Visions and Revisions

by Dale Peck

  Terms like “Gen X” and “New Narrative” imply a self-awareness that smacks of backward glances. At the time there was just the fragmented reality of political demonstrations and academic conferences, independent bookstores selling books published by small presses and guerilla xeroxing for those who couldn’t afford even those cheap paperbacks, handmade zines instead of the piss elegance of McSweeney’s. In those heady days before hipsters purchased poverty like a fashion statement, the magazine of choice for young writers like Heather and me was Between C & D, an accordion fold of dot-matrix printer paper that came in a plastic bag, and toward the end there was also a press, High Risk, whose oversaturated Rex Ray collages were the antidote to the bright kitschy covers Knopf’s Vintage line was making all the rage. “New Narrative” was a term that floated around this milieu and, like the term “PWA,” only had meaning if you were already acquainted with it, and even today the genre remains hard to quantify. Less postmodern than post-punk, it had no time for the inebriating irony that had paralyzed American literature in the 1970s. Fear, doubt, and uncertainty were plowed through, not confidently, but of necessity. History had regained its solidity in the most banal, terrifying manner—by asserting its right to kill you—and in response literature returned to the Homeric mode of bearing witness. Sentences were pared down, plots streamlined, self-examination and self-expression voiced in a present tense that measured the past in punches and orgasms, metered the future in breaths rather than years. There was no choate vision of survival, nor even a belief that survival was possible, and as a result New Narrative didn’t have a universal form as much as a unifying ethos, one in which desperation tinged success every bit as much as it did failure.

  Both Heather and I came late to this movement, publishing our first novels in 1994 and 1993, respectively, but we were too young to realize that the writers we admired weren’t our peers but our progenitors. Our teachers. In those days literary “generations” flashed by as rapidly as shuffling cards, and largely as a result of the efforts of writers who are only now reaching their fifties and sixties (if they’re still alive) we were able to launch our careers not with small presses but with Farrar Straus and Giroux in my case, and Doubleday’s boutique Nan Talese imprint in Heather’s. But though we didn’t realize it at the time, Heather and I were betweeners, aesthetically aligned with a group of writers who existed out of the mainstream even as we ourselves were proof that the mainstream could … what? Open its arms and expand its definition of normal? Suspend moral judgment where money could be made? We suspected the latter but operated as though the former were the case, but in the end motive matters less than results. It was only after the fact that we understood our election was predicated on the demise of the writing upon which we’d been weaned, the marginalization of it, by which I mean that critics neglected the literary merits of House Rules and its predecessors in favor of a new obsession: “victim art,” as the reactionary critic Katie Roiphe called it, an epithet that became the hatchet with which all art that portrayed personal suffering without a concomitant “hopeful” moral was cut down—especially art that dealt with sexual abuse and AIDS. The furore reached its nadir in December 1994, when the New Yorker’s dance critic, Arlene Croce, refused to see Still/Here by choreographer Bill T. Jones on the grounds that such “victim art” was “unreviewable.”

  WELL. WHAT AMERICA can’t exclude it absorbs, dilutes, mutes. The quasi-religious fantasy that a pattern hiding behind the chaos will emerge occasionally into view (i.e., the Joycean epiphany) reared its head yet again, and denied New Narrative’s single existential truth: that the end of life implies nothing more tangible than an earlier beginning, and art can do little besides measure the distance from the loss. In the end, New Narrative’s effect was different from what one might have expected, as a varied cohort of writers incorporated aspects of its sensibility into a neutered postmodernism. Much of the New Narrative writing it superseded has been denigrated to second-class status now, while most AIDS writing teeters on the verge of being forgotten or lost. When, in 2011, I created a Wikipedia page listing about 250 books with significant AIDS content, the page was soon deleted, with the justifying arguments ranging from “Are any of these books bestsellers?” to “I do not see any encycolpedic [sic] value for such a list” and “The Category:HIV/AIDS in literature [which at the time listed all of thirty-two books] suffices for works that are of note.”

