by Rob Spillman
A morning rush of a dozen cars interrupted my reading, capped off by a bleached trophy mistress. “C’mon, c’mon, I don’t have all day,” she said, her long red nails clicking against the side of her beige Mercedes. I didn’t reply verbally, instead pointed to the large “SELF-SERVE ONLY” sign hanging over the pump island. The kept woman humphed, then managed to work the nozzle and walk the ten feet in her silver stilettos to pay me the $10. I let her slide on the four cents she was over, even though it would come out of my pocket.
Then the miraculous happened—my customers all but vanished for two straight hours and I was left alone with Satie: elfin poet-pianist-prankster, Montmartre cabaret player and friend of Ravel and Debussy, then collaborator with Cocteau on the ballet Parade, with choreography by Massine and sets by Picasso, performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Later Satie would befriend Man Ray, Tristan Tzara, Duchamp, Picabia, Derain, Breton. He was wherever groundbreaking art was happening. And funny. His “incidental music,” performed during the intermissions of plays, confused everyone—it was too alluring to be background music, but Satie urged everyone to get up, to mill around, to talk while he played the piano.
One of Shattuck’s lines burned itself into me. Summarizing the avant-garde in Paris between 1885 and 1914, Shattuck wrote that “the fluid state known as bohemia, a cultural underground smacking of failure and fraud, crystallized for a few decades into a self-conscious avant-garde that carried the arts into a period of astonishingly varied renewal and accomplishment.” Sitting in the Aspen gas station’s lot while reading about Satie, I wanted nothing more than to be in prewar Paris.
What was I coming of age into? Baltimore. Aspen. The United States of late disco, punk, malaise—nothing but “failure and fraud.” But there had to be something else, didn’t there?
My shift over, I packed up my books and sped home, changed into my running shorts and shoes, and dashed into the mountains. I ran to the other side of the valley, to the trailhead of Hunter Creek, which snaked up into the valley between Red and Saddle Mountains. The trail was steep and rocky, with a quarter-mile stretch covered with Volkswagen-sized boulders which I pinballed, ricocheting past hikers who were carefully inching their way up the trail.
After, to cool down, I snuck into the Continental Inn’s pool, where my friend Andrea was hanging out in the Jacuzzi. She was light-skinned, with freckles splayed across her nose. Black Irish, literally. Andrea was a phenom, a freshman singer at Eastman, the youngest student of legendary teacher Jan DeGaetani, who also happened to be my father’s best friend. Andrea could talk her way into any party in town, and excitedly told me about two parties in the hills that were on the agenda, and the trio of rich townie girls who would be going with us to ensure that we got in. Andrea swept you up in her wake, leaving you little choice but to either get out of the way or follow.
“Sounds good,” I said, “but let’s ramp it up.”
“Ohhhh . . .” Andrea sang out a low note of curiosity.
“Let’s add to the mix,” I said. “I’ve got some crazies, some wild cards.”
“But what if they don’t—”
“Let’s call it a little critical-mass experiment,” I said. “The elements might blow up, but they might combine into something much more potent and volatile.”
“You’re wicked,” Andrea said.
“We’re going to have the greatest time ever or we’ll all hate each other and it’ll be a spectacular mess.”
That evening, Andrea joined me, my father, and Peter for Sunset Society, which I still loved, but found a little quaint and subdued. I couldn’t wait to get to Andre’s, the unabashed disco around the corner from the gas station where we were going to meet the rest of that evening’s elements. On the way we stopped to pick up Katrina, a twenty-six-year-old New York singer who thought I was “amusing.”
Andrea and I had fake IDs, procured from a local teenager who had converted a walk-in closet into a photo studio, with a Colorado driver’s license blown up and mounted on the wall—when you sat in the chair in front of the picture, your head was in the corner box and he would shoot the license, then crop and laminate it.
