AT 3 A.M. WE WENT TO THE DISCOTHEQUE. THEN OUR DAY BEGAN...
I used to sit on the sofa at the Twelfth Floor and wonder. They were so attractive, these young men who disappeared night after night into the frenzied clubs of New York City.
They were tall, with handsome, open faces and strong white teeth, and they were all dead. They lived only to bathe in the music, and each other's desire, in a strange democracy whose only admission ticket was physical beauty. All else was classless: the Puerto Rican boy who passed out on Tuinols washed dishes at CBS, but the doctor bending over him had treated presidents.
It was a democracy such as the world—with its competition and snobbery—never permits, but which flourished in this little room on the twelfth floor of a factory building, because its central principle was the most anarchic of all: erotic love.
Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body, is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS,
"Among School Children"
Midnight
The Deep South
Ecstasy,
It's finally spring down here on the Chattahoochee—the azaleas are in bloom, and everyone is dying of cancer. I am writing you very late at night. We have just one kerosene lamp, and the bugs outside are positively battering the screen at my elbow, trying to get at the light—like so many people we knew in New York trying to get Love, n'est-ce pas?—pushy, pushy, pushy.
I cannot tell you were I am, because I want to make a clean break with my former life. At this moment I know my apartment is rotting beneath a swarm of rat's and roaches; the woman downstairs is coughing her tubercular cough; the man next door is beating up his wife; the sound of canned laughter from an I Love Lucy rerun reverberates up the stairwell; the phone is ringing, and I do not care. I cannot go back. I would rather die like a beast in the fields, amigo, with my face to the moon and the empty sky and the stars, than go back; expire with the dew on my cheeks.
For example: At this instant a rust-red moon is hanging low above the water lilies on the lake, and the leaves of the live oaks gleam in its light. There is not a sound in the world except the ducks in the weeds that take up when the frogs die down. The egrets are nesting there, too, white egrets that, every afternoon at dusk, fly in great flocks to roost in the golden weeds, and after a long, hot day, we sit out under the trees to watch them and feel the breeze that comes up across the water. Everything is in bloom, azaleas and dogwood, the air is soft as talcum powder, so soft you can't imagine people dying here; you imagine them crumbling to death, like biscuits left out in the rain, biscuits and talcum powder and azaleas rotting beneath the bushes in drifts of petals—and at noon, dear, the odor of pine needles rises up from the earth when I walk through the woods, rises up and envelops me in a cloud, and one feels like swooning.
There are convicts along the roads down here, cutting the grass while a man with a rifle watches them; there are convicts and egrets and azaleas and rust-red moons, and water moccasins and pecan farms, and outside my window at this moment a brown thrasher sleeps by the nest he is building. He brings one twig at a time and then stands on the branch outside it, looking all around, guarding his work; it is fascinating, and so much nicer than those sooty pigeons. (How do they live in that filth up there? How did I?)
And the boys downtown who walk around in blue jeans and no shirts, lanky, long-limbed southern boys—and our Irish priest who just returned from the missions in Guinea! We go to mass every week and are quite active in church affairs. I am in love with him, and the mockingbirds and hot blue skies and intense white clouds under the noonday sun, and the pine trees that bristle in the heat, as if they were plugged into electric sockets, and the flies droning over the gardenias, and the red skies at dusk crossed by egrets flying low over the lake. At noon I lie in the hammock in our garden and listen to the mockingbirds carrying on high up in the live oaks and watch the cardinals dart through the Spanish moss.
I will tell you this much: We live on a farm near a small town filled with retired postmasters, most of whom are dying of cancer. Tomorrow Ramon and I are going over to the neighbors to help them install a septic tank. I cannot tell you how happy I am to be helping people install a septic tank, instead of listening to friends who call at three A.M. to tell me they're committing suicide. Americans are a practical people! We need practical problems. I would MUCH rather help someone install a septic tank than provide him with a reason for living—it is very easy to install a septic tank, but the latter is of course impossible. There are no Suicide Hotlines down here. If they want to end it all, they row out onto the lake, very early in the A.M. when the family is asleep, and blow their brains out where only the ducks can hear! Saves so many message units, don't you think?
