by Michael Nava
“Time passed and still no Professor Barton. We glanced at our watches, sneaked looks at each other, but no one spoke. Finally, the door opened and shambling into the room was a small woman in cat eye glasses who, in my memory, was clutching a sheaf of books and papers and a cup of coffee with a big black purse slung over her shoulder. She arranged herself in an armchair, brushed dog hair off her blouse, pushed her own thick, black hair back from her sharply pointed face, smiled warmly at us, and lit a cigarette.”
“Good morning!’ she exclaimed cheerfully. “I’m Ruth Barton.”
That voice! Slightly gravelly, rather low, a little breathless. Ruth’s voice was her signature: you could hear the Sweetwater, Texas childhood; you could hear the flat Midwestern and Western intonations from her years at the University of Wisconsin and in Colorado; but, most of all, you could hear in her voice the lively, inquisitive, humorous, and skeptical intelligence that made her such a compelling presence, notwithstanding her unassuming appearance.”
“Ruth did not look like a college professor to my seventeen-year-old eyes. She looked like one of the nice lady librarians who worked at the reference desk at my hometown library. But Ruth was to a small town librarian what an astrophysicist is to a high school science teacher; same genus, very different species.”
Among the many gifts she gave me, Ruth introduced me to mysteries. She was an avid fan of Rex Stout and I consumed all the Nero Wolfe novels he had written to that point. Having exhausted his work, I began to read other American and English mystery writers. I was aware, of course, that these were “entertainments,” but because Ruth had recommended them, I was unaware they were considered unliterary. She was a brilliant Yeats scholar and, while unpretentious, supremely cultured. She would never give me junk to read. (And anyway, hadn’t so magisterial a figure as T.S. Eliot proclaimed that poetry, my undergraduate end-all and be-all, was “only a superior form of entertainment”?) As a reader of fiction, I did not distinguish between “literary” and “genre” fiction. I read novels that gave me pleasure and that spoke to me. Those are still my criteria for fiction.
After college, I continued to read mysteries appreciatively if randomly, hopping from Ross Macdonald to John D. MacDonald, from Josephine Tey to P.D. James. Just before I started law school in 1978, I discovered the novels of Joseph Hansen. At that point, he had published three of his twelve mysteries: Fadeout (1971), Death Claims (1973), and Troublemaker (1975). Although Hansen’s protagonist, David Brandstetter, was an insurance investigator rather than a private detective, the tone was classic American noir as was the setting, Los Angeles and environs.
Rereading Fadeout after thirty-five years, I am still struck by Joe’s distinctive style, brisk, spare and poetic. Joe, too, began his literary life as a poet. (Aside: as I explain below, Joseph Hansen and I became friends and I cannot think of him as other than Joe.) Fadeout begins with Brandstetter standing on a wooden bridge in the rain looking down at the swirling waters where, a couple of weeks earlier, a car belonging to a man named Fox Olson, insured by Brandstetter’s company, crashed through the railing. The mystery: Olson’s body has not been recovered. Without proof Olson is dead, Brandstetter’s company will not pay the claim.
“Fog shrouded the canyon, a box canyon above a California ranch town called Pima. It rained. Not hard but steady and gray and dismal. Shaggy pines loomed through the mists like threats . . . Down in the arroyo water pounded, ugly, angry and deep.” The mood set, we are introduced to Brandstetter who is carrying a near-suicidal burden of grief. He describes driving across the bridge “with sweating hands. Why so careful? Wasn’t death all he’d wanted for the past six weeks? His mouth tightened. That was finished. He’d made up his mind to live now. Hadn’t he?” And then, a few pages later, we learn the source of his grief: “Bright and fierce, he pictured again Rod’s face, clay-white, fear in the eyes, as he’d seen it when he found him in the glaring bathroom that first night of the horrible months that had ended in his death from intestinal cancer.”
My pulse quickened: Rod?
