to ‘Sulky’, with an occasional reference to ‘Miss Sulks’ or ‘The Sulky One’. Dominic De Petrie’s name had undergone similar transformations from ‘Dom’ to ‘Dome’ to the nearly anagrammatical ‘St Peter’s Dome’, thereafter landing most often on ‘Saint Pete’ – when, that is, it wasn’t ‘Sneaky Pete’. But neither biographer had located the exact foci through which the name Aaron Axenfeld had become transformed into ‘Glum Gus’ or more simply ‘Gus’. Cummings had suggested one pathway from the name Axenfeld through Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice character Von Aschenbach, to that character’s first name Gustave, to Gustavus, and finally to Gus – which did make a weird sort of sense. Anyway, Gus was what they called Aaron.

  I keyboarded the name Gus and went to Direct Search, All Files. Pay dirt! It listed seventy-five files. Just to make sure, I accessed one and got a letter from Florence dated April 17th, 1976. Okay. This meant the two manuscripts were not on the computer. That was disappointing, if not particularly revelatory. Why should they be here if Len or Mark or Jeff were their author?

  I decided to move past Tanya’s instructions and went backward, looking for a listing of ‘All files’ under Mitch Leo to see what of her uncle’s work she had listed. This proved to be the titles of his published books, a few book reviews he’d published, a speech he’d given on ‘Gay Literature: The Future’ for a Midwest university, and the many letters. Nothing else.

  Only one more possibility to try. Bobbie Bonaventura had told me that after the bank heist involving Jeff Weber, Len had been hanging around with the Leo-McKewens. While I couldn’t completely trust her yet, the other thing she’d said about Len – that he and Mark Dodge had a previous relationship before Len met Jeff Weber – had proved true. Mark Dodge’s letter to his brother Thom confirmed that. It didn’t prove that Spurgeon was a bank robber. Even so … I opened the file for Leo’s letters again, went into Direct Search mode and typed in the name Len Spurgeon. I accessed for ‘All files’ and waited.

  Three entries showed up. The first two were dated June and September of 1979, exactly when Bobbie had said Len and the Leo-McKewens were hanging out together. The first, in a letter to Axenfeld, merely mentioned Len Spurgeon as ‘an old flame of Marco’s whom the Babe is sure he still has La Grandissimo Crusheroo on. And why not? Len is hot as the Fourth itself. One of those muscular, but somehow loosely muscled bodies you seldom see on white boys – which he very definitely is – but more often find on very deeply Southern-raised Afro-Americans. (I know, I know, I’ll always be a BlackHawk at heart.) Only medium height, but the languid pose, the downright dirty way he walks and gestures, make him seem a lot taller. Yessiroo, this Len got the old gonads going for moi-même not to mention scads others in the room. Waco, on the other hand, hated him at first sight. Must have been a chemical thing.’

  Waco – sometimes Wacky-o – the Leo-McKewens’ name for Jeff Weber, not inapt, in honor of his Western upbringing. And if Bobbie hadn’t been lying to me, I now knew better than Mitch Leo that it hadn’t been hate ‘at first sight’, but exactly the opposite emotion.

  The second Mitch Leo letter mentioned Len again, saying ‘this time without Marco, Len came over for High Tea yesterday’. Present at the occasion had been the Leo-McKewens’ usual assortment of those in the arts, socialites, people with summer houses they wanted invitations to, and Spurg
eon, ‘dressed in tight-fitting black denims, black T-shirt, silver and ebony vest and excellent hand-made boots from Texas’. One of only two women present, a vacuum-cleaner heiress, had flirted outrageously with Len, who was not amused by her attentions. Frankie McKewen had come upon the two of them smoking cigarettes on the little dining-room balcony, and he’d overheard Len saying, ‘Well, I for one damn well know the difference, and I very much prefer having male buttocks bouncing in the palms of my hands, and a male rectum on the head of my cock.’ Which had been duly and immediately reported to all present indoors. With the expected, sensational response. According to Leo, ‘many were the barks and (masculine) giggles that ensued’.

  So far, so good. If not telling. So, I went for Letter Number Three. As soon as it appeared on the screen I knew I had found something of significance. First, because across the top was written, ‘Not Mailed? Confirm with AA’, which I supposed to be Tanya’s note to herself. And beneath the comment, another note: ‘Confirmed with AA. This letter was never mailed.’

  The letter, in its entirety, read:

  La Città

  October 18th 1983

  Caro Gus,

  One hates to be here before the Season has really begun. Yet once it has begun, it’s so much better if the weather is boring, which it’s been. Even better if one has a new experience to report. A new experience to have experienced. We jaded old Hussies so seldom do have them. And so seldom are they as ‘downright ego-satisfying’ then as ‘purely mortifying!’ as what I am about to report. In secret, s.v.p. The Babe is not to hear a word of this except from my own lips, when I choose the time and place.