Do write. We pick up our mail in Atlanta once a week, when Ramon goes up to buy fertilizer, pumps, and things like that—big girl stuff.
Agathe-Hélène de Rothschild
The Lower East Side
New York, N.Y.
Vision,
It was spring here, too, last week—Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed. And down in your old neighborhood, darling, the bag ladies were sleeping outside again on the steps of the St. Marks Dispensary, and the whores were in hot pants, and the Polish men standing in front of your building in those dark suits & hats, as if they were waiting for a cortege to begin. EVeryone thought spring had come! And then it dropped thirty degrees in one afternoon, snowed the next morning, Bob was mugged on Ninth Street, and we are right back to a New York winter.
Flamingo had a White Party last night—two muscle numbers came in DIAPERS, Bob wore a sequined Halston top, the Baron Ambert was there, and two Egyptian women who were running around with Sutherland and who asked me if I thought they should paint their cunts! I told them that one should not draw attention to unpleasant things. Sutherland said the only reason he came was that he dared not defy the evening papers; Hobbs told him that a well-bred woman appears in print on only three occasions: her birth, marriage, and death. "Yes, darling," said Sutherland, "but I'm not that well-bred." The music was atrocious: that roller-skating music they're turning out now that discos are big business. It wasn't till six, when most everyone had gone, that he started to play the good stuff. Gene Harris sat on a banquette all night with a celestial Puerto Rican boy who was licking his arm every time I looked—I was ready to be taken to Bellevue.
So much for the life of the mind—I am in fact so depressed that last night while Bob Cjaneovic was sitting on my face, I began to think how futile life is, no matter what you do—it all ends in Death, we are given such a short time, and everything truly is, as Ecclesiastes says, Vanity, Vanity, Vanity. (Of course that only made me burrow deeper, but still—to have the thought.)
Perhaps that's why I walked out of Cadwalader, Wicker sham & Taft last month. It's true. I could not write another will, or letter of credit, or memorandum, so I've started to hook for a living. I'm very good. I can do it with anyone: old men, harelips. I give enemas, and one fellow who lives on Sutton Place just asks to smell my wet hair. THAT'S an easy hundred! I have one marvelous old guy who used to be a screenwriter, and knew EVeryone in Hollywood in the thirties, and during sex the phone rings and it's always Joan Fontaine!!
; I'm also doing lots of jockstrap things, at fifty bucks a throw (less the price of the jockstrap, which they get to keep). I have a man on Sixty-fourth Street who pours Bosco and whipped cream into my jock while I stand there, and he jerks off!!
(There's a big market in stained underwear, and smelly jockstraps, I'm told, darling—could we make a killing!)
As for Sutherland, he spent yesterday in Bergdorfs IN FULL DRAG—in a Halston George smuggled out of the shop for him. He had the saleswomen bill his purchases to a house in East Hampton! Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
Your first lover is very depressed; he thinks the West is being destroyed by the labor unions, that people no longer believe in anything, and the blacks have ruined the city, et cetera. Then he was mugged last night—by a white teenager—and spent the evening in Bellevue.
I myself was roughed up by three Serbo-Croatian security guards at the Plaza Hotel last night, where I went on a call. (And I thought these things only happened in East Germany!) I will not bore you with the rest of the story, except to say my left leg is now in a cast, and we're suing everyone.
So you see, you're missing nothing up here. Although everyone misses you. I have one more thing to tell you, more shocking than my new career, no doubt, and it's this: While recuperating from last night's "interrogation" I've started writing a novel that I want you to read. A gay novel, darling. About all of us. Would you, could you, give it a read?
