Horse Crazy
Page 1
also by gary indiana
fiction
Scar Tissue and Other Stories
White Trash Boulevard
Gone Tomorrow
Rent Boy
Resentment: A Comedy
Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story
Depraved Indifference
Do Everything in the Dark
The Shanghai Gesture
Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975–2010
Tiny Fish that Only Want to Kiss
To Whom It May Concern (with Louise Bourgeois)
nonfiction
Let It Bleed: Essays 1985–1995
The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt
Utopia’s Debris: Selected Essays
Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World
A Significant Loss of Human Life
I Can Give You Anything But Love
horse crazy
a novel
GARY INDIANA
introduction by
Tobi Haslett
SEVENS STORIES PRESS
New York • Oakland • London
Copyright © 1989 by Gary Indiana
Introduction © 2018 by Tobi Haslett
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher.
Most of this book, some of it in slightly different form, originally appeared in Bomb.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Indiana, Gary, author.
Title: Horse crazy / Gary Indiana.
Description: Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018017496 | ISBN 9781609808617 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781609808624 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Writers--Fiction. | Gays--Fiction. | AIDS (Disease)--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. | Male friendship--Fiction. | Drug addiction--Fiction. | GSAFD: Psychological fiction
Classification: LCC PS3559.N335 H67 2018 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017496
College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. To order, visit www.sevenstories.com or send a fax on school letterhead to (212) 226-1411.
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Introduction
by Tobi Haslett
Sex, hypocrisy, solitude, loss, the punitive affinities that swallow the self—these are Gary Indiana’s themes, jingling through his books like money in Balzac. But rumbling beneath the malice is a melancholy yearning, a mind groping vulnerably for a human link.
“Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people,” declares the narrator of Horse Crazy, whose own loneliness will froth into a mania by the novel’s end. A writer in his thirties, he’s just been named the art critic for a magazine he dislikes. “A new year had begun with ominously good fortune,” pushing him deeper into the New York culture industry, a feudal world ruled by bloated personae and venal logic. The post is prestigious; he greets it with dread. Chained to his column, he will now be a minor celebrity and a downtown figure, “an object of envy, malice, and all the other base emotions that drive the majority of people at all times in every conceivable place and circumstance.” Risible, then, that he wants to be loved.
And Horse Crazy is, by the laxest possible definition, a book about love—about a psyche smashed by what it can’t help but want. The narrator—I’ll call him “the critic”—is infatuated with a younger man, a twenty-seven-year-old artist named Gregory Burgess. But their courtship is pricked by a wincing imbalance. The critic is “established,” and Gregory is not. Gregory is a former heroin addict who makes rent by waiting tables at a passé restaurant, an arrangement he sees as a kind of cosmic abuse. Philippe, his boss, is an erratic French freak who deals cocaine, terrorizes his staff, keeps a gun behind the counter, and has lascivious designs on Gregory (the burden, of course, of his sexual appeal).
Gregory resents the job. He also resents the critic. His column, fame, and chicly accomplished milieu make him the whimpering target of Gregory’s punishments: the lying, cheating, screamed recriminations, and preposterous threats for which he is instantly forgiven, liberated from morality by his lovely face. And Gregory is lovely. He glitters with a mind-shattering sexiness, which he cannily exploits as he sails through the world.
His lies swirl into delusion. His compulsive manipulations grow more reckless and cruel. He might be using the critic to boost himself a bit higher in the art-world pecking order—or maybe he just likes his sexual power. Either way he’s mean, demanding, stroppy, petty: a bundle of malevolent reflexes and bullying tics. “I had always wanted someone to take control of my body and soul, rule my life, fill my consciousness to the exclusion of everyone else,” the critic admits. “And at last someone had, a full-blown psychopath.” So we’re shoved into the cage of the critic’s sexual need.