  What does survive shows up here and there like pieces of samizdat from another era, another world even, another life. I’ve always loved samizdat. The romance of the phenomenon, yes, but also the word itself, largely because the first time I remember hearing it was at ACT UP. The term was applied to the vast stacks of photocopies that we picked up on our way into the Monday night meeting: treatment guidelines, drug studies, bureaucratic analyses, meeting schedules, action plans, contact lists, party flyers, and announcements of events ranging from performances and gallery openings to house parties and memorial services. This collection was never referred to as anything other than “the table” (even though it usually spread over two or three), a twelve- or eighteen-foot-long print banquet down both sides of which several hundred gay men and lesbians, nearly indistinguishable in their Doc Martens and Levi’s and sloganned T-shirts, bent their spiky or shaved heads and served themselves and one another with the ordered geniality of an Amish wedding. I was a pretentious but undereducated twenty-two-year-old who didn’t want to admit he was unfamiliar with a term that had the clannish (ap)peal of jargon, the ignorance of which marked him out as neophyte or, worse, interloper. What I mean is, I heard the word in my head as “same-as-that,” or “sameasthat” really, which led me to think of it as an assertion of status: though these stapled stacks of paper, most written by people with no political background or scientific or journalistic training, lacked the credentials and durability of bound books, they were nevertheless the lifeblood of AIDS activism. Sameasthat: most of the table’s contents survived for only a few hours or a few days, ended up buried in boxes in closets, attics, garages, but to me they were the real library of AIDS, and the glossily jacketed books that trickled out of FSG and Nan Talese were the table’s supplements rather than the other way around.

  The single most significant piece of sameasthat in my life, however, and by far the most resonant document of my AIDS library, came into my world about nine months before I joined ACT UP. It was 1989 and I was in my last semester of college. I worked in a used bookstore, ostensibly to save up for my impending move to the city, though in fact most of my salary went right back into my boss’s till, since I must have bought three or five or a dozen books every week I worked there. At some point that spring Frank, my boss, brought in a cache of hundreds of opera records. The jackets were faded and tattered and spotted with mold, the discs filthy but, beneath their layer of dust, nearly pristine. Their condition attested to a long period of heavy but respectful use and a second interval of less than benign neglect. Each disc had to be taken from its sleeve and washed by hand, a delicate but monotonous job for a twenty-one-year-old who had zero interest in opera, and I was relieved as much as intrigued when five wrinkled sheets of onionskin fell out of a gaudy sixties or seventies-era case containing Bizet’s Carmen. The sheets were as well-worn as the cardboard that had held them, unruled and covered with florid and, as I thought, old ladyish hand-writing, still bright blue despite the fact that the date at the top of the first page read 26 September 1965—the day written before the month, in the European manner. “My dear Gino” was the only other thing I was able to make out before I put the letter aside and returned to the task at hand, and I didn’t decipher the rest until later that evening, alone in my dorm room, my heart quickening as each successive sentence revealed a love story that seemed as stark and gaudy as an opera, as melodramatic and doomed and unreal. Except this love, between a man named Gino and another named Jean-gabriel, was real, or at any rate it had been, twenty-four years earlier, and the next day I asked Frank—as nonchalantly
as possible, and without mentioning the letter—if he remembered the name of the person whose records he’d purchased the day before.

  It was a time in my life when omens seemed to appear everywhere, conflicting, confusing, beguiling. “You have terrible taste in literature,” my boss told me after perusing the stacks of books I’d set aside (almost all of which had been published within the last five years), and he gave me a copy of Frank Conroy’s Stop-Time. My boss knew I wanted to be a writer, but there was no way he could have been aware I’d applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, still less that I’d receive my rejection letter, signed by Conroy, on the very day I finished his memoir (which I loved, and which made the rejection feel personal and portentous). Then there was the matter of sex. I’d waited a long time before coming out, and on the very day I finally allowed myself to have sex my watch stopped. This was the only watch I’d ever owned, the watch I’d bought when I’d come to college two and a half years earlier, the watch that signified my desire to be on time for my adult life, and its battery gave out while I was getting fucked without a condom, and practically at the witching hour to boot: 11:57 P.M. And now there was this letter, which I wanted to see as a totem not just validating my sexuality but repudiating the augury of my watch’s stopped hands. Which is to say: my first sexual experience a year earlier remained my only one, and my conception of “the gay life” was mediated entirely through literature. I was the same age as the letter’s recipient and, like him, lived in New Jersey, but my sights were trained on the “N.Y. temptations” to which I would be immigrating in little over a month. What I mean is, I didn’t know if I wanted to meet Gino or to be Gino, only that I didn’t want my fate decided by a $30 Swatch.

