The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  Do you remember that divine Len Spurgeon who several years ago came to a few of our Teas on West End Avenue? Did you ever meet him? I think Marco said you eventually did, although he didn’t say in what context. Well, said lovely Len vanished from sight and when I severely quizzed Miss Polo about the lad, Marco claimed he knew rien pas. Perhaps he was in Parigi, from which I gathered Marco had ‘made the move’ and been repulsed. Or, more likely, they’d done the deed and it hadn’t worked out as planned. L’amour, L’amour as Mary Boland always said …

  Well, the lad resurfaced, with a vengeance. Last Monday night, I was at some stupid quasi-literary shindig at someone’s drearily furnished but v. nicely laid out flat at the Parc Vendome on West 57th Street and I left about midnight. Alone. The Babe was home with La Grippe. Could locate no taxis going uptown. So I wandered around Eighth Avenue and noted right there a place I’d heard about for years but never actually been near, although doubtless the Lady C, not to mention the Sulker know it v. well – I’m writing of that sleazy bar named the Hay Market. Second most famous hustler bar in the cittá. Since I’d never entered, that oversight had to be immediately rectified. I went in, ordered a drink and looked around. Mostly older gentlemen. As expected. But in the back pool room was all the young meat. And among the young meat, there was one partikularly cherce cut of darkmeat, just the way I like it. ‘Wayne’ – made-up name, I’m sure. It’s probably Cato or Norman. But despite that, v. special. And obviously trade.

  There too, leaning on the arm of another piece of trade, after a minute I see, is our old pal Len Spurgeon, also looking pretty damn tasty, in rubbed-raw 501’s left unbuttoned at the navel and a T that don’t quite meet the pants. He, alas for my interest that soir, was Caucasian and unquestionably ‘our age’.

  Len, however, does me the kindness of remembering me fondly, is amused when I ask, ‘Buying or selling?’ and buys me a second beer. He also points out that I’m looking pretty good myself and that one older gent looks v. interested in me. He points out the guy, who is maybe four years older, but v. square and out of town. Actually, handsome face, nice bod. Bad clothes, if not quite polyester. But almost ostentatiously ‘out of town’.

  I tell Len what I want, and he introduces me to Wayne. I take off my jacket, reveal tight bod beneath, lose a game and a dollar to Wayne playing pool. Afterwards, Len says of Wayne, ‘That’ll cost you seventy-five bucks the hour.’ Well, who has that on me? And anyway, who wants to pay? So I’m glum, until Len suggests the following: he’ll introduce me to Mr Out of Town. I’ll go trick with him at his hotel, then come back and use the money to buy café au lait Wayne.

  I can’t believe this is a realistic scenario. But Len does intro me to Herbert WhatsisName from Wherever, Indiana, who’s in town for a tool convention if you can dig it and wears a double wedding ring and wants sex bad enough he’ll pay me. The only way to be quite such a putana, however, is if Wayne knows about it in advance. So I go up to the pool table and tell him what I’m going to do, asking him to wait for me. He smiles widely and promisingly. And with the excitement potential, I go off.

  Halfway down the tackiest part of Eighth Avenue, feeling truly cheap, I wonder how I’m going to pull this off. It’s worse in the hotel lobby. And worse in the elevator, where I’m sure everyone is looking at me and thinking the truth. Upstairs, inside the door, I’m about to give Herbert a chance to rethink the scenario, but he’s instantly all over me. And he is the Roman candle of all time. Four-time shooter, in short, once against me in his shorts necking at the door, once on top of me, à la frottage, and twice when I’ve mounted him and am copulating like all get out. Turns out he’s nice, he’s handsome, he has a nice body and he excites the shit out of me. Terrific sex. So good I almost give back the money.

  I don’t. I leave when he’s half asleep, and I go back to the bar. I see Len and we wink conspiratorially. He connects me up to Wayne and we three laughingly discuss what I just did and after another half-hour or so, Wayne and I leave and we go to some fleabag room he tricks out of, which uses up both my twenty-five-dollar tip from Herbert and my taxi fare home. Wayne prefers posing, being adored, and being caressed. But finally relents and allows a blow job. He’s beautiful and it’s okay, although truth to tell, if I’d not fucked my brains out earlier, I’d possibly be a wee bit disappointed with how I was spending my money. I get home at three a.m. The Babe, luckily, is dead asleep.