But Gregory has renounced sex. The restaurant drains his vitality, so he can’t possibly “give you what you want.” Not to mention that his ex-girlfriend Gloria was apparently a vindictive nymphomaniac, an addled banshee whose savage appetite demoted him to the status of mere object—a theme he’s started to probe in his art. Gregory spends his days ripping pages from porn magazines, extracting pictures of limbs and genitals for his “technically sophisticated” collages, which mount a critique, he says, of sex. Or rather, the gleaming fantasy of sex—sex made vulgar and slick by commodity culture. “Something of the zeal with which reformed sinners make themselves odious sparkled across Gregory’s photographs.” So his celibacy is enshrined as a virtue in a world devoured by AIDS.
When Horse Crazy was first published in 1989, William Burroughs invoked Genet—“Fascinating to every man, no matter what his sexual tastes”—Peter Wollen reached for Breton—“a Nadja for New York”—but only the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, perhaps chastened by decades of militancy, thought to allude to Dante: “There’s a circle of hell called the Lower East Side of New York where boys and girls love too much and die too soon. Horse Crazy is one writer’s guided tour.”
It was also Indiana’s first novel. For three years, he’d been the art critic for the Village Voice—a job that placed him in the blast radius of the Lower East Side art scene, the garish bloom of galleries and “spaces” whose existence hinged on the very financial interests then dismantling the neighborhood. Trapped within this microcosm, Indiana sought to censure and expose it, cackling at its follies and chastising its buffoons. He was a canary, a Cassandra—the grimacing superego of a lurid age.
New York in the ’80s. The phrase brims with myths—about art and finance, AIDS and real estate, right-wing schadenfreude and a jagged avant-garde. In Horse Crazy, the critic’s ravings and sorrows are flecked with little musings, swiveling panoramas of a desolate decade. Bohemia is dying, rents are rising, and even the luftmenschen of downtown are gripped by a generalized neurosis and a twitching self-interest—a feeling enforced by a lethal disease. Horse Crazy traces the imprint of AIDS on the consciousness: its terror and humiliations, how it hardens the heart.
And mangles language. Indiana is among the best living prose stylists in English, lushly sensitive to phrasing, timing, patterns, sounds. Paul, a former lover, falls sick, “[a]nd so this body whose secret parts were my main pleasure in life for longer than anyone else’s transforms itself into a fount of contagion.” And Indiana summons the vocabulary of the disease with acrid brilliance: the word “pneumocystis” is
dumped into an otherwise elegant paragraph, and the “fatal sarcomas, pneumonias, and neuropathies” that feast on his friends comprise a kind of brittle clinical slang.
AIDS, in Horse Crazy, is an assault on intimacy, a kind of hyperbole for how hard it is to connect. But it’s also history—history coming into crashing contact with human life, human weakness. AIDS draws and patrols the line between people; it crumbles the body and poisons love. And the disease becomes a cynical alibi for Gregory’s refusal of the critic: “The only safe sex, he says, is if one person jerks off at one end of a room and someone else jerks off at the other, both trying to hit the same spot in the middle of the floor.” This has a chilling, malicious logic. Whole stretches of the novel consist of crazed thoughts and desperate calculations, as Indiana’s characters stare down the barrel of the epidemic. So the psyche lunges for totems and explanations, the kind of magical thinking that needs reasons, signs, clichés:
It wouldn’t be strange to get it and then to decide as Perkins did that this one particular person gave it to you, one out of ten or fifty or a hundred, maybe because that person made you feel something special, had done wonderful things in bed or gotten you to trust him physically and mentally as no one else ever had. . . . You would naturally connect your most vivid memory of pleasure to infection and death because the others weren’t remotely worth getting sick from, just pale skimpy traces of sex crossed with thin trickles of “bodily fluids,” if the two things had to be linked, better for a cherished memory of sex to connect with transmission of the microbe.