  He died of AIDS! Frank told me brightly, then blushed and dropped his eyes. He’d seen the obituary in the Times, he remembered, and somehow this didn’t surprise me: the fact that Gino was dead, I mean, not that he’d merited a Times obituary. The condition of his records, for one thing, and the fact that they were opera, which I associated with death (not with funerals per se, but with death scenes in movies, the kind of murder and mourning and revenge that insists on a soundtrack). And then, well, forty-four-year-old gay men were dying in legions in 1989. It was something Italian, Frank continued. Gianni, no, Gino, that was it! Gino … Gino …? But he couldn’t remember the last name. He looked for the paper but it was gone. He racked his brain but the only other things he remembered were that Gino had appeared in a Warhol movie, and that later he’d had something to do with music, though Frank didn’t remember in what capacity. As it turned out these were clues enough, though I didn’t realize it for another five years—five years during which I moved to the city and joined ACT UP to end the AIDS crisis and left ACT UP to start my writing career. The signs continued to appear, the most significant of which occurred when the magazine I was working for went out of business and I ran into Derek Link, who offered me the ticket to San Francisco that he’d bought for his boyfriend (the boyfriend he’d dumped me for), who’d just dumped him. It was a trip I couldn’t have taken if I’d had a job, and while I was away my agent got an offer from FSG for my first novel. My new editor’s assistant turned out to be a Warhol fan, which prompted me to mention the letter I’d found—to mention the date and the name Gino and his appearance in Warhol’s films—and without pausing Jennifer said, “Gino Piserchio.” Are you sure? I asked. I think he did some music too. This only strengthened Jennifer’s conviction: Gino Piserchio was the boy on the bed with Edie Sedgwick in Warhol’s Beauty No. 2, she told me, and, later, the composer of the music for Ciao! Manhattan, which, like Carmen, and like Bizet’s own life, and Piserchio’s, was yet another story of early death—in this case Sedgwick’s, whose obituary appears at the end of the film. As a final confirmation we looked up the date of Piserchio’s death: March 22, 1989.

  Of Jean-gabriel’s identity I remain ignorant, although I have to confess I’ve never searched for it very hard. His letter is beautiful and forlorn and beseeching and even a little creepy, but it is also a failure, at least in its intended sense. I’m forty-six now, two years older than Gino when he died, I’ve outgrown my youthful resistance to opera; and Gino was a musician, and an educated one at that: he went to Mannes College of Music and did graduate work at Columbia; he’s considered one of the first musicians to fully exploit the Moog synthesizer. He was, in other words, a music connoisseur, and a connoisseur wouldn’t keep Jean-gabriel’s letter in a copy of Carmen if its suit had been successful. Carmen is the girl who says, When will I love you? I don’t know. Maybe never, maybe tomorrow. She’s a liberated girl, or at any rate a lawless one: she works in a factory, she smokes, she slashes the face of Manuelita to end a fight that she—Carmen—started, then flirts with her guard until he lets her out of jail. When Don José is imprisoned for freeing Carmen she takes pity on him, even thinks she’s falling in love. She asks him to turn his back on his duty and join her as a gypsy, a vagabond, an outlaw. Circumstances keep them together for a while but Carmen quickly grows bored: Don José is, clearly, a good citizen, and Carmen is a free spirit—or, as she puts it in the opera’s most famous aria: Love is a gypsy’s child. It has never known the law. Soon enough Carmen throws Don José over for the bullfighter Escamillo and, in the grip of a madness that can only be whipped up by spurned love and a full orchestra, Don José stabs Carmen rather than relinquish her to another man. It is I who has killed her, he confesses to the crowd, Ah Carmen, my adored Carmen! The opera’s last lines have eerie—icky—resonance with something Chuck Wien says at one point in Beauty No. 2. Edie jostles Gino and he chokes on his drink. “Nice Gino,” Chuck admonishes Edie. “Don’t let Gino die. Sweet Gino. We’re not going to let him die.” “He won’t!” Edie protests, a little petulant, a little forlorn, her upper-class consonants crisp despite the amount of alcohol she’s consumed. “He won’t?” Chuck prompts, and Edie shakes her head. She looks at Gino. “You won’t want to die,” she says, consonants crisp, vowels round and full as embroidered bolsters even as the words formed from these cultured phonemes don’t quite make sense, and in response Gino lays a hand on her naked calf in a gesture that could mean anything, or nothing at all.