At Andre’s Andrea and Katrina commandeered a booth away from the flashing dance floor, and soon were joined by Andrea’s townie friends, whom I recognized but had never met. They were effortlessly put together and politely indifferent to us. Old money. They were quickly followed by my friend Steve, just out of state prison for larceny, and his sister Gwen, who was his de facto parole officer, and Olivia, her purple buzz cut freshly shorn. Andrea gave me a “You asshole” glare during the awkward intros when it looked like this was going to be a disastrous experiment, and I slipped off to the bar for a round of Stolis (Katrina’s choice), squeezing between an oily guy in an open-collared black Armani suit and a Chanel-bedecked woman who had gotten her makeup spackling tips from Zsa Zsa Gabor. I did a double take, not because the guy was cutting a couple of lines on the bar with an Amex, shielding them by the brass rail to be somewhat discreet, but because the Chanel-aholic was the same snooty Mercedes driver from the morning, who now didn’t recognize me as the gas station attendant.
“Hey sweetie, want a little toot?” the woman asked. I looked to her oily friend and he shrugged and handed me his sawed-off straw.
“Sure, thanks,” I said, not really wanting it. The few times I had accepted a line or two, coke had made me mellow, not amped liked it was supposed to. But I’d do a little bump—rich cretins deserved to have their drugs taken.
The evening’s mixture was strange and uncomfortable, but also exciting for its unpredictability. I hung back and watched as everyone else tried to make it work. With another round and a few more lines, the group loosened up and we took over the dance floor. Watching militantly queer Olivia dancing with one of the superhetero townie girls and both getting into it, I had an inkling that my creativity might lay in assemblage, in putting together groups of people who wouldn’t naturally come together, but which I could blend into easily.
Before I could further examine this theory, Andrea had talked the Armani-Chanel couple into giving us a ride to a party on Red Mountain—Andrea, me, Katrina, and Olivia in Armani’s Range Rover, the rest in Chanel’s Mercedes.
Pricey cars lined the driveway of a long, sleek house and Rod Stewart asked if we thought he was sexy from the huge open windows. Andrea was sure it was Jack Nicholson’s party, and she marched right around to the back patio and the bar by the pool as if she lived there. Andrea talked up everyone and anyone, telling them fabulous tales of her life as a backup singer for the Rolling Stones. She was a believable bullshitter—open-shirted men were drooling over her as she recounted her fictional adventures with Mick and Keith.
In front of the pool house a handful of men and women in catering whites were sweeping up ice and glass, the remnants of the pool house’s floor-to-ceiling picture window. Jagged shards poked out of the black-rimmed edges of the window’s frame, looking like a giant shark’s wide-open mouth set to swallow the party guests.
“What happened?” I asked the bartender.
“Dude, it was crazy. We’re running out of ice and all of a sudden Hunter Thompson shows up with the back of his Jeep filled with ice and he drives it right into the fucking house.”
Thompson, here? I thought. My hero, this close?
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Dumped the ice and took off.”
Damn. Yet what could I have possibly said to him?
In the middle of telling Katrina about Thompson, Andrea deemed the party to be nearing its peak. Since Andrea subscribed to Andy Warhol’s party dictum of always leaving before the crescendo, and even though the party was packed with beautiful people, and the booze and drugs were flowing, Andrea marched us right through the throngs and out. “Another party, ta-ta,” she announced to one of her admirers, who happily offered us a ride. Her townie friends and my friends
decided to stay.