  Naturally I keep all this to myself. Then last night, a week later, the Babe and I join La Simplessa (the Ribs Heiress) as her escorts at the Met Opera for a black-tie charity do, a production of La Bohème. V. High Society. Guess who’s in the lobby with three or four other tuxedoed to the toes v. attractive guys who all turn out to be A-list gays, but Len Spurgeon? We all meet at the first interval and I like who he’s with, and so does the Babe and even La Simplessa. So we all meet again at the second intermission. And we’re in a circle, talking, near the big horseshoe bar under the awful Chagall mural. I’m really a little bit getting to know these men, when one of them whom Len and I have moved a little bit away from the others to talk to – Rick something or other – really the neatest of them all, asks me what I do for a living. I say I’m a writer and am about to go on being mock-modest yet sincere (you know the act: hell, you invented the act!) when Len turns to Rick and says, ‘Of course, Mitch is also a whore. Aren’t you, Mitch?’

  Well, Gus, I could have died right on the spot. But I found that I could not say one word in my defense, and I could feel my face get deep red, which would have lied for me if I did try to defend myself. Len goes on to say, ‘A hundred dollars a throw! Isn’t that right, Mitch? Or is that only with a tip?’

  Rick looked surprised and Len smiled oddly at me, and a second later we were with the others again. And I knew that wherever I went from now on, wherever Len Spurgeon or any of these people said my name or had my name mentioned to them, one of them would bring up the fact that I was a hundred-dollar-a-night whore.

  It’s unbearable. Yet what can I do?

  You’re so clever. Do you know what? Is there anything at all?

  The ‘Doughty Lion’ or sometimes just ‘Our Lion’, Dominic De Petrie had called Mitch in his own letters to Aaron Axenfeld, and the name was more than just a play on Mitch’s last name. First there was his gleaming chestnut-brown mane, the beautifully – and expensively – kept hair, shoulder-length since the mid-1960s, and, according to everyone who met Mitch, the first thing one noticed about him; and long after his Italian Renaissance condottiere good looks had been absorbed, the last thing one noticed about him. Additionally, everyone testified that Mitch Leo’s character was that of someone strongly independent, protective, self-sufficient to the point of arrogance, leading, at times dictatorial, at all times socially conscious, dignified and, above all, proud. What had happened with Len Spurgeon must have been beyond mortifying to Mitch Leo. The fact that he’d never sent the letter attested to that. He’d probably never even told Frankie.

  True, Mitch wasn’t perfect. And, in a way, it was a pretty good, if spontaneously planned, comeuppance that he received. De Petrie often accused the Leo-McKewens of being unadulterated social climbers, and although he himself attended a half-dozen ‘High Teas’ at their apartment – a rent-controlled pre-war five-room flat on West End Avenue and 100th Street – when he wrote of it to Axenfeld or to others, invariably it was to make fun of the event and some of the more outré characters to be found there. ‘Severely aging heiresses in equally aging satin skirts and bad make-up,’ he’d written. And, of some of the artists, ‘He derives his iota of fame from having painted a portrait of a Surrealist poet none of us ever heard of about three minutes before the old fraud died.’ Even so, the Leo-McKewens often had four or five ‘real’, i.e. currently successful, authors and composers present along with what De Petrie described as the ‘usual crowd of ancient interior decorators, overdressed landscapers and questionably garbed Sotheby’s solicitors’.

  The monthly social teas had come about
for one reason: the Leo-McKewens had run out of money and couldn’t afford dinner parties. The afternoon events were accomplished by guests bringing cookies, cakes and candies. Their hosts provided the place, the atmosphere, the tea and the china.