Brandstetter is grieving the loss of his lover, a man named Rod Fleming. In chapter six, we get the whole story. In a flashback, Brandstetter, recently discharged from the army at the end of World War II, enters a furniture shop on Western Avenue in Los Angeles to buy a bed. He sees, across the crowded room, as it were, a young salesman, short and dark, with a dazzling smile. “ ‘I want you,’ Dave thought and wondered if he’d said it aloud because the boy looked at him then, over the heads of a lot of other people. Straight at him. And there was recognition in the eyes, curious opaque eyes, like bright stones in a stream bed.” The young salesman, Rod Fleming, sells Brandstetter a ridiculous white wicker bed which he ends up sharing with Brandstetter for the next twenty-three years until his cruel, painful death six weeks before Fadeout begins.
How can I explain to younger people the impact of Joe’s work on a gay reader like me? Maybe some context helps. I read Fadeout in 1976 or 1977. At that time, there was not a single city, county or state in the United States where an employer could not legally have fired me for being gay or a landlord not refused to rent an apartment to me. Indeed, in almost every state, I could have been imprisoned for having sex with another man. The American Psychiatric Association decreed homosexuality was no longer a mental illness in 1973, and California had only repealed its sodomy law in 1974. Even so, almost universally, gay men and lesbian women were still outlaws, widely regarded as sick, sinful or criminal.
Whether our individual lives were actually touched by these oppressive laws and social attitudes, all of us were embattled by their very existence. It is terribly hard to be hated for a characteristic over which one has no choice and no possibility of changing. To be hated for this reason is morally, psychologically and emotionally exhausting; no human being should have to endure it. Even those of us who fought the hatred sometimes surrendered to feelings of hopelessness when it seemed like things would never get better. In these moods we wondered whether they were right about us; that we were, in some fundamental way, diseased and condemned.
Most of the gay fiction I read at the time seemed to be by writers who accepted this morose formulation of homosexuality. The so-called post-Stonewall fiction emanating from New York in the mid-1970s was anything but liberating. These celebrated novels were about doomed, self-hating queens who took drugs, went to dance clubs, had emotionless sex and no visible community. As a high school student, I had buried myself in the stacks of the Sacramento public library surreptitiously reading anything I could find about homosexuality. For the most part, these were abnormal psychology texts in which homosexuals were presented as skinny, flamboyant, white men who lived in big cities, wore women’s clothes and trolled public toilets for sex. The gay fiction I encountered in the mid-1970s was scarcely more advanced in its depiction of gay men. Nothing could have been more alien to my life, my experience of myself or my aspirations.
I was a bookish, upwardly mobile Mexican-American boy from the hinterlands. I experienced myself as a fundamentally decent human being. I declined to view myself as doomed or depraved because I was homosexual and I refused to live a life characterized by self-hatred or secrecy. If there was no space for the kind of gay man I wanted to be, then I, along with what turned out to be millions of other gay men and lesbian women, would create it. Joe’s books legitimized my hopes and aspirations. Brandstetter was the kind of grown-up I could imagine myself becoming: a competent professional who was also unapologetically gay and who demanded to be respected on both counts. For me, Joe’s novels were the fiction of gay liberation.
5.
About Joseph Hansen. After the publication of The Little Death, for which he provided a generous blurb, I met Joe and for several years he and I had a standing monthly lunch date. There was a thirty-plus year difference in our ages and while over the course of those lunches I learned a great deal about Joe and his life, I cannot say we became intimate friends. We had two topics of conversation. The first
was novels and novelists. Joe never went to college but he was a lifelong autodidact who had a vast knowledge of European and American literature. He sometimes chided me on all the gaps in my reading of fiction—I had mostly read only poetry, remember—and once loaned me a volume of Chekhov’s stories which were, he assured me, the greatest short stories ever written. “Tsk, tsk,” he said, when I returned them with an uncomprehending shrug.
The other subject of our conversations was Joe himself. On that topic he was a charming, polished raconteur, although not necessarily the most trustworthy narrator. In his deep, melodious voice, he told stories about his life in which he edited out all the squalor of emotion. Nonetheless, it was impossible not to listen to his stories without sensing the hardship and discouragement he had endured for most of his life as he struggled to make his mark on the literary world. Joe was a writer who, more than most of us, needed the validation of a devoted readership but it was decades before he found his audience. He published his first poem in 1942 in The Atlantic, age nineteen. Fadeout, his first novel from a New York press appeared in 1971 when he was forty-eight. In the twenty-nine years between those events his only published works were pulp novels, some gay, some not, that he wrote under assumed names. His publishers were often just one cut above pornographers.
