The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  ‘He told me that first night that he and Mitch had been together since college days, but that they both slept around outside of the relationship. They both had boyfriends. They were both what he called “Blackhawks”, a term I’d never heard before. Mitch himself had had a boyfriend for almost a decade, but Frankie hadn’t had one in a few years. Now he was ready. Was I?

  ‘It all happened so fast, there seemed to be no way to stop it. He insisted on using condoms from the beginning. I didn’t find out he was HIV positive till a few months later. I never went to one of their teas, although I was invited several times. I did meet several brothers who’d gone out with either Mitch or Frankie and who told me I was in “good hands”. These were good people. They stood by you. I was surprised by how many of the group had slept with them. How beloved Frankie was as a buddy long after the sex was over with. All of which recommended him to me. Once Frankie started getting sick, which he did really sudden, Mitch kept me informed of what was going on. He had me up to Frankie’s hospital room, allowed me to stay there as long as I wanted. He asked my opinion in all medical treatment matters. He treated me like family. He made sure I got to speak my piece at Frankie’s memorial service, although I was pretty stunned, out of it, by then, never having lost anyone but one distant old grandpa before in my young life.

  ‘I guess it was Mitch’s doing that got all of Frankie’s papers to me a month later, and before Mitch himself died. Frankie hadn’t made a will. But it was Frankie’s wish and Mitch let everyone know that. By that time Mitch had already spoken to someone at the Timrod Collection and he believed they would probably approach me about buying them. Mitch told me, “You made Frankie so happy. Now it’s time for him to do you some good.” That was nice of him, don’t you think? ’Course, it took another ten, fifteen years to get it all settled.’

  We’d stopped work and were standing, half sitting on the edge of the work desk. Camden had opened a fruit juice for each of us and we’d sipped at them until they were empty. All earlier hostility was gone. As he’d spoken about the past, Camden himself had somehow altered, to become that naive young man of sixteen Frankie McKewen had met. It was easy to see the attraction. He must have been delightful, so full of life, so filled with promise, before the multiple deaths and the drab reality had set in and it was all over and never again would be so glorious.

  He was calmer now. So much so, that I felt able to say, ‘That was eighteen years ago. Surely a great deal has happened since then?’

  Camden sighed. ‘A great deal and not much of it good. I sometimes think that if Frankie came back and saw me now, he’d be real disappointed. But then, you see, it’s not all my fault. It seems to be my fate to get involved with things and people, projects and groups, just as they’re ending … falling apart … dissolving. The Black Poets in New York. A theater group in Philly after that. A black arts project in Oakland. A film production company in Ladera Hills. Seems whenever I get involved in something, it’s about over. You could say I’m the finishing man.’

  ‘You’re making a start now,’ I argued. ‘By the way, I’ve been racking my brains about something. The name of this place. Where did you get it?’

  ‘The Boxer Rebellion,’ he said. ‘The Chinese who tried to get the foreigners out of their country in the nineteenth century called themselves “The Righteous and Harmonious Fist of the People”.’

  ‘Of course!’

  Since we were getting along so well, I told Camden what it was I was looking for. He listened carefully. I knew it might be difficult to get him to admit to me that he’d held stuff back from the Timrod Collection. But I had to know. I kept asking about diaries, letters, journals, rather than fiction or non-fiction manuscripts, stressing that I was really interested in any material from McKewen’s early days, hoping that as that would predate the Purple Circle’s existence, he might have felt justified in holding it back from them, salting it away while awaiting a future Frankie McKewen revival.

  Unlike the other heirs and executors of the Purples, Camden had not put anything on computer, he told me, never mind organize it by page number and number of mentions. He said he did have a few hard-copy lists of MSS and he’d kept photocopies of everything he’d given to the collection – presumably that was what was in those cardboard boxes encircling his futon. Nor did he seem to be as up on the material as some others. Perhaps he’d never even read it all through. Perhaps that would explain why Len Spurgeon’s name elicited not a glimmer of a response from him. He seemed extremely hesitant before he finally said, ‘Whatever it is, this has to be between the two of us, you understand.’

  ‘Meaning if I publish it, I can’t mention the source in my attributions?’