  Exactly why the Leo-McKewens had run out of money is a bit more complicated. Cummings had written about it at some length. It mostly had to do with unmet expectations on Mitch’s part. The Leo family were successful ethical drug manufacturers, providing among the first so-called ‘generic’ brands on the market. During Mitch’s twenties and thirties, the company money had flowed and had been sufficient not only to buy the family large homes in horsy Montclair County as well as at the Jersey seashore, but also to send the kids to private schools, colleges and to pay an annual stipend to Mitch while he became a writer. Shortly before his fortieth birthday, Mitch’s mother died, and on his forty-first birthday, the family birthday card contained a single check for 10,000 dollars – with a note from his father saying this was Mitch’s share of what was left of his mother’s estate and that, with her death, the annual fund would no longer be continued.

  At first, the Leo-McKewens thought all would be well. They would live off their earnings as authors. Hadn’t Frankie’s last two books gone into hardcover and paperback? His 1978 tome on the ‘new sexuality in America’, titled Switch Hitters, had been reviewed in the Sunday section of the New York Times. As had the next book, published a year later, McKewen’s first truly gay opus, titled Whitman’s Sons and Sappho’s Daughters, an early study of the roots of gay male and lesbian poetry. Frankie was on something of a roll: working on two autobiographical novels – one about growing up in the Midwest, the second about his adventures as a young man in Europe – as well as another sure-to-be-profitable non-fiction title, a cultural history with lots of character sketches about that most openly homosexual period between ancient Greece and modern times: fifteenth-century Florence, the era of Michelangelo, Leonardo and Pope Leo X.

  If Frankie was heading toward a career culmination, with several books behind him and sections of the two novels already being accepted for magazines and anthologies, Mitch Leo’s star was only now for the first time seriously on the rise. By comparison with Frankie’s, it had been far dimmer for the past decade or more.

  In fact, since the two of them had collaborated on their first book, a curious, precocious, partly autobiographical study of UFO sightings and touchdowns, as well as alien abductions and ‘definitive’ signs of time travel (such as the Nazca carvings), titled Signals in the Sky, that book – seldom brought out for guests to inspect at tea, De Petrie acidly noted – had been issued in 1967, when the Leo-McKewens, according to the back-cover photos, were in their young manhood, lavishly coiffed, bearded and mustachioed, tanned, lithe-bodied in their snorkeling gear, and not much different than the Euro-Trash to be found sniffing coke in corners of Regine’s and the Peppermint Lounge or in beach-shack bars on Montego Bay. Oddly enough, while the book was remaindered within two years of publication, Signals had found fans enough since then: it had sold constantly in a ‘special’ edition, meaning at about half of its original price, and available in hardcover only from wholesalers, prominently listed in the ‘Arcana’ or ‘Psychic’ sections of their widely distributed mail-order book catalogues and flyers.

  While Frankie had eventually followed up that volume with another, then another, trendy non-fiction book – rock music and Native American Indians were two subjects, for example – Mitch had returned to his first love, fiction.

  That, after all, was what had initially brought the two together at that famous writers’ colony deep in the Vermont woods, to which each had received grants upon their college graduation in 1962. It had been there, among the hushed groves of towering alder and birch trees and the tiny hippie-style wood and stained-glass writers’ studio cabins that they had first befriended each other; there in clandestine fresh stream beaches and covert clear-as-glass pools, while discussing Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton and critiquing each other’s work, that they’d first discovered their shared sexuality. Partly, the Leo-McKewens had fallen in love and begun an affair as an escape from the voraciousness of two older, obviously husband-hunting, women, a poet and a novelist, at the colony. And while it had been touch and go for another two years afterward – as Frankie moved to Manhattan and Mitch returned to Montclair to live – at last they’d both managed to spend time together again in Florence. There, on the sizable outdoor terrazo connected to the seventh-story flat of a nondescript Contessa, amidst abundant springtime flowers and a bevy of tipsy guests, in view of the Duomo and the Ponte Vecchio, as the sun culminated in Gemini, the Leo-McKewens had exchanged gold rings and married for life.