During those years, Joe was also active in in the homophile movement—the precursor to gay liberation. He founded the pioneering gay journal Tangents in 1965 and hosted a radio program called Homosexuality Today. As important and courageous as these activities were, however, he never considered gay activism to be his primary vocation. Indeed, he disliked the word “gay” and preferred “homosexual.” He was first and last a literary man and the years of obscurity and rejection weighed heavily on him.
In Fadeout, Fox Olson, the subject of Brandstetter’s investigation is a frustrated novelist who achieves success late in life as a kind of folksy, Garrison Keillor-style radio personality. It was not the success he wanted; he had aspired to be a great writer. Olson’s wife shows Brandstetter a file cabinet filled with his unpublished manuscripts. She says, “ ‘He wrote this one in 1953, 1954. How fine I thought it was.’ With a small, sad laugh, she closed the covers, bent and pushed the manuscript back into its slot. ‘It wasn’t, I guess. Nobody would publish it.’ She stood and watched her foot as she rolled the drawer shut. ‘There are twelve novels in this cabinet. Three plays. Fifty short stories. Hundreds of poems.’ She looked at Dave and her voice was dry with remembered resentment. ‘Out of it all, only a handful of poems ever saw print.’ ”
As I reread that passage, I realized Joe was writing about himself. The long years in the desert left him with a thirst for recognition that even the success of the Brandstetter novels could not slake and perhaps he thought writing mysteries was a step down from the kind of novels for which he had hoped to be celebrated. Despite the great reviews and literary honors the Brandstetter books brought him, Joe could be arrogant, touchy and resentful (though never toward me, to whom he was always kind), all the more so because his late-life success was relative. Joe was critically acclaimed but his courage in creating a heroically ordinary gay protagonist limited the commercial appeal of his mysteries. Even at the height of his career, he made only a modest living and he died poor.
At one of our lunches he said a psychic had told him he would achieve his greatest fame posthumously. I hope she was right. He deserves it.
6.
Law school, I quickly discovered, was not the study of justice but an immersion in the minutiae of the law that was both complex and tedious. When I wasn’t floundering, I was bored senseless. By the end of my first semester, I was ready to drop out. Fortunately, I met a young lawyer named Matt Coles. Matt, then twenty-eight, shared office space on Castro Street, and sometimes collaborated with the first gay legal organization in the country, Gay Rights Advocates. He came to Stanford to give a talk about the legal rights of gays and lesbians which were, in 1979, basically nonexistent. Even so, he was indefatigably optimistic and energetic and adorable in a fast-talking, wise-cracking East Coast way. He persuaded me to stay in law school and we dated for a while.
On weekends I took the train up from Palo Alto to San Francisco where we would hang out in his basement apartment or drive around the city in his land yacht of a convertible or go drinking at a dive bar on Bush Street that had a great jukebox and was run by a female bartender who looked like Elizabeth Taylor in the actress’s later, zaftig incarnation. One of our shared passions was for mysteries. As we lay in bed or ate breakfast at Coming Home restaurant on Castro Street, we concocted the plot of a mystery novel we would write together about a young gay lawyer. Although we never got around to giving our protagonist a full name (we called him Nick), we did come up with a title for the book: The Little Death, a double-entendre that alludes to both murder and ejaculation. We thought it was a clever gay twist on a classic noir title. Matt reminded me recently that the plot of our novel involved a massive insurance scam but all I remember is that at one point our hero stumbled into a notorious leather bar on Folsom Street called Febe’s.
Gradually but definitely, in law school I stopped writing poetry. The impulse to write, however, did not go away. Entering my third year, I began to think about writing a novel, but I didn’t want to write the autobiographical, self-disclosing and self-indulgent novel that most first-time, young, would-be novelists produce. I wanted to write something that would force me to construct a plot and create characters that were not simply repurposed versions of myself. I remembered The Little Death but school, job-hunting and my first serious boyfriend kept me from immediately returning to it.