Yours in Christ,
Madeleine de Rothschild
P.S. I'm sorry everyone is dying of cancer, but be careful; I'm beginning to think cancer is contagious. I wouldn't want to lose you just yet.
Three o'clock
The Deep South
Madness,
I just finished scrubbing the church altar for the World Day of Prayer.
Please do send your novel on. This is the perfect place to read, and that is all I want to do with that life—read about it. One thing Ramon says is: Keep the chapters short. Ramon says no one has a very long attention span anymore, and that's why the world is so unhappy. (God knows it was true of us.)
However, I must caution you, love: Those things may be amusing to us, but who, after all, wants to read about sissies? Gay life fascinates you only because it is the life you were condemned to live. But if you were a family man going home on the 5:43 to Chappaqua, I don't think you'd want to read about men who suck each other's wee-wees! Even if people accept fags out of kindness, even if they tolerate the poor dears, they don't want to know WHAT THEY DO. Canons of taste must be observed, darling. People are tired of hearing about sex, anyway. And the story of a boy's love for a boy will never capture the world's heart as the story of a boy's love for a girl. (Or a boy's love for his DOG—if you could tell that story again, this country would make you rich as Croesus!) Also you would have to make your novel very sad—the world demands that gay life, like the life of the Very Rich, be ultimately sad, for everyone in this country believes, down deep in their heart, that to be happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMILY—a wife and 2.6 kids and a station wagon and a big dog and an elm tree with a tire hanging from it on a rope. Please, darling, there is not much variation of opinion in this country, or any country, for that matter; the whole world wants to be like My Three Sons. So (a) people would puke over a novel about men who suck dick (not to mention the Other Things!), and (b) they would demand it be ultimately violent and/or tragic, and why give in to them?
Anyway—contrary to the activists who want the world to believe not only that Gay Is Good, but Gay Is Better—gay life does have its sadness.
Your novel might serve a historical purpose—if only because the young queens nowadays are utterly indistinguishable from straight boys. The twenty-year-olds are completely calm about being gay, they do not consider themselves doomed. Someone should record the madness, the despair, of the old-time queens, the Great Queens whose stories, unlike Elizabeth of Austria's(!), have never been told: Sutherland, She Who Must Be Obeyed, and Epstein—the true loonies of this society, refusing to camouflage themselves for society's sake.
However, I don't think a novel is a historical record; all a piece of literature should do, I think, is tell you what it was like touching Frank Romero's lips for the first time on a hot afternoon in August in the bathroom of Les's Café on the way to Fire Island. If you can do that, divine!
So I think your task is nearly impossible, but send it on. I'd love to sit under the Spanish moss with a glass of lemonade and some pecan pralines, and read a novel written by a dear friend! How very southern! And I grow more fond of the South every day. The only part of this country with any manners whatsoever, and it's merely because people have no manners anymore that they are going to blow themselves up. I enclose one azalea, a faded shrimp color; I don't know what it will be when you get it.
Hélène de Sévigné
Midnight
The Lower East Side
Delirium,
Just returned from an Episcopalian priest, who is apparently very popular with his congregation in a little town in Connecticut—trés chic, of course. The man is so handsome, and so witty, and so charming—he recited psalms for me, and then had me beat him up with the butt of a machete and spit all over his face (the strain of being popular, I guess). And then I went to the Pierre, where lives Duncan Uhr, a boy with one of the biggest trust funds in New York, and one of the biggest dicks (a double legacy). He is quite intelligent, but he sits in the Pierre all day eating spaghetti and watching reruns ofI Love Lucy and having callboys come over; or he goes to the Baths at night. It was rather embarrassing, however, because WE KNEW EACH OTHER AT CHOATE! However, he had forgotten this till I reminded him, after our transaction was complete.
I do not know whether to use as a quote to open my novel a line of Nietzsche or the Shirelles:
Life can never be
Exactly what you want it to be.