“Mission accomplished,” I said to Andrea, who gave me a low five as we got into some guy’s Jaguar. I begged off the second party, so he dropped me and Katrina at the Red Onion, where my friend Tom was playing the piano, and where we could cop a free nightcap. Tom was a good Mormon gone bad, a million-watt chick magnet with his Utah pickup truck and his shaggy Western good looks and his Aw-shucks-I’m-just-a-nice-Mormon-kid-who-likes-to-go-camping spiel. Katrina and I walked in first. It was one in the morning, an hour before closing, and as I looked around the crowded room, I counted seven other women I had gone out with or was still seeing. Maybe the evening would blow up after all. I pulled Katrina to me and kissed her. She laughed and petted me like a puppy. In front of all of those other women, I grabbed the back of Katrina’s head and kissed her again. I didn’t care. I didn’t care if they turned their backs on me or slapped me. I didn’t care if Katrina dropped me then and there. And I didn’t care if I stayed in Aspen past the summer or went back east.
Two steps toward Tom, I felt all the lightness leave my body. Four gay male opera singers were singing along to Tom’s soppy version of Marlene Dietrich’s “Falling in Love Again.” I let go of Katrina and steadied myself on a bar stool. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that my father was about to die. Dan, the longtime choreographer for the opera program, had died over the winter, from what people in his hometown of San Francisco were calling “the gay flu.” Gay men everywhere were becoming sick. Very sick. Deathly sick. My father had performed in San Francisco several times over the last few years. Had he slept with anyone from there?
“You okay?” Katrina asked.
“I need . . .” I tried to think of what it was I needed—to run, for her to get me a really strong drink, for us to have sex right then and there?
Whatever she gave me, I would still have to leave Aspen at summer’s end. I could keep my gas station job, but I wouldn’t earn enough for an apartment anywhere nearby and I didn’t have a car. I couldn’t go back to Rochester. And do what—work in the run-down city where I had flunked out of college? My father was living with Peter in a tiny one-bedroom downtown, so I couldn’t live with him. The few friends I had made in my year at the university were still at school, and how depressing would that be, to be the failed townie hanging with your old college buddies?
Without money, I could see no other option than retreating to Baltimore, a city I had, only a year before, vowed never to set foot in again. Moving back into my mother’s house would further the humiliation. A felon who had been released for good behavior, I had blown my one chance in the real world and was now being reunited with my old prison cell.
53
“Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”
—Albert Camus
Soundtrack: Ida Cox and Lovie Austin, “Graveyard Dream Blues,” 1923
“EVEN FOR ME, I find bargains there,” Ringo had said about the impromptu Saturday flea market he gave us directions to. Flea markets and junk shops and yard sales were a constant for Elissa and me. It didn’t matter if we went home with nothing; it was enough to spend the day handling history, spinning stories, and then finally deciding whether or not the chunky Bakelite bracelet, the stiffly posed family daguerreotype, the wide-collared photo-print polyester shirt, and the space-age bachelor party records should become part of our history, our home.
I trailed right behind Elissa as we entered the small, crowded park, caught up to her as she ogled a large amber wedding necklace, the baubles the size of golf balls with hundreds of facets and gradated in color from brownish black to lemony amber. It was laid out on a blanket surrounded by silverware and china, and behind the blanket stood an old Polish couple. The man was impassive, but the woman smiled at us; both of them were haggard, overdressed for the warm morning. They were probably wearing what they owned. I looked around, and there were dozens of couples and families—Polish, Romanian, and Czech refugees—spreading out their worldly possessions for their slightly better-off former East German comrades, exchanging their history for a little bit of Western currency.
“I don’t feel so hot,” Elissa said.
“This is a bummer,” I said.
“All these people,” Elissa said. “There are just too many people here.”
“Should we go?”
“Imagine how horrible it will be for them in winter. In the snow. And with more of them coming every day.”
I knew she was right, but didn’t want her to be.
“Why don’t you buy the necklace?” I asked.
She shook her head and smiled at the woman, who was looking at us hopefully.
“It would feel like stealing.”
Instead, she pantomimed to the couple how pretty she thought their wedding jewelry was.
I wondered what we would have to spread out in front of us fifty years from now, if we had to evacuate our home and dump our possessions. What would we have of value? And where would that abandoned home be?