  ‘You can,’ Camden said, ‘But only if you say a “family member” or a “former friend or lover”.’

  ‘That can be done,’ I agreed.

  ‘And you have to evaluate it, tell me how much you think I could get to have it published.’

  ‘I’m not a book editor,’ I said, ‘but I’ll try.’

  ‘Also you have to agree to get someone who is a book editor to look at it for possible publication. And you have to agree to provide or to find someone else even more appropriate than yourself to provide a – what do you call it? – a preface? Or an introduction.’

  ‘Is it a Frankie McKewen book? An early, unpublished book?’

  ‘It’s’ – Camden Phoenix smiled and his eyes looked to be the color of old hundred-dollar bills – ‘Frankie McKewen’s “Berlin Diaries”, which,’ he quickly added, ‘you’ve never heard of. Because no one has. He wrote them in the early ’70s in Europe. I found them by chance, inside a box that contained an early draft of Whitman’s Sons. So? Are we agreed?’ he asked.

  ‘Agreed,’ I said.

  We shook hands then high-fived our palms.

  I waited nervously for the next ten minutes it took him to locate and get the MS. Before he handed it over, he said, ‘Maybe we should put this in writing?’ He took another ten minutes to locate an old Brother Word Processor, a glorified typewriter, to have me keyboard and then have him read over and approve a written agreement between us. He asked me to add in a clause in which I relinquished any and all future monies connected to publication in any medium.

  ‘Now you’ve got to leave. My aikido class begins in five minutes.’ I was so astounded by this news, I let him thrust the MS into my arms.

  ‘There’s a Denny’s up the street on Ventura Boulevard,’ Camden said. ‘You can take it there and read it through. The class lasts an hour and a half. That should be enough time. Bring it back when you’re done.’

  Naturally I would have preferred it if Frankie McKewen’s ‘Berlin Diaries’ was an unexpected masterpiece suddenly come to light. What literary scholar wouldn’t have wanted to be connected to such a discovery? And McKewen’s reputation could have used a shot in the arm. None of his books were in print. Only two of his titles had been available at the time of his death, the perennially titillating 1978 Switch-Hitters, McKewen’s study of the leather scene – gay, straight and bisexual – and the 1971 Signals in the Sky, the book on UFOs and other strange phenomena he’d co-written with Mitch Leo, a book by then already two decades old and for which neither they, their agent nor lawyer could ever obtain a sales statement for its very long run of being ‘remaindered’. Of the nine Purple Circlers, Frankie McKewen was the one today most ignored and forgotten, except maybe for Rowland Etheridge, and like Etheridge this was sad because he’d begun with so much promise: following the UFO book, another four non-fiction titles out of two publishers in less than a decade. Even more sadly, Frankie’s books had been reviewed in the major media, had gotten attention outside the book world, and he and Mitch and all their friends had believed he was headed toward long-term literary fame, and they all behaved as though this were so.

  That, of course, only made it all the more sad, strangely sad, when Frankie’s career seemed to come to a full stop in the same year that Mitch Leo, his lover’s, began
to rocket up. ‘It was as though,’ Reuben Weatherbury had written in the intro to the second Reader, ‘there was a large talent between the Leo-McKewens, but alas only enough talent for one to enjoy at a time.’ Irian St George in his book on De Petrie speculated further, wondering if ‘this folie à deux wasn’t indeed something more, a vampiric relationship, à la Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, where the energy, talent, ability, the life-force itself, was sucked out of one by the other, taking turns at varying times’.

  True, there had been a brief flurry of excitement surrounding the publication of McKewen’s posthumous novel A Boy From Quad Cities two years after his death. But that was in 1991. A lifetime ago in the publishing world, not to mention in gay literature, with its more than usual share of meteoric ascents – and fizzling crashes. And, as Erling Cummings had pointed out in his own book, McKewen’s novel might not have gotten the attention it did if it hadn’t coincided with the publication of Reuben Weatherbury’s well-reviewed first volume of The Purple Circle Reader. The novel hadn’t sold more than 5,000 copies, hardcover and trade paperback, and a few years later it too was gone. And while that first volume of the Reader had also never been a best-seller, it had become a steady one, eventually adopted for college use in the many lesbian and gay lit. courses that had popped up in the late 1990s. Cummings had openly wondered why McKewen’s own study of lesbian and gay literary precursors, Whitman’s Sons and Sappho’s Daughters, wasn’t also kept in print, or reprinted and used for courses. The critic/biographer thought it ‘good enough in its insights, wide-ranging in its allusions and references, if lacking the usual scholarly graces’.