  Jean-gabriel says in his first paragraph that he’s responding to a letter Gino wrote him after two years of silence, and one can’t help but wonder what made Gino reach out after all that time to a man he met only once. It’s 1965, remember: Beauty No. 2 has just come out, and Edie Sedgwick has been declared Girl of the Year. Twenty-one-year-old Gino must have basked in the glow she and Andy and the other Superstars gave off, must have felt like one himself. (Edie: “And then you said he wasn’t Beauty No. 1.” Chuck: “Nobody said he wasn’t Beauty No. 1. But that’s true, now that you say it.”) But he is beautiful. Everyone, men and women, want him, and more than a few get him, but through them all he remembers the French boy he fled from two years before and, in a fit of guilt or hubris or, who knows, genuine romance, decides to write him. Who knows what happened by the time Jean-gabriel’s answer came back? Another man maybe (Chuck: “The new is better. That’s what we live for. The new.”) or maybe a woman—Piserchio and heiress Gillian Spreckels Fuller married in 1972, then divorced three years later. At any rate whatever impulse had prompted Gino to write didn’t survive long enough for him to succumb to Jean-gabriel’s heart-on-his-sleeve, cards-on-the-table reply. But the urgency of the Frenchman’s words triggered something in its recipient, nostalgia maybe, a curiosity about what might have been, a desire to be worthy of the kind of love it offered, and eventually the letter took up residence in the sleeve of Carmen. I imagine Gino pulling it out every once in a while, intentionally at first, then accidentally, when he reaches for the case and the thin folded pages fall into his hands. I imagine him reading it while Escamillo and Don José and Carmen herself sing of a love that, because it has been recorded, can never die, but, because its object is dead, can never be consummated. When he does this he is nineteen again, twenty, twenty-one, in my head, in his. Hi
s fifteen minutes are still on the clock. His life isn’t ticking away from him. And isn’t that what art does? Transforms you, in your eyes, and in the eyes of the people who look upon you? Locates you at the beginning of a journey filled with possibility rather than at the end of the road? “I wonder if you are ready to build something ‘marvelous’ with a boy who did not forget you,” Jean-gabriel asks toward the end of his letter, and I wonder if Gino heard this question as Don José’s half-crazed For the last time, demon, will you follow me? or as Escamillo’s more equivocal invitation as he heads for the bullring: And whoever loves me will come there. Or had time and age and illness distilled the experience to the aria:

  Love is a rebellious bird

  that nothing can tame.

  And you call him in vain,

  if it suits him not to come.

  …

  The bird you hoped to catch

  beat its wings and flew away.

  Love stays away; you wait and wait;

  when least expected, there it is!

  All around you, swift, swift,

  it comes, goes, then it returns.

  You think you hold it fast, it flees;

  you think you’re free, it holds you fast.

  Oh, love! Love! Love! Love!

  Sunday 26 September 1965

  My dear Gino,

  What a wonderful surprise! You cannot imagine how much you made me happy receiving your very long letter. Not too long, of course. I was feeling 2 years younger and happy. Thanks, thank you very much. Go on. I am always astonished with your letters: I cannot understand how a so young boy like you is able to write down so lovely and intelligent letters.