54
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
—Edgar Allan Poe
Soundtrack: New Order, “Blue Monday,” 1983
I ENROLLED IN NIGHT CLASSES at Towson State University, a huge state school—embarrassingly, only two miles from Boys’ Latin. If I got A’s, I would raise my GPA enough to transfer to the regular school and then could run on the cross-country and track teams. During the day I worked at the Kelmscott Bookshop, which was in an old row house on Twenty-fifth Street, every square inch covered in used books. For five years the owners, two ex–Johns Hopkins literature professors, had been driving their battered van around to estate sales, buying thousands of books at a time. A few of the volumes were valuable, and some were books that people would want to read, but many were odd and unlikely to sell. These freak books the Johansons dumped into a large back room they called “Purgatorio” and designated as a place to be dealt with “later.” That “later” would not happen until they hired someone. That “someone” was me.
There were so many books crammed into Purgatorio that the door opened only an inch. My first task was to brave Limbo and shelve anything that could be salvaged. The books at the top of the heap weren’t in too bad a condition. The deeper down I plunged, the moldier the books were, and a foul animal smell became more pronounced as I worked my way to the back left corner, the most ancient part of the dumping ground. After a month of digging I found the source of the smell—three dead, shriveled rats. They must have burrowed into the corner and become trapped in an avalanche of books.
The Johansons were still very much absentminded professors, easily distracted by the merchandise they were supposed to be moving.
“What price should I mark this first American edition of Magic Mountain?” I would ask.
“Of course, being from Germany, you’ve read it?” Mr. Johanson would reply.
“No, not yet.”
“Really? No?” And off he would go about the sanatorium, the flaws and merits of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation, and Thomas Mann minutiae. (“Rob, did you know that during the war, Mann lived in Los Angeles, where he hung out with Charles Chaplin, Arnold Shoenberg, and Albert Einstein? What I wouldn’t give to have listened in on those conversations.”) And then the dusty 1927 Knopf first edition would be in my hands, not to be returned until I had finished it. The proverbial “kid in a candy shop” was me. Whatever I touched, I would ask about, and one or both of my bosses would launch into a mini-seminar which I would greedily inhale.
In a sealed cardboard box I found a stack of Paris Review Writers at Work anthologies. Over the next week, during breaks and at home, I read about how Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks during a break from manual labor, and how he thought that he and his contemporaries “failed to match our dream of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do
the impossible.” I read about how Hemingway counted each day’s words to mark his labor, how Dos Passos considered World War I his university. As I worked my through each interview, I fantasized about being these writers, or dreamed of at least being in their orbit, but not for a second did I think I was in any way related to them. Not for an instant did I think I could ever be where they had been, breathe the same way they did.
This pantheon of writers was even farther away than Berlin, which at least existed on a mortal plain. While I hauled around boxes of dusty books, I clung to being a citizen of dazzling Berlin, because if I wasn’t, it meant I would be claimed by dead-end Baltimore. If I was a Berliner, my life would have hope, glamour, history; if a Baltimorean, none of the above.
Night school, in comparison to my bookstore education, was superfluous. I learned far more at Kelmscott than in college. No literature class could match the pointed, guided tour through letters that the Johansons were giving me. But the night classes allowed me to transfer into the day school, and even though there were no subjects I particularly wanted to study, I felt that I needed a degree—for what, I didn’t know.
I was, however, now eligible for the cross-country and track teams. My new teammates were the opposite of my former Boys’ Latin classmates—rugged and down to earth, many of them the first in their blue-collar families to go to college, which none treated lightly. They were from factory towns and farms, and from nondescript Baltimore neighborhoods like Hampden and Dundalk. One was from a trailer park in Western Maryland. The toughest guy, Jack Peach, worked summers in a meat locker, lugging around cow carcasses in a thirty-degree icebox, and then he would run ten miles in the ninety-five-degree wet blanket that was Baltimore summer. A few were born-again, and they tried to school me in evolution and morals.