  Both he and Fleming had also mentioned McKewen’s In the Spirit of Chief Pontiac as a potential reprint. That 1976 study of how several once rich and powerful Native American cultures had or – more often – had not managed to survive the twentieth century was not only ahead of its time as a sociological study, it was also one of the earliest representations of ‘successful Indians’, including the Lenape-Sonorans, a southern California tribe that held onto traditional oil-rich lands and never lost wealth or power.

  The book on S/M life was one Frankie McKewen had been planning to write for some time and one reason he’d ended up in Germany in the spring of 1974, and come to pen a diary. The more specific reason for being there was research he needed for the book he had already half written, his 1975, I am You and You are Me. McKewen’s story of the rise of British rock music of the 1960s and its enormous influence on the American public and on American musical artists would become his best-selling title, coming out in four hardcover and two mass-market paperback editions, totaling 300,000 copies. It was this book and those on Native Americans and the S/M world that were responsible for him always seeming to have a book contract. That book’s title, taken from a Beatles’ song, gave precedence to the Fab Four. McKewen had come to believe that it was in Hamburg and Prague and Berlin, in small, smoky dive-like clubs, that the quartet had spent years perfecting their songs, their ensemble, their act, before they – and the Stones and the Who and the Animals – exploded first on the British, then the American (and world) publics. Frankie felt he had to be on the spot, to interview club managers and hangers-on, once contemporary groups still playing the venues, people who’d seen and heard them, the girls (sometimes the boys) members of the various rock bands had picked up, to get a sense of what had really been going on a decade before.

  The original plan was for Mitch to join Frankie for three months in Germany. After all, they lived and traveled together. But the money somehow failed to materialize. Mitch’s favorite aunt was diagnosed with leukemia. The trip was reduced to a month and a half, and Mitch stayed home.

  Unfortunately for Phoenix, and for me, Frankie McKewen’s ‘Berlin Diaries’ wasn’t anything more than working journals about the vagaries and obstacles and wrong turns in his travels, the slowdowns and about-faces and dead ends of his research, his sometimes – usually not – successful attempts to connect up with the people the Beatles or Stones had known, and the people he was meeting in the clubs, most of whom were destined to never rise above this local fame. McKewen’s descriptions of characters and places weren’t more than utilitarian, his grasp of what was happening in central Europe not sophisticated in politics or sociology, and when he did get someone interesting to interview, he didn’t dig deep, possibly afraid he would scare off the interviewee. So while I wouldn’t be able to tell Camden Phoenix that he’d been stashing something worthwhile all these years, someone at some future date might well edit it, issue the little book out of some university press. I’d try to interest Weatherbury in having it done.

  More crucial to my own purposes, the journals, which went along for some fifty-three pages without an enormous amount of interest, suddenly at page fifty-five contained this:

  … one of those allegedly outré leather parties common here in Berlin, where everyone gets together in some odd, large, unheated, unair-conditioned, temporarily unused formerly commercial structure – an old bakery, or recent pig slaughterhouse, cleaned up, still somehow redolent of their recent unsavory past. Karla had invited me and told me I’d meet her closest friends, Hei-ko and Hei-jo and Hei-pe. Japanese gentlemen, I assumed from their names. Wouldn’t you? But it turned out that they were merely hip young Berliners, their names short for Heinz-Konrad, Heinz-Joachim, and Heinz-Peter! We were all dancing in a circle, the three Heis, Karla, some older women with hennaed hair and kohl-smeared eyes, when I suddenly felt someone looking. The feeling went on for another ten minutes, so I could no longer deny it. I excused myself from the group, went over to the side of the huge, cool space where Pilsner in litre-sized bottles was selling, got one, sipped and looked around myself, trying to determine where the odd feeling was coming from.