To open your life is to threaten it—to die, in effect, for love:
In any case, if you had sex now it was a matter of deciding, even if you took elaborate precautions, whether the degree of risk involved (and who could calculate that?) was “worth it,” whether your need for that kind of experience with another person outweighed, in a sense, your desire for survival.
“Who,” asked Roland Barthes in 1977, “will write the history of tears?” Indiana has written the history of blood, skin, sputum, semen—and of art, lust, money, and fear. We are living, now, in a fearful time. And Gary Indiana is still writing books.
horse crazy
For Betsy Sussler
PART ONE
desire
1
Yesterday I took a miniature trip with M., back and forth on the Staten Island Ferry. The sky was clear and bright, the day was warm enough for us to stand on the deck without a sweater. Going out, we were light-headed and said a lot of silly things to each other, made fun of tourists, joked about the military look of New York Harbor. And then coming back, we felt weighted, withdrawn, ate hot dogs and potato chips in long pockets of silence, sitting inside this time as if the water and the passing sights had been used up on the first Crossing. It was fine going out, barely tolerable coming back. This problem of attrition has been creeping into many experiences lately. Things commence in reckless hope and die away in stifled longing, not that we had hoped for much From the Staten Island Ferry.
M. says the boy he’s been seeing uptown is infatuated with him and mistakenly believes this is love, true love. I know what M. means by “mistakenly” but it often comes to the same thing. Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people.
I dimly recall, from childhood, a movie where a man and a woman meet on the Staten Island Ferry late at night, by chance. It’s gradually revealed that one or the other, maybe both of them, had planned on jumping off the boat. But instead they fall in love, each becoming the other’s ray of hope. Love, the rescuer’s flashlight. Perhaps we all grow up with these salvational fantasies that never get entirely dislodged by experience.
I haven’t the heart to tell my own story, and keep looking for less convoluted fictions. Love like a stone in the stomach, a penance, a noose: love like a crime. Is this about love, I wonder.
There is a wall I run up against, again and again (a dream). At times what’s needed is this blank, horrendous wall. You rise up flush against its stark, gritty surface and can’t move any further. Even if you thwack your skull repeatedly against this wall, becoming bloody and insensible, the wall doesn’t know you, doesn’t yield, doesn’t pity. A pitiless wall, a pity. That’s how it is. Let’s say you think of leaping over it. Well, perhaps you can. But you don’t think you can, which is the same as not being able to. Its too high, just looking at it brings on a spasm of fear. You think: I’ll smoke a cigarette, have a drink, come back to it later. And your absence adds an inch or so to the wall. You return. My God, that’s a big wall. You seek advice about methods of jumping, phone people up. They tell you not to think about it, just jump. Jump blind. Or they might say, Don’t force yourself, take it easy. Jump in little stages. Or: Maybe you’re up against the wrong wall. Or: Try walking around the wall. Slinking around it. Pretend the wall isn’t there. Walk through the wall.
Through the wall. Like passing through an oval mirror with a peeling varnished frame, in a house where everything is running down, and the clock beats insistently while telling the wrong time. It has taken me this long to understand how dreadful it would be to say, That afternoon, I met Gregory Burgess in St. Marks Bookshop, planting the first stout parenthesis of a story that seems, now, really to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I didn’t just meet him, I would say, but froze in his gaze like an animal mesmerized by headlights. And it would not be my first attempt, then, to describe his oval chin, small ears, an unbroken, elegant curve of a nose with a tiny gold loop in one nostril, full lips that break easily into smiles, lips that chap and whiten in cold weather, and often go slack in a rictus of pain that obscures his bright teeth; clear coral eyes, a face fringed with onyx hair—I have more in this plangent vein, but Gregory doesn’t actually look like this, except for the nose ring. Is his chin oval? No. Yes. I don’t know. Neither oval nor square. A nicely formed chin, definitely. Memory doesn’t give me this chin, and the single photograph I possess looks nothing like Gregory: it’s a group shot, taken on my building stoop, Gregory’s sitting behind me, his fist planted firmly in his cheek, pulling the right side of his face off its axis. Memory obscures the immediate tug of Gregory’s beauty, drops the details from his chiseled face, the glinting facets in his unwavering stare. I remember that afternoon in surprisingly intricate detail, but nothing exceptional occurred.