Midway through my third year I was hired at the Palo Alto jail to be the “O.R.” or own recognizance officer. This, as I said, involved interviewing men—it was an all-male facility—after they had been hauled in and booked by the cops to determine whether they should be released on their written promise to appear in court or if they would have to sit in jail until morning when a judge would set bail. I had less discretion than the job description suggests. Basically, I asked questions from a form and wrote down the answers to determine the strength of the prisoner’s community ties, whether he had any prior criminal record and, if so, the nature of those offenses. After I questioned them, I looked at their rap sheets to see who was lying about his prior record. I added or subtracted points depending on their answers. You got lots of points if you owned a house in Palo Alto and were married with children and had no criminal record. Minus points if you lived in a motel, were single and had prior misdemeanors. Any felony conviction automatically disqualified you from your own recognizance release.
Predictably, white, middle-class guys picked up for drunk driving or some other booze-driven offense (disturbing the peace because of a bar fight or indecent exposure because they’d pissed into someone’s rose bushes) had no trouble qualifying for O.R. release. Young black guys from East Palo Alto (the poor black neighborhood on the wrong side of the 101 freeway) picked up for stealing a six-pack, dealing pot or breaking and entering did not fare as well. However, I tended to fudge the numbers of the black and Latino guys to let them out if I could. Also, in close cases, I could call a judge and get him to sign off on their release. There were two judges, old white men (I say old but they were probably both younger than I am now), who I could call. One of them was a hard-liner who never let anyone out, the other was either squishy or kind-hearted, depending on your point of view, and I could usually talk him into an O.R. release.
The sheriff’s deputies figured me for squishy right away, yet another civilian undermining their hard work of keeping the streets safe, and treated me with benign contempt. (Most of them never bothered to learn my name and just called me “O.R.”) When I told one of them I had been hired by the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office as a prosecutor, he snorted and said, “You’re too soft to be a DA. You should be a Public Defender.”
Still, I loved the job. After three years of sitting in the back tiers o
f Stanford’s amphitheater classrooms and trying to care about the Rule Against Perpetuities and the Administrative Procedures Act, here was the law operating at its crudest and most compelling level. Palo Alto’s jail was a windowless collection of cells and rooms in the basement of City Hall. I sat at a beat-up wooden desk in a big room between the reception area where prisoners were brought in through a sally door and the cell where they were strip searched. After being dressed in jumpsuits, they were either brought to me to be interviewed or I was called back to the holding cells to talk to them. In addition to the holding cells, there were also rows of cells for inmates serving misdemeanor sentences (sentences of a year or less; any sentence longer than a year required a transfer from county jail to a state prison.) One set of cells was reserved for homosexuals and transsexuals dubbed by the jailers the “queens tank.” I was a good-looking boy and any time I happened to be in that area, I drew whistles and catcalls, much to my mortification and the amusement of the jailers.
The atmosphere of the jail was relentlessly male and, from my point of view, unmistakably homoerotic. The jail was permeated with the raw stink of men, what I would describe in The Little Death as “a distinct genital smell.” I had encountered that stink in only one other place—the gay bathhouses in San Francisco. Also evocative of the bathhouses was the scene in the strip search cell—a group of men watching another man strip and display his body in postures that included bending over and spreading his cheeks. I tried, as the nuns had admonished us in catechism class, to keep “custody of my eyes,” but I couldn’t help but peek from time to time. To a horny twenty-three year old gay boy, the jail could be a bizarrely sexy place which was undoubtedly one reason I liked hanging out there. But I also liked the realness of the place, the cynical and casually profane jailers, the corn-rowed trustie who sullenly mopped the floors in the middle of the night, the vile decaffeinated coffee that was all the inmates were allowed to drink, the inmates themselves, some touchingly young and innocent appearing, and others who looked like they had been there cheering on the snake when it talked Eve into biting into the forbidden apple. After years of reading noir novels, I felt as if I had stepped into the pages of one.