(from "Dedicated to The One I Love")
In fact, I don't know whether the novel should be done along the lines of Auntie Mame, or Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; it has elements of both.
About your objections—which I appreciated—agree with Ramon, everyone's attention span is too short, and that is what's wrong with the world; however, as to nobody wants to read about fags!
I can't help its being gay. I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay, I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time—remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?—I am a doomed queen.
I would LIKE to be a happily married attorney with a house in the suburbs, 2.6 kids, and a station wagon, in which we would drive every summer to see the Grand Canyon, but I'm not! I am completely, hopelessly gay!
In fact when Stanford sent me a questionnaire asking what was the peak experience of the past ten years of my life, a voice inside answered without hesitation: sucking Alfredo Montavaldi's cock. (It certainly meant more than Professor Leon's Chaucer seminar.)
But let me reassure you, my novel is not about fags. It is about a few characters who just happen to be gay (I know that's a cliché, but it's true). After all, most fags are as boring as straight people—they start businesses with lovers and end up in Hollywood, Florida, with dogs and double-knit slacks and I have no desire to write about them. What can you say about a success? Nothing! But failures—that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff! that fascinates me. The fags who consider themselves worthless because they are queer, and who fall into degradation and sordidness! It was those whom Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH! (One of my clients has an account with a potato chip firm—I sit on his face.)
So you see I've written
about a small subspecies only, I've written about doomed queens. Capisce?
It’s very cold again; I passed the woman who lives next door coming up the stairs—she was drunk, as usual, and had to grab the railing to keep from falling over. She has such a sad face, the faded face of a woman who was once pretty, and now her face is just resigned, and it gives me a chill in my bones. THAT is what I want to write about—why life is SAD. And what people do for Love (everything)—whether they're gay or not.
Victor Hugo
High Noon
Chiggers & Spanish Moss
Life Itself,
Just came in from picking strawberries—big, beautiful ones—it is so good to work in the earth, dearest, to have Dirt under your fingernails—and not coming through the telephone, for a change! (Oh, that greasy receiver!) I cannot tell you how peaceful it is outside in the yard. It is high noon, love; everything is stunned by the heat; perfect silence, even the birds are napping; a faint wind blows through the screen, a wind far more caressing than any human lover's lips; and I feel at perfect peace with the universe. And how much there is in it! Yesterday I cleared some grass around a palm tree to fertilize it, (the farmers down here use banana skins, it gives the soil potassium) and I uncovered the glistening, almost liquid body of a baby snake—a striped, gray, wet body, which until then had been growing in a little cavern of grass and earth beside the palm tree trunk; I found, too, a turtle egg, very white and veined, like marble, or hard sugar; and a beautiful boy in a rowboat, fishing in the weeds offshore, with a hunting knife in his belt, in all the stillness and the heat.
Forgive me for boring you with all of this. However, there is no news down here, as you can well imagine—other than my turtle egg, and that the organist at church is sick, and Ramon's grandmother, too, who is visiting us. It occurred to me last night as I was bathing Señora Echevarria that the real sadness of gay life is that it cuts us off from experience like this: to be in a shadowed room at dusk on a spring evening, wiping the forehead of an old Cuban lady (who at least does not claim to have come from a Wealthy, Aristocratic Family of Havana, like all those queens in New York) while Ramon spoke to her in Spanish (alas, I know only French; and why? Because when I first came to New York, Sutherland told me there were only two requirements for social success with those queens in the Hamptons: a perfect knowledge of French and a big dick) and there was so much LIFE in that room, not the hothouse, artificial, desperate life we led up there in Gotham, but LIFE as it is in all its complexity and richness. For what is the real sadness of doomed, queens? That they run in packs with one another waiting for the next crow's foot to appear, and wondering how many more seasons they can spend on Fire Island before they have to take a house in upstate New York. Homosexuality is like a boarding school in which there are no vacations. My God!
Dancer From the Dance: A Novel Page 1