I made a clumsy, untoward effort to meet a total stranger, met him, got his address and phone number with dreamlike ease, established some flimsy pretext to see him again, and later felt foolish. It would be part of this way of telling about it to add that I knew he lived with a woman (he got this across almost instantly, pointedly), furthermore a quite possessive woman much younger than himself; that he worked killingly long hours, in four-day stints, at a French restaurant in SoHo, a job that drove him into spells of numbed exhaustion; and that he was, like most young men in Manhattan at the time, some kind of artist.
But here things bifurcate and become opaque. I don’t know how much of this I really found out that day. It seems important to keep events in order, not to run ahead of things. I’ve told the Gregory Burgess story to myself so many times, so many different ways, and told it to other people, too, for so many different reasons. I met him that afternoon in December, and after that I hardly thought about anything else. It really was that way. Still, questions obscure this story from beginning to end. For example: Did I go home that afternoon thinking, “I’ve met someone I could love.” It must have been like that, but this thought was sliced apart by the feeling that such a person couldn’t possibly love me, he being first of all a lover of women, secondly a physical marvel, thirdly eight or nine years younger than I was. None of which would, by itself make Gregory Burgess unattainable. But on the strength or weakness of this unforeseen, upsetting encounter, I decided, at once, that Gregory Burgess was unattainable, and I embarked almost immediately on the project of seducing him. I would seduce him by laying myself entirely open to him, offering myself unconditionally. Use me, I would beg him. People who look like
him, I thought, are completely selfish. They want everything, and if they know there’s something they can have, without obligation, at any time, chances are they’ll take it, sometime or other. Such is the flawed logic, I could say now.
That night I put aside my fiction of former defeats, former glories, Burma (a country where I have never been but have always wanted to go), and began writing a letter. It began reasonably, as a sort of old-fashioned, literary coda to the afternoon. How pleasant to have met you, and so on, the kind of letter no one ever writes anymore, which naturally has its peculiar charm for the startled recipient. A courtly letter. Spinsterish but sensual. I felt in the brief time we conversed that I was speaking with someone of extremely rare sensitivity, and that you, of course, sensed my physical attraction to you, and were gracious enough to take this in stride, giving me the opportunity to show you the kind of person I am. I know it’s eccentric to come right out with this in a letter, but I have been so moved by your beauty that I, that I, at this point everything floundered, I ripped the letter into shreds and started over. Dear Gregory Burgess, I began, It was obvious when I spoke with you today what I was feeling, and I’m sure you had no uncertainty about the nature of my interest. As you were kind enough to say you are familiar with my writing, I thought I would offer you my feelings in written form, regardless of the consequences. If this alienates you, I perfectly well understand. But I’m crazy about you. When I first saw your face I had no more choice about meeting you or not meeting you than, than, never mind what, I lost any idea of control, I had to talk to you, find out about you. I can’t pretend, even though you seem to have a sympathetic personality (I crossed out “personality” and wrote “character”), that my attraction is any different than that of a stranger who might catch a glimpse of you in the subway or the street. I desire you, it’s as simple and awful as that, and if this doesn’t repulse you, despite your current arrangements, I will propose something disgustingly modern, vulgar, contrary to my own way of doing things, but: I want you. If you ever feel you want me, should you ever have a moment’s urge to make love, I don’t care when, you can phone me up in the middle of the night and come over, use my body for whatever you like, and if it suits you, you can then leave and never have any contact with me again. I don’t know how else to present this. I’m not a subtle person in matters of this kind. I’m open to any urge you might have, however perverse or cruel. It’s idiotic, but I love you.