  There he was. Directly in front of me. Wearing a black leather vest over his shirtless, blond-tufted chest. A black motorcycle cap askew over one eye, and the tightest black denims I’ve ever seen. Yummy. It took me maybe one minute to remember him. We’d first and last met on the athletic grounds of Bettendorf High. Two or three classes as well as one or two teams had been out that afternoon when one of those astonishing Midwestern squalls had arisen as though out of nowhere at all. As these sometimes were accompanied by tornadoes, we’d been advised to seek shelter. When the sky darkened and the apple-sized hail began pelting, the only shelter I could see around was a half-underground athletic equipment shed. I ran for it.

  Inside, already soaking wet when I arrived, was this boy, someone on the track and field team practicing long jumps in the center of the oval around which I’d been running twenty laps of punishment thanks to that fuck Coach Jugend, who complained during our practice scrimmage that as his lead running back, I needed to ‘get the lead out of my ass’.

  We slammed the slanted door shut, then because the wind was grabbing so hard, bolted it shut. We peered together out the little window at the storm lancing the ground, listened to the noise of hail pelting from above, and suddenly – I didn’t know how – we had our hands all over each other and were pulling our soaked clothing off and he was on his knees, blowing me, then I did the same, and then we took turns screwing each other, all in the fifteen minutes it took for the storm to arrive, cause havoc in the stadium area, and leave.

  ‘Ken?’ I asked last night, not sure of his name. ‘Len,’ he said. ‘Len Spurgeon. You’re from Iowa? Right?’ I said right. We shook hands. Stood next to each other, sipping Pilsner. ‘You still in track and field?’ I asked. ‘No.’ he said. ‘I’m a professional baseball player. But I still suck dick and fuck guys. See that –’ pointing out this big Teutonic Adonis dancing in front of us – ‘he’s my boy!’

  We jawed a bit more. Len was in Germany since last year’s off-season. He wasn’t happy with his league contract offer, so he’d come to work for the government, helping the US Air Force set up baseball programs at their bases in Nuremberg and Pennemunde. He knew a lot about Germany and especially Berlin, as he was currently working out o
f the air base at Tempelhof, if I needed tips. Said he’d show me around if I wanted. He had plenty of spare time. I said sure. So we exchanged phone numbers. For a second I thought maybe we’d get a replay of that afternoon in the equipment shed, then Adonis showed up and made it clear that Len was all his.

  The next week of journals contained nothing about Len. Then there’s an account of a political demonstration of students, postgraduates and punks at the Marianneplatz, a popular hangout in Kreuzberg, where many younger West Germans had moved in, becoming squatters in apartments emptied in 1960 because they were so close to, indeed faced the narrow-at-that-point no man’s land on either side of the omnipresent Berlin Wall. McKewen can’t figure out the reason for the demonstration or the protests that have been going on for a week already, centering on nearby Yorckstrasse. Something to do with a Berlin newspaper publisher. Or a new residence law. He’s not sure. Although it is clear that the West Berlin police will soon move in on the crowd as they’ve done before. During the demonstration/picnic/music festival, Len Spurgeon makes a sudden appearance, dressed casually rather than formally in black leather, but without his Adonis, and finding the whole thing boring, says ‘This Oranienstrasse scene is so yesterday, don’t you think?’ He drags Frankie off in his shiny new Opel coupe and deposits McKewen and himself inside a large, old-fashioned, mahogany, mirror and chandeliered coffee house close to the toney Kurfürstendamm. There, amidst watercress and schnitzel sandwiches and huge glasses of Viennese coffee mounded mit Schlag, Len asks Frankie if he would like to accompany him to his tailor, a Franco-White Russian named Gyoetz who does superb work and doesn’t charge that much. Not only does Frankie go along with Len, but he ends up ordering his very first ‘bespoke’ suit, which Len arranges to get him at a good price. Furthermore, they’ll meet in two weeks to pick the suits up and then they’ll celebrate not at Cafe Einstein but at the even more famous Krantzler for nesselrode pie.