  Mitch was himself then a potential heir (along with his two brothers) to a third of what promised to be the nicely sized Leo fortune. He needn’t work. He could spend a decade writing what would turn out to be an enigmatic, Jamesian novella, The Younger, published in 1977, with a lovely cover wrap and wonderfully apt interior black and white etchings by a dilettante older friend, whose current beau celebrated by throwing Leo a very toney book party in one of the generally unused galleries of the Frick.

  No one was more surprised than Mitch himself when, in the wake of the novella’s publication, his next book, Refitting Tom Devere, more or less ‘wrote itself’, as he put it in a letter to Axenfeld. No one was more surprised and thrilled when that novel found a good publisher and caught the wave of gay lit hitting the country at the cusp of the 1980s.

  It had been terrifically reviewed, had sold well, and in trade paperback had sold even better. Further opening the creative flood gates. Again, before Tom Devere was out, Mitch was already working on After the Piano Recital, and while that book – odder in content, if very Mitch Leo in its interests – didn’t enjoy the same success of its predecessor, it led to an even more easily penned third novel, Serial Childhood, which took up the character and life of Tom Devere and which, eventually, outstripped both prior books in both sales and critical acclaim.

  It still wasn’t enough financially. Partly because Mitch’s success turned out to be simultaneous with Frankie’s appalling lack of same. The Renaissance study McKewen had labored upon for several years and therefore had counted on to fulfill all, was, when he at last handed it in, sat on for months by his editor before – to the horror of all – being eventually turned down. Although it was subsequently shopped around for the next several years by McKewen’s agent, it didn’t find another publisher and moreover was never finished.

  Frankie’s two novels came to more and more occupy his time and mind – it couldn’t have escaped him that all the other Purple Circlers were succeeding in the area of fiction – but he found writing them hard-going, especially as he wasn’t able to presell either book, which would have provided at least some fiduciary motivation. All those book editors who’d spoken so highly of the published excerpts at lit. conferences and parties now refused to look at his work in progress and demanded to see ‘the finished book’. Which only added pressure on Frankie, who, after all, was an essayist, a miniaturist, who believed in ‘intuitive’ rather than highly crafted writing, and who knew his talents and limitations enough to know he didn’t have the narrative sweep and psychological acuity of a novelist.

  It could not have been easy on their relationship, this final period of McKewen’s non-achievement, coming so directly alongside Leo’s sudden success, but the couple did manage to weather it psychologically, which attested to the strength of their bond. Financially, it was a different matter.

  Mitch’s income, now only advances and royalties (both of which were lower than what McKewen had regularly received for his nonfiction), was not anything like as large or as regular as it had been when his income was a Leo family monthly stipend. On top of that, the Leo-McKewens had developed spending habits over two decades that proved difficult to grow out of. They would primly budget and prudently live a month or two at a time, then one or the other would see something pricey and go
rgeous they had to have, and would blow the equivalent of three budgeted months on, say, a Persian turquoise ring or an Erte letter H watercolor or a Portuguese lace tablecloth. After all, it was difficult growing up to believe someone would always be there to pay and at the same time learn to deny yourself anything.

  Frankie and Mitch kept up the belief that the Leos’ company would get back on its feet and return to its headier profit-making days. If it ever did, his brothers – now managing the company -managed to skim the earnings toward themselves and their families, so Mitch only got it last and least. One could understand the brothers’ point of view: they worked in an office nine to five, forty-eight weeks a year; while Mitch sat a few hours a day at a desk, usually in terrific surroundings – in Florence, in Paris, at Fire Island Pines, at the family beach house. Anyway, didn’t he now have other sources of income?

  Among the other Purple Circlers, however, the truth was more evident: it was clear to those who were better off financially that money to sustain the Leo-McKewen folie à deux would have to be loaned to the couple on a more or less regular basis. Axenfeld and De Petrie and Mark Dodge were the usual lenders. One time, finding himself with a windfall, generous Axenfeld had simply, anonymously, paid their Macy’s account, knowing the Leo-McKewens depended upon charging at the gourmet basement to food shop when they were in straits. To his great annoyance, the duo were certain the bill had been paid by one of the heiresses they cultivated, and they delightedly speculated for weeks which one it had been – until, and to everyone’s embarrassment but his own, De Petrie at last set the two of them straight.